This Is the First Film in History to Feature a Kiss Between Two Women

A newly uncovered film has rewritten cinema history by revealing what is now believed to be the first on-screen kiss between two women.

The short film, titled The Kiss, was created in the mid-1880s by Eadweard Muybridge, a pioneering photographer best known for his studies of motion, including the famous Horse in Motion.

Historians had previously debated which early films featured the first queer kiss, with titles like D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) and William A. Wellman’s Wings (1927) often cited. However, a discovery at the Boston Public Library in 2011 revealed The Kiss, predating these films by decades.

The short sequence captures two nude women moving closer and sharing a kiss, making it both the first same-sex kiss on film and one of the earliest recorded cinematic kisses overall.

Muybridge, often called “the man who stopped time” for his work photographing rapid sequences, set up a studio in downtown San Francisco to study human movement. He had previously focused on animals, but eventually turned to more intimate moments. Using female models, he photographed their kiss in a series of images to study motion, not for erotic purposes.

The two women, known as Model One and Model Eight, were edited together to display the kiss from multiple angles.

The context of the time made this work especially notable. Victorian America viewed sexuality as largely masculine, and women were often assumed to lack sexual agency. Lesbianism was largely ignored in cultural and scientific discussions.

Muybridge’s project was groundbreaking not only for its artistic and scientific ambition but also for the way it captured queer representation long before it appeared in mainstream cinema.

According to the Muybridge Online Archives, “Muybridge was not into smut and eroticism. His rapid-fire sequential photographs of two naked women kissing served to aid his studies of human and animal movement. It was in the interests of art and science Muybridge secured the services of two women, invited them to undress and photographed them kissing.”

This rediscovery places The Kiss as a major landmark in both queer and film history, showing that representation existed far earlier than many had realized.

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