Getting LGBT History Right: Films That Did and Didn't

Every work of fiction based on historical events includes some fabrications — invented dialogue, composite characters, and skewed timelines, for instance. Even nonfiction works, like documentary films, are selective about which points of view to highlight. But the question of just how much deviation from the historical record is acceptable in narrative films has been a topic of heated debate lately with the release of Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall, which focuses on a fictional white gay man at the expense of the real-life people of color and transgender people who played a huge role in the 1969 riots that fueled the modern LGBT rights movement. With that debate going on, and with October being LGBT history month, here we take a look at some fictional film portrayals of important LGBT people and events and the controversies these films have aroused — and whether they deserved it. Like the new Stonewall film, this list is heavily focused on white males, simply because they’ve been the subjects most often portrayed — and some of the works on women and people of color, like the recent HBO film Bessie, with Queen Latifah playing bisexual blues singer Bessie Smith, didn’t come in for a lot of criticism. And the jury is still out on Freeheld, the just-opened docudrama starring Julianne Moore and Ellen Page. Click through for our assessments of more than a dozen films, some of which are very entertaining and even inspiring despite the liberties they took.