21 LGBTQ Movies That Redefined Cinema

Frustrated by the lack of representation in film history, Cheryl Dunye wrote, directed, and starred in The Watermelon Woman to fix it. In The Watermelon Woman, she plays a young Black lesbian filmmaker in Philadelphia researching a forgotten Black actress from the 1930s. The catch? The actress, Fae Richards, is a complete fiction invented by Dunye for the film. This clever blend of documentary and narrative fiction powerfully highlights the real-life erasure of Black queer women from our cultural memory. It’s a film about searching for history and deciding to create it yourself.