There comes a moment in every queer childs life when their young mind starts to stir. It might happen while watching a movie at a sleepover or in the quietude of a darkened theater. Staring at the screen, something curious and exciting occurs, a response that often cannot be defined because the appropriate words arent accessible yet.

For much of the past century, that was how LGBTQ fledglings confirmed they werent alone in their experiences: through popular culture, however imperfect it may be.

To say that cinemas queer history is fraught would be an understatement. But even in the early days of Hollywood, LGBTQ audiences found kinship through movies and television. Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich kissed women on-screen in the 1930s, and filmmakers ever since have tackled queerness in profound, titillating and insulting ways.

By my count, there are four types of queer-awakening movies:

• Coming-of-age depictions built around sex and romance, often involving characters who are discovering or coming to terms with their own potential queerness (Heavenly Creatures, Pariah, Call Me by Your Name)

• Slice-of-life stories that show queer people embracing their identities in spite of the world around them (The Boys in the Band, Longtime Companion, The Kids Are All Right)

• Megahits that bring queerness into the mainstream (The Color Purple, Philadelphia, The Birdcage)

• Movies with camp eccentricities, gay icons or coded queerness (Lawrence of Arabia, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, anything starring Judy Garland)

With Pride Month arriving, I wanted to know what shaped todays LGBTQ directors, so I asked a number of filmmakers and showrunners to reflect on the first queer or queer-adjacent movie they fell in love with. Their selections had little overlap, spanning a variety of sensibilities everything from All That Jazz and The Wiz to Midnight Cowboy and The Talented Mr. Ripley and demonstrating the dynamism of the queer experience.

Below are the 40 responses I received, mostly by email. They are lightly edited for grammar, clarity and length.

Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho, Milk)

His pick: Pink Flamingos

This film was, at the time (1972), an outrageous, willful, cheap crowd-pleaser. The crowd at the time was a very ragamuffin midnight crowd in New York City that showed me that the counterculture, in some places, had taken over and had its own values and brain. It was a gay culture essentially, but not a mainstream gay culture. It had a cast of gay pirates as far as I could tell, which was inspiring for me. It also showed that modern communication could be held in the hands of the gay fashion pirates: John Waters, Divine and Mink Stole.

Jill Soloway (Transparent, I Love Dick)

Their pick: Working Girls

As someone who really didnt identify as queer or trans until waaaaay after I started seeing movies, Ill talk about a movie that vibrated me to my very core. I wanna shout out Lizzie Borden and her 1986 film Working Girls (not Working Girl with Melanie Griffith!). Borden brought us straight into the heart of a brothel in Manhattan and just sat down in the lives of these amazing sex workers. Tupperware lunches and all. She answered my unnamed yearning to see content that did not come from the straight male gaze, that did not seek to flatter men. Seeing how Borden spent unfiltered time in the daily lives of sex workers was a very small but incredibly powerful bolt of lightning for me about the kind of work I wanted to do with art and film. Maybe I didnt even quite know it yet. Maybe all I knew was that I was seeing something that no one had ever captured before. A kind of truth about being female and being human.

Bill Condon (Beauty and the Beast, Dreamgirls)

His pick: Bonnie and Clyde

One of the advantages of growing up in New York in the late 60s was that lots of movie theaters were too run-down (or empty) to bother enforcing the ratings system. Which is how I managed to see Bonnie and Clyde four or five times as a 12-year-old, despite its R rating. It was the first movie I discovered on my own and the first I fell in love with. I was already a film geek, so I knew the movie was considered groundbreaking. But my personal obsession had more to do with the ambiguous sexuality of Clyde, as played by the stunningly beautiful Warren Beatty. Years later, I learned that in David Newman and Robert Bentons original screenplay, Clyde was bisexual and involved in a mnage trois with Bonnie and C.W. (played by Michael J. Pollard). Beatty ordered the subplot removed but somehow enough of the intention survived that even a barely pubescent gay boy could revel in it. For this gift, as well as the introduction to the glorious icon known as Faye Dunaway, I will always think of Bonnie and Clyde as my first gay movie experience.