A queer film every day of Pride Month 2022.

It's almost incredible watching John Cameron Mitchell's scorching debut film, HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH, today. How could something that still feels so prescient, transgressive, and forward-thinking be over 20 years old? Even by modern standards, this modern classic of queer cinema feels at once subversive and progressive, offering a bold vision of gender fluidity and identity that paints a much more complex portrait of masculinity and femininity than we are often given on Twitter. That's because Hedwig (Mitchell), the victim of a botched back-alley gender-reassignment surgery in East (undergone at the behest of an American GI who discovers that he can only marry young Hansel and take him back to America if he's a woman), is neither full transgender or cisgender. True, she undergoes gender-reassignment, but since she didn't really want it, can she truly be called trans? Or is she in reality a cisgender gay man? Hedwig is unclassifiable, and that's what makes her so emblematic of the core of human sexuality - it's impossible to put Hedwig in a box.
This is a film about discovering oneself in the margins of society's rigid gender definitions - a theme it hits on in its poignant centerpiece number,…