Best gay storylines
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—AF
“Hedda”
“Hedda” wears the clothes of a prestige period drama, but its queerness is far from ornamental. —WC
“Sauna”
Mathias Broe’s steamy (pardon the couldn’t-resist pun) Danish romance “Sauna” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival as a modest gem in the World Cinema section — but the honest emotions it packs are anything but.
The story follows two professional hockey players at the top of their game who find themselves turning their rivalry on the ice into something far more intimate in the bedroom. —WC
“RuPaul’s Drag Race”
Seventeen seasons into making her-story, “RuPaul’s Drag Race” spent 2025 doing what it does best: turning queer joy into a global spectator sport.
—AF
“Twinless”
James Sweeney’s sophomore feature, “Twinless” works as both a horrifying queer thriller and a discomfortingly funny dark comedy. Creator Benito Skinner was inspired heavily by his own life — and pop culture obsessions — while making the series, which follows a teen named Benny as he heads off to Yates College and grapples with his sexuality.
Dickinson stands out from other period pieces not only for its rare queer content but also for its use of modern language and cultural references woven into its historical setting.
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RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–present)
You better work. Drag legend RuPaul leads the way on this reality competition show that’s part America’s Next Top Model, part American Idol, and part LGBTQ Super Bowl.
The show charts their relationship over the next three decades, all the way up to the AIDS crisis, with a beautiful, poignant story that echoes with political issues we’re still seeing to this day. Gorgeously animated and delicately written, “The Summer Hikaru Died” tells a teen melodrama tale through a decidedly queer lens, asking how repression and self-hate can make one feel like their own desires are monstrous.
The Best LGBT Movies and TV Shows of 2025
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The show is very funny, with some scene-stealing cameos from stars like Charli XCX or Bowen Yang, but at its heart is a tale of someone coming into his own and learning to let go of the expectations and walls he’s put around himself. The story of a man named Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) who travels to small-town France in order to pay his respects to his newly deceased old boss, “Misericordia” watches from a smirking remove as its protagonist begins to tug at the knotted psychosexual dynamics he shares with the dead man’s widow (Catherine Trot) and her oafish bruiser of a son.
Through all of its twists and turns, the film confirms Guiraudie as our keenest, canniest director to bring male longing and its fallouts and physical particulars back to movie screens.
And for more, check out Victoria Schwab’s short story from which the show was based.
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Modern Family (2009–2020)
The radical thing about this classic ABC ensemble comedy was that whereas many LGBTQ television shows have depicted gay characters in urban landscapes, this one depicted a married gay couple tackling suburbia.
In 2025, identity is treated as a declaration and silence is regarded as assumed erasure. Trying to find her way in this brave new world, Carol emerges as one of the most complicated and dynamic queer characters in recent TV memory, at turns deeply relatable and wildly unpleasant, equally grieving the death of her partner as she is lusting after the member of the hive mind that becomes her guide.
“Blue Moon”
Ethan Hawke isn’t the first choice you would think of to play an embittered, messy bisexual — one who is several inches shorter than his lanky build, nonetheless — but somehow the actor nails it in “Blue Moon,” a biopic of acclaimed lyricist Lorenzo Hart from Hawke’s frequent collaborator Richard Linklater.
It’s a glossy, Southern-set thriller that leans hard into guns, sex, and red-state decadence. —WC
“Misericordia”
Alain Guiraudie‘s extraordinary and wonderfully twisted new queer noir, “Misericordia,” begins on a long, snaking, winding drive and ends with a man and a woman, who are unrelated and unmarried, in bed, and a light turned out.
The being he now calls his friend is a spirit that has taken his form — with Yoshiki’s voice, too — and one that will kill him if he tells anyone the truth. Backlash against trans and nonbinary authorship rippled across the global art scene, while book bans and drag queens still dominated local chatter in the U.S.
But it wasn’t all bad news.