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12 Great LGBTQ Rom-Coms to Stream During Pride Month
Celebrate love (and happy endings!) with this delightful dozen
Left to right: Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis in "Happiest Season"; Tomás Matos, Matt Rogers, Joel Kim Booster, Margaret Cho and Torian Miller in "Fire Island"; Karan Soni and Jonathan Groff in "A Nice Indian Boy"
AARP (Lacey Terrell/Hulu/Courtesy Everett Collection; Jeong Park/Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection; Blue Harbor Entertainment/Courtesy Everett Collection)
As we celebrate Pride Month this June, there are plenty of movies you can watch to learn about the centuries-long struggle for gay rights, including Philadelphia, Milk, Pride and Stonewall. But that’s only one side of this celebratory occasion. Pride festivals are just as much about unbridled exuberance and joy as they are about protest and perseverance.
In that spirit, we’ve put together a watch list of that most joyful of cinematic genres, the romantic comedy, featuring LGBTQ+ couples. These 12 films prove, as Lin-Manuel Miranda once said, that love is love is love is love.
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A Nice Indian Boy (2025, NR)
Pressured by his traditional Indian-American family to be the next to marry, the shy Naveen (Deadpool’s Karan Soni) falls for Jay (Broadway sensation Jonathan Groff), a free-spirited white photographer with Indian adoptive roots. The rom-com obstacle here? It’s more about the cultural disconnect than Naveen’s sexuality, but a Bollywood-style proposal and a big multicultural wedding prove that love might be big but it’s nothing to fear.
Watch it: A Nice Indian Boy
Red, White & Royal Blue (2023, R)
Based on the 2019 New York Times bestseller of the same name, Red, White & Royal Blue centers on a long-running feud between Alex (Taylor Zakhar Perez), son of the president of the United States, and Prince Henry of Britain (Nicholas Galitzine). When the rivals are forced into a staged truce, their icy relationship begins to thaw and the friction between them sparks something deeper than they ever expected. Uma Thurman, 56, plays the president.
Watch it: Red, White & Royal Blue
Bros (2022, R)
Best known for his manically energetic series Billy on the Street, comedian Billy Eichner showed a somewhat softer — and definitely more romantic — side in this rom-com that he cowrote with director Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall). Touted as the first gay rom-com by a major Hollywood studio, the film stars Eichner as a podcaster and museum curator who finds himself falling for a macho lawyer named Aaron (Luke Macfarlane), despite both of their long histories of commitment-phobia. With an eye toward gay history, Bros features an entirely LGBTQ+ cast — with a few notable exceptions that we won’t spoil for you! — including such fan favorites as Harvey Fierstein (74 on June 6), Scandal’s Guillermo Díaz, (51) and Bowen Yang.
Watch it: Bros
Fire Island (2022, R)
Comedian Joel Kim Booster wrote and starred in this modern-day adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, set in the titular Long Island gay beach hamlet. Jane Austen fans will get a kick out of figuring out how the updated characters correspond to P&P favorites: Booster plays the Elizabeth Bennet stand-in, Noah; SNL star Bowen Yang is an amalgamation of Bennet and Charlotte Lucas; and Conrad Ricamora, who played Oliver on How to Get Away With Murder, keeps ’em swooning as the Mr. Darcy–inspired Will. Margaret Cho, 57, the groundbreaking comedian and LGBTQ+ social activist of her generation, plays Erin, the “house mother” who owns the property where the friends stay every summer.
Watch it: Fire Island
Single All the Way (2021, NR)
In this holiday rom-com by Tony-winning Broadway director Michael Mayer, 65, L.A. social media strategist Peter (Michael Urie) faces nonstop judgment from his family about his long-term bachelorhood. To avoid their criticism, he convinces his best friend, Nick (Philemon Chambers), to come home for the holidays with him and pretend to be his boyfriend. The only catch: Peter’s mother (Kathy Najimy, 69) has already set him up on a blind date with her spin instructor, James (Luke Macfarlane). Could Peter and Nick become more than friends? Or is James about to pedal his way into Peter’s heart? Jennifer Coolidge, 64, steals scenes as the kooky Aunt Sandy, who directs the town’s Christmas pageant, which Urie said in an interview was “the gayest thing to happen to Christmas since Mariah!”
Watch it: Single All the Way
Happiest Season (2020, PG-13)
Abby (Kristen Stewart) and Harper (Mackenzie Davis) travel to Harper’s family’s house to celebrate the holidays. Abby plans to propose on Christmas morning, but on the way, she learns that her girlfriend has never come out to her conservative parents, played by Mary Steenburgen, 73, and Victor Garber, 77. The ensemble cast includes a roster of recognizable faces, such as Schitt’s Creek star Dan Levy as Abby’s best friend, Alison Brie as Harper’s sister and The White Lotus’s Aubrey Plaza as Harper’s ex-girlfriend. The clever soundtrack comprises holiday classics covered by queer artists like Sia and the duo Tegan and Sara.
Watch it: Happiest Season
Love, Simon (2018, R)
It might be hard to imagine that this 2018 romance was the first film by a major Hollywood studio to focus on a gay teenager coming out. Simon (Nick Robinson) is a closeted high schooler who begins an anonymous email correspondence with a fellow classmate who’s also struggling with his sexuality. When class clown Martin (Logan Miller) finds out Simon’s secret, he threatens to expose him to his friends if he doesn’t help Martin get a date. It’s a sensitively told story that drew many comparisons to the 1980s films of director John Hughes, and it was so popular that it even inspired a Hulu spinoff series called Love, Victor. Jennifer Garner, 54, and Josh Duhamel, 53, play Simon’s loving and supportive parents.
Watch it: Love, Simon
Imagine Me & You (2005, R)
If you’re a fan of witty British rom-coms like Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral, you’ll love this winning romance by writer-director Ol Parker, 56, of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again fame. On her wedding day, Rachel (Piper Perabo) begins to second-guess everything when she makes eye contact with her florist, Luce (Lena Headey, now 52), as she walks down the aisle; they soon have a proper meet-cute as Luce helps Rachel fish her wedding ring out of a punch bowl into which she’s dropped it. Could this be love at first sight — even if it happens on the worst day possible? Expect heaps of rom-com cliches, including a climactic scene during a London traffic jam set to the Turtles song “Happy Together,” whose opening line gave the film its title.
Watch it: Imagine Me & You
Kissing Jessica Stein (2001, R)
Stars Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen (now both 56) wrote and produced this indie romantic comedy, which netted them an Independent Spirit Award nomination for best first screenplay. Following a series of failed blind dates, uptight New York City copy editor Jessica Stein (Westfeldt) stumbles upon a personal ad that features her favorite Rilke quote — and it just so happens to be in the paper’s “women seeking women” section. She throws caution to the wind and meets up with free-spirited gallerist Helen Cooper (Juergensen), and the two soon begin to get closer and closer as Jessica wrestles with whether this is a budding friendship or something more.
Watch it: Kissing Jessica Stein
But I’m a Cheerleader (1999, R)
In this camp satire, Poker Face’s Natasha Lyonne stars as Megan Bloomfield, a high school cheerleader whose parents begin to suspect she’s a lesbian thanks to her vegetarianism and love of Melissa Etheridge. With the help of an “ex-gay” counselor named Mike (played by RuPaul, 65, out of drag), they send her away to a conversion therapy camp designed to turn teens straight. But their plan backfires when she strikes up a relationship with a fellow camper named Graham Eaton (Clea DuVall from Veep). Lovers of queer culture might recognize John Waters regular Mink Stole, 78, as Megan’s mom. Raging Bull Oscar nominee Cathy Moriarty, 65, makes an appropriately menacing camp founder.
Watch it: But I’m a Cheerleader
Jeffrey (1995, R)
Set in New York City during the AIDS crisis, this groundbreaking ’90s rom-com, based on an off-Broadway play, follows the titular actor-waiter (Wings star Steven Weber, 65), who takes a vow of celibacy because of his paranoia about the plague. He’s not only afraid of catching the disease but of falling for someone who might end up dying and leaving him heartbroken. But fate has other ideas, and Jeffrey soon finds himself falling for the handsome — and HIV-positive — Steve (Michael T. Weiss, 64). For advice, he turns to his friends, interior decorator Sterling (Patrick Stewart, 85) and his partner Darius (Mad Men’s Bryan Batt, 63). Despite being a relatively modest indie hit, the film has an absurdly stacked cast, including Christine Baranski, 74, Sigourney Weaver, 76, Robert Klein, 84, and Nathan Lane, 70.
Watch it: Jeffrey
The Wedding Banquet (1993, R)
More than a decade before his acclaimed drama Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee, 71, wrote and directed this decidedly more lighthearted comedy, which earned an Oscar nomination for best foreign film. Young Taiwanese landlord Wai-Tung Gao (Winston Chao, now 65) lives with his American boyfriend in Manhattan, unbeknownst to his conservative parents back home. When they hire a dating service to find him a wife, Wai-Tung decides to enter into a marriage of convenience with his tenant, a poor artist named Wei-Wei (May Chin, 60) who needs a green card — and who also happens to have a crush on Wai-Tung. The plan seems as if it might go off without a hitch until his parents announce they’re planning to visit from Taiwan to host a grand wedding celebration for the new couple. While not as critically acclaimed as the original, the 2025 remake, directed by Andrew Ahn and featuring Joan Chen, 65, Lily Gladstone and Bowen Yang, among others, can be a fun second watch.
Watch it: The Wedding Banquet
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