Revry's "office" in Glendale, California feels an awful lot like off-campus college housing. There's a fireplace that looks like it hasn't seen a flame in decades. There's a slightly tattered leather couch, some pillows featuring Wonder Woman, Star Wars, and Steve Jobs. A copy of the club-kid makeup portrait book Getting Into Face sits the coffee table. The flatscreen on the wall isn't playing Netflix, though. Instead it's cycling through a highlight reel of programs that I've never seen—but wish had been around when I was younger.

The craftsman-style house may be nowhere near a university campus, but Revry is serving up content that's truly educational. Operating under the tagline "Stream. Out. Loud." the service offers up hours upon hours of queer movies and TV to viewers around the world—116 countries total, including China, where even Netflix can't get past censors (at least not directly. "We haven't been blocked yet," says Revry's chief business officer, Christopher Rodriguez, after we settle in to the company's upstairs conference room.

The company's CEO, Damian Pelliccione notes that the company has dozens of hours of queer content in Mandarin; "that’s something we're so proud of," he says, "and is super important to us." Also important: bringing LGBTQ+ programming to Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and any number of other countries where homosexuality is shunned—or even outlawed—giving queer people in those regions a chance to see themselves reflected in media in a way they might never have had otherwise.

This wasn't always explicitly Revry's goal. Pelliccione and Rodriguez started the company out of their own Los Angeles home in 2015. The pair, who have been partners for more than a decade, went to an Apple store to fix Rodriguez's cracked iPhone screen, and wound up buying the then-new Apple TV. When set it up, they searched the OS for apps that delivered LGBTQ+ content—but nothing popped up. A former instructor at YouTube Space LA, Pelliccione decided to change that. He gathered Rodriguez, who works as an entertainment attorney, and two friends—Alia Daniels, also a lawyer, and LaShawn McGhee, a film and TV editor—in their Echo Park living room and propose that they all build a streaming service for queer content. Not a single person said "no."

"It was an opportunity to see ourselves truly as a community reflected in the media," Pelliccione says. "We're a cause-driven company. But it wasn't even just seeing an opportunity in the market, it was seeing an opportunity to reach those audiences who have never seen themselves reflected on television."

After that meeting, Daniels left her job at a small startup; Rodriguez finished up a gig providing legal counsel to Shark Tank; McGhee finished the feature she was editing and never looked back. "There was nothing else I'd rather do," McGhee says.

They hired a developer to work on the app and got busy thinking up ideas for marketing, messaging, shows they wanted to make or acquire, and other aspects of the business plan. Less than six months later, in March 2016, they had a version of the app in beta. They officially launched at San Francisco Pride a few months later; each of the cofounders wore a pink company-branded T-shirts, and they all handed out flyers telling people to check out their new streaming service.

Representation Matters

Showing authentic representations of queer people has been a concern practically since the dawn of filmed entertainment. Images of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people are scant in movies and TV—but so is access to the content that does exist. Revry provides that access. Like Netflix or Amazon, the service is available on laptops as well as phones and streaming devices like Roku. And because it’s now available Hulu-style, supported by ads instead of just subscription fees, viewers who don’t have the means to pay for it (or would just be afraid to have their name and/or credit card information associated with an LGBTQ+ streaming service) can get it more easily than ever.