National Film Registry’s LGBTQ collection is growing

Another groundbreaking LGBTQ film has been added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, which has archived more than 800 films of national cultural importance since the registry started in 1988.

Among this year’s 25 additions is “The Wedding Banquet,” director Ang Lee’s 1993 romantic comedy about a gay Taiwanese man who hides his male partner from his parents as he plans to wed a woman. Other films added to the registry this year include “12 Years a Slave,” “Home Alone” and “Lady and the Tramp.”

“What’s really wonderful about ‘The Wedding Banquet’ is that it is able to share the experiences of immigrants,” said Nick McCarthy, director of programming at NewFest, New York’s premier LGBTQ film festival. “Having representation of the immigrant experience through an LGBTQ+ lens, I think, really captures the heart of America.”

Lee now has two titles on the National Film Registry, with his groundbreaking 2005 cowboy love story “Brokeback Mountain” having been added in 2018. McCarthy said the two fundamentally different films — one about ranchers in Wyoming and the other about immigrants in Manhattan — “make absolute sense” as part of the American LGBTQ film canon.

“There is the whole of humanity under the umbrella of the LGBTQ+ experience,” he said. “Both of those films, I think, show characters that are yearning to live their lives as authentically as possible but may face barriers in an oppressive American ideology.”

Here are some of the most notable films with LGBTQ themes and characters in the National Film Registry:

‘Scorpio Rising’ (1964)

One of the oldest films exploring LGBTQ themes in the registry is described by the Library of Congress as a “rapid-fire exploration and juxtaposition of symbolism and ideas about religion, Nazism, biker subculture, mystique of the underground, gay life and more.”