40 Essential LGBTQ+ Documentaries 

Queer cinema hinges on stories about the one and the many. LGBTQ+ documentary films, though, can only ever offer both: portraits of individuals necessarily speak more broadly about the community they come to represent, while chronicles of a group (or a family, or a segment of the population) can only ever do so through individual testimonials and the singular vision of the filmmaker at hand. Films like Portrait of Jason and Tongues Untied, for instance, tell contemporary viewers as much about the individual stories about gay Black men presented on screen as about the communities (real and imagined) that their respective filmmakers brought to bear on their finished films. The following list of LGBTQ+ documentaries offers us windows into the past, allowing us glimpses into moments made worthy by their mere documentation.

Yet to say nonfiction filmmaking has merely documented the LGBTQ+ community is to sell short the work that some of the seminal documentaries listed below have accomplished. Projects like 1977’s Word is Out, which compiled testimonials from men and women about their experiences coming to terms with their sexuality and coming out, began sketching on screen what a community could and did look like. Similarly, aptly-titled works like Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community and Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives offer not just potent history lessons but snapshots of how Americans were conceiving of their own community-building in the years following the 1969 Stonewall riots.

There is also, of course, no way of discussing queer nonfiction cinema without calling up the urgent historiographical work of films like Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, How to Survive a Plague, and We Were Here. These projects remind us that telling the history of the AIDS crisis necessarily inverts ACT UP’s famous Silence=Death rallying cry: to memorialize those lost and to chronicle their activist fights is to refuse the erasure which so drove the early years of the crisis, both in the press and at the White House.

As the LGBTQ+ community now grapples with a changing social and political landscape, wherein trans individuals continue to be targeted with disingenuous fear-mongering rhetoric, discriminatory bills across the United States, and an epidemic of violence that disproportionately affects trans women of color, nonfiction filmmakers have created powerful chronicles that prove the fight for queer liberation is far from over. Projects like Call Her Ganda, Transhood, and Indianara have offered vivid portraits of trans individuals, alongside the towering achievement that is the GLAAD Media Award-winning doc Disclosure: Trans Lives On Screen, stress the urgency of trans liberation politics.

The list below, which reaches back to the late 1960s and includes recent projects from around the globe that have further broadened what kinds of LGBTQ+ stories get told, is an invitation to see how queer and straight filmmakers alike have made real-life narratives pulsate with meaning. To look at this list of documentaries is to see the commingling of the one and the many. Together they create a kaleidoscopic vision of what the queer community has looked like on the big screen.

Here are our 40 essential LGBTQ+ documentaries, in order of release. – Manuel Betancourt 

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