Queer News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

Queer cinema has always been in a state of continual evolution, but the evolution of trans depiction has come slower, even during agreed-upon golden eras of queer cinema. But in 2024, we are in the midst of a potentially new movement in which three trans-authored films are reshaping the possibilities of what a trans film looks like, and how transness can be expressed in cinema.

The Dead Boy Detectives are a cult favorite that never quite found a cult. Introduced in the pages of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, the undeniable strength of the premise — a ghost boy from the 1910s is best friends with a ghost boy from the 1990s; they solve ghost mysteries! — regularly lures in comics creators, but rarely for longer than a single story arc every five to 10 years.

Over the past couple of weeks, the Stardew Valley queer community has been calling on Eric 'ConcernedApe' Barone to add pronouns to the character creator, allowing non-binary people to feel better represented in-game. However, others have responded by harassing LGBTQ+ players and content creators.

John Wiswell’s debut novel Someone You Can Build a Nest In was one of Polygon’s most anticipated SFF novels of 2024, and it lived up to that title. It’s an energetic, deeply strange, surprising book whose protagonist, a monster named Shesheshen, strongly reminded me of one of the decade’s most popular SFF protagonists, Martha Wells’ Murderbot. Like Murderbot, Shesheshen is a nonhuman character who struggles to understand human emotion and behavior, and is frustrated and even repelled when she starts experiencing it herself. They share a certain outlook — a loneliness they can’t acknowledge, and an attachment to one human in particular.

If Warner Bros. Pictures had successfully intimidated trans filmmaker Vera Drew out of releasing her tiny pop-punk biopic The People’s Joker, it’s possible that it would have disappeared quietly: yet another small, personal indie film hunting for an audience in an oversaturated market. Instead, Vera’s hallucinogenic memoir — an energetic, rawly personal trans coming-out story built around crowdsourced digital animation — became international news.

The books in DC Comics’ Black Label imprint are defined by top-of-their-game writers and artists telling standalone stories too big for continuity at a high production value. And Zatanna: Bring Down the House, coming this summer from Mariko Tamaki and Javier Rodríguez, checks all of those boxes with a big marker.

Back in 2022, Vera Drew’s highly personal, incredibly irreverent stylized memoir movie The People’s Joker made a splashy debut at the Toronto International Film Festival — in that immediately after its premiere, DC Comics’ parent company, Warner Bros., filed a cease-and-desist order against the movie, shutting down all subsequent screenings and throwing the movie’s future into doubt. It’s taken years for the film to see the light of day, outside of the occasional festival screening. I saw it at the 2023 Fantastic Fest, where Vera Drew was present to talk about the experience, but was careful not to address the question of whether her film might ever get a real theatrical run. But now, according to the poster, it’s “coming soon. Legally. Seriously.”

The Coen brothers’ filmography is tragically straight. Acclaimed for their stylistic breadth and wit, their films are rich and willing to play with gender roles in ways that welcome queer readings — the screwball hijinks of The Hudsucker Proxy and the winking choreography behind Channing Tatum’s dance numbers in Hail, Caesar! are among the many playful flourishes where the space between quirk and intent are as wide as the viewer wants it to be.

Andrew Haigh’s dark love story All of Us Strangers arrived to Hulu on Feb. 22, after two quiet months of building up word of mouth in theaters. Debuting just before Christmas and competing with a lot of more bombastic releases, it initially reached a small audience — but it was evident that it made an impression, as critics and viewers spun out lengthy online analyses and discussions of its memorable, divisive ending.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth reviews are out now, giving us a taste of what the highly anticipated sequel has to offer. And while we won't delve into spoilers just yet, one thing that's stood out from our time with the game is that Rebirth is full of queer representation, much more so than previous games.

According to a new GLAAD report, one in five gamers surveyed are LGBTQ+, but 38 percent "feel they sometimes don't belong in the gaming community". A staggering 42 percent report that they even avoid "playing a game because they thought they would be harassed."

Like most queer people who went to high school in the early 2000s, I lived for the lesbian romance of But I’m A Cheerleader and combed through other women-led movies like Charlie’s Angels and Josie and the Pussycats for queer subtext. And yet somehow, I missed out completely on a lesbian spy comedy called DEBS, written and directed by Angela Robinson (The L Word, True Blood).

Our Flag Means Death took the world by storm with its release in 2022 and continued to dominate with its second season. However, once again fans are given bad news as another fan favorite is given the ultimate death – cancellation.

Fans of Pixar’s Luca — specifically those who ship the titular young sea monster and his best friend Alberto — are rejoicing on social media, announcing that “Luberto” (as the ship has been dubbed) has been declared canon. This conversation sparked when McKenna Harris, story artist on Luca and director of the companion short Ciao Alberto, shared a sequence of cute (and unofficial) art of Luca and Alberto in an Instagram story, ending with a picture of the two kissing beneath an umbrella.

Until my early 20s, I believed I was a “normal” sex-haver. I assumed any guilt or repulsion I felt after intimacy was a universal experience. It wasn’t until a year ago that, after hearing me mention that I had repeatedly dissociated after kissing various Tinder dates, my friend said: “You know what asexuality is, right?” I stuttered, offended; of course I knew what it meant, but only in that “jock calling the nerd asexual because he won’t ever get laid” way. She called my bluff and showed me a video from an asexual YouTuber who echoed many of my secret opinions about dating and intimacy. This set me on the path to find as many video essays about asexuality as possible, which explained that I wasn’t broken or in need of the “right person”; my love would just come from somewhere besides sex. Any blueprints for where I might find it or what that love might be instead were a mystery, as I quickly found that asexual representation in media is an absolute travesty.

Rose Glass's new romantic thriller Love Lies Bleeding has unveiled its first trailer – and it offers up all the queer love, '80's vibes and action-packed mayhem we were hoping for.

Actor Neil Newbon has just won best performance at The Game Awards for his portrayal of everyone's favourite vampire, Astarion, in Baldur's Gate 3.

It’s pretty common to see long, elaborate videos show up in your YouTube recommendations — I’ve found myself watching multi-hour takedowns of obscure foreign series I’ve never watched before. One particular video, clocking in at just under four hours, has taken off on the platform, and is a hot topic of discussion on social media. Plagiarism and You(Tube), by Harry ‘Hbomberguy’ Brewis, digs into several important topics: reaction content, AI-generated media summaries, and of course, plagiarism.

Nexus Mods, likely the most popular mod site on the planet and a place you're definitely familiar with if you've ever had cause to tinker with a Bethesda game, has banned a user for attempting to mod a same-sex pairing out of Baldur's Gate 3. Beware there are some very mild spoilers ahead for some act 2 characters. Named Ser Aylin, the mod in question (via Eurogamer) affects the relationship between Ketheric's daughter Isobel and the aasimar Dame Aylin. As you can probably guess from the name, it turned the latter into Ser Aylin, a «slightly more polite and male version» that also used AI to alter the character's voice in a more masculine direction. The mod's description (which no longer exists on Nexus Mods, but has been archived on the Wayback Machine) reads politely enough, as though it was innocently uploaded by some naif who wasn't quite aware of the implications that turning Aylin into a man carried.

Glorious fantasy RPG Baldur's Gate 3is full of a wonderful roster of diverse and interesting characters, all of which help to make it one of the best RPGs of the decade so far. However, one mod aimed to callously erase the LGBTQ+ identities of certain characters from the game before it was banned by the folks as Nexus Mods. 

NexusMods has removed a mod that aimed to make one of Baldur's Gate 3's most popular queer romances heterosexual in the wake of a backlash from fans.

There’s one Baldur’s Gate 3 mod that has garnered a flooding of controversy on Reddit, reaching over 16,000 upvotes. But what is this Ser Aylin mod controversy for BG3?

Jennifer English, the voice of Shadowheart the brooding Cleric in hit fantasy RPG Baldur's Gate 3has shed more light on her performance, stating that the character's arc is a «trans allegory.» 

In June 2020, I found my life steadily unraveling. While quarantining during the COVID-19 pandemic, I felt besieged by cages: my house, where my entire family lived in suffocatingly close proximity; my room, which, thanks to Zoom, had become an ad hoc auditorium for various professors; and my body, whose masculinity felt increasingly alien. I had successfully avoided interrogating my gender for months, but that changed when I watched Steven Universe.

Later Daters is a game about dating and companionship in a retirement community. It’s not some doom and gloom tale about romance at the end of your days, though; it’s an exploration of the passion, change, fun, and often-untold stories of life that happen as you’re experiencing your later years.

I’ve written about a lot of games in this column in the last year, all of which I’ve loved very much. But I don’t think I’ve been totally obsessed with any of them in the way I’ve been obsessed with In Stars and Time. For a week, I stayed up late every night because I couldn’t put it down. I dreamed about it. I sat at my desk at work, watching the clock, eager for the hour when I could finally get home and try again to unravel the mystery of what was really going on in the hearts and heads of protagonist Siffrin and his companions.

It’s been around a year since I first played Signalis, and a year since it wormed into my brain. No matter how much I think about it, watch video essays about it, or replay it, something lingers.

It has not been a vintage year for romantic comedies. (It hasn’t been a vintage year for this undervalued genre for quite some time.) There have been just a couple of brighter spots: Rye Lane’s colorful walk-and-talk through the streets of South London, Red, White & Royal Blue’s fanfic-adjacent queer romance. In series, Apple’s Platonic, with the ever-delightful pairing of Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen, attempted to twist the genre to focus on an obsessive, semi-toxic friendship. It found some rich material on the way, but predictably floundered when it came to the payoff because it had nowhere to go. This is the thing with rom-coms: More than almost any other genre, they are incredibly strictly codified, and you really do have to play them by the book.

There’s a chaotic, disorienting quality to many of Adi Shankar’s short films and series like Netflix’s first Castlevania that makes it seem as if the writer / director / producer always wants his stories to leave you winded and a bit rattled. His Konami-approved take on Dracula came with the brand name recognition and exquisite action sequences evocative of the classic games, but in Castlevania, you could still see shades of the high-energy, low-budget Bootleg Universe that first put Shankar on the map. This is even more true of Shankar’s latest series for Netflix, Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix.

Nintendo has officially confirmed that it's working on a live-action movie adaptation of The Legend of Zelda alongside Venom producer Avi Arad and Maze Runner director Wes Ball.

Alan Scott, the Golden Age Green Lantern, made his comic debut back in 1941. But thanks to the modern story development of Alan Scott coming out as gay, he remains surprisingly relevant to the DC Universe. And now, he's taking the spotlight in his own limited series as part of DC's New Golden Age.

Ubisoft lays off 124 employees in the name of "enhanc[ing] collective efficiency", adding to the already huge number of job losses in the gaming industry this year.

Overwatch is finally getting a non-binary hero, with the recently revealed Venture confirmed to use they/them pronouns. They will be a new damage hero, expanding the queer cast even further after other recent additions such as Lifeweaver and Baptiste.

After more than a decade of unprecedented growth, the audience for tabletop games keeps getting more diverse. So too is the subject matter of popular games, which increasingly include environmental and even social themes. But absent a few notable exceptions, historical games — that is, games inspired by real-world historical events — have lagged somewhat behind, with designers seemingly satisfied to simulate the same conflicts over and over and over again in miniature. In 2021, a blue-ribbon panel of industry experts decided to do what they could to change that. As a result, the Zenobia Award was born.

Black-owned indie game and animation studio JumpButton (JBS) is a force to be reckoned with in the industry. Their diverse and inclusive storytelling team is driving a range of startlingly original IPs that give center stage to those who are historically excluded or marginalized, while they spearhead the charge to more than double the amount of Black, brown and queer representation in the industry at large (which currently hovers at a pitiful 4%).

Jala doesn’t go to bed without saying goodnight to her father. Each night after Jala backflips out of her jacket and kicks off her shoes, she joins him on the couch until she falls asleep to the sounds of dad shows: Cold War documentaries and her taped childhood basketball games, naturally. After years away from her family, Jala allows herself to soften for a moment in their support. And each night, once Jala falls asleep, her father slings her onto his back to carry his adult daughter upstairs.

October is coming to a close, and with it, Halloween season ends. Fret not, though — there are still a few days left, and fall continues around the corner. And there are plenty of great movies leaving streaming services to catch up with before you say goodbye to spooky season.

It’s common for comic book creators to get on social media and rally fans to buy their newest book. But writer Tim Sheridan — whose credits include Teen Titans Academy, Dragon Age: Absolution, and as of this week, DC Comics’ six-issue miniseries Alan Scott: The Green Lantern — had something a little different to say last week.

Xbox seems to have accidentally confirmed Omni-Man's early access release date via the Mortal Kombat 1 store page, which reveals that he's coming on November 6.

Spider-Man 2 has a lot of MCU suits, bringing all of Tom Holland's different looks to the game alongside an original design. That makes nine total, nine little Tom Hollands crammed into the menu waiting to be plucked out. That's far too many as far as fans are concerned.

Mainstream movies have a hard time addressing trans characters without making them into symbols. In 2023, it feels like studios are so scared to even acknowledge the existence of trans people, let alone express an opinion about us, that they decided to just not include us, for fear of starting a debate about how woke their projects are. And yet, in 2023, I’m seeing myself in more movies than ever, even if those portrayals are unintentional and sometimes messy.

The actor who plays Shadowheart in Baldur's Gate 3 has revealed the secret sauce that makes the RPG's romances so believable: that sweet, sweet slow burn.

Many players have celebratedThe Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the space it made to find queer expression in Hyrule. Its story provided just enough possibility space for players to explore in ways that did not conform to its developers’ intent. But stepping into Hyrule Field again in Tears of the Kingdom, I felt much more constrained.

This week is a choose-your-own-adventure for TV premieres: Are you interested in a new murder mystery, complete with a time-hopping twist? You’ll want to check out Netflix’s Bodies then. Do you want to continue rolling through spooky season with some haunted delights, either fictional (The Burning Girls) or real-life (Living for the Dead)?

EGX 2023 attendees are criticising organisers and security following multiple complaints of sexism and harassment at the event. This also comes as Just Stop Oil protestors were able to disrupt a Tekken 7 tournament on the final day, spraying equipment with orange paint.

Mortal Kombat 1's first Kombat Pack includes three comic-book characters, Peacemaker, Omni-Man (from Invincible), and Homelander (from The Boys). All three have appeared in TV adaptations over the past few years, with the first two played by John Cena and J. K. Simmons respectively. They're both reprising their roles for MK1, but there's still no word on whether Antony Starr will.

Stardew Valley fans are asking for improved pronoun options to be included in the farming sim's upcoming 1.6 update - via a 5,000-signature petition. 

It’s been over seven years since the release of Stardew Valley,and its fan base is as active as ever. This time, Stardew Valley fans have organized to ask for more inclusive pronoun options in the beloved farming sim. On Sept. 29, Canadian content creator Atmos Fierce started an online petition asking the game’s creator, Eric Barone, to add additional pronoun options as part of the upcoming 1.6 update. Since then, the petition has received over 3,000 signatures and revived a long-running conversation around how the game interacts with its queer fan base.

The trailer for Dicks: The Musical is a difficult watch: a series of juvenile, faux-edgy jokes a giggling 13-year-old might make. But it turns out that the marketing lacks the context that makes the movie a gloriously silly inside joke, revealed even before its opening frames.

Stardew Valley is getting a brand new update at some point in the near future, as creator Eric "Concerned Ape" Barone has been teasing upcoming additions to the game via his personal Twitter account. There are plenty of things that fans are excited about, but the game's queer community thinks that this final update is the perfect opportunity to fix a problem that has existed since launch.

The comfortability of a handheld console like the Nintendo Switch makes it the perfect hub for gamers seeking diverse and inclusive experiences. Despite being a six-year-old console, the Switch offers an ever-growing library of games. Today, we choose to highlight those that celebrate queer representation and relationships. You’ll find tactical RPGs, heartfelt narratives, and (lots of) quirky dating sims in this list.

I remember the first time I truly cringed while watching a TikTok. The video showed a trend where women interrupted their boyfriends at their desks by walking into the room naked and recording the response. Given my general interests at the time — which consisted of watching edits of anime characters playing volleyball and rewatching clips of Persona 5 Royal — the trend appeared wildly out of place on my For You Page.

Everyone knows Taylor Swift, one of the world’s biggest pop stars, but only a select few know what she’s really thinking. Much like an Instagram story that’s secretly meant for a crush, Swift is always subtly putting herself out there, hoping you’ll notice. At least, that’s how fans tell it. For these fans, “Mastermind” isn’t just a single off her new album — it’s Swift’s entire modus operandi.

Resident Evil 4 Remake finally has the Separate Ways expansion, launched earlier this week. As well as letting players take the role of Ada and follow her own story, it also gives dataminers a bunch of new files to glean over - and one discovery and piqued the fanbase's interest.

Resident Evil fans are shocked at the many brutal ways that Ada Wong can be killed in the Separate Ways DLC for Resident Evil 4's remake, with one even being a reference to the laser room from the 2002 movie.

After tons of requests from fans since Resident Evil 4's launch earlier this year, Capcom has finally included a way to unlock Leon's Resident Evil 2 outfit in the Separate Ways expansion.

It took 10 seasons and 283 episodes for Princess Bubblegum and Marceline the Vampire Queen to kiss on Adventure Time. Of course, it was obvious they were together — or at least had feelings for each other — long before that, evidenced by their sharing clothes and general moon eyes in each other’s presence. Since the series ended in 2018, we’ve seen the pair simply exist as queer people in the 2020 Adventure Time: Distant Lands “Obsidian” special, both as individuals and as a couple, and they’re still a couple in the new Fionna and Cake spinoff series on Max. They are always written as each other’s romantic destinies.

One of the things I like best about Die Gute Fabrik's forthcoming Saltsea Chronicles is an optional feature. It's a card game, Spoils, which you can play while sojourning upon the game's islands and searching for clues about your ship's missing captain, Maja. Here's how it works: two teams of two characters take turns to play cards, moving in clockwise around a table. Player must follow the lead player's suit, and the highest-scoring card wins the trick, with four tricks comprising a round. It might sound like a straightforward competition, but different islands offer different house rules, and there are twists that reflect the game's ethic of community, mutual respect and diversity, and help animate the detail of its gently post-apocalyptic oceanic world.

The first full-length trailer for Sex Education season 4 is here – and the new school year looks like it's going to be full of new challenges for Otis (Asa Butterfield).

Everyone remembers the lovely romantic relationships in Dragon Age, but the series’ former lead writer, David Gaider, actually wasn’t a fan of writing these intimate storylines at first.

Spoilers for Baldur's Gate 3

Every team behind a book-to-film adaptation has hard choices to make. But one of the trickiest elements is taking a book that’s very much embedded in a character’s head and putting those moments on screen in an interesting way. Voice-overs can only go so far in conveying the way authors capture specific thought patterns.

To say fall 2023 is packing some truly stellar sci-fi and fantasy releases would be something of an understatement. The next few months include a return to the world of Red London, two truly unsettling houses, and giant cats that wear business suits (which is as adorable as it is terrifying to think about).

“Who says pirates have to be scary?”

Fans of Max’s addictive pirate comedy/drama/romance Our Flag Means Death have had a strained, sweaty wait for season 2, ever since season 1 ended with a heartbreaking story shift and an emotional send-off designed to give them the exact opposite of what they wanted for the leads, based-on-real-life pirate captains Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby) and Edward “Blackbeard” Teach (Taika Waititi). Now season 2 finally has a release date, and a first teaser that suggests fans will get exactly what they want in season 2: a whole lot of angst and piratey threat, outsized romantic drama, a return for the big and colorful cast, and Waititi playing operatic tsundere all the way up to the rafters.

If you also chronically scroll through TikTok, and you’re an anime fan, then you likely know of musician Ricky Montgomery. His songs have commanded enormous audiences, and clips from “Mr. Loverman” and “Line Without a Hook” have been used and reused for trends. TikTok has launched numerous musicians into stardom, and Montgomery took off during the COVID-19 pandemic, around the same time anime and manga fandom intensified online. At the time of publication, his music has surpassed 1 billion streams globally, and he has two platinum records.

Why did Riverdale return to the 1950s? The same reason Riverdale does anything: because it can, and because it’s the only show audacious enough to do it. In interviews, the cast has credited this choice to showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s desire to end things in the most “wholesome, Archie Comics way possible.” But the truth — and how it got to its big, twisty, and complicated ending — is much more complex, and much more interesting. This is, after all, Riverdale; nothing here is as straightforward as it seems.

Eduard Badaluta, the face model for Leon Kennedy in the Resident Evil 2 and 4 remakes, is calling on fan accounts to be deleted. In comments that have since been removed, Badaluta says these fans are running "piece of shit accounts", and says that he "doesn't need" fan accounts in the first place.

For better or worse, readers and reviewers alike often describe the bestselling romance Red, White & Royal Blue as reading “like fanfiction.” Four years after its debut, the queer love story and political commentary of Casey McQuiston’s novel have amassed a certifiably huge online fandom. Matthew López, director of Amazon Studios’ newly released movie adaptation, described himself as a “rabid, passionate fan” of the book himself.

Star Trek shows a vision of humanity’s future, but it’s always really about the present.

We're thrilled to announce the return of GamesBeat Summit Next, hosted in San Francisco this October, where we will explore the theme of «Playing the Edge.» Apply to speak  here  and learn more about sponsorship opportunities  here . 

On a desolate beachfront, two drunk First Nation teens stumble upon a naked corpse; in a meticulously organized house full of labeled Mason jars and Post-it notes, two women attempt to have sex while their dog watches, confused and upset; outside of the house, there are four garbage cans with ACAB painted on them. These are the scenes that open Deadloch, a new Australian murder mystery black comedy created by Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan. The Amazon Prime series wastes no time establishing a world whose queerness, murder, and incompetent law enforcement underpin Senior Sgt. Dulcie Collins (Kate Box) and her team’s attempts to maintain order in Deadloch while unmasking a misandrist murderer.

Heartstopper’s first season only briefly gestured at Charlie’s disordered relationship with food. There were small moments that webcomic fans could recognize — Charlie picking at his breakfast cereal or barely finishing his meal at a family dinner. Season 2, on Netflix Aug. 4, brings these details to the fore, following with author Alice Oseman’s source material; Heartstopper volumes 2 and 3 dig deeper into Charlie’s long-term trauma from being bullied, among other heftier topics.

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercurycreator Bandai Namco Filmworks is now under scrutiny for possibly erasing queer representation in the popular anime.

After a relatively cozy and oddly happy season, Good Omens broke everyone’s hearts — but in the best way possible.

When you are 7 years old, your favorite color is a big deal. It’s the first thing new friends at the playground ask you about, it decides which shoes you buy, and, most importantly, it is a litmus test for gender expression. But my favorite color was a conglomerate I dubbed “greenorange,” and I was definitely not passing this test.

Previously only available on itch.io, Taylor McCue has released their traumatic Game Boy Color art game, He Fucked the Girl Out of Me, on Steam. You can now nab it there for the price of free.

It can be hard to believe how much has changed over the past 30 years for queer Americans. In the distant past of 1993, gay marriage wasn’t legal in any state in the country. Sodomy laws all over America attempted to outlaw gay sex by criminalizing any oral or anal erotic contact. And Dan Savage, a sex-advice columnist then only known to readers of a few independent alt-newspapers around the country, was capable of making breakout news with a scandalous revelation: Mattel’s latest Ken doll, part of the Earring Magic line of Barbie toys, was openly modeled on gay fashion. And Mattel had unwittingly put a sex toy around his neck.