The Best LGBTQ Documentaries of All Time

Wilson Chapman and Alison Foreman
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Queer movies and TV shows are all well and good, but arguably even more important is the existence of great LGBTQ documentaries. Fiction can help provide great representation and tell moving queer stories, but documentary does something else entirely: it preserves entire communities’ stories as snapshots in humanity’s kaleidoscopic history.

Documentary filmmaking has (almost) always been a relative safe haven for LGBTQ cinema, particularly smaller, experimental docs created by independent filmmakers. For years, mainstream films largely sanitized and ignored the LGBTQ community — but the documentary format allowed queer people to capture the truths of their lives that went otherwise undepicted. Great LGBTQ documentaries stretch back as far as 1967, with “Portrait of Jason”: a fascinating profile of a gay nightclub performer. Other early greats provided the first mainstream depictions of vibrant gay subcultures, like 1991 ballroom doc “Paris Is Burning” or 1967’s drag film “The Queen.” And still others provided sweeping and inspiring depictions of the LGBTQ rights movement, as with “Before Stonewall” or “The Times of Harvey Milk.” Some documentaries released today provide the most thorough depictions of the AIDS crisis ever rendered, reconsidering the federal government’s horrific silence in the light of the 21st century, as with “How to Survive Plague.”

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Today, there are no shortage of queer documentaries worth championing, like the Oscar-nominated animated masterpiece “Flee,” or music doc “Sirens.” This year has already seen the premiere of another great one: D. Smith’s “Kokomo City.” A profile of three Black trans sex workers and their lives, the film bowed at Sundance to critical acclaim, and will be receiving a limited release this July. In celebration of “Kokomo City,” let’s take a look back at some of the historical greats in LGBTQ documentary cinema. This list considers projects that either profile LGBTQ community members, or focus on queer history. Entries are listed in order of their U.S. premiere date.

Here are the 15 best LGBTQ documentaries of all time.

With editorial contributions by Tambay Obenson and Eric Kohn. [Editor’s note: This article was published on June 28, 2023, and has been updated since.]

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