The Southern Movies series explores images of the South in modern films as well as how those images affect American perspectives on the region.

In June, during Pride Month, we take time to recognize the history, realities, struggles, contributions, achievements, and lives of the LGBTQ community. So, in light of that, the Southern movies listed below contain treatments of issues faced by LGBTQ people in the South. From recent years, moviegoers may be familiar with current LGBTQ films like 2005’s Mississippi Damned or 2014’s Blackbird, but here are six Southern movies from the 20th century that tell older stories of a different time.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)

This classic film, which was based on Tennessee Williams’ play of the same name, carries within it a sub-plot with a gay love affair implied. Because the main character Brick will not have sex with his beautiful young wife Maggie after the death of his best friend Skipper, there are insinuations that there was more between Brick and Skipper than the camaraderie of two football players. Further complicating the matter, we learn midway through the film that Skipper killed himself after being confronted by Maggie about the nature of his friendship with Brick.

Though no one actually says out loud that Brick might have been in a romantic relationship with his male best friend, the dialogue opens the door without walking through it. A gay man himself, Williams was a master of creating dialogue that said things without actually saying them. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a complex movie about family, wealth, power, death, social class, sports, and more . . . and as such the LGBTQ component can get lost in the mix. But it is there, and it is brought to our attention as something that should never fully come to our attention.

Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

Another Tennessee Williams classic, this story is much darker. This time, rather than having a dead man who might have been gay lingering in the background of the story, this plot centers overtly on a gay man who has recently died. Like we never see or hear from Skipper on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sebastian Venable is a man discussed posthumously in dueling anecdotes. His extremely wealthy mother does everything that she can to preserve her narrative of his life, claiming he was a misunderstood poetic genius who loved only her. However, we also watch his beautiful and distraught young cousin who was with him when he died, and as such, she is willing and able to reveal the truth. Sebastian Venable was not chaste and celibate. He was gay and promiscuous, and he used attractive women as traveling companions to get the attention of men he wanted. The way that his cousin puts it, they would “procure” for him.

In watching this story, it is difficult to decide whether Sebastian Venable was selfish and amoral jerk who used people like objects, or if he was a man who had to hide his true self, who lived under unique and unusual circumstances, and who did what he had to do to be himself when he could. No matter what, it is difficult to like Sebastian Venable— the real question of the play is: do we understand who he really was?

The Children’s Hour (1961)

Adapted from a play by Lillian Hellman, this film centers on two young women who have been best friends and colleagues in their work as school teachers. Now, one of them is getting married, and the other is being left behind. The scene seems innocent enough until one of their students, a nosy little girl with bad intentions, overhears something that she distorts and repeats. This catalyst creates a chain of events that has each of the two main characters questioning the nature of their relationship. As the plot proceeds and these two young women try to discern whether they are good friends or in love, the girl who carried what she overheard out into the community has whipped up a storm of anti-LGBTQ sentiment, all based on a child’s hearsay and fast-spreading rumors.

The Children’s Hour is an exploration, like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, of how Southerners have suspicions when two friends of the same sex seem to be too close. In this story’s case, all it takes one bad little girl’s mean-spirited move that confirms these suspicions. Then the effects begin to be felt.

Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)

In the TCM introduction segment for Reflections in a Golden Eye, Ben Mancewiecz explains that lead actor Marlin Brando didn’t want to do this film, but ultimately changed his mind. The film is adapted from a Carson McCullers novel, and it involves the illicit affairs of an Army officer’s wife, while he deals with his own “repressed homosexuality.” Once again, we have Liz Taylor as the sultry wife of a man who struggles with sex and sexuality, even though he is the kind of man that other men regard as a real man. But even though he is outwardly strong and has it together and she is beautiful and vivacious, they don’t mix well.

Several of Carson McCullers’ works were made into movies between the 1960s and 1990s. Though her work often dealt with outsiders and outcasts, rarely did her characters’ difference center on being gay. (Perhaps the only other character was Amelia Evans in Ballad of the Sad Café, who threw her husband Marvin Macy down the stairs on their wedding night and never once slept in the bed with him. It was implied that she never wanted to be married and his attempt to have sex with her was what invoked her most severe wrath.) This movie is an underrated classic, though very tense and sometimes hard to watch, as that tension bubbles to the surface.

Ode to Billy Joe (1976)

This film is an interesting addition to this themed sampler, because it is based on a song that has absolutely no mention of anything about sex between two men. The original Bobbie Gentry song from 1967 alludes to Billy Joe McAllister jumping off the Tallahatchie Bridge, presumably to kill himself. It also mentions that a neighbor had seen Billy Joe and a girl that looked like our narrator throwing something off the bridge prior to the boys’ suicide. But there is not even the slightest hint of gay sex between Billy Joe and his boss at the sawmill, which is where the film version takes the story.

From the song’s lyrics, my best guess about what was thrown off the bridge by the young couple would be a stillborn child or miscarried fetus, which would imply a secret heterosexual affair between teenagers followed by an unwanted child conceived out of wedlock. But Max Baer, Jr.’s 1976 film takes Billy Joe’s angst in a whole different direction by having him confess to a one-night stand with an older man, then he kills himself over it. In the end of the movie, the older man seeks out the young girlfriend who is running away because everyone assumes she is pregnant. He offers to save her reputation by outing himself. Ultimately, she tells him that it isn’t worth it, then she leaves, and we never know what he does with his secret or with his guilt.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997)

This movie caused quite a stir in the late 1990s, because it was based on real people and events that had been reported in the news. Set in Savannah, Georgia, a coastal town well known for its historical class of wealthy elites, this story centers on a wealthy socialite whose seedy gay lover is killed. Coincidentally, a journalist is in town to do a story on that wealthy man’s home and holiday party, so he acts as the sleuth that allows the story to be told. Everyone local seems to know what’s going on and why, including the black drag queen who reluctantly befriends our clueless reporter from out-of-town.

This movie stands out because, unlike previous films, the facts of gay men and drag queens are not veiled by innuendo. They are right there. We understand clearly that a wealthy gay man killed his problematic boyfriend. We also understand that his social status inclines some people to look away from the truth or to attempt to sweep it under the rug.

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