Missing parties and parades during Pride Month? These movies will fill your screen with joy, history and rainbows.
It’s June, and that normally means it’s time to celebrate Pride. But with protests, a deadly pandemic and record unemployment convulsing the country, it feels like there’s little reason to party.
That doesn’t mean Pride is over. Parades and events may have been canceled or postponed. But Pride Month festivities are moving online, with virtual drag shows, benefit concerts and many other events daily around the globe.
Movies are no substitute for a rainbow-drenched parade. But they can be entertaining and evocative — and let’s face it, shorter — ways to experience queer community and commune with the past. Here are seven films that will deliver the revolution, camaraderie and flirtatiousness of Pride right to your home.
Stream on Amazon Prime.
The director Arthur J. Bressan Jr. was an indie polyglot who made adult films and the under-the-radar 1985 AIDS drama “Buddies” (beautifully restored in 2018). But Bressan, who died from the disease in 1987, also made this carefully observed documentary about Pride in New York and other cities. It’s a fascinating, scrappy time capsule of queer life in post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS epidemic America that chronicles the revelry and protest that greeted the modern gay liberation movement. “Gay USA” also features footage, taken by the activist Lilli Vincenz, of New York’s first gay pride parade, in 1970, on what was then known as Christopher Street Liberation Day.
Stream on Fandor or Kanopy. Rent or buy on Amazon or iTunes.
The first Pride parades were revolutionary. But for the generation of L. G. B. T. Q. people who came of age before the Stonewall riots in 1969, a parade was only the latest, if most visible, sign of public resistance and self-respect. The uncovering of that past is the mission of this documentary, directed with tenderness and urgency by Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg (and selected for the National Film Registry).
