A queer watchlist to pregame ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’

Schoenbrun’s predecessor to Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma follows two lonely teens who connect over their obsession with a TV show called “The Pink Opaque”, set in a world that feels more like home than their own. In the TV’s glow, the pair start to feel who they might in fact be. It’s a chillingly apt queer allegory about how the closet can feel before you realise that you’re in it.

There was a special feeling of being a kid in school, watching a show that none of your friends knew about, and then meeting one person who did so that the two of you could slip away into your own secret world. In early adulthood, quite often I’ve made friends who had seen these lesser watched, but cherished pieces of media—most often having discovered it by going into the search bar and typing “gay”. Schoebrun’s film heartbreakingly captures this unspoken queer tradition.

This documentary follows Will Ferrell and his close friend and collaborator of three decades, Harper Steele, who came out as a trans woman later in life. As a means to reconnect and learn how to navigate this new chapter as friends, the pair embark on a cross-country road trip—a favourite pastime of Harper’s all her life but one that is considerably less safe for her to do alone post-transition. With Ferrell by her side, she reacquaints herself with that pastime in this moving portrait of two friends reacquainting themselves with one another which features an original song by Kristen Wiig that is guaranteed to make you bawl.

The first Marathi film at Sundance, Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s debut feature, Sabar Bonda, uses many little acts of subversion for a more gentle expression of queer love. The film follows its protagonist Anand and his family as they observe the 10-day mourning period after the death of his father, their patriarch. Journeying back back from his home in Mumbai to his family’s ancestral village, Anand is confronted with questions about his sexuality from niggling relatives and encounters his childhood companion, Balya.

“When I was growing up, I wasn’t sad or questioning my sexuality. This might be the reality for other people, but it’s the only reality we see onscreen. We need to see the other side too,” Kanawade told The Nod.

This film is essential viewing. The cult classic follows all-American cheerleader Megan (Natasha Lyonne), whose parents decide that she’s gay—much to her confusion, not to mention her football-player boyfriend—and send her to True Directions, a conversion therapy camp that promises to set her straight. “I’m not perverted! I get good grades! I go to church! I’m a cheerleader! I’m not like all of you!” Megan insists in the company of “unashamed” lesbians such as Graham (Clea Duvall). The rest, as they say, is cinema history. The cast includes RuPaul, Michelle Williams, and Melanie Lynskey, among other greats.

The Julio Torres HBO six-part series doesn’t forefront queer romantic love or coming to terms with a queer identity but is undeniably and deeply queer in its sensibility. Through a series of vignettes, not unlike a variety programme, and starring a delectably unbound array of queer performers, Fantasmas is a depiction of surviving New York City that’s less Friends and more Alice in Wonderland. Julio Torres’s mind is one of the great treasures of our time, and I have no idea how they got this inimitable series made, but I’m glad it happened during my lifetime.

Four-word pitch: Teenage Lesbian Fight Club. Need I say more? 

Director Emma Seligman paired up with actor Rachel Sennott for the second time (their first film together was Shiva Baby) and added Ayo Edebiri to the cast so the two could play best friends PJ and Josie—teenage lesbians at the bottom of the social food chain who inadvertently start a self-defence club with the motive of leveraging the club to get closer to, and eventually hook up with, cheerleaders. It’s like the gay younger cousin to all the teen comedies that came before, with a score co-composed by Charli XCX, fuelled by two gay protagonists dying to actually be gay in practice. I hate this word, usually, but for Bottoms, unapologetic is a compliment of the highest order.

The National Award-winning film starring Sharmila Tagore and Manoj Bajpayee marries the themes of chosen family through the story of an adopted son, a family home, a connecting thread of queer lineage between grandmother and granddaughter, and rewiring family systems to prioritise love, acceptance, and securely detaching from the way things were.

The 2024 comedy (with a second season on the way) starring Benito Skinner, Mary Beth Barone, and Wally Baram is a quintessential college coming-out story penned and enacted by Skinner, a beloved comedian-podcaster of our time, and soundtracked to some of the 2010s most iconic bangers. Don’t even get me started on the cameos.

It follows in the great teen drama tradition of the actors being nowhere near the age they’re depicting, and its absolutely stacked cast—made up of Skinner’s collaborators (Owen Thiele, for instance) and idols (Kyle MacLachlan, Megan Fox, to name a few)—is almost a gentle encouragement that while you may be afraid that coming out will change things, it might actually bring you closer to those who are meant to be in your life.

The the cult comedy series created by and starring Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson needs little introduction, but for the uninitiated, the show (adapted from their web series of the same name) follows the two best friends living their best New York City life… well, on a budget. Part of the show’s specialness comes from the way it framed the friendship between the two characters as the central, most important relationship in their lives.

This HBO comedy follows two millennial siblings, Cary and Brooke Dubek (played by Drew Tarver and Heléne Yorke respectively) who haven’t quite figured it all (or well, anything) out yet but must try and get their shit together after their 13-year-old younger brother, aka Chase Dreams, becomes an overnight, Internet pop sensation. 

Penned by queer comedians including Cole Escola, Joel Kim Booster, Matt Rogers, and Chris Kelly (the first openly gay head writer of Saturday Night Live), the show is memorable for Tarver’s thoughtful portrayal of Cary Dubek, a gay, aspiring actor who has conflicts and actions that feel true to life without being plagued by the question of queerness.