“Moonlight” made history in 2017 as the first LGBTQ+ movie to win the Oscar for Best Picture.
Later, the New Queer Cinema in the 1990s flourished as many independent filmmakers (many of whom were gay) told fluid, empathetic stories about queer individuals. Afterward, gay characters appeared more but often in tragic stories like 1961’s “The Children’s Hour.”Īlthough LGBTQ+ representation remained sparse over the next few decades, queer camp in the 1970s saw a rise in popularity with the increased prominence of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and the films of John Waters. In Hollywood, the strict Hays Code forbade explicit depictions of homosexuality in film for three decades, during which there was a slew of queer-coded villains. While gay characters were frequently used for laughs or not explicitly stated to be queer in the earliest mainstream Hollywood films, a brief relaxation in Germany’s film production code in the early 20th century allowed for LGBTQ+ classics like “Different from the Others” and “Mädchen in Uniform.” Depictions of queer and trans people have been present in the film medium since its inception more than 100 years ago, but due to censorship and varying degrees of prejudice against the LGBTQ+ community at different points in time, onscreen representation has a long, complicated, and often coded history.
