At one point, we even see a lesbian dying after being crushed by a falling tree. What’s more, the documentary also included a montage of homosexuals dying on screen because, of course, there was enough material to make an entire montage. The homosexuals who did make it to the big screen, however, tended to fall into one of few categories: homosexuals who were The Joke homosexuals who were predators, killers, vampires, or some form of menace to society and homosexuals whose stories acted as a cautionary tale for otherwise straight folk.
GAY MOVIES WITH HAPPY ENDINGS ON NETFLIX CODE
The code dictated what was acceptable and morally objectionable in films between 19, and led to the erasure of LGBTQ+ characters and themes in many of the movies of the time. The Celluloid Closet (1995), a documentary about homosexuality in the film industry throughout the 20th century, traces how the moral crackdown of the 1920s led to the creation of the Motion Picture Production Code of the US, otherwise known as The Hays Codes. But the all-too-common themes of love followed by misery or even death has a pretty sad history in queer media in general.
Of course, a lot of these films are great - critically acclaimed, in fact, and have made their mark on cinema. There are the secret lesbians from a time without electricity in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) and Ammonite (2020), the coming-of-age lesbians who undergo a lot of trauma because of homophobia and heteronormativity in Pariah (2011) and Rafiki (2018), and finally, the lesbians whose love is doomed to end in Blue is the Warmest Color (2013). If you’re new to lesbian films, you might notice that many of them - or, at least, the prominent ones - tend to be pretty sad.