The 15 Best LGBTQ+ Movies to Stream on Max

When Max (née HBO Max) first launched, it was for the gays and the gays only. Shows like Legendary and We’re Here were proof that the streamer was developing programming with LGBTQ+ audiences in mind.

Initially, I wasn’t convinced the premium streamer’s hefty price tag was worth it. I mean, we all had Netflix to start, and then suddenly there was an endless spew of silly little apps we needed to pay for, too. However, a reluctant 14-day free trial opened my eyes; I came for the very bisexual-friendly Mummy franchise, and stayed for the bountiful queer content. Before long, I was officially an HBO Maxinista, patiently enduring interface crashes every time a new Euphoria episode dropped.

But things have changed for the worse under the Warner Bros. Discovery merger. HBO Max began removing programming, including LGBTQ+ shows like Genera+ion, to cut costs, and it controversially dropped the “HBO” from its name. The rechristened Max still has an LGBTQ+ Voices collection you can locate if you rifle around your homepage long enough. However, it’s not a standalone genre or category; you can’t specifically search the collection, filter through it, or do much of any tailored navigation.

That’s why some personalized curation can come in handy. Let me do the hard work of sifting through the remaining queer options on the platform. If you’re looking for a guide to the best LGBTQ+ films on Netflix and Hulu, we’ve got those, too — but if you’re in search of the 15 scariest, freshest, funniest, and most important queer flicks on Max, read our guide below. — Sadie Collins

Click here to jump to a section: Coming of Age, Documentary, Slice of Life, Romance, Thriller and Horror, Oh My!

Easily one of the finest Best Picture winners in recent memory, Barry Jenkins’ magnum opus tells one gay Black man’s coming-of-age story in unforgettably impressionistic, tender ways. Played by Alex. R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes (as a child, teenager, and adult, respectively), Chiron navigates his identity, his relationship with his mother, and his attraction to childhood friend. Moonlight marked a major cultural turning point in how Black queer stories were told onscreen, becoming the first gay film with an all-Black cast to take home the Academy’s top prize. — Abby Monteil

As someone currently living in Missouri during the rollback of Roe v. Wade, a buddy movie about a lesbian and her popular-but-now-pregnant ex-best friend taking a road trip to New Mexico for an abortion feels extremely timely.

In short, Veronica (Haley Lu Richardson) is in a pickle. She needs an abortion, but doesn’t want to tell any of her judgmental friends. As an added challenge, minors can’t legally abort in Missouri without their parents’ consent, which isn’t going to happen. As a last resort, Veronica reaches out to her former best friend Bailey (Barbie Ferreira) to give her a ride to Albuquerque. What ensues is a chaotic and extremely hilarious cross-country trek to the Southwest. Unpregnant takes a pretty deeply unfunny situation and asks, “Actually, what if this was told with the humor of the teenage girls who experience this?” And, spoiler alert, it’s extremely good. — Sadie Collins

Art has always played a central role in queer resistance, a fact that’s made arrestingly clear in Laura Poitras’ Oscar-nominated documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. The film centers on legendary photographer and AIDS activist Nan Goldin, who was instrumental in drawing attention to the role the wealthy Sackler family and their art world associates played in America’s opioid crisis. Even the documentary’s structure feels fundamentally queer in its disinterest in conforming to biopic clichés. Rather than simply listing causes and effects, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed weaves together art and archival footage shot by Goldin, a recovering addict herself, to tell an interconnected story of queer collective action and artistic freedom. — Abby Monteil

This is simultaneously one of the most crucial queer documentaries to come out in the past decade, and also one of the most upsetting.

Beginning in roughly 2017, the Chechen government began kidnapping, detaining, and purging queer citizens. Welcome to Chechnya follows a group of LGBTQ+ activists as they provide support to Chechen survivors, aiding them in their journey outside of Russia. There’s a balancing act in capturing their efforts, and the atrocities suffered by the people they help, while also ensuring their continued anonymity — one that documentarian David France performs with skill and sensitivity. The breadth of queer suffering in the film often feels overwhelming, but by watching, there is the overwhelming feeling of privilege in hearing their stories, of knowing they exist, and seeing the lives that powerful institutions weren’t able to hide. — Sadie Collins

To be queer is to be a part of a rich tapestry; even when torn and thrown away, our colors stay so breaktakingly vibrant. No one knows this better than the subjects of The Legend of the Underground.

This documentary follows a group of queer Nigerian young adults owning their truth, despite danger or discrimination. The Legend of the Underground explores the colonialist roots of homophobia, and how those aftershocks manifest in countless ways for countries that have anti-gay laws deeply embedded in their justice systems. As such, our subjects, and many others like them, have experienced complex layers of trauma from their loved ones and community. But like flowers growing up through the cracks of concrete, they have also cultivated a rich, revitalizing community of their own, fortified by grassroots activism and nurturing love. — Sadie Collins

Is Paris Is Burning’s elevation of a cis white filmmaker — and failure to compensate many of its queer and trans subjects of color — worth noting and critiquing? Yes. Does Jennie Livingston’s onscreen chronicle of New York City’s Black and Latino Harlem drag ball scene in the 1980s remain a vital portrait of queer subculture in film? Absolutely. Featuring prolific drag queens and voguers like Venus Xtravaganza, Pepper Labeija, and Willi Ninja, Paris Is Burning is an LGBTQ+ classic that helped pave the runway for contemporary media like Kiki, Pose, and Shakedown. — Abby Monteil

Does Grey Gardens have any expressly queer subjects? Not technically. Is it an essential pillar of the queer community for about a thousand intangible reasons? Absolutely.

Often described as one of the best documentaries ever made, Grey Gardens tells the story of an elderly mother and her middle-aged daughter, both named Edith Beale. Living in their titular dilapidated mansion in upstate New York, the women simultaneously exist in poverty and as perpetual socialites. “Little Edie” and “Big Edie,” each eccentric in their own way, dote on each other while constantly locking horns. They listen to old records, feed Wonder Bread to the raccoons living in their attic, and wear pants as headscarves. At its core, this documentary represents the inherent queerness of refusing to participate in society, as both women want to re-enter the world, but avoid all opportunities to do so. Much like the mother/daughter relationship living in its vermin-infested walls, Grey Gardens is both an entrapment and a release. — Sadie Collins

If you’re looking to increase the stress in your life by about 500% for 78 minutes, Shiva Baby is the movie for you.

Danielle (Rachel Sennott), a bisexual college student with a messy love life and a casual sugar daddy, attends a shiva. This would not be particularly interesting in and of itself, but when Danielle’s ex Maya (Molly Gordon) appears with simmering tension, things enter into anxious territory. And when Danielle’s sugar daddy Max (Danny Deferrari) shows up to the somber affair with a whole wife and child in tow, she suffers a feature-length heart attack. It’s Uncut Gems for bisexuals, Hereditary for people who don’t like violence, and Fleabag for, well, Fleabag fans. Paired with an anxiety-inducing soundtrack and claustrophobic camerawork, Shiva Baby is a wholly refreshing — and adrenaline-fueled — queer comedy. — Sadie Collins

Little Miss Sunshine is uncomfortable, timeless, and beat-for-beat hilarious. It stars bite-sized Abigail Breslin as Olive, a peppy middle schooler with the kind of dysfunctional family that could only come from 2006. They’re a group of misfit toys, including her depressed gay uncle Frank (Steve Carrell), cocaine-snorting grandpa Ed (Alan Arkin), and Toni Colette in her classically exhausted mother role.

When the family realizes Olive has been accepted as a last-minute beauty pageant entrant, the entire crew embarks on a road trip in a yellow van that’s as scrappy and unstable as its passengers. Rather than focusing on people finding each other and becoming a family for the first time, Little Miss Sunshine is about a fractured clan of oddballs finding each other again – and realizing just how well they belong with each other. — Sadie Collins

In this vastly underrated (and very ’90s) biopic, Angelina Jolie offers us a beautiful, depressive, and wholly sincere portrayal of Gia Carangi, a Sapphic icon and one of the world’s first supermodels.

In real life, Gia was a teenager who first moved to New York City in the late 1970s. Her meteoric rise to fame within the modeling industry was filled with luxury, fame, and bone-breaking loneliness. After the death of her close friend and protective mentor Wilhelmina Cooper (Faye Dunaway), Gia was swept up in the cocaine craze of the early '80s, while also entering into a passionate love affair with her makeup artist, Linda (Elizabeth Mitchell). Watching Gia is akin to experiencing a Shakespearian tragedy because — spoiler alert — things don’t end well for our Ophelia-esque subject. But if your two favorite genres of film are “sad” and “gay”, Gia is for you. — Sadie Collins

After the resonating success of Pariah, writer-director Dee Rees tackled the indomitable blues singer Bessie Smith, portrayed by Queen Latifah — and Rees gives Bessie’s queerness the space it deserves.

The film charts the titular figure’s journey from being an undiscovered young singer working in vaudeville shows to studying under Ma Rainey before finally becoming a famed artist in her own right. Rees’ Bessie, who had many male and female lovers historically, is a plus-size queer Black woman with an overwhelmingly rich interior. In other words, it’s a beautifully true-to-life depiction. Though it may settle into formulaic biopic structure at some points, Bessie is integral viewing as an ode to an iconic songbird, as full and lush as Smith’s contralto. — Sadie Collins

Released in the 1980s as one of the first lesbian movies, not to mention one of the first major queer films with a happy ending, Desert Hearts has aged like fine Sapphic wine.

Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver) is a strait-laced literature professor in 1959, coming to Reno so she can get a quick divorce and move on with her life. Shortly thereafter, however, she meets Cay Rivers (Patricia Charbonneau), a freethinking and uninhibited sculptor with a sharp smile and luscious hair. Despite the tension inherent in their chemistry, Vivian and Cay grow close – but this is the 1950s, after all, and queer hearts always run the risk of breaking. Under the backdrop of twinkling stars and sparse foliage, Desert Hearts is just as fresh — and just as grippingly romantic — as it was all those years ago. — Sadie Collins

Perhaps one of the most nuanced and turbulent depictions of queer love committed to film, watching Happy Together is akin to stepping into a turbulent ocean when you can’t quite swim and there’s no life jacket in sight.

Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) and Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) are a couple who can’t quite seem to stop hurting each other. They begin the film by moving to Argentina in hopes of healing their relationship, but after a few difficult experiences, both men drift apart in Buenos Aires – but never far apart, still unable to escape their mutual orbit. With his later film In the Mood For Love, director Wong Kar-wai officially solidified his expertise in the film genre “Sad But Invigoratingly Romantic.” However, before all of that, there was Happy Together, a subtly transformative and toxic tale, but healing in the same heated, intimate breath. — Sadie Collins

Director Jane Schoenbrun announced themself as an exciting new voice in found footage and trans filmmaking with 2022’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. The film stars newcomer Anna Cobb as Casey, a lonely teenager who finds the line between reality and fantasy blurred when she becomes immersed in the viral “World’s Fair” online horror challenge. Featuring a haunting score from indie musician Alex G, World’s Fair’s expert blend of various internet eras — particularly creepypastas — is also a visceral excavation of the haze of dysphoria, and of the dual potential for comfort and manipulation that queer kids so often find reflected in the glow of a computer screen. — Abby Monteil

Siri, play “Wake Up” by Rage Against the Machines. It’s time to talk about the queerest science fiction film ever made, and yes, I’m even factoring in Alien. In The Matrix, our main character Neo (Keanu Reeves), discontent with his life and sure something isn’t quite right, learns the truth about reality; he then must decide if he’s content to live in a simulation or strive for a better world. The core plot — humans who are forced to play a false version of themselves in a safe hamster cage, only to find freedom and chase after it, despite the pain they’ll experience in the pursuit — has resonated with the trans community since it was released. To reject the rigid binary of gender is to not only bend the rules, but rewrite the code upon which it’s based. While we exist in a world where queerness is often ostracizing, humans in The Matrix crave autonomy at all costs. — Sadie Collins

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