SUMMARY
Considering the quality, quantity, and diversity of LGBTQ characters in films distributed under A24 in 2024, GLAAD has rated A24 as GOOD.
A24 exhibited a breadth of high-quality LGBTQ representation across its 2024 calendar year of releases. A variety of LGBTQ characters were featured in leading roles and supporting roles as well as in smaller moments of casual representation. In films such as Love Lies Bleeding, Problemista, and Queer, queer characters lead their own stories across differing genres and were never sanitized or oversimplified. Two thirds of the LGBTQ-inclusive films from A24 featured queer women, including Love Lies Bleeding, Babygirl, I Saw the TV Glow, Janet Planet, We Live in Time, and Y2K. More than half of A24’s films, all of which were released theatrically, were LGBTQ-inclusive, marking the first time in this study’s history that a major studio has crossed this benchmark. GLAAD is looking forward to more queer content from the studio and hopes to see trans-inclusive A24 films with the same nuance the company has granted other queer characters, as well as more LGBTQ characters of color.
HISTORY
Founded in 2012 by arthouse film executives Daniel Katz, David Fenkel, and John Hodges, A24 Films began distributing films in 2013. With the abbreviation of the studio’s name in 2016, A24 announced a multi-year non-exclusive partnership with Apple and through that released its first in-house production, the GLAAD Media Award-winning and Oscar’s history-making film Moonlight. Previous LGBTQ-inclusive films from A24 include GLAAD Media Award winners Moonlight (2016) and The Inspection (2022), GLAAD Media Award nominees Lady Bird (2017), Bodies Bodies Bodies and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), as well as Aftersun (2022), Dicks: The Musical, Medusa Deluxe, and Talk to Me (2023).
This film follows Romy, a married CEO who strikes up an affair with her intern, Samuel. Romy’s daughter, Isabel, is queer and references her girlfriend, Mary, multiple times. There is a moment midway through the film where Romy sees Isabel cheating on Mary and kissing another girl, Ophelia. Isabel tells her mother she can love Mary but still have fun with Ophelia. Unbeknownst to Isabel, this provides Romy with justification to continue seeing Samuel. Later, when Romy’s husband finds out about her affair, Isabel acts as the reuniting force for her family, asking her mother to come back home. Isabel tells her mother that Mary forgave her for her indiscretions, so there is hope for Romy to be forgiven as well. Though Isabel is in no way a lead character, she has a significant impact on the protagonist and her queerness is an organic and matter-of-fact facet of her identity.
I Saw the TV Glow follows Owen, a social outcast who becomes obsessed with the fictional TV series The Pink Opaque. The second lead is Maddy, another loner at school, who helps Owens watch the show. At one point, Maddy tells Owen that she’s only into girls when she thinks his interest is in her, not in their shared love of television. The two strike up a bond based on the TV show, and years later, Maddy returns to tell Owen that The Pink Opaque is real and that they have been living a lie. Owen refuses to believe her, and continues to live his life, wondering what could have been and what lives inside him. Maddy is a driving force in the film, kickstarting Owen’s journey by helping him watch The Pink Opaque and later trying to free him from the potentially false world they have been living in.
Janet Planet is a slice of life drama following 11-year-old Lacy over the course of one summer with her mom, Janet. There is a sequence toward the beginning of the film that shows Lacy bonding with another young girl, Sequoia, the daughter of Janet’s current boyfriend, Wayne. When Wayne and Janet break up, Lacy is clearly sad about not getting to see Sequoia anymore. Later on in the film, Lacy asks her mother if she would be disappointed if Lacy ever dated a girl. Janet says she wouldn’t be disappointed and that she’s always wondered if Lacy was a lesbian. Though Lacy says she “never said she was a lesbian,” it’s clear to the audience that Lacy is still figuring out much about her life as a young teen and that she did have a crush on Sequoia. While this scene is the only mention of Lacy’s identity, showing the viewpoint and experience of a queer child is an important perspective that is often missing from the film landscape.
A romantic thriller set in the ‘80s, this film follows gym manager Lou and her budding relationship with Jackie, a bodybuilder passing through town. The two women strike up an intense sexual and romantic relationship, but complications arise due to Lou’s criminal family and Jackie’s steroid abuse, creating hyperbolic and unrealistic scenarios. Jackie ends up killing Lou’s brother-in-law, leaving Jackie and Lou to attempt to cover it up. This leads to Daisy, another woman who has feelings for Lou, discovering the truth and subsequently getting killed by Jackie. Lou and Jackie fight and separate, but the film concludes with the pair running away together as Jackie turns into a literal giant. Though the film has heightened versions of violence and reality, the core narrative centers on a love story between two women and never wavers from it, something all too rare and exciting to see in this genre.
Problemista is a surrealist comedy that follows Alejandro, an artist and immigrant from El Salvador who ends up working for eccentric art dealer Elizabeth in the hopes that she will sponsor his visa. Throughout the film, he takes side jobs to make extra money, including a sex work job where he cleans another man’s house to fulfill his kink. During the encounter, it’s clear Ale is attracted to the other man and craves an emotional connection. Another gay character, Bingham, gets a job working for Elizabeth through family connections. While the film centers on Ale’s relationship to his own immigration status and art, it is also open about his queerness and shows the nuance and depth of that perspective on his life. Specifically, Problemista tells a queer Latine immigrant story that isn’t based in trauma or his queerness as the source of conflict. GLAAD urges more films to follow this structure by including an LGBTQ protagonist whose queerness is an intrinsic part of them while also fully exploring other facets of the character’s personality and journey.
Based on William Burrough’s unfinished novel of the same name, Queer follows American ex-pat Lee living in Mexico City in the 1950s. The film depicts the larger queer community in the city that surrounds Lee, though nearly all of them are white men. Lee meets Allerton, a handsome younger man who Lee becomes obsessed with after the two strike up a casual relationship. Allerton is also often seen with a woman; their relationship is unclear, although implied to be sexual. Lee eventually takes Allerton as his companion on a trip to South America in search of a type of psychedelic drug that he believes can give him telepathic abilities. When they find it and partake together, Allerton denies his queerness and after that trip the two never see each other again. The film has a number of surrealist elements, often brought on by Lee’s addiction to heroin. While it is exciting to see a film where almost all the characters are queer, the self-loathing and internalized homophobia of the lead characters remains a tiresome trope of queer stories.
We Live in Time
This horror-comedy offers a retelling of history that sees the feared events of the Y2K computing crisis on December 31, 1999 come to pass, following a group of teens who must stop the machine uprising in their small town. One of the teens, Ash, is a masculine dressing teen in a friend group consisting only of teen boys. At one point, she talks about how she hooked up with one of her male friends and is teased about it, and goes on to say that she’s not sure if she even likes boys. Though this is the only mention of Ash’s sexual orientation, she is one of the few characters who survives through the end of the film.
