17 LGBTQ+ TV Shows Removed From Max, Disney+, Showtime and Hulu

Finding queer content on television has never been easy, but it’s getting even harder now that streaming networks like Max, Disney+, Showtime and Hulu have begun cutting costs by completely removing various television shows and movies from their platforms altogether. Here are some of our gayest losses.


12 Dates of Christmas (Max)

Amanda and her date under a tent

This completely bananas dating show that shoehorned a Christmas theme into its little chalet of chaos had lesbian and gay contestants in Season Two, truly good luck figuring out how to watch this online!

Big Shot (Disney+)

girls basketball team standing in a row

A college basketball coach finds himself leading a girl’s high school team (obviously there is a lesbian) in this comedy you will never see

Camping (Max)

Curious about Bridget Everett as a butch lesbian named Harry in a cruel comedy where everybody is gay by the end? Well, you know what they say, “curiosity killed the cat.”

Diary of a Future President (Disney+)

diary of a future president two women on a sofa

We’ll never know now if she will be a president in the future

Dollface (Hulu)

Shay Mitchell in "Dollface"

If you want to see Shay Mitchell in a queer role you will have to do so somewhere else sorry

Genera+ion (Max)

Perhaps the greatest wound inflicted directly into the soul of our generation was the removal of this small gem of a super-queer Gen Z ensemble show.

Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies (Paramount+)

grease pink ladies in the hallway

Those kids sang and danced for their lives and now nobody will ever see what they did!

Legendary (Max)

Legendary

HBO Max ditched this voguing competition show but great news: you can watch it on Roku and Tubi.

Love Life (Max)

Punkie Johnson laughing in a white t-shirt

A rom-com anthology series with lesbians in both seasons and in the second season the lesbian is played by SNL legend Punkie Johnson sounds pretty fun but unfortunately it is not available to watch at this time.

The L Word: Generation Q (Showtime)

(L-R): Leisha Hailey as Alice, Katherine Moennig as Shane and Jennifer Beals as Bette in THE L WORD: GENERATION Q ÒLuck be a LadyÓ. Photo Credit: Liz Morris/SHOWTIME.

Liz Morris/SHOWTIME.

I mean we have discussed the injustice here!!!!!

Marvel’s Runaways (Hulu)

cast of marvel's runaways

THIS SHOW RULED I’M SO SAD

Masters of Sex (Max)

masters of sex, two lesbians vintage looking at a poster together

Photo: Warren Feldman/SHOWTIME

Annaleigh Ashford plays a sex worker named Betty in this TV show about Masters & Johnson’s sex research but unfortunately you can’t watch it

Mrs. Fletcher (Max)

Mrs Fletcher sitting on her bed with a candle

Kathryn Hahn as a middle-aged divorced Mom exploring her fluid sexuality and taking a writing class from Jen Richards sounds pretty fun, doesn’t it? Well, you can’t watch it.

Snowpiercer (Max)

woman at a bar in a fancy dress

A train goes round and round and round and now POOF it’s gone

Work in Progress (Showtime)

abby and chris at a nightclub

Cancelling this brilliant queer comedy was one thing but scrubbing it from Showtime altogether was an injustice.

Westworld (Max)

evan rachel wood in westworld

ok

Willow (Disney+)

Jade looking at Kit with literal heart eyes

Disney+”s Willow has “multiple queer characters to root for” but you can’t.

Y: The Last Man (Hulu)

Olivia Thirlby and Elliot Fletcher in Y: The Last Man

This was in development for much longer than it was on actual television!

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Riese

Riese is the 41-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

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21 Comments

    • yeah i think now if you want to watch work in progress you have to buy the season on prime video! and camping is weird, like you can watch one episode for free but then the rest are unavailable altogether?

    • The prominent practice of early cancellations and now targeted removal by streamers besides NF means a lot of cool niche shows never finding their cult following.
      Meanwhile, NF is becoming a graveyard of pointless, underdeveloped single-season narratives with no conclusions.
      All around poor outcomes for original storytelling and a hurdle for new minority producers and showrunners coming to prominence.
      The favored alternative strategy right now seems to be to produce sequels, prequels and universe expansions to existing IPs where the best queer bets are limited to Star Trek, SitC and TLW
      All in the name of budgets, competitive advantages and merging prospects in the field of streaming services.
      And so Millenial & Gen Z viewers wanting good representation and social commentary lose and removal of “Genera+ion” makes it a loss when it could have been the new “Skins” or “SKAM”.
      Its producers Daniel and Zelda Barnes meant it was an American Gen Z teen show made with Gen Z teen input.
      Specifically centering Genders & Sexualities Alliance students who believably embody Californian adolescents facing inexperience and confusion, dealing with family as dependents.
      Who feel like young people still connecting the dots of their wants and needs.
      Fortunately, it is now AVAILABLE for free on Tubi!

      I think Netflix’s “Heartbreak High” centering an Aussie HS Sex Ed class is poised to deliver and deepen a similar viewing experience – if it’s given another 1-2 seasons.

      Otherwise, time to check out BBC’s Channel 4, Canadian/Australian BC works, Spanish/Portuguese offerings.
      In 3-5 years check in on Germans and hope that these fastidious Europeans employ a writers’ room, intimacy coaches and several directors in adapting “Euphoria.”

  1. Some of these I already knew about in a deeply “Thanks. I hate it,” way. But others were on my “to watch” list, or even ones I was partway through watching. And many (if not most) aren’t available for purchase anywhere either!

  2. The Willow removal pisses me off so much! I grew up with the movie and getting a very lesbian centric continuation was really phenomenal! I adored the show and planned to have it as a “comfort rewatch”. We just can’t have nice things :/

  3. Removing content from streaming sites because they are too cheap to deal with residual payments and the like… don’t mind me, I’ll be setting sail on the high seas of the interwebs once again in search of “backup copies”. (VPN is highly recommended)

  4. It feels like such a waste of all the energy, care, time, and money that went into these productions in the first place, from the writers to the actors and everyone behind the scenes.

    Residuals aren’t that significant, are they?? I mean, isn’t that one (of many valid) reasons that streaming content is not very reliable, financially at least, for those that create it (writers, actors, etc)?

  5. Marvel’s Runaways is missing from this list. It was removed by Hulu a couple of weeks ago. I used to occasionally go and rewatch all the Deanoru (Nico/Karolina) scenes.

    I saw an article that HBO is going to start putting shows on Netflix. But I expect NF would only want the really big shows like Westworld. It’s the same with the other streaming services – some of these shows will be licensed to run on them for a little while, but again, it’ll only be the big shows. :( Genera+ion was awesome and I don’t expect it ever to turn up again.

  6. We can now update this list to include Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies on Paramount+. Canceled today and will be removed in around a week. A show that literally JUST finished airing.

  7. I feel like I have to point out that all of these shows are probably easily available by pirating, which is something I think we’re all going to need to be more well versed in the way things are going! But yeah…this is just baffling to me. In what way does it help these streamers to remove content that has already been produced and released?!

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