Gaysploitation Forever!

Do not let factoids, TikToks, Instagram reels, or neatly packaged retrospectives fool you: gay people have not always been represented in Hollywood, not in any legible way. They were present, of course, most commonly behind the camera. But on screen they flickered in and out like phantoms: suggested and coded, but rarely named. Queer cinema began in the margins. 

“Gaysploitation” is one of those terms that exists almost entirely in the margins as well. There is no official entry for it in the canon, no glossy oral history in the trades, no consensus about where it began  or what exactly it entails. A search on Letterboxd yields virtually nothing. The word appears instead in scattered articles, academic essays, and half-forgotten corners of the internet, usually invoked when queer images become too lurid or grotesque to fit comfortably inside the respectable narratives we prefer to tell about progress. 

Film scholar Darren Elliott-Smith uses the term “gaysploitation horror” to describe films in which queer viewers identify with the very monsters meant to contain them. Conservative critics instead use “gaysploitation” as an accusation, condemning any depiction of queer life that refuses to appear assimilated and effectively heterosexual. Between those two definitions lies the history of queer cinema. The same image that degrades us also arouses us, horrifies us, and sometimes, if we’re lucky, sets us free. The question is not whether queer people have been exploited. The question is when exploitation became our own form of authorship.

One of the first times these margins cracked open was in 1919 Germany, when Different from the Others, a silent melodrama, dared to depict homosexuality directly at a time when it had been made illegal in the country. National censors were established in response, and within a year, the film was banned. The message was clear: you can exist, but not like this. Not openly and not without consequence. As outlined in Vito Russo’s 1981 book The Celluloid Closet, queer cinema survived through implication, through coded villains and martyrs. It survived by not being named. Then, decades later in the underground, it started naming itself. 

In California in 1947, 20-year-old Kenneth Anger shot Fireworks in his parents’ garage. To call the film experimental is true, but misses the point. However fragmented its imagery may be, its subject—the psychic death and rebirth that accompanies queer self-recognition—is unmistakable. Sailors drift through the film like erotic apparitions in a world where violence and desire become indistinguishable. Anger built a new kind of cinema based in desire and ritual, where homosexuality was no longer coded and never apologized for. Instead, he transformed queerdom into myth. And while he may not have been the first to capture explicit queer imagery on film, he lit a fuse whose long tail would inspire generations of filmmakers to see themselves as spectacle rather than subtext. And spectacle, as we know, can be sold. 

Jean Genet’s 1950 film Un Chant d’Amour picks up the threads of oppression and exploitation with its depiction of lovers in prison and the consummation of love through voyeurism. Although banned upon release, just like the others, the film gave queer desire a cinematic language of its own, even as it was criminalized and contained. 

Soon after, the underground cinema of the 1960s created a spectacle that was reproducible for the first time. The films of Jack Smith and later Andy Warhol were able to emerge from the cult and enter the marketplace. Queer desire was being photographed directly, not through suggestion, in the public eye, and before long it became a commodity. Beautiful nobodies gazed into the camera, becoming something more than drag queens and hustlers, becoming icons. 

On the other side of the world, Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) pushed this process even further. Its flawed, messy portrayal of trans performers makes melodrama and psychedelia out of the inherent instability of their lives, honoring them while also exploiting them. By the end of the 1960s, queer cinema had moved from the private mythology of Anger to a fully visible counterculture. It was still seen as scandalous, but filmmakers had discovered that spectacle could be manipulated and turned back against the culture that first used it to marginalize. By the time Arthur J. Bressan Jr. began making films in the 1970s, the grammar already existed.

Bressan’s early work moved through erotica, but not without intention. In 1979’s Forbidden Letters, desire is not just depicted—it aches, trying to become something more than transactional. Around the same time, another branch of queer cinema pushed exploitation toward something even more confrontational. In 1972’s Pink Flamingos, John Waters weaponizes bad taste. His films dare you to look, recoil, and decide whether what you’re seeing is liberation or degradation. This is the tension at the heart of gaysploitation. Is visibility alone liberation, or is it nothing more than another form of consumption? 

Then came 1985’s Buddies, widely cited as the first film about AIDS. In it, a man is dying in a hospital room, with no metaphor or distance from its subject. It’s a transmission of fear and neglect, a lamentation of a culture that refuses to see until it is forced to. Bressan himself was left to die at the margins of the culture he helped create. As so often happens in queer history, the artist is discarded even though their work would become foundational. Our innovators are frequently celebrated only after they are no longer alive to receive the security and recognition they made possible for others. 

By the 1990s, what came to be known as New Queer Cinema had emerged, bringing filmmakers like Todd Haynes, Gregg Araki, and Gus Van Sant into the fold. Their films were more legible to critics and institutions, sharper and more controlled. They played festivals, received distribution, and were welcomed into the canon after decades of queer filmmakers hadn’t even been considered. Not only because their films had more palatable sensibilities, but also because they were easier to contain. 

New Queer Cinema did not kill gaysploitation intentionally. In many ways, it was necessary for queer existence for our art to be finally welcomed into spaces like museums and multiplexes. It offered consistency for burgeoning careers that could only be afforded by making themselves more familiar to audiences. The movement relocated from the grindhouse to the arthouse, which has its benefits, but also has a cost. Many of the figures immortalized in Paris Is Burning (1990) were already dead or would soon be gone by the time the culture began treating them as icons. Queer cinema has repeatedly transformed precarious lives into enduring images, even when the people inside those images were denied the stability those images later produced. 

Waters himself charts that transition, from the anarchic filth of Mondo Trasho (1969) to the relative warmth of Hairspray (1988). The transgression remains, but over time it gets softened so that audiences can embrace it without fear of contamination. Waters never abandoned exploitation—in fact, he returned to it with great success in his final films. But when he needed to most, he refined and smuggled it into the mainstream under the guise of charm.

Our current queer cinema inherits all of this. Films like Stranger by the Lake (2013) return to something closer to the earlier mode. Sex is danger, anonymity is desire, both are untethered from moral instruction, and the body is once again central. Gaysploitation had been dismissed because it looked cheap and refused to behave. It was one of the only spaces where queer artists could seize authorship at all, even if the terms were imperfect, even if the images were shaped by the same exploitative logic they had been forced to exist within. With legitimacy came responsibility, and with responsibility came the slow sanding down of the edges.

Contemporary queer media, for all its visibility, often feels safer. Maybe this is because the advent of social media gave heterosexuals a clearer window into our lives and -isms. Maybe it’s because after their own well is beginning to feel tapped dry, they have no one left to codify but us. The modern mainstream queer cinema is often cleaner, designed to offend no one and therefore challenge nothing. Representation has expanded alongside the machinery surrounding it, and queerness, while managed, is no longer invisible. 

Some readers may recall only a few years ago when Emilia Perez, a French farce masquerading as trans liberation, became a frontrunner in the Oscar race, scoring the first competitive acting nomination for a transgender performer at the Academy Awards, exploiting our image all the way to cinema’s biggest stage, only to fail at every opportunity to make anything resembling a significant remark on the adversity and outright animosity the community is facing right now. Our exploitation is now prestige, and the privileges of that prestige are enjoyed by any community but our own. 

But outside of the mainstream, something else is happening. In the work of filmmakers like Vera Drew, Alice Maio McKay, Louise Weard, and many others, you can feel a different energy taking shape. Call it a trans new wave, or don’t call it anything at all—it doesn’t matter. Labels have a habit of arriving after the fact, once the thing itself has already been softened enough to name. 

These films are messy, excessive, made with little money and even less institutional support. They blur the lines between sincerity and satire, between identity and performance, between pleasure and discomfort. They return to bodies, to transformation, to grotesquerie, to humor that feels dangerous again. Not because it is shocking, but because it refuses to explain itself. If earlier waves of queer cinema sought legitimacy, this one seems less interested in being understood than in being felt.

The familiar pattern persists, as artists take the greatest formal and political risks but are rarely rewarded with the largest budgets. There is something familiar in that, too. Not a regression, but a return. Not to the conditions of exploitation, but to the willingness to risk it. To make images that are too strange, too specific, too unstable to be easily absorbed. To reject the idea that visibility must come with clarity, or that representation must come with approval. While more institutionally legible queer films often lead to studio opportunities, filmmakers like Vera Drew continue to work with comparatively little support. 

This is not gaysploitation as it was—this new wave does something riskier. The conditions and stakes are different but the impulse is the same: to take the tools that were once used to reduce us to spectacle and turn them into something else. Queer cinema does not need to escape exploitation. We have more queer film images now than ever before, and we can exploit the image before it can exploit us. Gaysploitation now. Gaysploitation forever! 

Kenna Wong Ghaill

First published in The Ardent magazine's June 2026 issue.

Edited by Matt Miller and Meghan O'Dell.