21 filmmakers who have directed more than one gay movie

These filmmakers keep returning to gay stories, and we love them for it!

We love gay movies, and you can’t make a gay movie without a director. Thankfully, some directors make it their career mission to make as many queer movies as they can.

Some of these filmmakers are near the beginning of their careers with only a few movies to their names, but others have made dozens of films. But the thing they all have in common is that they keep returning to queer stories for their films.

Here are 21 acclaimed directors who have directed more than one queer film.

1. Goran Stolevski

Macedonian Australian director Goran Stolevski has two queer films that he’s directed. The first was 2022’s Of an Age, about a Serbian immigrant in Australia who enters an intense romance with the brother of his ballroom dance partner. This year, he’s directed Housekeeping for Beginners, about a woman who never planned on being a mother who is forced to raise her girlfriend’s two daughters.

• Of an Age
• Housekeeping for Beginners

2. Francis Lee

English filmmaker Francis Lee has two films under his belt and both of them are queer. His debut film God’s Own Country is a gay romantic drama starring Josh O’Connor and Alec Secăreanu as a Yorkshire sheep farmer and Romanian migrant worker who fall in love. In 2020, he made Ammonite, a fictional story based on a speculative romance between British paleontologist Mary Anning and her friend Charlotte Murchison.

• God’s Own Country
• Ammonite

3. Luca Guadagnino

Guadagnino’s most famous queer film is Call Me by Your Name, but the Italian director also includes queer storylines and themes in films like Bones and All, Challengers, and his upcoming film Queer.

• I Am Love
• Call Me by Your Name
• Bones and All
• Challengers
• Queer

4. Ang Lee

Acclaimed director Ang Lee won the Oscar for Best Director at the 78th Academy Awards for directing the gay cowboy drama Brokeback Mountain. His film The Wedding Banquet follows a gay Taiwanese immigrant who marries a Chinese woman to place his parents and has to hide his gay partner from them.

• The Wedding Banquet
• Brokeback Mountain

5. Pedro Almodovar

Almodovar is widely considered to be one of the best directors of his generation, winning two Oscars and having his films nominated for nine. Most of his movies have queer characters and themes.

• Strange Way of Life
• Pepi, Luci, Bom
• Labyrinth of Passion
• Dark Habits
• Law of Desire
• All About My Mother
• Bad Education
• Parallel Mothers
• Julieta
• I’m So Excited!
• The Skin I Live In
• Pain and Glory

6. Jamie Babbit

Babbit’s most famous film is But I’m a Cheerleader, a seminal lesbian romantic comedy, but she also directed other queer films!

• But I’m a Cheerleader
• Itty Bitty Titty Committee
• Breaking the Girls
• Addicted to Fresno

7. Dee Rees

Rees’ coming-of-age drama Pariah is considered one of the best lesbian movies of all time. Her biopic Bessie, about singer Bessie Smith, won four Emmys.

• Pariah
• Bessie

8. John Waters

Waters is one of the kings of camp and trash cinema. HII films, often starring the drag queen Divine, set the tone for weird queer cinema for years.

• Mondo Trasho
• Multiple Maniacs
• Pink Flamingos
• Female Trouble
• Hairspray
• Pecker
• Desperate Living
• Polyester

9. Gus Van Sant

Van Sant is considered one of the main directors of the New Queer Cinema movement, and has been nominated for two Oscars. The first came from directing Good Will Hunting, the second for directing Milk, about assassinated gay politician Harvey Milk.

• Mala Noche
• My Own Private Idaho
• Last Days
• Elephant
• Milk

10. Angela Robinson

Robinson’s debut feature length film D.E.B.S. follows a group of teen girls who work as spies when one of them falls in love with the female thief they’re trying to catch. Later she directed Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, a biopic of Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston and his two polyamorous partners.

• D.E.B.S.
• Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

11. Alice Wu

Wu has directed two terrific queer films about Asian American women, Saving Face and The Half of It.

• Saving Face
• The Half of It

12. Andrew Haigh

Haigh had big success in 2023 with his gay film All of Us Strangers, but had two previous gay films before that, including the movie sequel to Looking, the show he executive produced for HBO.

• Weekend
• Looking: The Movie
• All of Us Strangers

13. Todd Haynes

Haynes is a great director who has been nominated for two Golden Globes, an Oscar, and ten Independent Spirit Awards, winning two of those. He’s directed queer classics like Velvet Goldmine and Carol.

• Poison
• Velvet Goldmine
• Far From Heaven
• Carol

14. Francois Ozon

Ozon is a French director whose films often deal with themes of sexual identity. He’s considered one of the heads of the New Wave in French cinema.

• Sitcom
• Water Drops on Burning Rocks
• 8 Women
• Time to Leave
• The New Girlfriend
• Summer of 85
• Peter von Kant

15. R.W. Fassbinder

Fassbinder was a German filmmaker and one of the major figures of the New German Cinema movement in the '60s and '70s. Fassbinder died at the young age of 37, but made over 40 films in his career.

• The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
• Fox and His Friends
• In a Year of 13 Moons
• Querelle

16. Gregg Araki

Like Gus Van Sant, Araki is considered one of the leaders of the New Queer Cinema movement, and his film Kaboom was the first winner of the Cannes Film Festival's Queer Palm award.

• Three Bewildered People in the Night
• The Long Weekend (O’ Despair)
• The Living End
• Totally Fucked Up
• The Doom Generation
• Splendor
• Mysterious Skin
• Kaboom

17. Derek Jarman

Jarman was an English artist, filmmaker, writer, poet, and activist who died of an AIDS-related illness at age 52 in 1994. Many of his films were experimental.

• Sebastiane
• Jubilee
• The Angelic Conversation
• Caravaggio
• The Garden
• Edward II
• Wittgenstein

18. Rose Glass

Glass is a young British filmmaker who has only made two movies, both of which are queer. Her first film Saint Maud was released in 2019, and her second, Love Lies Bleeding, comes out this year.

• Saint Maud
• Love Lies Bleeding

19. Desiree Akhavan

Akhavan is a bisexual Iranian American filmmaker who has directed two films about queer women.

• Appropriate Behavior
• The Miseducation of Cameron Post

20. Ira Sachs

American filmmaker Ira Sachs released Passages last year to much acclaim. He had previously directed several other queer movies.

• The Delta
• Keep the Lights On
• Love Is Strange
• Passages

21. Emma Seligman

One of the youngest filmmakers on this list, Seligman already has two fantastic comedies under her belt in her writing/directing career so far — Shiva Baby and Bottoms — both of which center on the misadventures of young queer women.

• Shiva Baby
• Bottoms