Although LGBTQ representation was few and far in between among the headliners at this year’s SXSW, several indie darlings broke the industry’s cis-heteronormative mold to stand out.
From Special Jury Award winner Fucktoys, multi-hyphenate Annapurna Sriram’s bold celluloid fever dream of a feature debut, to The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick, co-writer/director Pete Ohs’ captivating model for cooperative filmmaking, there’s a glimmer of hope that the future of the industry lies in the hands of a new generation of marginalized folk with the right amount of passion, vision and ingenuity.
While catching up with Sophia Bush about her upcoming One Tree Hill revival in the works at Netflix, the actress emphasized the importance of LGBTQ representation in media as the Trump administration continues to dismantle DEI.
“I think 2025 sucks for everyone, to be clear, but what I think is worrisome, particularly for us, is the desire to take people’s civil rights away,” Bush told Deadline at the iHeartPodcast Awards at Austin City Limits during SXSW. “We are meant to be the land of the free, a nation of free, a nation that respects its constitution and its due process and its laws, and we are in a very lawless time and it’s very unfortunate to watch that kind of disrespect be weaponized against people who are so vulnerable to discrimination. … It’s incredibly tired that we are coming after people for being their happiest, healthiest, most loving and most loved selves.”
Sriram, whose directorial debut Fucktoys is her tribute to queer filmmakers like John Waters and Gregg Araki, “felt like a lot of the acting opportunities I had were very limiting and very racist” before writing her own dream role about a fun-loving dominatrix trying to get rid of a curse.
Sophia Bush attends the iHeartPodcast Awards during SXSW
Glenn Garner/Deadline
“I sort of wrote the script out of feeling like … I might actually just have to cast myself in that light, because I don’t think anyone is gonna see me how I see myself,” she explained.
“We were told so much through the process, ‘You can’t call it this, you can’t shoot on film, you don’t know what you’re doing,’ that I think it kind of emboldened us to say, these are made-up and arbitrary rules, and this is art,” Sriram continued. “Women are censored, queer filmmakers are censored so much in terms of what they’re allowed to say or express and explore in terms of their own sexuality, that we kind of felt like, if all these f*cking cis, straight, white men are gonna tell me what I can and can’t title my movie, then I’m gonna actually call it Fucktoys in spite of them.”
Although she laughed that she “didn’t actually realize how gay I was making my movie,” Sriram assembled a talented queer ensemble including Sadie Scott, Francois Arnaud, Brandon Flynn and Big Freedia — who also performed at Stubb’s during the music leg of SXSW.
RELATED: SXSW 2025: All Of Deadline’s Movie Reviews
The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick co-writer and director Ohs used his “table of bubbles” method, forming somewhat of a writers room with the cast before filming to help everyone feel equally invested in the creative process. Something about actors reading their own lines also adds a deeper sense of authenticity to the roles.
‘Fucktoys’ writer, director and star Annapurna Sriram at SXSW
Glenn Garner/Deadline
Actress Callie Hernandez, who rented the house where the movie was filmed with the goal of shooting as many micro-budget films in a year as possible, noted “the whole thing was an experiment,” adding: “It’s a response, but it’s also just a curiosity of how many different ways can we try and make this.”
Co-writer/co-star Zoë Chao explained that they’ve discussed the “process being a queering of filmmaking,” adding: “We’ve been told that there’s a certain way to make a film, Pete didn’t want to do that anymore. Also, we didn’t have the resources. When we were shooting this film, it was the height of strike. Thank you to our union for letting us make a micro-budget film.
“But something I love so much about this process is like, ‘What do we have available to us? What is here? We’re not going to reach for something we don’t have. And who are we? And how do we bring that out and into this piece? How do we lift our essences and infuse the story with them?’” added Chao. “And I do think we are not a very normative group, thank goodness. And I think part of feeling so safe was that, it was really a kind of a queer space, insofar as like bring your whole self.”
‘The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick’ stars/co-writers James Cutasi-Moyer, Callie Hernandez, Zoë Chao, Jeremy O. Harris and co-writer/director Pete Ohs at SXSW
Glenn Garner/Deadline
Ohs explained that the film’s titular parasites represent “the things that happen in our lives that we didn’t choose, that we just unfortunately walked through that field. Unfortunately, we grew up in this time, in this city, in this town, in the state, in this country and it changes us, it kind of f*cks us up. It is this element that then we have to deal with and it can kind of hold us down, destroy us. We can’t get rid of it. The best-case scenario is that we sort of find some sort of value within it and then like that makes us stronger, that makes us more able to move through the world in spite of the fear of it.”
RELATED: Deadline Studio At SXSW 2025: Portrait Gallery
Although he admitted he’s “straight as hell,” Ohs has felt “weird” and “other my whole life.” Co-writer/star Jeremy O. Harris said, “If there’s LGBTQIA+, you’re definitely the plus,” praising Ohs and their team for making “the most loudly queer” film they could.
As co-star/writer James Cusati-Moyer noted, “Just the timeline of when we made this movie, during the strikes, politically, and what we knew was coming ultimately, another Trump term … What I love about this queer movie that has queer former relationships, current relationships, biodynamic relationships, is that there’s no comment from the outside world about it. It simply sits exactly where it is.”
He added, “To make anything with heart and valor and compassion is revolutionary in this moment.”
‘Outerlands’ writer-director Elena Oxman and star Asia Kate Dillon at SXSW
Glenn Garner/Deadline
Outerlands star Asia Kate Dillon praised writer-director Elena Oxman for giving them the opportunity to play a “lead character who is in almost every frame of the film, who is a non-binary trans character, but that’s not what the movie is about.” For Dillon, they were attracted to a story about “how to heal our own trauma, our own wounds.”
“There is so much erasure of non-binary trans folks, and also just history. I feel like any time we can put ourselves in a photograph, on film, document ourselves in some way, because no one is doing that for us and we really have to do it for ourselves — I feel like this film is now in the canonical history of queer films. Like, if this one had come out when I was a kid, it would have changed my life,” said Dillon, adding: “I just feel really proud that this film now sits in like the historical canon of queer films because it’s like, we were here. You can’t deny it … or you can, but we don’t care.”
Following her SXSW featured session, comedian Taylor Tomlinson spoke to the importance of that representation as she said “it’s really easy to forget” when you live in New York, Los Angeles or other major cities, that LGBTQ people in other places “might not feel safe enough to come out as queer.”
“And what I love so much about traveling and going on the road and stand-up in general is the ability to bring those perspectives to those cities that don’t have a queer scene or queer nightlife or queer bars or like as many queer resources,” explained Tomlinson. “Because, I grew up in California, but I grew up in a conservative town where that was not encouraged or the norm, and it was very religious, and you just feel very isolated and surrounded. So, I think it’s super important right now, especially with everything going on with the Trump administration.”
The After Midnight host has found “a lot of the funniest people are queer” when it comes to the star-studded comedian guests on her CBS talk/game show hybrid.
‘The Threesome’ stars Jaboukie Young-White and Ruby Cruz at SXSW
Glenn Garner/Deadline
One such comedian, Jaboukie Young-White, gave a spectacularly witty performance in director Chad Hartigan’s The Threesome as Greg, a gay best friend who rises above the role’s archetypal tropes and manages to make the messy cis-het drama the butt of the joke.
“I feel in this film the same way I feel in real life, which is, I love it when straight people get messy,” Young-White told me at the Deadline Studio. “When they’re doing like Brooklyn polycule dynamics, that’s amazing. You don’t see that outside of Bushwick too often … and Little Rock! Love is love, and love finds a way. They found mess in a hopeless place, I think that’s the tagline.”
Ruby Cruz, a queer actress who follows up her hilarious stud role in last year’s Bottoms with the conservative pro-life character Jenny in The Threesome, explained that although the character is “so different from me in so many ways,” she loves “to explore every side of myself.”
“It’s in my everyday life and in my character’s. I love getting to explore different ways to express myself, express my gender,” added Cruz. “I feel like, masculine, feminine… the fact that I’ve gotten so many different types of people as characters is so fun for me to explore, because as Ruby, I like to explore that too.”
(L-R) ‘She’s the He’ star Misha Osherovich, writer-director Siobhan McCarthy and star Nico Carney at SXSW
Glenn Garner/Deadline
Another title that explored gender was writer-director Siobhan McCarthy’s She’s the He, a clever queer take on the often cringe gender-bending teen classics like She’s the Man (2006), Sorority Boys (2002) and Just One of the Guys (1985).
“It is interesting to look back at that era of, at least my childhood, now as an adult who has come into my transness, who understands my transness and understand there were pieces of that that then spoke to me and came out through that,” said McCarthy.
Non-binary star Misha Osherovich found the teen film to be “a bit of reclamation,” getting to relive their youth as a trans high school student.
“When it came across my email that this like was like a trans buddy comedy, I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? This is like the perfect movie. I’m so excited,’” added co-star Nico Carney. “It was just a ton of fun.”
While the headliners at SXSW were lacking in the LGBTQ representation department — with the exception of a bizarre Blake Lively-on-Blake Lively kiss scene in Another Simple Favor — it’s the smaller-budget titles that swung for the fences and made the case for a new post-strike era of filmmaking that returns the craft to the artists.
(L-R) ‘Satisfaction’ writer-director Alex Burunova and star Emma Laird at SXSW
Glenn Garner/Deadline
From Alex Burunova’s Satisfaction, a hauntingly beautiful relationship drama, to Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror, a documentary that sheds light on the musical writer Richard O’Brien’s gender journey, and Katie Aselton’s Magic Hour, which features an unexpected love letter to drag in one scene, LGBTQ audiences are sure to see themselves represented if they know where to look.
“This country is slipping into really scary, really dangerous territory. And as artists, it feels silly because we obviously have to go join the revolution and go on the street and protest, but then I feel like as artists, we have to support each other. We have to go see each other’s films. We have to go and spread the word,” said Sriram, adding: “I feel like it’s life or death. … And that If they’re coming for trans people, they’re coming for gay people, they’re coming for brown people. We’re all on the hit list. So, this is the time when we have to hold together and be strong.”
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