From Rope to Bound , 11 Sexy Queer Thrillers That Will Keep You on the Edge of Your Seat

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Queer thrillers might be so back. With the recent successes of movies like Love Lies Bleeding and TV shows like Killing Eve, it’s clear that I’m not alone in my affinity for media that combines a little action with a lot of queerness. While I’m still crossing my fingers for a full-blown queer thriller revival in the second half of the 2020s, there are plenty of standout examples of the genre that already exist, going as far back as the 1940s.

The queer DNA of the genre makes sense: Thrillers are defined by the same blend of secrecy, tension, and desperation that has defined many queer people’s private lives. There are also structural reasons why LGBTQ+ themes have also become intermeshed with the thriller genre. From roughly the 1930s to the 1960s, a set of guidelines for the American film industry known as the Hays Code banned open depictions of homosexuality, interracial relationships, and other “morally evil” content. During those three decades, many filmmakers secretly slipped queerness into their films by assigning stereotypically gay traits to characters who were framed as antagonists, hence the term “queer-coded villain.”

In 1968, the Hays Code was replaced with the current MPAA rating system, meaning that queerness in America cinema could exist not just as subtext, but as text. Now we don’t just have queer-coded villains in the thriller genre: we have out queer heroes and villains, along with characters who land somewhere in the moral gray area between those two poles.

The thrillers on this list run the gamut from merely queer-coded to explicitly queer — with a hard emphasis on explicit — but if there’s one thing that unites them all, it’s that they’ll have you on the edge of your seat. Read on for 11 LGBTQ+ thrillers, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope to the Kristen Stewart film Love Lies Bleeding.

Stranger by the Lake (2013)

This 2013 film directed by Alain Guiraudie might be the platonic ideal of a queer thriller. It takes place over the course of a few languid summer days at an idyllic lake that’s also a cruising hotspot. To seek public sex with strangers is to accept a certain degree of risk. But without spoiling the plot, Stranger by the Lake heightens the question of how much risk we are willing to accept in order to fulfill our desires, turning up the stakes to an almost unbearable level. Prepare to be alternately turned on by the film’s numerous unsimulated sex scenes, and so anxious that you find yourself holding your breath.

Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

If you’ve ever visited this website before, there’s a good chance you already know this one. But we couldn’t possibly do a list of queer thrillers without including director Rose Glass’ latest. Starring Kristen Stewart as gym manager Lou and Katy O’Brien as pro bodybuilder Jackie, Love Lies Bleeding is gorgeously shot and acted, while still retaining a little bit of the schlocky edge that characterizes the most fun thrillers. (If you haven’t seen it yet, you’ll completely understand what I mean when you reach that larger-than-life ending scene.)

Doom Generation (1995)

Yes, it is billed as “A Heterosexual Movie by Gregg Araki,” but if you know anything about the legendary New Queer Cinema director, you should know not to take that statement at face value. The toxic bisexual pseudo-throuple vibes of this movie are potent from the jump, when Jordan White (James Duval) and Amy Blue (Rose McGowan) pick up Xavier Red (Johnathon Schaech) in their car after a night out, leading to immediate tension between the two men. But we’re barely able to savor that intoxicating dynamic before the trio gets into a violent altercation at a convenience store, kicking off a chain of similarly surreal, random events. The breakneck pace barely gives the viewer any room to breathe until the brutal end. (And I do mean brutal.)

Black Swan (2010)

If you are looking for subtlety, you may not find it in this list, and certainly not in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. Natalie Portman stars as the wide-eyed Nina Sayers, a ballet dancer with the New York City Ballet who must learn to embody the dark side of the titular bird in the company’s production of Swan Lake. She learns by experience from fellow dancer Nina (Mila Kunis), who draws her into a world of sex, drugs, hallucinations, and sometimes all three at once.

Bound (1996)

Bound ran so that Love Lies Bleeding could… also run. This 1996 classic was the Wachowskis’ directorial debut before the sisters went on to write and direct The Matrix. In addition to being unapologetically sexy and butch/femme, Bound is also flawlessly written and directed as a thriller. And — slight spoiler alert — unlike many other sapphic characters, the lesbians actually make it out alive. What more could you ask for?

The Handmaiden (2016)

South Korean director Park Chan-wook is arguably the king of the thriller genre, and Sarah Waters is the queen of lesbian historical fiction. Naturally, Park’s 2016 adaptation of Waters’ novel Fingersmith is masterful, right down to its juicy depictions of clandestine lesbian sex. It’s a common, if baffling, argument now that sex scenes in movies are inherently unnecessary and detract from the plot. The Handmaiden is proof that that isn’t true. This film’s intimate scenes are essential to its depiction of the struggle to break free from the repressive chains of colonialism and patriarchy.

Rope (1948)

Alfred Hitchcock basically invented “Be Gay, Do Crime” with this one. Rope is not overtly gay, as Hollywood was still governed by the Hays Code at the time, but it is covertly gay in a way that’s near impossible to miss. That was certainly helped by the fact that the two central actors, John Dall and Farley Granger, were reportedly queer themselves, though not openly. They have undeniable chemistry as Brandon Shaw (Dall) and Phillip Morgan (Granger), a pair of handsome, brilliant young “roommates” who murder a former classmate of theirs as a moral-philosophical experiment. That’s not a spoiler — it happens at the very beginning. And yes, as you might imagine, it only gets wilder from there.

Set It Off (1996)

The trope of the morally gray antihero is typically relegated to straight white men. Not so with Set It Off. The 1996 heist thriller follows Stony Newsome (Jada Pinkett Smith), Cleo Sims (Queen Latifah), Frankie Sutton (Vivica A. Fox), and T.T. Williams (Kimberly Elise), a friend group of Black women in Los Angeles. After a series of harrowing but heartbreakingly realistic tragedies, the women are pushed to the point of desperation and commit a series of bank robberies. The film’s portrayal of their deep, loving friendship already feels kind of queer in and of itself — but also, Queen Latifah’s Cleo is an incredibly sexy stud.

Cruising (1980)

Young Al Pacino stars as Steve Burns, a cop who goes undercover in the leather clubs that once dominated the downtown Manhattan gay scene of the ’70s in order to find a serial killer who targets gay men. What could possibly go wrong? (A lot.) Because director William Friedkin is straight, Cruising was incredibly controversial upon release, with gay advocacy groups protesting the film before it even premiered. But having watched the movie multiple times, I don’t think that Cruising is homophobic as much as it shines light on a subculture that more assimilationist gays would prefer to leave hidden in the dark. Especially considering that the subculture depicted in Cruising would largely vanish in the years following the release of the film due to the rise of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City, Cruising is absolutely worth a watch, even if only for the fact that it serves as a time capsule for a bygone era.

Knife + Heart (2018)

Knife + Heart kind of feels like the spiritual, aggressively French successor to Cruising. Like the Pacino film, Knife + Heart is set at the end of the ’70s, and features a mysterious killer targeting gay men. That’s where the similarities end though; there’s maybe one woman in all of Cruising, but Knife + Heart centers on Anne Parèze (Vanessa Paradis), who produces and directs gay male pornography, and who is in a relationship with her female editor, Lo?s (Kate Moran). Whereas the plot of Cruising is fairly straightforward, Knife + Heart throws a new twist at you every 15 minutes or so, right up until — and through — the credits sequence.

Femme (2024)

Femme is a difficult watch for many reasons. The film opens with Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), a Black gay drag queen, getting beaten up in a homophobic attack, and ends on a similarly queasy note, to say the absolute least. But the journey from point A to point B had me literally biting my nails the whole time. After Jules is beaten, he coincidentally runs into his attacker, a bro-y white guy named Preston (George MacKay), at a sauna, who seems not to recognize Jules out of drag. The two begin meeting up regularly for sex, with Jules playing the long game of eventual revenge. You could guess how this ends, but I’d recommend watching and finding out for yourself.

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