The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)

In a career lasting just over two decades, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died in 1982 at the age of thirty-seven, directed more than forty films (in addition to over twenty plays, and several lengthy television series). The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, a sado-masochistic love story which began life in June 1971 as a play and was adapted six months later into one of Fassbinder’s most potent pictures, is infused with autobiography. Petra (Margit Carstensen) is a self-absorbed fashion designer besotted with a doll-faced model, Karin (Hanna Schygulla), who responds only with scorn, boredom or material demands – much as Fassbinder’s object of affection, the actor Gunther Kaufmann, did during the turbulent shooting of the director’s 1971 western Whity. ‘Rainer never challenged the view held by those closest to him that every word in the play was spoken either to him or by him,’ said his biographer Robert Katz, who called Petra von Kant ‘the story, transsexualised into a lesbian love affair, of Rainer’s relationship with Gunther’. Petra’s claustrophobic apartment, peopled by mannequins, seems to expand and contract under the lens of Michael Ballhaus, who later shot Goodfellas. Fassbinder’s film inspired Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy, and was the basis for Peter von Kant, François Ozon’s gender-switched interrogative remake.

Dyketactics (1974)

There is more sensual bliss in this short from the pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer than in many full-length features. Four minutes long, with 110 cuts and a beeping Moog soundtrack, it layers shots of women frolicking and dancing in rural Napa County, followed by close-ups of kissing, stroking, licking and sucking, each image melting and dissolving into the next. Experimental cinema was a natural fit for Hammer, who came out following a heterosexual marriage. ‘Being a lesbian is experimental,’ she reasoned. “We’re creating a new life for ourselves. Why not create a new media as well?”

Female Trouble (1974)

The first John Waters film I saw was the PG-rated Hairspray: brilliant but hardly indicative of the depths of this filmmaker’s depravity. That was Waters’s final film with the glorious Divine (the Marlene Dietrich to his Josef von Sternberg), who died shortly before it opened in 1988. To savour their juiciest work, go back to Pink Flamingos, which ends with the notorious shot of Divine eating something brown and sticky that isn’t a Mars bar. Even better is the follow-up, Female Trouble, which begins with Divine, as juvenile delinquent Dawn Davenport, shoving the family Christmas tree onto her wailing mother, who has neglected to buy her the cha-cha heels she asked for. An outrageous catalogue of misadventures in crime and modelling ends with Dawn frying in the electric chair. I borrowed dialogue from Female Trouble for the epigraph to It Used to Be Witches, including the immortal line: ‘The world of the heterosexual is a sick and boring life’. In the spirit of Jean Genet, Waters’s films tell the straight world: ‘You think we queers are vile? You ain’t seen nothing yet!’

L’Homme blessé (The Wounded Man) (1983)

I had never heard of Patrice Chéreau’s hothouse drama until I began researching It Used to Be Witches, but now it is easily one of my favourite films. Jean-Hugues Anglade (twenty-seven at the time but convincingly passing for a twitchy teen) is the adolescent who accompanies his buttoned-up parents to see his sister off to university from the train station, only to find himself cruised there by an older man, with whom he plays a kind of cat-and-mouse game around the station’s concourse. Every element in the film is feverish, especially once the protagonist becomes obsessed with a handsome pimp; the whole thing runs on dream logic, full of repetition, woozy carnality and ritualistic behaviour. It captures uncannily the headiness and confusion of being young, queer and horny.

In Bed With Madonna (1991)

It might be hard for audiences now to appreciate the radicalism of In Bed With Madonna, AKA Truth or Dare, so allow me to set the scene. Two years after releasing her masterpiece, Like a Prayer, and a year on from touring the correspondingly provocative Blonde Ambition world tour, Madonna released this occasionally candid but often blatantly manufactured film-of-the-tour-of-the-album, directed by Alek Keshishian and mixing black-and-white behind-the-scenes footage with colour excerpts from the spectacular stage show. The shock, seeing this at an Essex multiplex at the age of twenty, was how much Madonna ceded the screen to her predominantly gay male dancers. My recollection is that the Friday night audience responded with audible revulsion to the general queerness, and specifically to the shot of a full-on male tongue sandwich. It was seeing In Bed With Madonna as a child that gave Levan Akin, the Swedish director of And Then We Danced and Crossing, his earliest inklings about his sexuality. ‘I’d never seen guys kissing until that movie,’ he told me in 2024. ‘I was appalled: “Eww, this is so nasty and dirty.” All my little ten-year-old self-hate was coming through. Then I watched it, like, fifty times. I was fascinated.’

High Art (1998)

An acutely observed debut from Lisa Cholodenko, who later directed Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as a lesbian couple whose children want to find their biological father in The Kids Are All Right. In High Art, the enigmatic Radha Mitchell plays Syd, an up-and-coming magazine editor who persuades the reclusive Nan Golding-like photographer Lucy (Ally Sheedy) to work on a new project. The two women progress from business to pleasure, and soon Syd is jeopardising Lucy’s relationship with her girlfriend, Greta (Patricia Clarkson), a faded German actor prone to reminiscing dreamily about her days in Fassbinder’s inner circle. Desiree Akhavan, the writer-director-star of Appropriate Behaviour, has called High Art ‘good and sexy and honest and raw’ and ‘one of the very few films that engaged both my heart and my loins’.

Stud Life (2012)

Campbell X’s invigorating debut feature is a wake-up call for queer solidarity. It even begins with an alarm going off: JJ (T’Nia Miller), a masc lesbian photographer, sits up in bed next to her snoozing bestie, Seb (Kyle Treslove), and starts snapping away, only to be mildly appalled by his early-morning erection. Though marketed as a love story between her and the femme sex worker Elle (Robyn Kerr), it is the friendship between JJ and Kyle that drives the action, punctuated by JJ’s vlogs, which show a side to her personality that she keeps hidden from Elle: unguarded, intimate, authentic. Despite the acclaim for Stud Life, it has taken Campbell X more than a decade to get his second film off the ground. But Low Rider, a poetic queer road movie set in the Western Cape in South Africa, was worth the wait, and should be in cinemas later this year.

The People’s Joker (2022)

A riot of colour, vitality and radicalism, Vera Drew’s debut is a reimagining of Joker as a trans coming-out story. Drew herself plays Joker the Harlequin, a budding stand-up comic in Gotham City, where comedy can only be practised by licensed clowns. She establishes her own underground anti-comedy club with the help of the Penguin and becomes infatuated with a fellow trans stand-up, Mr J., who turns out to be harmful to her mental health; she eventually confronts Batman himself, the billionaire groomer of teenage boys. After its 2022 midnight premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, The People’s Joker was mired in legal issues for several years before eventually exploding into US cinemas in 2024 and winning Drew the Breakthrough Director prize at the Gotham awards. It would be impossible to lose faith in queer cinema when films like hers – as well as the work of Louise Weard (Castration Movie), Rose Glass (Love Lies Bleeding), Sebastián Silva (Rotting in the Sun) and the Brazilian duo Marcio Reolon and Filipe Matzembacher (Night Stage) – can exist in all their brazenly disreputable glory.

Ryan Gilbey will be discussing the book at Foyles, Charing Cross Road, London WC2 (4 June); the Margate Bookshop (12 June); the Cinema Museum, London SE11 (15 June); Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham (16 June); Waterstones Bristol Galleries (27 June); BFI Southbank, London SE1 (14 July); as well as introducing screenings of End of the Century at the Barbican, London EC2 (9 June), The Duke of Burgundy at the Garden Cinema, London WC2 (18 June, plus Q&A with the film’s director Peter Strickland) and Femme at the Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford (1 July).