Peck, Ron

1978

Jim, a gay teacher in a London comprehensive school, lives the classic double life: straight days in school, gay nights in bars and discos. With each new pick-up the same tension and uncertainty arises: Is there anything more to gay life than the one-night stand? At school he find himself overworked and forced to hide his true experiences and feelings. After the traditional year-end school dance and a drunken staff party, Jim finally pours out something of himself to a friendly female teacher. It is a step toward openness and enables Jim to face the inevitable explosion triggered by his curious 14-year-old students. Writers/directors Ron Peck and Paul Hallam began work on Nighthawks in 1975, creating the first feature film to come out of a gay community. Conceived as a "panoramic view of gay life in London," they soon realized it couldn't cover everything, and that what was needed was "hundreds of gay films, not half a dozen, to make homosexuality visible in the cinema."

Mariposa Film Group

1977

Ask a gay man or lesbian over 35 what film most affected their lives as gay people, and likely as not they'll answer Word Is Out. In the mid-1970’s the Mariposa Film Group, under the leadership of Peter Adair, undertook to make the first portrait of gay life made by and for gays and lesbians. Adair assembled a team of artists whose members went on to become some of the great names of independent filmmaking, and the result was a powerful success. Word Is Out, which premiered at the Castro Theatre in 1977, interweaves the stories of 27 gay men and lesbians (including local icons Pat Bond, George Mendenhall, Tede Matthews and Rick Stokes) in a complex tapestry that comprises possibly the most comprehensive single artistic testimony to what it means to be gay. Compelling, funny, poignant, inspiring — even twenty years after its release, Word Is Out retains its power to move hearts and change minds. To see it is to understand at the same time how far we have come and how far we have to go.

Reid, Frances

1977

The family lives of eight lesbian mothers and their children are profiled in this unique documentary, which was produced in 1977 by the ground-breaking feminist film distribution company Iris Films. After ten months of research and interviews with more than sixty lesbian mothers and their children, these eight families were chosen as the subjects of this controversial look at child custody by lesbian parents. These families represent a variety of racial and class backgrounds and a diversity of experiences. Their stories are augmented by an attorney and a clinical social worker, who offer their professional opinions on the legality, morality, and ultimately the human factors involved in cases of child custody by non-traditional parents. The interviews with the children are particularly moving: they are full of candor and wisdom about their personal experiences with courtrooms and custody, about having mothers who are “different,” and about their own emerging sexual identities.

Hammer, Barbara

1977

Silent. A lesbian feels more lesbian the shorter her hair gets.

Dundas, Edward

1977

In 1977, the Gay Men's Theatre Collective of San Francisco commisioned a videotape of their landmark play, Crimes Against Nature, in hopes of gaining funding for a film that never panned out. A three-camera, forty-hour shot produced this vibrant translation of the testaments and self-discovery of a group of gay men. Described in the ‘70s as a “Chorus Line for gay people,” Crimes Against Nature remains vital today as a communal disclosure of roles gay people adopt in order to survive in a world that devalues homosexual feelings. The play features individual actors delivering revealing monologues, during which the other memebers of the collective play background roles (parents, schoolmates, etc.). One by one the actors detail the ways in which they have buried their true selves in order to survive and be accepted in the world: repression; drug use; shyness; being agreeable; putting experiences into “little boxes”; acting “butch”; and so on. An inspiring courage informs the sometimes humorous, sometimes painful testimony of the men, each of whom occupies the unsettling region between intellectual and emotional transformation. Exceptional performances convey the suspense involved in treading such dangerous psychological ground. Clever staging raised the original theatrical production above mere confession and director Edward Dundas imaginatively weaves his camera into the play's action to create an intimacy that the viewer fully shares. Dundas's videotape recreates the emotion, humor, ritual, and pathos that characterized the play. The world premiere of Crimes Against Nature is one of the "must see" programs of this year’s festival. As a record of a popular and important play produced in a bygone era, this tape has obvious historical value. Its message about the urgency of authenticity speaks directly to the present.

Gaffney, Cindy

1986

Bogart, Paul

1976

Pamela Bellwood stars as Amy, the lonely wife of a long overseas World War I soldier, in the rarely seen PBS production of The War Widow, one of the most requested titles each year at the festival. Constructed with a delicacy reminiscent of Edith Wharton, The War Widow tells the story of the love that grows between the conventional Amy, who lives with her mother and daughter in a stately New York suburb, and the free-spirited Jenny (Frances Lee McCain) whose passion for photography is equaled only by her passion for Amy. The romance between Amy and Jenny begins innocently in a New York tearoom, when Jenny befriends Amy, whose eyes she finds "so deeply, painfully sad." The two women come to know each other better as they work on one of Jenny's photography projects. A vacation together at the beach makes each realize the depth of their relationship, something which forces Amy to face "what I cannot even name when I am alone and there is no one else to hear." True to the lives of many lesbians of the period, Amy's society does not easily allow her to reconcile her love for Jenny with the duties of her station. When her husband announces his return, she is forced to make the ultimate choice—between her family, including her young daughter Beth, and her lover.In his book The Celluloid Closet, Vito Russo lauds The War Widow as a "positive evocation" of the lives of gay characters and as a piece in which the central characters have a "sense of history" and of their role in the struggle for sexual freedom. Winner of the 1988 San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival Audience Award for Best Video.

Schlatter, George

1976

It would be easy to dismiss Norman, Is That You? as an extended one-note pro-gay fag joke, but that would do it a disservice. While it does wallow in stereotypical character types (straight, gay, white, black, etc.), director George Schlatter's 1976 film combines what were obviously the best of intentions (what was that about the road to hell?) with a plot that could only have started life as some well-meaning Broadway comedy. Besides, who can resist Hollywood's idea of what homosexuals were wearing in the mid-'70s? It's about a black man whose parents discover that he's gay while visiting one weekend to tell him that they are getting a divorce. He's a combination of two black gay stereotypes: the Mandinka buck (an incredibly durable and pervasive representation of black masculinity and sexuality) and the deracinated WASP wanna-be (the epitome of aggressive assimilation, he's sociopolitically and culturally white). The white lover (Dennis Dugan) is a flamboyant queen (funny and nonthreatening to the dominant culture's notions of masculinity). “Sanford & Son's” Redd Foxx plays the homophobic father with Neanderthal abandon, while Pearl Bailey plays the mother as the archetypical sassy, wise-cracking black woman. Basically, everyone comes off as a buffoon.

Wallin, Michael

1975

1975

The tragedy of today’s lonely housewife.