About

This annotated bibliography (or technically, filmography) seeks to offer a curated list of films addressing the many, many different aspects of life as a Queer or Trans Person of Color (QTPOC) in the United States. Ultimately, I hope people use this site to seek out films to address gaps in their knowledge, to increase their empathy and understanding of the lives that might be very different than their own, and perhaps most importantly for QTPOC to see our own lives reflected in meaningful ways in film. It is odd to me that more resources like this do not already exist, but it’s a blessing and an honor to have the opportunity to create the kinds of resources we want to see in the world.

The films can all be found in the A-Z list from the main page, but they are also organized by racial/ethnic/religious categories as well as sexuality/gender/sub-cultural categories. This is done to enhance findability and navigation, but I acknowledge the “necessary evil” nature of categorizing films by such indefinite and non-universal social constructs like race and gender (in fact, if there are better ways, please suggest them).

Overall, since starting this project at the beginning of 2018, I have evaluated 174 films that, at least loosely, fit the criteria of centering QTPOC people, characters, and stories. This was a massive and time-consuming undertaking. The 60+ films selected for the Canon are some of the most excellent, representative examples of the kinds of wonderful and illuminating films that tell many different types of under-heard stories.

What’s Included

  • I considered narrative films and documentaries, both feature-length films and shorts, for inclusion.

  • The canon skews towards recency for a couple reasons. This is a product both of the exponentially higher rate of QTPOC films in the past decade and of older films often containing terminally outdated concepts, tropes, representations, and exposition.

  • I sought to include as many immigrant stories as I could. This is partially because immigration has been exploited in such a racist and toxic manner and that politicization obscures the real issues in QTPOC immigrants lives. It is also because immigrant status does add an important and unique intersection that needs to be understood.

  • When making decisions about what to include and exclude from the long-list of 174 films, I weighted films QTPOC writers/directors/performers/interviewees higher. We appreciate Caucasian and cisgender/heterosexual allies and facilitators of the telling of our stories, but historically and quite commonly, much has been lost in translation when they have attempted to tell QTPOC stories (with some exceptions of course)

What’s Not Included

  • I tended to steer clear of ensemble films where perhaps one character is a QTPOC, but their story isn’t centered in a meaningful way (e.g. Billy Porter’s character in The Broken Hearts Club, Reuben Greene’s Bernard in The Boys in the Band, or Queen Latifah’s iconic “Cleo” in Set it Off). This is not a commentary on the quality of those performances or films. This list seeks to go beyond incidental representation or, in some cases, tokenism. It is about highlighting and centering QTPOC lives.

  • Some films were simply impossible to access for evaluation, so I could not include them. This is infamously the case for Patrik-Ian Polk’s Punks (in fact, there was an illuminating recent episode of NPR’s Nancy podcast about this film’s unavailability) and many, many wonderful-sounding short films. Given time and perseverance, many of these films can be tracked down and may be included in the future.

  • Films had to be set in the territories of the United States of America. Though this does frame this project neatly, it’s admittedly a slightly arbitrary criterion. Opening this to films set outside of America would have required viewing and evaluating too many films to fit the timeframe for the completion of the grant.

  • Bisexual folks, stories, and issues simply haven’t been adequately represented in American film, much less when it comes to a QTPOC lens. The lack of films responsibly representing or discussing bisexuality amongst QTPOC people is painfully striking.

  • I found the selection of films featuring both Native American characters and characters of Middle Eastern descent to be lacking. In the case of films highlighting Native experiences, many of the best examples were either Canadian (e.g. Johnny Greyeyes), had a character with too insubstantial of a presence (e.g. Big Eden), or had too much involvement with Sherman Alexie (e.g. The Business of Fancydancing) whose recent admissions of pervasive sexual harassment made me recoil from including him. I welcome suggestions for other films to be included on the list, however.

Origins

I have always sought out films centering QTPOC experiences. In my youth, in the 1990s, this may have saved my life. There were so few examples and role models, that I literally had no concept of what my future would look like. Sure, QTPOC enjoyed Will and Grace and Queer as Folk, but it was abundantly clear from the lack of diversity of those shows that they were focusing on a Caucasian LGBT experience (and, to be honest, bisexual and trans experiences were poorly represented) at the expense of all others. So, when I discovered films like Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet and Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning or the genius of documentarian Marlon Riggs, the experience was truly revelatory.

As QTPOC have gained more and more access to opportunities, funding, and audiences to tell our stories, there has been a marked uptick in high-quality films that spotlight our lives. With the recent smashing success of Oscar-winners like Moonlight and Emmy-winners like Pose, the future only looks brighter. These successes, however, are not sudden occurrences. They are the culmination of decades of struggle, perseverance, genius and talent. These stories have been told for years and QTPOC and their allies have finally accessed the audiences they deserve. This project was undertaken to further widen that audience by drawing attention to where we’ve been.

Further inspiration for this grant came from Slate.com and their outstanding Black Film Canon project of 2016. The labor and process of putting this project together truly made me appreciate what an epic undertaking that kind of journalism is. I’ve wanted to apply for a Carnegie Whitney Grant since I first heard of their existence, but I never could quite hone in on a scope or focus until Slate’s feature appeared. I thank them for that.