The 18 best queer coming-of-age movies

Blockers is one of the most slept-on high school comedies of the past decade. While people get hung up on the admittedly very icky title and conceit—three parents try to “...block” their teenage daughters from losing their virginity on prom night—what lies beneath is a genuinely moving and forward-thinking exploration of identity, family, adolescent friendship, and sexuality. The latter mostly concerns one member of the friend group who, over the course of the film, realizes that she not only doesn’t want to sleep with a man at prom, she doesn’t want to sleep with a man ever. It’s very sweet and leads to a surprising number of emotional scenes like the one we’ve linked to above—as well as an after-prom smooch, of course.

Bodies Bodies Bodies featured Bottoms’ Rachel Sennott, and the films share a similar vibe. The irreverent tale of a Mafia-style party game gone terribly, horribly wrong, Bodies is at once a laugh-out-loud sleepover slasher and razor-sharp commentary on the chronically online. It’s a great film to watch with all the friends and frenemies in your life. (Just maybe make sure the power is fully functional first. And you should probably put your phones away.)

What else can we say about Booksmart, Olivia Wilde’s feature directing debut and her last outing behind the camera before … all that? It features one of the most painfully real lesbian teenagers (Amy, played by Kaitlyn Dever) in cinema history. It made a ton of its viewers—this writer included—sprint to the nearest karaoke bar to bust out some Alanis. Plus, it’s as smart as its title, and hilarious, to boot. It truly is all of those things, and so much more.

Sometimes you just can’t beat the classics. But I’m A Cheerleader, Jamie Babbit’s pioneering ’90s-era satire, has truly stood the test of time. The film, about a popular, “straight” girl who likes Melissa Etheridge, hates kissing her boyfriend, and whose parents send her to conversion therapy (because she’s a vegetarian), features an all-star cast including Natasha Lyonne, Clea DuVall, Michelle Williams, Melanie Lynskey (in full Kiwi mode!), and RuPaul Charles (as an equally “straight” man). The film is among many peoples’ lists of all-time favs (this writer included) and has inspired a spate of sapphic music videos recently, including Zolita’s “Somebody I F*cked Once” and MUNA’s “Silk Chiffon.”

Before Timothée Chalamet played a cannibal and Armie Hammer—maybe—was a cannibal, the two devoured hearts and minds in Call Me By Your Name, the Luca Guadagnino-directed sultry summer romance between an Italian-American teen and the visiting grad student who becomes his first love. A slow, sensual, and undeniably gorgeous film, CMBYN is responsible for launching Timmy—as well as Sufjan Stevens, who heavily contributed to the soundtrack—into the stratosphere. It also changed the way we look at peaches forever.

If you can’t launch a whole fight club to deal with the pressure of being gay in high school—like in Bottoms—you might as well do the next best thing: convince your childhood friend to loudly fake having sex with you at a party so everyone thinks you’re straight. Hey, it worked for Easy A’s oft-overlooked instigator Brandon (Dan Byrd), who still managed to find love by the end of this hit comedy that starred Emma Stone. Sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do.

G.B.F. (a.k.a. Gay Best Friend) may look outdated on the surface, but underneath its extremely early 2000s veneer, it’s actually a very sweet and funny send-up of the sorts of stereotypes that have plagued lesser LGBTQ-adjacent films for decades. When a closeted teen is accidentally outed to the whole school, his presence incites a war between the school’s three queen bees, who are all in search of a new member to fill out their clique in time for prom. The (also very 2000s) cast includes Natasha Lyonne (in her second entry on this list), Michael J. Willett, Paul Iacono, Sasha Pieterse, Evanna Lynch, JoJo Levesque, and Megan Mullally.

While 2023 welcomed back the sex comedy (see: No Hard Feelings), 2013 was a very different time. Today, the Bottoms girls may be able to pound one out on school property (and by that, we mean knock someone’s teeth out), but 10 years ago there was an alternate world in which, instead of starting a not-so-secret fight club, they had to start a very secret Gay Straight Alliance disguised as a geography club. Luckily times have (somewhat) changed, but Geography Club is a charming watch nonetheless.

With everything else that happened in 2020, Netflix’s The Half Of It didn’t get—excuse the pun—even half the love it deserved. In this full-of-heart Cyrano adaptation from writer and director Alice Wu, a straight boy named Paul and a closeted girl named Ellie fall into a love triangle of sorts as Ellie agrees to ghostwrite Paul’s love letters to a mutual female crush. This is as much a story of first love as it is of finding that one, completely platonic friend who understands you even more than you understand yourself; Wu was inspired to write the film by a formative friendship she shared with a straight boy during her own coming out process, so the whole thing feels very authentic and tender.

Irish indie film Handsome Devil is essentially Heartstopper if Nick and Charlie were platonic boarding school roommates (not the fake kind) and didn’t have to constantly truck back and forth to each other’s houses. Also “Nick” is played by Nicholas Galitzine, who kind of came out of nowhere (well, not entirely; his wacky film history is generating a lot of discussion on X) to feature as both the asshole jock boyfriend in Bottoms and in another film later on this list. Also, Andrew Scott—a.k.a. The Hot Priest from Fleabag—is in this!

The 2018 mega-hit Love, Simon tells the story of a closeted gay teen who is “just like you,” actually. While the Greg Berlanti-directed flick may not be the most subversive on this list—or actively progressive, at least by today’s standards—it still made waves when it was released for featuring an LGBTQ+ character in a leading, romantic, and mainstream role. Also, its spin-off show, Love, Victor, is pretty good.

This is easily the heaviest film on this list—and would frankly make a pretty odd pairing with Bottoms—but any collection of queer coming-of-age films would simply not be complete without the queer coming-of-age film of the last decade, Moonlight. Director Barry Jenkins’ Oscar-winning odyssey chronicles the journey of one young man growing up in the Miami projects as he grapples with his sexuality, poverty, and drugs, as well as the meanings of life, love, and what it means to be a man. It’s a tour de force from all parties involved, and one that should absolutely be required viewing.

Sometimes you’re simply not lucky enough to be a modern, American teen who can sucker-punch her way into a really good hookup. Sometimes you draw the short end of the stick and end up as an 18th-century French lady caught in a toxic, hetero-patriarchal society where all you can really do is yearn. And sit for portrait sessions. And touch each other’s armpits. And yearn some more. Portrait Of A Lady On Fire is devastating (like really, brutally sad), but it’s also one of the most beautiful movies to grace our screens in recent memory.

Red, White & Royal Blue is the first film to capture widespread audience attention since the hype for Barbenheimer (slightly) died down—and for good reason. Namely, it’s really fun! Nicholas Galitzine (his third shout-out on this list) delivers a Jane Austen-worthy performance as Henry, the closeted prince of England. His scene partner Taylor Zakhar Perez … doesn’t, but he’s not bad and he certainly looks the part. Uma Thurman delivers a genuinely insane approximation of a Texas accent and name-drops Truvada at one point. Rachel Maddow is there! A cake smashes into a million pieces! It rules.

Rachel Sennott may play a fully grown adult in Shiva Baby, but her character—a bisexual college senior studying “the business of gender” while moonlighting as a sugar baby—still has a whole lot of growing up to do. Over the course of a family shiva that makes up almost the entirety of the film’s tight, 78-minute runtime, Danielle (Sennott) manages to ruin at least one marriage, make out with her far more successful ex, and cry in front of literally everybody. She’s a messy bitch who lives for drama, and we love her for it.

Okay, fine. We’re cheating a little bit with Stick It. But while Haley Graham—the hotheaded narrator and protagonist of the classic, Blink-182-filled gymnastics movie (“it’s not called gym-nice-tics!”)—isn’t explicitly queer, she’s certainly queer-coded and has served as something of an awakening for a whole generation of sapphic millennials (including this writer’s friend, who has the ice bath scene tattooed on her arm). What we’re trying to say is that Sennott and Edibiri’s characters from Bottoms have definitely watched it, and you should too if you somehow haven’t already. Plus, the film’s many bumps and bruises will fit right in with Bottoms’ blood and black eyes.

With all the noise around this summer’s two biggest releases (you know the ones), you might have missed this gem of a film that defied gravity and didn’t throw away its shot despite flying very low under the radar (okay, we’re done now). While Theater Camp—about a ragtag group of thespians trying to save their beloved camp—is largely concerned with the exploits of its adult counselors (including a sidelined but still hilarious turn from Ayo Edebiri), the arc of one little boy coming to terms with a … let’s just say rare sexuality among his fellow campers is not to be missed.

This sweet Brazilian film about a blind, gay high school student should go down like a nice dessert—or at least an ice pack—after some of the harder punches on this list. This is also a safe choice for the love triangle-weary among us. In the words of The A.V. Club reviewer Keith Uhlich, “there are so many cheap and hokey ways this love triangle could play out that it’s almost a relief [director Daniel] Ribeiro … keeps things consistently tranquil. Situations that would be treated histrionically in many movies ... are passed over with relative placidity—a ripple as opposed to a tidal wave.”