Despite its socialist and working-class roots, Women’s History Month has since been sanitized to fit a neat and often depoliticized “Let’s celebrate women!” narrative. That’s why I made sure this list of films and TV shows to stream in March wasn’t just a survey of notable queer women throughout history. Instead, I wanted to center works that were expansive, radical, and above all, deeply loving.
Observed since the early 1900s, International Women’s Day—the origin of Women's History Month—was largely organized by working-class women in Europe and North America who were part of labor movements and organizing for women’s suffrage. While women’s suffrage was one of the main goals of what was originally called “Women’s Day,” the organizers had larger, strategic aims to reimagine society and the experiences of women — especially those who worked.
Inspired by these origins, this list features seven films and television shows that explore spaces where queer women thrived, danced, and communed with each other throughout history. They also explore the social forces that have historically restricted women or changed the places we love beyond recognition. Others honor gatherings and love formed in places outside of queer hubs like New York City, or explore an alternate version of our world in a way that remains deeply relevant today.
History, especially for queer women, is a thorny thing that is constantly renegotiated and redefined. I see these films less as a record and more as a form of discovery and honoring. Hopefully, you can look into the past through these works and the past will share something as expansive, radical, and loving as they are.
Bessie is featured quite frequently on lists of films featuring queer characters in historical contexts. It charts the career and life of legendary Blues singer Bessie Smith, played by the equally legendary Queen Latifah. I included it here for one scene in particular: After learning devastating news, Bessie, fully nude, sings as she sits at her vanity mirror and removes her rings, her makeup, and her wig — each coming down with a resounding sound on the vanity table. As she takes away all of the elements that separate Bessie the performer from Bessie the singer, director Dee Rees and cinematographer Jeff Jur bask her in a light that gives her an extraordinary glow, showcasing a fat woman in a moment of vulnerability unlike any I’d ever seen. It’s the moment that took Bessie to another level for me. The film deserves continued consideration for the dignity it brings to Bessie’s queerness and artistry, but also for the way it venerates her body.
Loosely based on the 1957 novel Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule, Desert Hearts is a thoroughly tender movie that was one of the first wide releases in the U.S. to center steadfastly on a lesbian romance.
Set in 1959, Vivian is an English professor from New York City who is in the process of getting a divorce and decides to establish residency in Reno, Nevada in order to expedite the process. Staying at a ranch guest house for women, Vivian meets a younger, lighthearted sculptor named Cay who shares her history of lesbian relationships with no shame or concern for the thoughts of others — a fact that Vivian finds incredibly jarring. Vivian and Cay’s relationship hits story beats that may not feel the most original now but are executed with remarkable intimacy and visual flair, especially as their love develops.
Director Donna Deitch wanted to create a lesbian film not centered in well-known spaces like Greenwich Village, and the setting still feels fresh today. The time period, the always sunny Nevada desert, and the distinct class difference between the leads all give Desert Hearts a nuance that is still worth seeking out.
I’m still discovering and seeking out the work of the late Belgian director Chantal Akerman. Akerman likely would not have loved being on this list, considering how resistant she was to being labeled. But Akerman’s work, particularly News from Home, has such a strong sense and understanding of alienation — from self, from cities, from loved ones like your mother (even when you love them dearly, and they love you just as fiercely back) — that it’s impossible not to feel its queerness. This alienation permeates her work, with Akerman repeatedly considering how we contend with distance while still maintaining connection.
In News from Home, she reads, in voiceover, letters written to her by her mother between the years 1971-1973 when Akerman lived in New York. Various train stops, streets, and people throughout the city serve as the backdrop for these letters. Collectively, they paint a fascinating portrait of Akerman as a person and a daughter, and a view of New York City uniquely hers.
While Derry Girls does not always give Claire, the show’s wonderful “wee lesbian,” the time to explore her identity, it’s worth highlighting Nicola Coughlan’s performance and the way Derry Girls excels at exploring the quotidian during a period of great change and strife. Coughlan portrays Claire with such infectiousness, constantly brimming with energy, while the writing and performance imbue the character with a confidence you can’t help but admire.
In the first season, Claire comes out to her best friend, Erin, who reacts quite negatively. After sparring back and forth with Erin with her hand proudly on her hip, Claire’s face softens as she moves to leave and says, “I really thought you’d understand.” It’s a devastating sentence, and it's Claire’s belief in herself that makes this scene so compelling. Coming out is no requirement, but Claire’s scene with Erin asserts that coming out can be an invitation to share a part of yourself with someone else — and that such an invitation can be swiftly, and rightfully, revoked.
Set in the mid-1990s during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the show never shies away from what the larger conflict means for Claire, her friends, and their families as they are each impacted in different ways. As we’ve continued to live in this pandemic, rewatching a show like Derry Girls, which will come to a close at some point this year, has become something of a balm. We have all continued living and changing—likely in not as wacky or absurd ways as the Derry Girls group do, but changing nonetheless.
“Have you picked your name yet?”
I may be cheating a little bit with this choice because it’s not a film set in the past, but Faye Ruiz’s The Lights Are On, No One’s Home is a work that chiefly looks toward the past as a way to construct and consider one’s self in the present. In this 10-minute short, Mar, a young trans woman, returns to her childhood home and is forced to contend with the ways in which it has changed. She walks through the grasses that were once her grandmother’s gardens and the hallways and rooms she used to dream in — all of them now covered by the destruction that gentrification brings.
Through lush coloring and beautiful small details in its set design, the film follows Mar as she wonders what name to choose for herself and how to understand who she is when the home she and her family have cultivated no longer exists. How can you decide who you are when your foundations have fundamentally shifted? Does a name have the strength to preserve, in its own way, what has been taken away? It is a path and a form of reclamation not without pain, but one that Ruiz’s film beautifully explores.
In one of the opening sequences of Leilah Weinraub’s documentary Shakedown, the host makes two things very clear: “This is a gay club and please don’t disrespect my dancers”.
Over the span of 15 years beginning in the early 2000s, Weinraub captured the South Central L.A. underground Black lesbian club Shakedown and its marvelous array of dancers, the Shakedown Angels. As a club, Shakedown features no poles or ornate lighting design, but it does feature incredibly-designed costumes and dancers centered right in the crowd. Weinraub places her camera in the middle of it all with a perspective full of reverence for the dancers’ talents and their bodies. In interviews throughout the film, the dancers describe how they inhabited themselves differently when they performed. The same beautiful spirituality in their descriptions also comes through in the incredible moments Weinraub preserves onscreen.
The film is a revelatory exploration of how spaces are maintained and cared for through shared trust and custom, even under the constant threat of surveillance from institutions like the police. Filled with thrilling performances and a distinctly Black celebration of queerness, Shakedown is a loving record and assertion of a space that may never exist in quite the same way again.
While director Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames is set in an alternative version of the U.S., it still viscerally captures the forms of oppression that we have to contend with when promises are made by a state that has no intention of keeping them. Set ten-years after a “War of Liberation” installed a socialist democracy in the U.S., Born in Flames contains an energy and candor that is not always easy to capture.
Through the use of both experimental and documentary techniques, the film focuses on The Women’s Army, a militant group, largely composed of queer women and working mothers, led by the effervescent Adelaide, a queer Black woman.
In addition, we spend time with two feminist radio stations: Phoenix Radio, led by a Black woman named Honey whose voice warmly encourages collective action and connection through music, and Radio Ragazza, hosted by Isabel, a white punk whose spoken-word-like rhythms call for complete reorganization of the current state. Interspersed throughout are meetings with three white women editors of a state-sponsored newspaper whose criticisms of The Women’s Army clearly illustrate the disregards and shortcomings of white feminism.
These various groups are spurred to connect and mobilize together when a tragedy occurs that affects them all. Born in Flames ends on no easy note, but it does provide clear frameworks from which we can continue to mobilize ourselves and others.
As Isabel from Radio Ragazza notes in a broadcast towards the end, “The scope and capabilities of human love are as wide and encompassing as this vast universe that we all swirl in, one for all and all for oneness.” I, for one, fully believe in the capability of human love to inspire and imagine just as radically as the women in Born in Flames.
Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for them.'s weekly newsletter here.