Couch Potato - Queer Streaming Picks 2024

Start off your 2024 off with some queer desire, triumph and a few thrills! With our FUSE Magainze top four TV streaming picks, While The Men Are Away, NYAD, Cassandro and Fellow Travelers.

While The Men Are Away
Queerness & desire will set you free
Streaming on SBS

When war breaks out in the 1940s, Australia’s menfolk head overseas to fight, leaving the women to fill the roles left vacant — like Frankie (Michela De Rossi), who assumes control of her husband’s orchard and enlists her domestic, Kathleen (Phoebe Grainer), and some Women’s Land Army recruits (Max McKenna and Jana Zvedeniuk) to help run it.

If you enjoyed the recent A League Of Their Own TV series, you’ll likely enjoy this queer take on Aussie history, which mixes drama and comedy to cleverly explore how, in the absence of men, women step up, take charge and make all-new discoveries about themselves.

WATCH FREE ON SBS

Cassandro
Liberace of lucha libre
Streaming on SBS

A gay wrestler from El Paso rises to stardom after he creates the character Cassandro. In a career spanning more than 20 years, Gael Garcia Bernal (Y Tu Mama Tambien) gives arguably a career-best performance as Saúl Armendáriz, an openly gay wrestler who shot to fame in Mexico as an exótico in the early 1990s. A stereotypically gay wrestling character, an exótico is there for the derision of the crowd and to make the other (hetero) fighters look good — but Saúl, under the pseudonym Cassandro, decides he isn’t going to be a punching bag, literally or figuratively, and sets out to win everyone over with his unique style, becoming the Liberace of lucha libre.

WATCH ON PRIME

Nyad
A remarkable story of SPIRT & triumph!
Streaming on Netflix

Nyad arrives at Netflix with positive buzz for its stars Annette Bening and Jodie Foster. They play real-life longtime friends and one-time lovers Diane Nyad and Bonnie Stoll; the latter supporting the former’s lifelong dream of swimming from Cuba to Key West, Florida, at age 64.

Directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Oscar winners for their documentary Free Solo about rock climber Alex Honnold), capture the arduous open water swim Diane undertakes, but it’s the friendship (and the performances of Bening and Foster) that is the heart of this feel-good story.

WATCH ON NETFLIX

Fellow Travelers
An epic love story & political thriller.
Streaming on Paramount+

Adapted from Thomas Mallon’s novel by Ron Nyswaner (an Oscar nominee for 1993’s Philadelphia, and who also adapted last year’s My Policeman), Fellow Travelers tells of the decades-long relationship between Hawkins Fuller (Matt Bomer, The Boys in the Band) and Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey, Bridgerton), from the 1950s, where they first meet in the halls of American politics during the McCarthy era, through to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

Epic yet intimate as it chronicles the men’s relationship and the wider gay history of America, Fellow Travelers, which releases week-to-week, promises to be powerful viewing. .

WATCH ON PARAMOUNT+