10 top shows and movies to watch with Pride

If the political climate across the globe is giving you chills – and not in a good way – we have the perfect menu to warm up a cold winter month. As an appetiser for South Africa’s Pride in October, and to cheer on our friends overseas, we’ve prepared a delicious serving of alphabet soup. None of those “there’s one queer character in it” scraps, we’re serving those gourmet LGBTQIA+ flavours. All the shows and movies on the menu are by and about queer people, with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of over 85% Fresh. And, okay, yes, we’ve slipped in two off-menu items, but the taste is immaculate, and those Yelp reviews were from haters. 

Bon appetit, and all the joy of Pride Month, Part One!

Quick click links

1: Problemista

2: We’re Here Season 1-4

3: Suited

4: Transhood

5: Jerrod Carmichael: Reality Show 

6: John Early: Now More than Ever 

7: Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music

8: Tig Notaro: Drawn + Tig Notaro: Boyish Girl Interrupted

9: Striking with Pride

10: The Stroll: Stream from Thursday, 26 June 

Bonus: When I Knew

1. Problemista

Rotten Tomates rating: 86%

The breakdown: Fantasy comedy film. Alejandro (Julio Torres, Fantasmas and Los eSpookys), a struggling aspiring toy designer from El Salvador, starts working for Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), a New York City art critic, art world outcast and nightmare boss, in exchange for visa sponsorship that will allow him to make his mark before the clock runs down on completing his rat run through the bureaucratic maze he’s facing to get a work visa. 

Representation: Alejandro’s toy designs have a rich vein of camp – especially the fashion doll who can cross her fingers behind her back for extra drama! The film’s writer-creator is gay, but more than that, he is Julio Torres. Tilda is Tilda and identifies as queer. 

Stream Problemista from Thursday, 5 June

2. We’re Here Seasons 1-4

RT rating: 100%

The breakdown: Emmy-, Peabody-, and GLAAD Media Award-winning reality series. Four drag queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race take a road trip through small town USA to meet isolated LGBTQIA+ people, and help them to build community through putting on a one-night-only drag show. The drag queens for Seasons 1-3 are Bob the Drag Queen, Shangela and Eureka O’Hara, while Jaida Essence Hall, Priyanka, Sasha Velour and Latrice Royale take over for Season 4. The series celebrates the open-minded acceptance and self-love at the heart of Pride. But it doesn’t gloss over the realities of standing up to the political movements that are provoking hate and fear to justify attacks on queer people.

Representation: A truly intersectional reality show, with nearly every colour of the Pride Flag flying high (sorry to our Ace friends, though), queer joy celebrated, and a focus on teaching what healthy family and community relationships can look like. 

3. Suited

RT rating: 100%

The breakdown: This HBO documentary film takes us behind the scenes at the Brooklyn tailoring company Bindle and Keep, which specialises in making gender non-conforming clients look and feel immaculate. The story begins with how co-founder Rae Tutera persuaded tailor Daniel Friedman to take them on as an apprentice, and then as a business partner. We get to meet a handful of their clients who’re looking for a bespoke suit experience for a special occasion, and Suited shows how affirming it can be to wear something that fits you exquisitely, while projecting the physical image that you want it to – truly the height of the tailor’s art.

Representation: Whether you’re trans, non-binary, or in any way gender-queer with a preference for masculine presentation or well-fitted suiting, this will have you weighing up your options. 

4. Transhood

RT rating: 86%

The breakdown: Filmed over five years in the right-wing, religious-conservative-dominated state of Kansas, movie-length HBO documentary Transhood follows four kids – Avery (aged 7), Jay (aged 18), Leena (aged 15) and Phoenix (aged 4) – as they grow up challenging their assigned gender identity in the United States. The film doesn’t hold back about the challenges the kids and their supportive families face, or about how their goals sometimes clash and shift along the winding path of establishing gender identity, social transition, and choices surrounding medical transition. But it does so with open-hearted, sympathetic neutrality and honesty.

Representation: Crosses the big T in LGBTQIA+ with love.

5. Jerrod Carmichael: Reality Show

RT rating: 95%

The breakdown: This unique comedy-reality series centres on standup comedian Jerrod Carmichael’s attempts at “radical honesty” in his life with family, friends and potential partners. With a hint of tongue in cheek, Jerrod takes us along via camera as he confesses his crush to his long time friend Tyler the Creator and asks him to be Jerrod’s plus-one at the Emmy Awards. If you’re looking for therapy, come along as Jerrod discusses possible sex addiction at his latest appointment. And climb aboard for a road trip as Jerrod tries to explain to his conservative-leaning dad why “accepting” but silencing queer kids isn’t accepting them at all. 

Representation: Get ready for the realest, rawest, funniest deep dive into life as a queer, Black man from a conservative, religious family in the United States. There are so many points of connection for local LGBTQIA+ viewers, so it’s worth a watch, no matter which flag you fly.

6. John Early: Now More than Ever

RT rating: 100%

The breakdown: Stand-up comedian John Early blends comedy sets, music mockumentary, and industrial strength cringe in this special that takes aim at how very weird the people in his generation can be in online safe spaces … and at the hideously untalented and ferociously self-promotional among us and their efforts to perform authenticity. Between performances we get production insights into John Early’s “musician” character and his cancel-courting abuses of power, contempt for his stage band The Lemon Squares, attention seeking antics, and worse. 

Representation: If you’re looking for a “relatable” gay, white, male comedian, behold the final boss.

7. Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music

RT rating: 100%

The breakdown: Actor, musician and cabaret artist Taylor Mac allowed HBO to film a performance of judy’s* 24-hour stage production, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music. The show uses 246 pieces of popular music to reframe American history through the eyes of marginalised communities and their efforts to push back and hold onto culture and joy. To do so, Taylor enlists judy’s audience to take opposing sides in history, even encouraging them to rebel against judy. Aside from the result being a magnetic performance, this feast for the eyeballs won an Emmy for Outstanding Costumes in 2024. 

Representation: Could not be queerer or more delightful! But get ready for that feeling when you’re singled out and picked apart by a drag queen or stand up comedian. 

*Taylor’s pronoun of choice is “judy”.

8. Tig Notaro: Drawn + Tig Notaro: Boyish Girl Interrupted

RT rating: 100% each

The breakdown: Get ready for the world’s first-ever fully animated stand-up comedy special in Drawn! Tig’s slow, drawn-out stories get a whole new dimension as we’re taken everywhere from her blood-spattered dental surgery incident, to her (somehow also blood-drenched) proposal to her wife. While Drawn gave us Tig’s sillier, sweeter side, her hour-long standup comedy special Boyish Girl Interrupted celebrates a certain kind of awkwardness familiar to genderqueer and gender non-conforming people. In one segment, Tig takes us along for a gleeful moment with a baffled airport security guard following her cancer-related double mastectomy. “I was enjoying the awkwardness so much,” she insists. Watch now, and find out what it’s like to have your own boobs try to kill you!

Representation: The butch lesbian experience we’ve been yearning for!

9. Striking with Pride 

RT rating: Not yet rated (but not to be missed)

The breakdown: In the mid-80s when British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher threatened to plunge Welsh coal miners into poverty with the stroke of a pen, it wasn’t just Britain’s coal miners who stood by them. Help came from an unexpected source as London’s LGBTQIA+ activists dedicated their 1984-1985 Pride march to raising funds to support the striking coal miners. Now as filmmaker Ashley Francis-Roy spotlights the need for solidarity by going back to the original sources, Welsh drag queen Tayce (RuPaul’s Drag Race) tells the story of the strike – and how we find strength by uniting in common causes – to a new generation of children. 

Representation: Looking for truly intersectional activism? Striking With Pride highlights vital contributions that were largely ignored by the media at the time, including those by lesbians who raised funds, and the Welsh women who kept their families and neighbours afloat. 

Stream Striking with Pride now.

10. The Stroll

RT rating: 95%

The breakdown: During the 1980s and 1990s in New York, there were few work opportunities and fewer support systems available to gender non-conforming people. Many Black and Latina transwomen fleeing abuse at home, or just looking for a way to reach for their dreams, wound up in the city’s Meatpacking District, in an area nicknamed The Stroll, where they became sex workers. Transwomen, who survived hate, violence, intimidation and constant police harassment and exploitation, now tell their stories alongside archive footage of New York. The documentary also highlights how activist Sylvia Rivera rallied the LGBTQIA+ community around the hate crime murder of Black transwoman Amanda Milan, who was stabbed to death in Times Square in 2000, and drove real political change. 

Representation: The Stroll flies the flag for Black trans people and all LGBTQIA+ people whose financial and social marginalisation make them an easy target for hate. It’s a reminder of how we’ve all benefitted from the colossal amount of work that Black transwomen have done, since Stonewall, to campaign for the rights of everyone in the alphabet soup. 

Stream from Thursday, 26 June.

Bonus pick: Not yet rated, but not to be missed

When I Knew

RT rating: Not yet rated

The breakdown: This 35-minute HBO documentary from back in 2008 asks a simple question with a complex and hugely variable answer. Inspired by Robert Trachtenberg’s 2005 book of the same name, filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (The Eyes of Tammy Faye) asked 16 gay and lesbian people across the United States about the defining moment in which they recognised their own sexuality or gender identity. For many, in the brief snippets of their stories, this happened long before they came out. But for others, the realisation upended everything they thought they knew about themselves. 

Representation: Gay and lesbian people speak directly about their experiences – in the face of claims like “kids are too young to know”, and “surely you would have known before?”