Summer 2023 didn’t exactly reach “equality” in the representation of queer women in mainstream cinema. However, several movies rolled into theaters during the hottest months of that year with intriguing explicit or allegorical depictions of LGBTQIA+ women simply existing. Trace Lysette cemented her status as a leading lady in Monica. Bottoms gave the world the raucous horny lesbian comedy it didn’t deserve, but desperately needed. Hari Nef got to just be another one of the girls in Barbie. Gwen Stacy in Across the Spider-Verse inhabited a universe draped in the trans pride colors. Even on streaming, Nimona’s titular character was an allegorically trans character full of chaos and levity.
It was a promising summer for all kinds of queer women representation, suggesting a new day had finally dawned. Cut to this past summer, however and LGBTQIA+ ladies were M.I.A. Negasonic Teenage Warhead and Yukio didn’t even hold hands in Deadpool & Wolverine. Sasha Lane and Katy O’Brian barely made eye contact in Twisters. Pixar and Disney brass apparently went into panicky overdrive to make sure nothing in Inside Out 2 could be interpreted as maybe queer. Even the indies this summer were painfully hetero productions like Ezra and Daddio.
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With so many Ryan Reynolds and Kevin Costner movies filling up theaters this summer, it’s worth asking: where did all the LGBTQIA+ women characters go? Why did summer 2024 decrease so drastically in this department compared to last year?
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This plummet in summertime allegorical and explicit queer gal representation was striking However, there’s also unfortunately banal reasons behind this phenomenon. Not every tide that comes to the shore is a gigantic wave. Similarly, not every summertime season is going to offer a plethora of queer women options. Those craving LGBTQIA+ women cinema needed to get their fix in during the spring. This is when The People’s Joker, Stress Positions, and Love Lies Bleeding all played on the big screen. Some basic scheduling snafus seemed to just shift more of the LGBTQIA+ lady movie representation to an earlier time slot.
With so many Ryan Reynolds and Kevin Costner movies filling up theaters this summer, it’s worth asking: where did all the LGBTQIA+ women go?
Lisa Laman
Further hampering summer output was the pair of strikes that hampered Hollywood last year. With studios refusing to give artists livable wages in 2023, writers and actors went on strike. Corporations prolonged these strikes. This left several summer 2024 tentpoles delayed out of the season. In the process, there simply weren’t as many chances for even allegorically queer women cinema in summer 2024. A significantly subdued slate of titles only offered fleeting glimpses of queer women existence, such as the tentpole Furiosa (which just radiates allegorically trans lady energy). Otherwise, Hollywood focused on a handful of “safe” cis-het-skewing bets like IF, Horizon: An American Saga, and Borderlands.
With those polite acknowledgements out of the way, the greater culprit behind summer 2024’s lack of queer women appears to be a byproduct of troubling Hollywood trends. In the last two years, new regimes have taken over major studios. These freshly-installed leaders are eager to slash costs and the number of movies produced each year. Others, like Disney, have gone back to old leadership while trying to play things “safer”. 2022 saw a deluge of lesbian-oriented TV shows get the boot. LGBTQIA+ characters across the small screen decreased significantly throughout 2023. The first casualties of “belt-tightening” are diverse communities. Films are no different.
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New WarnerDiscovery CEO David Zaslav (owner of Warner Bros. Pictures) installed leadership at this company largely prioritizing privileged communities. His company has also very publicly shown support for JK Rowling, a position innately putting Warner Bros. at odds with trans women. Meanwhile, an IGN exposé on Pixar Animation Studios alleged, among other grave concerns, that studio brass worked overtime to ensure nothing in Inside Out 2 registered as “gay”. Reportedly, the 10-second depiction of on-screen lesbianism in Lightyear got the blame for why that somber costly prequel flopped.
With these developments and allegations, it’s hard not to see the lack of queer women in summer 2024 as a reflection of major Hollywood studios reinforcing their norms. This is not emblematic of “a broken system”. This is the horrific way this industry operates. Ten years ago, Vanity Fair covered a GLAAD survey chronicling mainstream cinema’s dearth of queer representation. A year earlier, a survey of queer Screen Actor’s Guild members revealed homophobic rhetoric was rampant on all levels of film production. Back in 2001, The Guardian published a piece entitled “Hollywood opens up to gays, but will stars come out?” . This article noted that only Paramount Pictures had recently bought advertising space to advocate for queer films festival Outfest. Other studios were on the sidelines, refusing to offer any perspective or endorsement of queer art. What’s old is new again.
All the way back in 1990, iconic filmmaker Derek Jarman remarked to Out Week that it’s “much more difficult to get gay material funded, if you’re a gay film director.” Such words echo modern-day accounts of endless challenges Todd Haynes movies like Carol face in securing financing. On and on the examples go. Summer 2023 offered some delightful and refreshing deviations from the typical dearth of big screen queer representation. One summer, though, does not erase toxic systemic attitudes towards queer women form major studios. Summer 2024 was a reminder that the standards of Derek Jarman’s day are still with us.
Examining various summer 2024 features, it’s remarkable how those standards were so deeply reinforced on audiences. The Fall Guy’s trailer featured a joke where Ryan Gosling remarks to a baddie he’d previously fought “I never forget a fist”. He backtracks immediately, saying “not like that!” No homo, bro! Deadpool & Wolverine’s marketing tittered over how funny it is that two conventionally attractive cis-men would hold hands or dance together. Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung proudly boasted of the film being “non-political” in its refusal to comment on the existence of climate change. That lack of “politics” extended to not acknowledging queer people in the slightest.
Summer 2024’s movies were almost like a gentle pat on the head to folks who’d been toxically yelling “go woke, go broke” online for years. Last summer’s cinematic high points in queer women representation offered glimmers of hope for a better tomorrow. Summer 2024, meanwhile, largely boxed away the entire LGBTQIA+ community (save for indie feature Cuckoo giving Hunter Schafer a much-needed lead role). Studio heads are more eager than ever to “avoid controversy”. This means it’s doubtful meaningful major studio progress will be made on the queer women representation front anytime soon. After all, outfits like Lionsgate are more interested in embracing generative A.I. than queer storytellers!
Looking ahead to summer 2025’s biggest blockbusters, there are few indications of LGBTQIA+ women on the horizon. The two Marvel Studios blockbusters scheduled for next year (Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps) have no queer gal characters in their respective casts to speak of. Other titles like F1, Jurassic World: Rebirth, and whatever they end up calling the next Mission: Impossible similarly seem determined to emphasize cis-het perspectives. The status quo of Hollywood looks to be firmly returning after one brief summer indicating potential progress.
Summer 2024’s movies were almost like a gentle pat on the head to folks who’d been toxically yelling “go woke, go broke” online for years.
Lisa Laman
Even that fateful summer 2023, where titles like Bottoms indicated first steps taken towards a better tomorrow, had its shortcomings in queer women representation. Chiefly, the outstanding documentary Kokomo City barely got theatrical distribution despite being one of 2023’s most acclaimed motion pictures. The critically reviled Poolman still ended up dropping in 250+ theaters months after its Toronto International Film Festival debut. By contrast, Kokomo City’s buzzy Sundance drop didn’t inspire A24 or Neon to pick up distribution rights to the title. Even the biggest arthouse labels largely ignroed a project frankly exploring the existences of black trans women sex workers.
Even in a better than usual summer for LGBTQIA+ women representation, summer 2023 had shortcomings in this department. In hindsight, they were ominous harbingers that summer 2024 would bring back the LGBTQIA+ representation standard with a vengeance. Last year’s biggest summertime movies featured Hari Nef and a Gwen Stacy deeply rooted in trans-relevant material. Summer 2024, meanwhile, belonged to Deadpool & Wolverine’s gay panic jokes and a Pixar movie studio executives desperately tried to make as heterosexual as possible. The disparity here is shocking. It also encapsulates what a dreary landscape American cinema usually is for queer characters and artists.♦
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