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Curating this selection of LGBTQ+ vacation films has been a journey in and of itself. This list began when I started looking for queer films that use a trip, or a vacation away from daily monotony, as an impetus for the plot or a way to provide narrative structure. Then I started to think more about setting, and what the process of relocation can do for people, whether it’s temporary or forever. Summer is the season when many of us think about changing scenery: We may no longer be going to school every day, we may take time off work, or maybe we just more intentionally log off so we can go outside and let the sun have its way with us.
While definitions of vacation and summer are stretched a bit in this list, there are plenty of moments in these movies that feature sweltering heat, fireworks illuminating night skies, and laying out in the sun. These are films about trying to connect with the impending promise of change that it always feels like the season can bring. The heat of summer, especially the humid summers I grew up with in the South, sticks to you like no other and I find that experience can be quite similar to coming into and luxuriating in queerness: Once you’ve felt that warmth, you don’t ever forget how it feels. I hope you bask in the films on this list for a while.
When Kit (Henry Golding) arrives back in Saigon, the first sounds we hear are cars: the honking and revving of engines as he navigates a place he hasn’t been since he was six years old. It’s an intentionally overwhelming feeling that permeates the entire film. Monsoon, directed by Hong Khaou, follows Kit’s trip to return his parents’ ashes from England, and he finds himself in the curious position of being both a tourist and a once-resident. He takes a bus tour of Saigon to see some of its biggest sites, but he also visits the now-filled pond where he played with his childhood friend, Lee, and tries to get inside the home where he and his family lived during the war that prompted their exit. Lewis (Parker Sawyers), his Black American entrepreneur love interest asks him if it’s his first time in Vietnam, and initially Kit lies, saying yes because it feels like too much to share with a stranger — too much to talk about how returning is affecting him.
Monsoon presents Kit’s trip as one of documentation and rediscovery, weighing the constant tension Kit feels from not fully remembering the place where he was born and from trying to decide a final resting place for his parents, who never got to go back to their home. When Kit takes photos in front of his parents’ home in Hanoi, he’s doing it to recognize that he was here, to have proof in a way that his parents couldn’t. The film is lovingly rendered, and it does not force a grand catharsis on Kit; it simply asks us to ride along with him.
Beach Rats centers on Frankie (Harris Dickinson), a young man from Brooklyn who is drifting through his life. He sees friends he barely cares about, he secretly sleeps with older men because he knows he'll never run into them during his day-to-day routines, and he helps his family take care of their father, who is dealing with a long-term illness. As the film goes on, these compartments of his life begin to collide and intersect with one another.
The film isn’t necessarily interested in a straightforward narrative of Frankie finding himself and defining his sexuality; rather it allows him to be and feel as lost as he really is. Eliza Hittman’s direction is quiet at times, mirroring her understated protagonist, and the moments when she allows the sound to come alive are in the trysts and conversations Frankie has with men online and in-person — through breaths, the crashing of ocean waves, and the clicks of a camera.
Beach Rats has perhaps one of my favorite endings in recent memory. Not to spoil too much, but as Frankie walks along the Coney Island boardwalk, the bright lights of fireworks and illuminated roller coasters behind him, he is overwhelmed by a feeling of loss, of change, and of frustration with himself for being unable to fully connect with others in the way he wants.
Okay, bear with me on this one. Picnic at Hanging Rock’s queerness is the least overt on this list, but its hazy visual choices and subtle mysteries feel perfect for summer. This Peter Weir-directed Australian film will resonate with anyone familiar with Sofia Coppola’s work.
Set in 1900 on Valentine’s Day, a group of schoolgirls who attend a private school in Victoria, leave for a day trip to a geological formation called Hanging Rock, but by nightfall, three girls and a teacher have gone missing without a trace. The first half of the film is dedicated to this fateful day on Hanging Rock. As their classmates all sleep in the sun, we watch as Miranda, Marion, and Irma disappear into the rock much to the shock of their classmate, Edith.
Much like the neighbor boys think they know the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides, the friends and loved ones of the missing girls are mystified. The ensuing fallout from their disappearance finds them attempting to assign logic and reason to their actions. They want to figure out why Miranda, Marion, and Irma would turn their back on of their future as young white women at the turn of the century, and instead choose to lean into the implied spirituality of the Rock.
Early in the film, Miranda, one of the girls who will later disappear, tells Sarah, another classmate who is quite infatuated with her, that she must learn to love someone apart from her since she won’t be here for much longer. It strikes me as particularly queer to know something about yourself that is deeply intangible to those who cannot think outside of their own confines.
Much has already been written about Fire Island, so I don’t need to sell you too much on the idea of spending time with this film. Andrew Ahn’s direction is a draw, as is the particular way the movie examines the alienation and loneliness of being on the outskirts of an already marginalized community. I can only add that there are unique joys to be had in watching it as a Jane Austen adaptation.
Joel Kim Booster’s writing gives Noah, Howie (Bowen Yang) and the entire supporting cast just enough of the contours of Austen’s original characters in Pride and Prejudice, which means when you watch it for the first time, you’ll think, ”Oh, that’s Jane! And he’s absolutely Lydia.”
However, Booster also gives each character their own rich specificity, allowing them to live outside of their connection to the source material. It’s a tricky thing to make work with such a large cast, but not only does Fire Island give equal weight to the romances in which Noah and Howie find themselves, it also honors the deep love between their entire family of friends as they embark on a new phase of life. Together, Booster and Ahn meaningfully explore how a place like Fire Island can be both a place of sorrow and a site of celebration, recalibration, and connection.
Directed by Dutch feminist filmmaker Nouchka van Brakel, A Woman Like Eve features a narrative that’s quite familiar in its construction but is handled with a remarkable degree of care and empathy. Eve (Monique van de Ven), a housewife who is exhausted by the demands of managing her family and their household, is sent on a vacation to France with her friend Sonja (Marijke Merckens) after it becomes very clear that she’s in need of a break.
While on this trip, she meets and becomes enamored with Lilliane (Maria Schneider), a lesbian French woman who works and lives in a farm collective in the French countryside, and who invites Eve to the commune when they meet while swimming one day. Lilliane’s collective is bright and open, full of organic vegetables — and of other queer women who’ve constructed alternate family formations. Eve regards them all first with astonishment, but then eventual interest. When Lilliane comes to visit the Netherlands after the trip, Eve’s feelings for Lilliane begin to change, and the latter half of the film considers how Eve can construct a life with Lilliane and her children during the ensuing custody battle with her husband.
The film balances Eve’s journey to personal freedom with other concerns that marked second-wave feminism, like constructing a family while maintaining your own identity. When she returns home, Eve organizes a regular meeting of other housewives in her neighborhood for them to collectively find support for the demands of their roles and maintain individual identities, all while fiercely loving their children. A Woman Like Eve would make an excellent double feature with Agnes Varda’s One Sings, The Other Doesn’t. Both films thoroughly and lovingly consider what it means to define a family amid a search for personal freedom.
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