The first time as a moviegoer that director Bill Condon felt seen as a gay man was with the 1971 “Sunday, Bloody Sunday.”

“There was a great big passionate kiss between the older and younger man that was absolutely wonderful and a completely non-judgmental portrayal of a gay man,” Condon says. Prior to that, LGBTQ+ representation was often preachy or depressing, often culminating in death, as Vito Russo so shockingly presented in his 1981 book and 1995 documentary “The Celluloid Closet.” As Condon says, gay representation on-screen often presented “one narrative, which is that a gay life is a lonely life, and possibly a short life.”

Since that time, representation has blossomed, with not just queer stories being told but LGBTQ+ directors and screenwriters, like Condon, making art. While representation has decreased 1.2 percent, per a 2023 GLAAD study that looked at features from that year versus the previous one, this year alone there are features by directors like James Sweeney’s Twinless and Oliver Hermanus’s History of Sound, as well as the popular White Lotus TV series crafted by Mike White, plus Ncuti Gatwa portraying the long-running character Doctor Who, and English Teacher, from creator-star Brian Jordan Alvarez, centering on a gay high-school teacher.

Condon, the director behind Gods and Monsters and Kinsey, is adding to those numbers with his feature Kiss of the Spider Woman, a musical story of resistance featuring a same-sex love story between a political prisoner (Diego Luna) and a man imprisoned for his sexuality (Tonatiuh). Condon specifically wanted to touch on Hollywood’s fractious history with homosexuality by having Tonatiuh’s Molina mention how frequently gay characters die in movies.

It’s remarkable to see how things have changed.

Condon wanted to direct Brokeback Mountain after the success of Gods and Monsters.

“A manager of mine, who also managed that book, [said] the message was, ‘They do not want a gay director. Larry McMurtry does not want a gay director or writer.’ And that’s not that long ago.” So to see LGBTQ directors like Sweeney, Hermanus, or Dean DeBlois — director of this year’s live-action How to Train Your Dragon — actively helming stories is remarkable. Another thing Condon points out is how these movies don’t position being gay as the central premise for the movie. Kiss of the Spider Woman has a gay romance but it’s balanced by a movie musical within that narrative, and by the political situation in Argentina. Twinless is about a man grieving the loss of his twin brother.

Condon is concerned, though, about what the current political climate means for the future of LGBTQ+ representation on-screen. “There are two movie cultures,” he says. “There’s the studio culture and independent. And it does feel, to me, studios always respond to pressure, and you see that happening now. I think they are deciding to, I suspect, pull back on more progressive ideas being expressed in the mainstream.”

But that only fuels the need for more independent studios to pick up the slack. More boutique studios like Roadside Attractions — which is releasing Spider Woman — alongside the likes of A24 and Neon, could become the places where queer representation on-screen continues to flourish.