Marlon Riggs, with assistance from other gay Black men, especially poet Essex Hemphill, celebrates Black men loving Black men as a revolutionary act. The film intercuts footage of Hemphill reciting his poetry, Riggs telling the story of his growing up, scenes of men in social intercourse and dance, and various comic riffs, including a visit to the "Institute of Snap!thology," where men take lessons in how to snap their fingers: the sling snap, the point snap, the diva snap.

Birds of The Borderlands follows four Arab queers as they risk their place in their families, communities and even countries to be themselves. Hiba is a Bedouin trans-girl fleeing her tribe before they discover her secret transition; Youssef is a gay Iraqi refugee murder-witness, waiting in hiding for UNHCR to hand him his fate; Khalaf is a gay Imam turned LGBT activist forced to seek asylum abroad after a vicious assault from his family; Rasha is a young Jordanian feminist who finds herself in a relationship with Jordan, the Australian filmmaker who is determined to help the film’s characters but doesn’t understand the price paid for freedom in a country where honor can still be thicker than blood.

Dr Jean Markham (Anna Paquin) returns to the town she left as a teenager to take over her late father's medical practice. When a school-yard scuffle lands Charlie (Gregor Selkirk) in her surgery, she invites him to visit the hives in her garden and tell his secrets to the bees, as she once did. The new friendship between the boy and the bee keeper brings his mother Lydia (Holliday Grainger) into Jean's world. In the sanctuary of the doctor's house the two women find themselves drawn to one another in a way that Jean recognises and fears, and Lydia could never have expected. But, in 1950's small-town Britain, their new secret can't stay hidden forever.