L.A.'s Queer Cinema Scene Demands Better Than Tokenism

Bing Liu's "Scratch" arrives in Los Angeles at a moment when the city's queer film landscape has become almost unrecognizable in its blandness. Walk into any multiplex or scroll through the streaming services that dominate how most people consume movies, and you'll find a depressing parade of narratives about acceptance, healing, and the triumph of the human spirit—all of it sanitized, all of it designed to make straight audiences feel good about themselves for watching it. Meanwhile, actual queer people sit in those theaters wondering when someone will make a film that speaks to the messiness, the contradiction, the sheer difficulty of existing in a body that the world has decided is wrong. "Scratch" is that film. It's a documentary about queer ballroom culture in New York, but calling it that undersells what Liu has actually accomplished. This isn't a celebration of community resilience or a portrait of a safe space where marginalized people can finally be themselves. It's a film about desire, ambition, exploitation, and the way power operates even within spaces that are supposed to be liberated. It's a film that trusts its audience to sit with discomfort. The screening matters because Los Angeles has been starving for this kind of cinema. The city has produced some of the most important queer films in history—from the underground cinema of the 1970s to the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s to contemporary work that's genuinely pushing boundaries. Yet somehow, what gets programmed at local theaters, what gets highlighted at festivals, what gets funded and distributed, has become increasingly conservative. The default mode is uplift. The default mode is inspiration. The default mode is a story where the protagonist learns to love themselves despite society's cruelty, and everyone goes home feeling moved. There's nothing wrong with uplift. But there's something deeply wrong with a film culture where uplift becomes the only acceptable register for queer stories. It suggests that queer people are only valuable as subjects of inspiration porn, only worthy of attention insofar as we can make straight people feel enlightened about diversity. Liu's film refuses that assignment entirely. "Scratch" documents the lives of several figures within New York's ballroom scene—people who are navigating precarity, desire, competition, and the search for recognition within a subculture that promises freedom but delivers something far more complicated. The film doesn't shy away from the exploitative aspects of ballroom culture, the way mentorship can slide into manipulation, the way the pursuit of status can corrupt even the most liberatory spaces. It's a film that respects its subjects enough to show them as fully human: contradictory, flawed, capable of both generosity and cruelty. What makes this particularly relevant for Los Angeles is the way the city's queer film ecosystem has become increasingly professionalized and risk-averse. The major festivals have grown larger, better-funded, more visible—which sounds like a victory until you realize that larger and better-funded often means more cautious. There are certain kinds of stories that play well with donors and sponsors. There are certain kinds of narratives that don't make people uncomfortable. And so the festivals, for all their apparent abundance, end up programming a narrower range of work than they would if they were actually taking risks. Independent venues and smaller festivals still exist throughout Los Angeles—places where filmmakers can show work that doesn't fit the mainstream mold. But these spaces are perpetually underfunded, perpetually struggling for audience attention, perpetually marginalized within the broader cultural conversation. A film like "Scratch" might play at one of these venues to an audience of maybe a hundred people, while a more palatable queer drama plays at a major multiplex to thousands. The economics of it are brutal. What's particularly galling is that Los Angeles has the infrastructure to support ambitious queer cinema. The city is full of filmmakers, full of queer people hungry for art that actually reflects their lives, full of venues and programmers who could be championing this work. What's missing isn't capacity—it's courage. It's a willingness to program something that might make some audience members uncomfortable. It's a willingness to trust that queer people want more than inspiration and affirmation. Liu's film is also a reminder that the most important queer cinema often comes from outside the official LGBTQ film festival circuit. "Scratch" has played at prestigious venues and festivals, but it's not primarily a "queer film" in the way that term is usually deployed. It's a film about queer people, made by a queer filmmaker, that happens to engage with queer culture—but it's made with the ambition and rigor of someone who's trying to make a great film, period, not a good queer film. There's a difference, and it matters. When filmmakers approach queer stories with the assumption that they're making work for a niche audience, the results tend to be smaller, safer, more didactic. When they approach queer stories with the ambition they'd bring to any subject—with the assumption that this story is important enough to demand the best version of itself—the results can be genuinely transformative. Los Angeles needs more of that ambition. The city has the talent, the infrastructure, and the audience for a genuinely adventurous queer cinema. What it needs is programmers and funders willing to bet on work that doesn't come with built-in assurances that it will feel good to watch. "Scratch" is a start. Whether the city actually pays attention is another question entirely.