On the penultimate night of this year’s recent Cannes film festival, I went — as is the custom for rosé-seeking journalists hanging on through the last days — to the Queer Palme awards night, where an independent jury announces their pick for the best LGBT-themed film of the fest. It’s traditionally more of a party than an awards ceremony, not least because the winner tends to be a foregone conclusion. That one overtly queer film that was in the official selection? Yep, probably that one.

Not so this year, as the cocktail rounds were lightly speckled with speculation after a festival unusually rich in LGBT narratives. The Belgian director Lukas Dhont’s debut Girl, a sensitively wrought study of an aspiring transgender ballerina, prevailed over a number of credible candidates: Kenyan lesbian coming-of-ager Rafiki, tough French rentboy portrait Sauvage, loopy Portuguese elasti-sexual comedy Diamantino and Christophe Honore’s tender Parisian Aids drama Sorry Angel, among others. At an event whose programming is still controversially plagued by representational blind spots – not least its shortage of female film-makers – the rainbow flag was flying at full mast.

Cannes wasn’t exactly blazing a trail here. This year’s strong queer showing was indicative of a larger watershed moment for LGBT cinema across the industry, as stories and artists once confined to rarefied corners of the arthouse are being gradually welcomed into the mainstream. This hasn’t been an overnight shift. It’s been 12 years since Brokeback Mountain raked in over £130m worldwide, cracking open Hollywood’s collective idea of what audiences will and won’t respond to (though not without some resistance from conservative factions that cost it an Oscar).

The last couple of years, however, have kicked that evolution into fast-forward, helped along by real-world advances in LGBT rights, and the Twitter-assisted revolution in identity politics awareness. The world, in other words, is a very different place for gay and trans people than it was even a decade ago, and cinema is feeling the change. Last year, encouraged by a wave of critical hosannas, even that fusty pool of Oscar voters finally handed their top prize to a drama of gay identity and desire in Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight – a film preoccupied as much with the social oppression of blackness as of homosexuality, making it a once-unthinkably intersectional choice for a predominantly straight, white and privileged body.

This year, they nominated Call Me By Your Name, Luca Guadagnino’s woozy evocation of a same-sex summer crush – the kind of handsome European delicacy that would once have been deemed a niche item, but is now an object of obsessive youth fandom, memed and gif-ed and quoted to within an inch of its life across social media. It lost the best picture to The Shape of Water: not a directly queer film, but one whose romantic interspecies fantasy rallied gay, black and disabled characters in joint support of alternative sexuality. At the same ceremony, the best foreign language film prize went to Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman, a study of transgender self-assertion powered by the remarkable trans actress Daniela Vega; the kudos fed directly into the starry publicity campaign for Lelio’s first English-language film Disobedience, a heady, well-received study of lesbian desire in the Orthodox Jewish community. Directors of queer stories get to move faster these days.

There will be no awards attention for Love, Simon – perhaps the year’s most deceptively groundbreaking LGBT film – and for its purposes, that can be considered a badge of honour. Where the aforementioned films, for all their success, fall into a particular bracket of adult-targeted prestige cinema, Greg Berlanti’s bright teen comedy is Hollywood’s first gay romance aimed expressly at the multiplex audience: sweet, edgeless and sex-free, it’s a gay film that paradoxically feels progressive in its safeness, normalising the coming-out experience to the point of standard-issue adolescent soap opera. It didn’t set the box office alight, but it didn’t raise many eyebrows either. Already, it’s one of several teen-oriented US films this year to tackle the challenges of nascent homosexuality with a gentle, spry touch – among them Netflix’s peppy, John Hughes-referencing love triangle Alex Strangelove, in which our pretty, conflicted young hero considers the spectrum of sexual identification options available to his post-millennial generation before settling on good old-fashioned gayness.

These films sit far from the range of LGBT experiences being portrayed on international screens: South Africa’s The Wound faced controversy on home turf for portraying a violent clash of masculine tribal tradition and contemporary queer identity, France’s 120 Beats Per Minute brought bracing eroticism and rhetorical vigour to its study of early-90s Aids activism, while in Britain, God’s Own Country impressed at the arthouse box office for delicately exploring homosexual yearning in the working-class hinterland. Always a broad umbrella of styles and viewpoints, LGBT cinema has branched out to such a degree that it’s increasingly nonsensical to regard it as a genre in itself: a Netflix-distributed youth romp, a broadly celebrated Oscar darling and an embattled African art film cannot be said to share a common creative church or commercial playing field.

Yet if one thing does bind these disparate visions, beyond the “alternative” sexualities of their characters, it’s a mutual concern with the past – an urge to process centuries of persecution and internalised prejudice before looking ahead to whatever the future of queer identity might be.

Many are period pieces, giving characters straitjacketed in the taboos and restrictions of their era the liberal allowances and understanding they didn’t necessarily feel then: the tightly buttoned, tentatively emerging midcentury rebels of Todd Haynes’ Carol and Far from Heaven; the confused 1980s semi-hedonists of Call Me By Your Name, torn between domestic conventions and glimpses of new-wave cultural subversion; the enraged campaigners of 120 Beats Per Minute, politically woken as a better 21st century looms but in a race to be heard before disease claims them. A rejoinder to more decorous historical portraits, Rupert Everett’s chaotic, sensual Oscar Wilde biopic The Happy Prince offers a modern, sympathetically queer reading of a character caught at least a century out a time. “Why should a perfectly divine leopard change his spots?” his Wilde asks – as do most of these films, wishing their characters into the more liberated present.

Even the recent past is up for rearview speculation. Desiree Akhavan’s 1993-set The Miseducation of Cameron Post – the top prizewinner at this year’s Sundance festival – stars Chloë Grace Moretz as an insecure lesbian high-schooler surviving the horrors of gay conversion camp. It’s one of two films this year to examine the social and psychological damage wrought by such attempted therapy, still operational in America’s US Bible belt. The second, Joel Edgerton’s all-star directorial effort Boy Erased, is drawn from the horrifying memoir of the millennial-age writer and Baptist preacher’s son Garrard Conley. We know Conley’s story has a happy ending; the fragile fictional teens of Akhavan’s film are brought to a less certain brink of escape and self-realisation, though it cautiously points to a brighter, freer future.

Even contemporary-set, ostensibly new-generation LGBT films come with baggage to shed: the wholesome, jockish hero of Love, Simon may come out to general support from friends and family, but his long-closeted identity is dictated by outmoded constructs of masculinity. Some critics even questioned whether 46-year-old gay film-maker Berlanti’s film was inadvertently dated for its young, less inhibited audience – whether it was a coming-of-age story rooted more in his own childhood than that of a 21st-century boy. Until that generation (one younger even than 29-year-old Canadian Xavier Dolan, whose filmography has already covered a range of forthright, agitated gay viewpoints) starts filming its own LGBT narratives, it’ll be hard to gauge just how radically different the ruling queer perspective will be, though one imagines it will be governed less by prejudice than by possibility. At any rate, it will surely make swift, dust-gathering fossils of films like the forthcoming Steve Coogan-Paul Rudd vehicle Ideal Home, a generally well-meaning gay adoption comedy undermined by flouncy stereotyping.

Notwithstanding such crass outliers, the LGBT cinema of the current moment is perhaps best regarded as a kind of truth and reconciliation inquiry for artists and audiences alike. It’s not as aggressive or inventive, perhaps, as the brasher, angrier queer cinema of decades past – we’re arguably not seeing a new John Waters or Gregg Araki on the frontline – but it is thoughtful, hopeful and socially conscious in its unpacking of personal experience and political adjustment across the expanding alphabet of queer identity. Like the cautiously united, emboldened lovers at the respective endings of Moonlight, Carol or God’s Own Country, LGBT cinema is either at the putting-to-bed stage or the going-to-bed stage. Let’s see what awaits in the morning.