10 Powerful LGBTQ+ TV Shows To Watch To Celebrate Pride Month

LGBTQ+ Pride month is celebrated in June every year, in honor of the Stonewall Uprising, a series of spontaneous and violent demonstrations in response to a police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village. One way in which the Stonewall riots are akin to the current Black Lives Matter protests is that it was an expression of the culminated frustration homosexuals felt at the time about their regular, long-standing experience of oppression and brutality at the hands of the NYPD. The fuse was lit long before Stonewall exploded into the gay liberation movement and the long fight for LGBTQ+ rights in the United States that continues today. This June 28 marks the 50th anniversary of the first Pride march in New York City, which began on the first anniversary of Stonewall.

Happily, the list below is the tip of an iceberg of programming that represents LGBTQ+ people in all their human complexity. As such, the list here forms a sampling from comedy to drama to reality television to animation.

10 Orange Is The New Black

Orange Is The New Black, or OITNB, completed its series run when its seventh season was released in July 2019. Set in Litchfield Penitentiary, a minimum-security women’s federal prison in upstate New York, the series first follows Piper Chapman, a young, upper-class white prisoner.

She is engaged to marry a man when she enters but falls back in love with a fellow inmate with whom she’d been in a lesbian relationship years earlier. The series quickly sprawls out as it focuses on other inmates, including Sophia Burset, so movingly played by Laverne Cox, that the first openly transgender actress was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for her performance.

9 Tales of the City

For the full experience, you’ll need to watch the 1993  six-episode run and its 2019 Netflix original ten-episode limited series, both entitled Tales of the City. The new one is a continuation of the first, twenty years later, with the same leads reprising their previous roles.

Based on American author Armistead Maupin’s extended love letter to the city of San Francisco, his Tales began life as serial shorts in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1978, finally accumulating into nine novels by 2014 (the last four were written directly as novels). With San Francisco as a haven culturally and historically, the series organically features a spectrum of sexual and gender orientation in all its complexity and richness with respect.

8 Brooklyn Nine-Nine

While the seven seasons of Brooklyn Nine-Nine are not about gayness — it is, after all, a police-centered workplace comedy and vehicle for Andy Samberg — two of the main characters present us their struggle with it in gentle, humorous, ways. Captain Raymond Holt, played with beautifully comic and mostly buttoned-up reserve by Andre Braugher, is a gay man in a stable, loving relationship.

But Holt’s success is hard-won, and he bears the scars of years of being passed over for promotions and mockery. In later seasons, Stephanie Beatriz’s fiery Detective Rosa Diaz struggles to come out to her parents and friends as bisexual.

7 Queer Eye

The very first lines of the Netflix 2018 reboot of the 2003 Bravo series Queer Eye immediately sets a tone: “The original show was fighting for tolerance. Our fight is for acceptance.” It’s a shorthand way to acknowledge that the cultural needle has moved while making it clear that there is still more work to be done.  At the show’s heart is agape, a Greco-Christian term for an all-encompassing love.

The Fab Five makeover experts lovingly dole out their gifts (understanding food and wine, fashion, culture, lifestyle, grooming, and design) to people who are unfamiliar with the topics as a way of modeling the treatment that everyone deserves. What’s more, they do it with great humor, grace, and panache.   

6 American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace

If at the heart of Queer Eye is the yearning for acceptance, at the heart of American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace is the price paid when self-acceptance is absent. The real story of the murder of fashion icon Gianni Versace by Andrew Cunanan has been the subject of several films.

The bigger canvas of Ryan Murphy’s nine-episode anthology drama series for FX allows for a deeper dive into the psychology of both men. The stark contrast between Versace’s grounded and evolved self-acceptance and Cunanan’s self-loathing and mental illness plays out with deadly consequences.

5 Steven Universe

This award-winning Cartoon Network animated series marks a major win for LGBTQ+ visibility. Over its five seasons from 2013-2019, Steven Universe featured non-binary and bisexual characters, a same-sex wedding, and even a polyamorous relationship.

An important point to note is that the show is as much about sci-fi-style world-building, magic, comedy, and positivity as it is about its more controversial subject matter.

4 Queer as Folk

Queer as Folk is the oldest series on this list, with its five-season run from late-2000 to mid-2005. This groundbreaking drama series that follows the lives of five gay men in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, wears well.

Some of the show’s topics seem less taboo now, like casual sex, H.I.V., coming out, and same-sex marriage. But it’s easy to find many hot-button issues fifteen years later, like graphic sex, gay adoption, workplace discrimination, and actively gay Catholic priests.

3 A Very English Scandal

Based on the true story chronicled in John Preston’s book of the same name, A Very English Scandal is a dramedy miniseries set primarily in the very homophobic British 1960s and 70s and follows a very closeted Liberal Party Member of Parliament named Jeremy Thorpe (Hugh Grant). Thorpe faces the increasingly difficult task of covering up a past same-sex affair with Norman Josiffe (Ben Whishaw) at a time when homosexuality has only recently been decriminalized. The series and both actors received multiple award nominations, with Whishaw winning an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA Award.

2 Pose

No list of critical LGBTQ+ shows would be complete without this vital relative new-comer. Set in 1980s New York, Pose centers on the queer African-American and Latino communities steeped in “ball culture,” an underground subculture within which people compete through performances, dance, lip-synching, and modeling.

The award-winning cast is a celebrity transgender who’s who, including Dominique Jackson, Indya Moore, MJ Rodriguez, Angelica Ross, and Hailie Sahar. Pose’s third season is confirmed, but filming is on hold.

1 The Bisexual

Set in London, this dramedy collaboration between British Channel 4 and Hulu, stars co-writer and director Desiree Akhavan as Leila,  an Iranian-American woman at a crossroads. Her long-term same-sex relationship has just ended, and she finds herself interested in dating men for the first time.

Gay culture sometimes sees bi-sexuality as a threat. That’s not difficult to appreciate when one accounts for a long and brutal history of attempts to purge homosexuals of their “gayness” by any means necessary, from electroconvulsive shock treatments to conversion therapy.  This show lives in that cramped space by forcing the question of sexual orientation as existing on a continuum.

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