There's a wealth of accessible queer media available online through various streaming platforms. With our campus credentials, all CPP students, staff, and faculty are able to use Kanopy free of charge! You may also have access to it through your local public library.
We've selected a handful of excellent films and documentaries created both by LGBTQIA+ filmmakers and about LGBTQIA+ subjects. If you're interested in further LGBTQIA+ resources streaming on Kanopy, check out what's available through the following distribution companies: Outcast Films, Women Make Movies, Frameline, and Wolfe Video.
Still looking for more resources? Most streaming services, like Hulu and Netflix, also offer LGBTQIA+ materials year round.
Kanopy - Celebrate Pride Month with these must-watch titles
Tangerine (2015) – Directed by Sean Baker
Sin-Dee is back. Upon hearing that her pimp boyfriend was unfaithful during the days she was jailed, the sex worker and her friend, Alexandra, set out to get to the bottom of this. Their odyssey leads them through subcultures of Los Angeles.
Official Selection at the Sundance Film Festival.
(Image and description from Kanopy)
Common Threads (1989) – Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman
The Memorial Quilt was started in a San Francisco storefront by the NAMES Project in the summer of 1987…and by the fall of '88, the quilt had grown to include 8,288 panels, each a handmade memorial to a life lost to AIDS. Filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman first witnessed the quilt when it was barely a fraction of its final expanse, and they quickly moved to capture the NAMES Project's process. Their efforts won Epstein and Friedman the Oscar® for Best Documentary, attributed to an emotional, vibrant story of a tremendous tragedy that evolved into one of the great protest movements in American history.
(Image and description from Kanopy)
Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart (2017) – Directed by Tracy Heather Strain
This documentary sheds valuable light on all aspects of Lorraine Hansberry's play, A Raisin in the Sun, including the daunting challenge of securing investment and a venue for this production about a working class Black family, the casting process, artistic debates and finally its public reception.
(Image and description from Kanopy)
Moonlight (2016) – Directed by Barry Jenkins
Oscar-winner for Best Picture, MOONLIGHT is a moving and transcendent look at three defining chapters in the life of Chiron, a young man growing up in Miami. His epic journey to adulthood, as a shy outsider dealing with difficult circumstances, is guided by support, empathy and love from the most unexpected places.
(Image and description from Kanopy)
Spa Night (2016) – Directed by Andrew Ahn
A portrait of forbidden sexual awakening set in the nocturnal world of spas and karaoke bars in Los Angeles' Koreatown.
Nominated for two prizes at Sundance Film Festival, Winner of the John Cassavetes Award at the Film Independent Spirit Awards.
"Writer-director Andrew Ahn has made a confident, assured, low-key debut that's a textbook example of how to make a compelling small-budget movie." - G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle
(Image and description from Kanopy)
Mosquita y Mari (2012) – Directed by Aurora Guerrero
This exquisitely crafted coming of age tale follows a pair of Latina teens who fall gradually in love against the backdrop of Southeast Los Angeles. When straight A student Yolanda -- aka Mosquita (Fenessa Pineda) decides to help struggling tough girl Mari (Venecia Troncoso) with her homework an intense attraction evolves between the two. As their friendship grows, a yearning to explore their strange yet beautiful connection surfaces. Lost in their private world of unspoken affection, lingering gazes, and heart-felt confessions of uncertain futures, Yolanda's grades begin to slip while Mari's focus drifts away from her duties at a new job. Mounting pressures at home collide with their new-found desires thus driving Yolanda and Mari's relationship to the edge, forcing them to choose between their obligations to others and staying true to each other.
(Image from Alamo Drafthouse and description from Kanopy)
Tomboy (2011) – Directed by Céline Sciamma
From out lesbian director Celine Sciamma (Water Lilies), Tomboy tells the story of 10-year-old Laure (played by the amazing Zoe Heran) who moves to the suburbs and decides to pass as a boy amongst the pack of neighborhood kids. As "Mikael" she catches the attention of leader of the pack Lisa, who becomes smitten with her. At home with her parents and younger sister Jeanne, she is Laure; while hanging out with her new pals and girlfriend, she is Mikael. Finding resourceful ways to hide her true self, Laure takes advantage of her new identity, as if the end of the summer would never reveal her unsettling secret.
(Image and description from Kanopy)
Portrait of Jason (1967) – Directed by Shirley Clarke
On December 2, 1966, director Shirley Clarke and a miniscule film crew gathered in her apartment at the Hotel Chelsea. Bestowed for twelve hours with the one-and-only Jason Holliday, Clarke confronted the iconic performer about his good times and bad behavior as a gay hustler, on-and-off houseboy and aspiring cabaret performer. As the cameras rolled and Holliday spun tales, sang songs and donned costumes through the night, a mesmerizing portrait formed of a remarkable man. Ingmar Bergman called it “the most extraordinary film I’ve seen in my life,” but audiences may know it better as PORTRAIT OF JASON, a funny, stinging and painful meditation on pride and prejudice through the eyes of a legendary figure.
(Image and description from Kanopy)
The Early Works of Cheryl Dunye: Six Short Films (1994) – Directed by Cheryl Dunye
Vilified by conservatives in Congress, defended by major newspapers, and celebrated by audiences and festivals around the world as one of the most provocative, humorous and important filmmakers of our time, Cheryl Dunye practically invented a new form of cinema - call it the 'Dunyementary.'
Presented here are the films that started it all - the early works which gave birth to an extraordinary and original filmmaking talent. Made with great creativity on often miniscule budgets, they represent the first chapter of the Cheryl Dunye oeuvre.
(Image and description from Kanopy)
Poison (1991) – Directed by Todd Haynes
This groundbreaking American Indie was the most fervently debated film of the 1990s and a trailblazing landmark of queer cinema. A work of immense visual invention, Haynes' spectacular follow-up to his legendary "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story" is audacious, disturbing and thrillingly cinematic.
A runaway theatrical hit and Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize winner, which made national headlines and the network news when it was attacked by right-wing minister Donald Wildmon, POISON is unsettling, unforgettable and thoroughly entertaining.
(Image and description from Kanopy)
Tongues Untied (1989) – Directed by Marlon Riggs
Marlon Riggs' essay film TONGUES UNTIED gives voice to communities of black gay men, presenting their cultures and perspectives on the world as they confront racism, homophobia, and marginalization. It broke new artistic ground by mixing poetry, music, performance and Riggs' autobiographical revelations. The film was embraced by black gay audiences for its authentic representation of style, and culture, as well its fierce response to oppression. It opened up opportunities for dialogue among and across communities.
(Image and description from Kanopy)
Desert Hearts (1985) – Directed by Donna Deitch
Donna Deitch's swooning and sensual first narrative feature, DESERT HEARTS, was groundbreaking upon its release in 1985: a love story about two women, made entirely independently, on a shoestring budget, by a woman.
In this 1959-set film, adapted from a beloved novel by Jane Rule, straitlaced East Coast professor Vivian Bell arrives in Reno to file for divorce but winds up catching the eye of someone new, the free-spirited young Cay, touching off a slow seduction that unfolds against a breathtaking desert landscape.
(Image and description from Kanopy)
Before Stonewall (1984) – Directed by Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg
In 1969 the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village, leading to three nights of rioting by the city's gay community. With this outpouring of courage and unity the Gay Liberation Movement had begun.
BEFORE STONEWALL pries open the closet door--setting free the dramatic story of the sometimes horrifying public and private existences experienced by gay and lesbian Americans since the 1920s. Revealing and often humorous, this widely acclaimed film relives the emotionally-charged sparking of today's gay rights movement, from the events that led to the fevered 1969 riots to many other milestones in the brave fight for acceptance.
Experience the fascinating and unforgettable, decade-by-decade history of homosexuality in America through eye-opening historical footage and amazing interviews with those who lived through an often brutal closeted history.
(Image and description from Kanopy)
Beau Travail (1999) – Directed by Claire Denis
With her ravishingly sensual take on Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd, Sailor,” Claire Denis firmly established herself as one of the great visual tone poets of our time. Amid the azure waters and sunbaked desert landscapes of Djibouti, a French Foreign Legion sergeant (Denis Lavant) sows the seeds of his own ruin as his obsession with a striking young recruit (Grégoire Colin) plays out to the thunderous, operatic strains of Benjamin Britten. Denis and cinematographer Agnès Godard fold military and masculine codes of honor, colonialism’s legacy, destructive jealousy, and repressed desire into shimmering, hypnotic images that ultimately explode in one of the most startling and unforgettable endings in all of modern cinema.
(Image and description from Kanopy)
The Queen (1968) – Directed by Frank Simon
More than 40 years before RuPaul's Drag Race, this ground-breaking documentary about the 1967 Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant introduced audiences to the world of competitive drag. The film takes us backstage to kiki with the contestants as they rehearse, throw shade, and transform into their drag personas in the lead-up to the big event.
Organized by LGBTQ icon and activist Flawless Sabrina, the competition boasted a star-studded panel of judges including Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, and Terry Southern...But perhaps most memorable is an epic diatribe calling out the pageant's bias delivered by Crystal LaBeija, who would go on to form the influential House of LaBeija, heavily featured in Paris Is Burning (1990).
(Image and description from Kanopy)