Headline : Be gay, do crime! A brief history of the lesbian thriller

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An excellent new development for anybody who is completely fed up of lesbians being denied electricity in favour of tightly-winched corsets and exchanging yearnful glances by candlelight ‒ after a glut of admittedly brilliant queer period dramas, it looks like 2024 officially belongs to the sapphic crime thriller. French lesbians sharing lingering hand holds in Portrait of a Lady on Fire? A miserable Kate Winslet scrubbing at a crusty old ammonite while pining after a geologist’s wife? No longer: brooding historical stories are officially taking a back seat in favour of raucous crime thrillers and sapphic, gun-wielding villains hellbent on wreaking supremely gory revenge on the hetties.

Though it feels like there’s a new wave building steam, queer crime has been a movie staple for decades; from using sexuality as shorthand for villainous tendencies, to carving out spaces for some of cinema’s best queer heroes and villains. The best of the whole bunch has to be Bound, the debut feature from Matrix directors Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski. It arguably set the bar for the depiction of lesbian relationships on-screen, and decades before intimacy coordinators became common on TV and film sets, the siblings hired the feminist critic and editor Susie Bright to consult on the sex scenes between ex-con plumber Corky and mafia-affiliated Violet, which unfold amid a saturation of bloody, gangster-fuelled violence. It’s a proper classic.

And now, it’s arguably the leading touchstone for the muscle-popping new film Love Lies Bleeding, out now. Ahead of its release, here’s a look back at the other criminal capers that have paved the way.

In this Thirties rom-com, Katherine Hepburn stars as Sylvia, the queer-coded sidekick to her criminal dad as he indulges in a spot of black market lace-smuggling and goes on the run. In order to fly under the radar, she disguises herself as Sylvester (genius!) and together with an ever-expanding rabble of fellow crooks, the gang barrel around cooking up new schemes. Along the way, both men and women fall head over heels for her amid the gender confusion. Directed by George Cukor (who was gay; an open secret in Hollywood) Sylvia Scarlett was a Box Office bomb, but has since been reappraised as one of the queerest films of the Golden Age.

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