The Best LGBTQ+ Film and TV of 2025 — and What's Coming in 2026

2025 was a complicated year for queer Americans — but it was, quietly, an excellent year for queer storytelling on screen. When the political environment gets difficult, LGBTQ+ artists have a history of responding with work that matters. Last year lived up to that tradition.

Here’s what we thought was worth watching from 2025, the just-announced GLAAD Award winners, and what’s coming in 2026.

Best of 2025

Boots (TV Series)

The year’s most talked-about LGBTQ+ TV drama was this adaptation of Greg Cope White’s memoir The Pink Marine. Miles Heizer plays Cameron Cope, a closeted gay teenager in the early 1990s who enlists in the Marines — partly for structure, partly for escape, partly because he doesn’t yet have language for who he is.

Boots is meticulous about its period setting and careful not to retrofit 2025 sensibilities onto 1993 realities. It’s about closetedness as a survival mechanism, about how institutions shape and suppress identity, and about the particular loneliness of being young and gay in America before the internet changed everything. Heizer is exceptional. It’s not an easy watch, but it’s a meaningful one.

Hacks — Season 4 (HBO/Max)

Hacks continued its run as one of the best shows on television. The comedy-drama about a Las Vegas comedian (Jean Smart as Deborah Vance) and her young queer writer (Hannah Einbinder as Ava) has evolved far from its origins into a full examination of women navigating power, age, and ambition. The show’s treatment of Ava’s queerness has always been matter-of-fact in the best way — identity-present without being identity-defining. Season 5 will be the final season. We’ll be bereft.

A Nice Indian Boy (Film)

This romantic comedy — about a gay Indian-American doctor who falls for a white man from a traditional Indian family (yes, that’s the twist) — arrived with 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and became one of the year’s most talked-about queer films in the independent space. It’s funny, warm, and genuinely interested in the intersections of cultural identity and queerness in a way that never feels like an academic exercise. One of the best surprises of the year.

Pluribus (Apple TV+)

Apple TV+‘s queer drama Pluribus arrived with a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and became one of the streaming year’s most discussed series. The show explores a queer ensemble navigating chosen family, loss, and identity in contemporary America. The critical reception was exceptional; the audience finding it just as much so.

Come See Me in the Good Light (Documentary)

Director Ryan White’s portrait of genderqueer poet Andrea Gibson is the year’s most emotionally demanding film and one of its most beautiful. Gibson — who has been living with cancer while continuing to write and perform — is one of the most significant queer voices in contemporary poetry, and White’s film gives that voice the full cinematic treatment it deserves. Seek this out.

Sauna (Film)

Mathias Broe’s Danish romance premiered at Sundance 2025 and has been making the festival rounds since. Johan is an out gay man who encounters trans man William at a Copenhagen sauna — and what follows is a quiet, tender examination of connection and desire that refuses easy categorization. Scandinavian queer cinema has been consistently excellent, and Sauna belongs in that tradition.

The Last of Us — Season 2 (HBO/Max)

Not a queer show per se, but Season 2 deepened the LGBTQ+ representation that made Season 1 notable. The story continued with some of the most ambitious and divisive storytelling in prestige television — and the show maintained its commitment to queer characters as fully realized humans rather than symbols or sidekicks.

The Emilia Pérez Conversation

No queer film of 2025 generated more debate than Emilia Pérez, Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language cartel musical about a trans woman drug lord. The film swept awards season — 13 Oscar nominations, a historic Best Actress win — and simultaneously faced sustained criticism from parts of the trans community about its casting choices (a cisgender actress in the lead), its portrayal of trans experience, and the question of who gets to tell trans stories.

The debate itself was important and real. So was the film’s technical achievement and the conversation it forced about representation. We’re not going to pretend there’s an easy resolution here — hold both things at once.

The 2026 GLAAD Award Winners

The GLAAD Media Awards were announced in early 2026, recognizing the best LGBTQ+ representations of 2025:

Outstanding Film (Wide Release): Kiss of the Spider Woman — a visually stunning adaptation of Manuel Puig’s celebrated novel, recognized for its portrayal of gay and trans identity under political repression
Outstanding Drama Series: Stranger Things Season 5 — the final season deepened its queer representation significantly in its closing arc
Outstanding New TV Series: Heated Rivalry — the breakout queer sports drama earned significant critical and audience recognition, with GLAAD noting its unusually layered portrayal of queer masculinity
Outstanding Reality Competition: The Traitors — the reality competition’s ensemble has consistently featured queer contestants whose identities are treated as unremarkable (as it should be)

The full GLAAD award results, including film awards, documentary, and music categories, are at glaad.org.

The History of Sound (2026, Cannes)

The most anticipated queer film of 2026 is this period drama starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor — two of the most acclaimed young actors in film — as two men whose relationship unfolds in the years before and during World War I. The film premiered at Cannes to considerable attention. US release is expected later in 2026. Based on what critics have seen, it’s likely to be the year’s most discussed queer film.

What Else Is Coming in 2026

Euphoria — Season 3 (Final Season, HBO/Max)

The long-awaited final season of Euphoria ends the story of Rue Bennett (Zendaya) and the queer-populated community of teenagers around her. After a long production hiatus, expectations are extremely high. The show has been polarizing — its aesthetics are sometimes more striking than its storytelling — but its commitment to representing queer adolescence in all its messiness has been consistent. Also returning: Colman Domingo, Sydney Sweeney, Jacob Elordi.

Yellowjackets — Season 4 (Final Season)

The cult survival-horror drama ends its run, bringing back the queer storyline of Taissa and Van — the show’s most compelling relationship across its timeline. Showrunners have confirmed the queer storyline is central to the finale.

A Note on the Broader Landscape

In a year when platforms like Meta and YouTube have rolled back LGBTQ+ content protections, LGBTQ+ representation in prestige TV and film has remained robust. HBO/Max, Apple TV+, and a handful of indie distributors have maintained consistent commitments to queer storytelling — partly because the LGBTQ+ audience is large, loyal, and financially significant, and partly because years of queer writers, directors, and producers working their way into positions of influence has structurally changed what gets made.

That structural change doesn’t reverse quickly. The films and shows above prove the point. Boots, Pluribus, A Nice Indian Boy, Sauna, Come See Me in the Good Light — these aren’t cynical attempts at representation. They’re genuine artistic achievements made by people with something to say.

That matters, particularly right now.

Sources: GLAAD Media Awards (glaad.org), Rotten Tomatoes, The Guardian, Variety, IndieWire.