What's your essential piece of queer pop culture?

Liza Minnelli’s status as a gay icon has been solid for close to 60 years. She may in fact even be the ultimate example of one; if she has any competition, it’s from her literal mother Judy Garland. Regardless, Liza With A Z, her 1972 TV special once believed to be lost to time, is a towering achievement of old-school performance and showmanship. Sure, Minnelli herself isn’t queer, but there’s an undeniable sensibility to her (and the behind-the-scenes talents of gay artists John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Halson, for example, certainly inform this too).

Releasing the same year as her triumph in Cabaret, Minnelli was in her prime. But what’s most notable in watching the also-Bob Fosse-directed Liza is the complete abandon with which she takes the stage, unafraid to look momentarily weird or awkward to help the whole room achieve catharsis. What says Pride month more than that? [Drew Gillis]

An avant-garde death dream, transposing filmmaker Derek Jarman’s fading eyesight to an unceasing, unyielding blue frame for 79 solid minutes, Blue is one of the most poetic and sensational films ever made. Jarman’s diary-close text, read in voiceover by Jarman and longtime collaborators John Quentin, Nigel Terry, and Tilda Swinton, moves between memory and imagery easily, leaping from playful profanity to heartbreakingly simple repetition as one would cross a stream on a series of flat stones. Of course, you don’t buy new shoes when you’re dying of AIDS. The shoes you’ve got on will do until you don’t need them any longer.

Sad, furious, and masterful, it’s as intimate a farewell as has ever been put on screen. A blind gay man, attacking and mourning and laughing at his fate, sums up so much of the AIDS crisis and the response of those affected. It’s hard now for me to even see a blank-screened TV, looking for input, without the memories of this movie welling up in my mind. Jarman’s blue sharpens us, consumes us, cuts out all the other bullshit of the world, and allows us to really, truly listen to the end of his life. You know how they say that removing one sense heightens your others? Blue is a sensory deprivation film, but it gives you so much in return. [Jacob Oller]

Deepa Mehta’s groundbreaking film Fire was unlike any other Indian movie in the ’90s—and it’s still unlike any today. Well, technically it’s an Indo-Canadian endeavor and occurs in English, but the cast is full of Hindi movie icons like Shabana Azmi, Nandita Das, Vinay Pathak, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, and Jaaved Jaffrey. The movie’s legacy endures because of its excellent filmmaking, performances, and grit in storytelling. This progressive film was a game-changer because it was the first one in Bollywood to depict an erotic, sweet lesbian romance. Sisters-in-law Sita (Das) and Radha (Azmi) are each married to men who cannot keep them happy or satisfied. They find a new lease on life in each other and strive for their love in a taboo society. Their effervescent chemistry and tender dialogue make it an unforgettable movie. It was met with protests and anger upon its release, but Fire overcame it all and will go down as a timeless piece of queer pop culture. [Saloni Gajjar]

The Wachowskis hit the ground running with their 1996 crackerjack neo-noir, Bound. But while much of their style would go bigger and more expansive as their post-Matrix careers took flight, it was distilled so exquisitely here. Made before the Wachowskis came out as transgender, the film still communicated such aching desire through Corky (Gina Gershon) and Violet (Jennifer Tilly), two lesbians trapped in systems of male control.

Bound creates a sense of emotional claustrophobia through its lead lovers, Corky (Gershon) and Violet (Tilly), who, behind the back of Violet’s abusive and pathetic boyfriend, Caesar (Joe Pantoliano), devise a plan to rip him off. The Wachowskis create visual metaphors and thematically rich restrictions for Corky and Violet’s internal prison (the movie opens in a closet, for goodness sake), only to break free in scenes of passionate eroticism and kinetic violence. They directed the hell out of Bound in 1996. We’re still all wrapped up in it. [Matt Schimkowitz]

I haven’t seen Shortbus, writer-director John Cameron Mitchell’s gutsy, explicit follow-up to Hedwig And The Angry Inch, since it played in theaters way back in 2006, but it’s always stuck with me. The film centers on the titular party in Brooklyn hosted by Justin Vivian Bond, where the likes of a sex therapist (who’s yet to have an orgasm), a dominatrix, a gay couple thinking about opening up their relationship, a stalker, and a whole lot of musicians and artsy types hookup and chat and mingle and celebrate. It captures the feeling of the city in the early aughts just beautifully, with an original score by Yo La Tengo and a fantastic needle drop of “Winters Love” by Animal Collective to bolster its sense of time and place. And it has one of the best lines about NYC to appear in a movie, in my opinion, delivered by an ex-Mayor clearly modeled after Ed Koch: “But you know what’s the most wonderful thing about New York? It’s where everyone comes to get fucked.” [Tim Lowery]

When she first brought up the idea of Transgender Dysphoria Blues with her bandmates, Against Me! frontwoman Laura Jane Grace told them it was a concept album about a trans sex worker. But, before they started working on it, Grace came out as a trans woman. Transgender Dysphoria Blues became more about her own experiences with dysphoria and her very public transition. It’s still got Against Me!’s signature sound, something Grace always knew wouldn’t change. “However fierce our band was in the past, imagine me, six foot two, in heels, fucking screaming in someone’s face,” she told Rolling Stone in 2012. But the lyrics, especially on tracks like “True Trans Soul Rebel,” set the songs apart from the band’s previous work.

All the outward-facing anger on older albums is turned inward, and Grace’s anguish is directed at the feeling of being uncomfortable in the body and the gender she was assigned at birth. In any other context, I’d have a hard time describing an album whose closing song (“Black Me Out”) includes the lyrics “I wanna piss on the walls of your house” as life-affirming, but by the time we get there, those words feel like a rallying cry. This is Laura Jane Grace completely unrestrained, fucking screaming in my face—and it feels so fucking good. [Jen Lennon]

Schitt’s Creek holds a special place in the queer canon, and my heart, for its sweet, prejudice-free depiction of the relationship between David Rose (Dan Levy, who created the show with his father Eugene Levy) and the love of his life, Patrick Brewer (Noah Reid). It didn’t get there right away, though. In the early episodes, you can see the show wrestling a bit with how to depict David’s sexuality. There’s even a half-hearted attempt at a romantic storyline between him and Stevie (Emily Hampshire). And then, in episode 10 we get it spelled out, metaphorically at least, in their famous conversation about David’s wine preferences. “I like the wine and not the label,” he tells her.

Having a pansexual character as one of the leads of a popular mainstream show is worth celebrating on its own, but it isn’t until David meets Patrick in season three that his full character arc comes into focus. Do they live in an idealized world of acceptance that doesn’t necessarily match reality? Yes. Do I enjoy indulging in a bit of fanciful escapism in wanting to see these two happy and thriving together? Also yes. [Cindy White]

These days, most people know Julien Baker as “the little one” in Boygenius, always running around the stage and panicking while introducing herself to interviewers. But while, as a longtime fan, it’s unbelievably gratifying to finally see the artist so happy and at home in her own skin, to only know her in her current state does a massive disservice to how hard she fought to get there. It also discounts her first two albums—Sprained Ankle (2015) and Turn Out The Lights (2017)—which are both staggering works of lyricism and raw vulnerability in their own right.

At its lowest emotional moments, listening to Turn Out The Lights feels like watching someone bleed out onto a looper pedal. In razor-sharp couplets over her tender guitar, Baker carves through her past struggles with addiction, doubts about God, and the consistent pain of trying so hard to make things better but always coming up short. “Maybe it’s all gonna turn out all right/Oh, I know that it’s not, but I have to believe that it is,” she pleads on one of the album’s standout tracks, “Appointments.” It may sound cheesy, but especially during pride month, it’s nice to see that sometimes it really does get better. [Emma Keates]