When We Rise

In the aftermath of Stonewall, a newly politicized Vito Russo found his voice as a gay activist and critic of LGBTQ+ representation in the media. He went on to write "The Celluloid Closet", the first book to critique Hollywood's portrayals of gays on screen. During the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, Vito became a passionate advocate for justice via the newly formed ACT UP, before his death in 1990.

This sequel to "Before Stonewall" documents the history of gay and lesbian life from the riots at Stonewall in 1969 to the present. Narrated by Melissa Etheridge, the film explains the work, struggles, victories, and defeats the gay community has weathered to become a vibrant and integral part of North American society.

New York City's Stonewall Inn is regarded by many as the site of gay and lesbian liberation since it was at this bar that drag queens fought back against police June 27-28, 1969. This documentary uses extensive archival film, movie clips and personal recollections to construct an audiovisual history of the gay community before the Stonewall riots.

Megan is an all-American girl. A cheerleader. She has a boyfriend. But Megan doesn't like kissing her boyfriend very much. And she's pretty touchy with her cheerleader friends. Her conservative parents worry that she must be a lesbian and send her off to "sexual redirection" school, where she must, with other lesbians and gays learn how to be straight.

Mentally ill. Deviant. Diseased. And in need of a cure. These were among the terms psychiatrists used to describe gay women and men in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. And as long as they were “sick”, progress toward equality was impossible. This documentary chronicles the battle waged by a small group of activists who declared war against a formidable institution – and won a crucial victory in the modern movement for LGBTQIA+ equality.

The true story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man ever elected to public office. In San Francisco in the late 1970s, Harvey Milk becomes an activist for gay rights and inspires others to join him in his fight for equal rights that should be available to all Americans.

Gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin helps Martin Luther King Jr. and others organize the 1963 March on Washington.

A story of two coalitions – ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group) – whose activism and innovation turned AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable condition. Despite having no scientific training, these self-made activists infiltrated the pharmaceutical industry and helped identify promising new drugs, moving them from experimental trials to patients in record time.

A group of gay friends try to live with dignity and self-respect while events build to the opening battle in the major gay rights movement.

Kicked out by his parents, a gay teenager leaves small-town Indiana for New York's Greenwich Village, where growing discrimination against the gay community leads to riots on June 28, 1969.

Harvey Milk was an outspoken human rights activist and one of the first openly gay U.S. politicians elected to public office; even after his assassination in 1978, he continues to inspire disenfranchised people around the world.

Following a series of gay teen suicides, a deeply closeted student confronts his repressed sexuality in search of acceptance from his family, community, and himself.

While the fight for LGBTQ Civil Rights movement was gaining momentum, the 1970s witnessed horrific custody battles for lesbian mothers. Mom's Apple Pie: The Heart of the Lesbian Mothers’ Custody Movement revisits the early tumultuous years of the lesbian custody movement through the stories of five lesbian mothers and their four children. Narrated by Kate Clinton, the documentary interviews the sons and daughters who were separated from their mothers, the mothers themselves, and one woman who made the difficult decision to flee with her children.

Amid shifting times, two women kept their decades-long love a secret. But coming out later in life comes with its own set of challenges.

Over the course of a year, film follows Vancouver Pride Society president Ken Coolen to various international Pride events, including Poland, Hungary, Russia, Sri Lanka and others where there is great opposition to pride parades. In North America, Pride is complicated by commercialization and a sense that the festivals are turning away from their political roots toward tourism, party promotion and entertainment. Christie documents the ways larger, more mainstream Pride events have supported the global Pride movement and how human rights components are being added to more established events. In the New York sequence, leaders organize an alternative Pride parade, the Drag March, set up to protest the corporatization of New York Pride. A parade in São Paulo, the world's largest Pride festival, itself includes a completely empty float, meant to symbolize all those lost to HIV and to anti-gay violence.

Any Day Now is an American drama series that aired on the Lifetime network from 1998 to 2002. The show stars Annie Potts and Lorraine Toussaint as best friends of different races who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1960s during the peak of the Civil Rights Movement. In every episode, contemporary storylines are interwoven with a storyline from their shared past.

A hotheaded widow searching for the hit-and-run driver who mowed down her husband befriends an eccentric optimist who isn't quite what she seems.

Brash humor and genuine emotion make up this original series revolving around the lives, loves, ambitions, careers and friendships of a group of gay men and women living on Liberty Avenue in contemporary Pittsburgh, PA. The show offers an unapologetic look at modern, urban gay and lesbian lives while addressing the most critical health and political issues affecting the community. Sometimes racy, sometimes sensitive and always straight to the heart.

A group of lesbian friends struggle with romance and careers in Los Angeles.

Charles Ryder, an agnostic man, becomes involved with members of the Flytes, a Catholic family of aristocrats, over the course of several years between the two world wars.

The definitive story of the Civil Rights era from the point of view of the ordinary men and women whose extraordinary actions launched a movement that changed the fabric of American life, and embodied a struggle whose reverberation continue to be felt today.

The remarkable true story of Edwardian writer Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson.

A love story in two films charts the very different challenges to happiness for Michael and Thomas in the aftermath of World War 2, and to Adam and Steve in the present day.

A series of eight monologues set in the same pub over many years of gay history in response to the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act.

It's the late 1960s, homosexuality has only just been legalised and Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal party, has a secret he's desperate to hide.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard's chair of Afro-American Studies, travels the length and breadth of the United States to take the temperature of black America at the start of the new century. He explores this rich and diverse landscape, social as well as geographic, and meets the people who are defining black America, from the most famous and influential to those at the grassroots.

In post-World War II Hollywood, an ambitious group of aspiring actors and filmmakers will do almost anything to make their showbiz dreams come true.

A chronicle of five friends during a decade in which everything changed, including the rise of AIDS.

1950s. Under the communist regime, a struggling actor joins the KGB as an informant to make ends meet. He quickly finds himself caught up in a dangerous web of deceit and treachery.

Decades-long chronicle of the risky, volatile and steamy relationship between the charismatic and ambitious Hawk and the pious and idealistic Tim, two political staffers who fall in love at the height of the 1950s Lavender Scare. Through the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, the drug-fueled disco culture of the 1970s and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, the two men’s fiery affair only intensifies despite the constant threat of being exposed and losing everything.