Before Stonewall: 9 must-see queer period pieces set in the mid-20th century
A League Of Their Own was lauded for its inclusion of LGBTQ characters and themes. Though some have balked at the insinuation that the real All-American Girls Professional Baseball League of the 1940s featured queer players, it is, in fact, historically accurate.As series co-creator/star Abbi Jacobson has remarked, “Queer people didn’t just show up at Stonewall—we’ve been around forever.”Related: The earliest examples of gay people in historyOf course, we’ve long known that to be true, but that had us thinking about other period pieces that have put queer characters front and center, particularly those set around the same time as A League Of Their Own, before the start of the Gay Liberation Movement.
As it turns out, there are quite a few!In fact, one of our most anticipated films of the fall, My Policeman, will examine the life of a gay man (played by Harry Styles) in 1950s England.
But until then, there are plenty of excellent LGBTQ-focused movies set around the mid-20th Century that are worth checking out, so we’ve assembled an overview of the most notable examples.Related: Everything we know about Harry Styles’ gay romance ‘My Policeman’ (so far!)To qualify for the list, these films had to be set somewhere between the 1930s and 1965—effectively the “mid-century”—and feature a known queer character in one of the lead roles.
While these stories may run the gamut from thrilling to heartbreaking, they all bear that distinctive mid-century aesthetic, so you’ll want to watch with pen and paper in hand to take some chic retro-style notes.An English public school in the 1930s is rocked by a scandal, making the only openly gay student, Guy Bennett, the subject of bullying at the hands of his peers.
