This Pride Month, join us in honoring the vibrant and diverse voices of the LGBTQ+ community through the power of film. Explore our curated collection of Pride films on Kanopy and immerse yourself in stories that inspire, educate, and uplift. Just go to kanopy.com/category/43961.
Beyond the Straight and Narrow
How did the rise of LGBTQ visibility, political progress, and digital technologies in the 2000s come together to offer the abundance of complex queer and transgender representations we see today? Media scholar Katherine Sender shows how LGBTQ visibility and political progress have combined with new digital media technologies and television platforms to produce an increasingly complex range of queer and transgender representations.
In the 1950s and ’60s, an underground network of transgender women and cross-dressing men found refuge at a house in the Catskills region of New York. Known as Casa Susanna, the house provided a safe place to express their true selves. Told through the memories of those who visited, the film looks back at a secret world where the persecuted and frightened found freedom and acceptance.
This romantic comedy centers on the chaotic love life of Jeffrey, a gay man who swears off sex only to fall in love with his ideal man. Jeffrey’s vow of chastity is inspired by a fear of AIDS, a prospect which has started to terrify him so much that he decides he’d be better off never making love again. He is happy and relieved for a time, until he meets Steve, a handsome, charming dreamboat who also happens to be HIV-positive. Jeffrey wants nothing more than to be with Steve, but his anxiety over the disease and fear of commitment stand in the way.
Marianne is hired to paint the wedding portrait of Héloïse. As the women orbit each other, intimacy and attraction grow as they share Héloïse’s first moments of freedom.
The Year We Thought About Love
With passion, wit, intelligence and attitude, an LGBTQ youth theater group creates a play about love in all its forms, while bonding together to make change in their own lives. With candor, they tell their stories through intimate interviews, entertaining and powerful clips of their self-written plays, and glimpse into their everyday lives.