We’re experiencing a renaissance of queer Hispanics in film … and it could save lives

Two Mexican boys fell in love last year on the big screen in the film Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. Though it only grossed $407,838 at the box office, it still represented a historic achievement as possibly the first-ever U.S. film to show two Hispanic boys in love.

After years without much onscreen representation, LGBTQ+ Hispanic actors and characters have begun appearing more frequently on the silver screen. The shift towards this trend has been gradual, and it remains as fragile as it is important; especially as right-wing politics continues to reduce Hispanics to either a biased voting bloc or as immigrants threatening to destroy the nation.

Related:

45 years ago, Cheech & Chong released a massively popular pro-queer punk rock song

The stoner comedians’ performance of “Earache My Eye” was surprisingly progressive in an era of bad gay media representation.

A quick look reveals a number of notable queer Hispanic and Latine film roles over the last decade: Hispanic actress Kitana Kiki Rodriguez played the vindictive sex worker anti-hero in the 2015 dramedy Tangerine; a bisexual Dominican love interest named Kevin romanced the Black gay lead in the 2016 Academy Award-winning coming-of-age film Moonlight; transgender Latinx actress Zoey Luna played a young witch in 2021 supernatural thriller The Craft: Legacy; part-Hispanic actor Taylor Zakhar Perez played the president’s charming son Alex Claremont-Diaz in the 2023 rom-com Red, White & Royal Blue; and Argentine actor Juan Pablo Di Pace played a lead in the 2024 drama The Mattachine Family.

Never Miss a Beat

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.

Daily

Weekly

Good News

This seeming increase in queer Hispanic and Latine characters has been a long time coming. Even though the Hispanics and Latine people have grown from 12.5% to 19% of the U.S. population from 2000 to 2022, only 5.5% of speaking characters in mainstream films during the same period were Hispanic or Latine, according to a 2023 study by the University of California (USC).

During most of that time, Hispanic and Latine film roles remained heavily stereotyped and mostly invisible. Early 20th-century films depicted Hispanics and Latine people as unprincipled fathers, saintly mothers, and rebellious “greaser” sons. Late 20th-century films began depicting them as farm laborers, distressed immigrants, drug-dealing gang members, maids with broken English, temperamental or over-sexualized lovers or in non-speaking, background roles.

These roles also suffered from colorism, with dark-skinned Hispanics and Latine actors playing villains and lighter-skinned ones playing heroes or victims. And these biased depictions also revealed a deeper Hollywood bias. While two Hispanic actors won Oscars in the 1950s, another didn’t win until Benicio del Toro’s 2000 Best Supporting Actor win as a Mexican police officer in the crime drama Traffic. No Hispanic or Latine actor has won an acting Oscar since.

Thankfully, the queer Hispanic and Latine characters in modern films differ drastically from their 20th-century counterparts in one major way: They’re not background and supporting characters — they’re fully fleshed-out main characters with self-determination and complicated emotions.

And while they’re more heroic than in the past, they’re also imperfect: Alex in Red, White and Royal Blue royally screws up a diplomatic visit with a British prince, risking his mom’s presidential re-election in the process. The transgender Latinx witch in The Craft: Legacy recklessly uses magic for selfish reasons, endangering herself and her friends. Sin-Dee, the trans sex worker protagonist in Tangerine, literally drags her no-good boyfriend’s drug-addled mistress across town by her hair as a sign of her power and seriously misplaced priorities. Even the teen Mexican-American couple in Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe feel conflicted about their racial and sexual identities.

The number of queer Hispanic and Latine characters on the big screen have increased over the last decade. In 2013, only one of the 31 LGBTQ+ characters who appeared in mainstream movies was Hispanic or Latine, according to a GLAAD study. By 2023, 17 of the 292 LGBTQ+ characters in mainstream and direct-to-streaming movies were Hispanic or Latine, GLAAD reported.

But despite this 1,600% increase, the overall percentage of queer Hispanic and Latine characters in film — compared to the overall number of LGBTQ+ characters in film — has remained somewhat stagnant. In 2013, queer Hispanic and Latine roles made up 6% of all queer movie characters — in 2023, they still made up just 6%.

This stagnation has arguably contributed to a lack of understanding or even negative public perceptions of Hispanics and Latine people, possibly to lethal consequences.

On August 3, 2019, a 21-year-old white supremacist gunman intentionally targeted Hispanics and Latines in a Walmart in the border city of El Paso, Texas. He killed 23 people — most were Mexican. An investigation revealed that he believed in the “Great Replacement Theory,” a racist and increasingly Republican conspiracy theory that Hispanics and other non-white immigrants are trying to replace white Americans and destroy the country’s capitalist and Christian values. Many noted that then-President Trump made vilifying Hispanic and Latine immigrants a regular trademark of his presidency.

On the shooting’s first anniversary, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX).wrote an essay in Variety that stated, “There is a dangerous nexus between the racist political rhetoric and the negative images of Latines as criminals and invaders that Americans see on their screens.”

About a year later, Castro organized a September 2021 House Judiciary Committee hearing about the lack of diversity in media. In his testimony, award-winning Hispanic actor Edward James Olmos said that film has a unique influence over viewer’s minds.

“We’re talking about the single most important art form that humans have ever created,” Olmos said. “Nothing attacks the subconscious mind more. You sit down before a theater screen, a dark room, with no peripheral vision. Everything goes into the subconscious, and it stays there.”

In her article about queer Latine representation in film, film critic Nadia Awad wrote, “We know lack of representation can nurture a context for dehumanization, violence, and policies that hurt communities for generations. Representation is the first step towards becoming part of a story, and our stories tell us who we are. When collections of stories accumulate over a long period of time, certain themes and ideas start to be thought of as ‘natural’ or ‘common sense.’”

The lack of representation persists behind the camera as well, with few Hispanic or Latine directors, producers, and studio executives, and few casting directors and film festivals soliciting work from Hispanics. Movies centered on Hispanics and Latine characters received substantially smaller production budgets; roughly $10 million compared to $25 million for movies centered on non-Hispanic/Latine characters, according to a study by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Similarly, films with Hispanic and Latine leads receive fewer marketing dollars and are shown in fewer theaters than films with non-Hispanic/Latine leads, the study added. Online critics also tend to rate Hispanic- and Latine-led films much lower than films with non-Hispanic/Latine leads.

This all perpetuates a cycle of exclusion, creating fewer Hispanic/Latine roles in a shrinking number of Hispanic/Latine-themed films, and also fewer opportunities for Hispanic and Latine creatives looking to tell culturally authentic stories.

When Aurora Guerrero, a queer Chicana filmmaker, wanted to explore a same-sex crush between two Latina teenagers in her 2012 film Mosquita y Mari, her team had to crowdfund the film’s $80,000 production budget just to get it made. Though the film achieved critical success, she still struggled to find work for three years after its release.

“So many women of color, so many Latina women get passed over for an opportunity to direct,” Guerrero said. “So there are these barriers that are very difficult to get past when people don’t take the time to really see you, to really consider you and let you compete with your talent.”

“By refusing to tell our stories and by refusing to put us in charge of telling them, Hollywood power brokers are complicit in our exclusion,” 270 Latine creators wrote in an October 2020 open letter to the film industry. The letter called for Hollywood to create more Latine-fronted projects for, by, and about the Latine community and also the hiring of Latine creators for non-Latine projects.

But as the overall number of queer Hispanic and Latine film characters has risen over the last decade, so too has another trend: Hispanic and Latine directors are mining the rich vein of cultural history to create documentaries and biopics that reintroduce lesser-known queer Hispanic history-makers to a new generation.

In 2016, queer Hispanic producer Joe Castel released Nelly Queen: The Life and Times of Jose Sarria, a film about the Spanish-Colombian drag queen who was the first openly gay candidate to run for public office in North America. In 2017, Daresha Kyi — a longtime producer of English and Spanish films — released Chavela, a biopic of lesbian Hispanic singing legend Chavela Vargas. In 2020, the documentary Mucho, Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado shared the explots of the flamboyant Mexican TV psychic.

In 2023, Cassandro presented a biopic of Saúl Armendáriz, a real-life gay exótico (drag) lucha libre wrestler who was known for wearing makeup and animal prints in the ring and for drawing power from the homophobic opposition he faced in the traditionally macho sport. The 2024 documentary Frida told the story of disabled painter Frida Kahlo through her own surrealist self-portraits, diaries, letters, essays, and interviews.

These films are helping contemporary film viewers reconnect and find power in the past, popularizing iconic Hispanic and Latine queer figures and expanding the public imagination of queer Hispanic and Latine people’s contributions to American and world culture.

Hispanic film critic Yolanda Machado considered the lasting legacy of such films, writing, “Representation on-screen, doesn’t just further our stories…it helps bridge the gap between younger and older generations who were raised in a very close minded and non-accepting way.”

The bridges will matter all the more as younger Hispanics and Latine people increasingly identify as LGBTQ+, and as Hispanics and Latine people gradually become 25% of the U.S. population, a demographic shift expected to occur by 2060.

(Additional research for this article was provided by Daniel Villarreal.)

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.

Don't forget to share: