Until the Outfest
Legacy Project came around, pioneering gay films like
Parting Glances were falling into disrepair,
unable to be issued on DVD or even properly screened. But
now they're being restored to former glory—and
getting a new lease on life.
Film has been a
crucial component of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender struggle for visibility and equality. From
Making Love to Desert Hearts to
Paris Is Burning to Boys Don't Cry to
Brokeback Mountain, film images in the decades
since Stonewall have helped make what's "invisible" about us
visible. So many of us have been personally shaped, even
saved, by films that spoke directly to our experiences
of living unspoken lives—of discovering our
true selves or demanding our rightful place at the table
of humanity.
There is a saying
that memory is a monument harder than stone. At the
dawn of the 21st century LGBT people continue to have few
actual monuments—so little mainstream
acknowledgement of our struggles and our
contributions. But the task and responsibility remain before
us: Build the monuments ourselves by telling our own
stories and passing them on. Yes, we've done an
amazing job over the last three decades of telling
those stories in film, but very, very few of them are being
properly taken care of, and they've begun to
disappear. Almost none of the major LGBT films of
1970s, '80s, and '90s have been preserved.
As a result, the
state of independent queer film preservation is in
crisis.
The film elements
that make possible everything from revival screenings
to commercial DVDs are lost, in disrepair, and in some cases
have already substantially deteriorated. Whenever
Outfest—the Los Angeles LGBT film festival,
which I'm the executive director of—programs a
revival screening, we inevitably brace ourselves to
receive a print on its very last legs. It's usually
one of the original prints struck 10 or 20 years ago,
never replaced because there's no real money to be made from
a new print, the elements are lost, or the filmmaker
has died.
So Outfest
decided two years ago to not be complicit in the erasure of
our own heritage. The Outfest Legacy Project for LGBT Film
Preservation, a partnership with the UCLA Film and
Television Archive, has established the largest
publicly accessible collection of LGBT films in the world.
Our collection already includes over 5,300 titles (more than
250,000 minutes of moving images) and features scores
of archive-quality 35-millimeter film prints, from
Claire of the Moon to Edge of
Seventeen to Wild Reeds, as well as access copies
of older films, many that don't exist anywhere else.
And the Outfest
Legacy Project recently entered the most expensive and
time-consuming area of film preservation:
restoration—actually undoing the damage and
bringing some of our most threatened films back to life.
Our inaugural restoration project is Parting
Glances, a beloved 1986 indie classic that launched the
careers of Steve Buscemi and Kathy Kinney. The
restored film premiered Monday, July 16, at Outfest.
Stephen Gutwillig, Kathey Kinney, Steve Buscemi
I was 21 years
old when Parting Glances came out. I saw it at
the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, Mass., and it
changed my life. This intimate, funny gem remains one of the
best portraits of love and friendship among gay
men—and one of the best films about
AIDS—ever made. As a gay man and a film lover, it
crystallized for me what was possible—how good
the movies about our lives deserved to be.
Bill Sherwood
wrote and directed Parting Glances. It was his
only film. He died of AIDS complications a few
years after its release, and today there isn't a single
viable print of the film archived anywhere—the
prints that do exist are now themselves 20 years old,
and look like it. The commercial tapes and DVDs of the film
were struck from unrestored film elements. After tracking
down the rights holder, obtaining his consent, and
locating the original elements, we raised $88,000 to
complete a full restoration of the film, and with
it a piece of the LGBT community's soul.
Our next
restoration is Word Is Out: Stories From Some of
Our Lives from 1977, the first feature-length
documentary by gays and lesbians about their lives.
But as you can imagine, there is much, much more we
need to do.
The Outfest
Legacy Project collection recently formed a partnership with
the extraordinary One National Gay and Lesbian Archives. We
are in the process of accessioning some of One's
rarest and most fragile moving images. These include
one-of-a-kind tapes of artists like Allen Ginsberg and
William Burroughs, plus civil rights pioneers Evelyn Hooker,
Morris Kite, and Harry Hay. We stand on their
shoulders today, but much of this recorded history is
terribly threatened and could be lost to future
generations of LGBT people seeking a record of their
cultural history.
Like a lot of
you, I hear about these images and am desperate to see
them. As a gay man I'm desperate to know my history, to
connect with my ancestors. And I'm furious at having
been denied these images as well as whatever else
may be out there deteriorating. I'm determined to have
this void filled—whether it was caused by
benign neglect or homophobic censorship. This blackout
must end.
Memory is a
monument harder than stone, and the Outfest Legacy Project
is building a living, moving monument of memory. Most
of us in the LGBT community realize that this work,
this righteous act of cultural reclamation, is
something we have to do for ourselves. The uncertain,
often virulent national political climate aside, this is our
cause, the least we can do for the brave artists who
told our stories and changed the world. Far from a
burden, it is a joyous undertaking to lovingly tend
to and rediscover our creative legacy. They are the
films that told us who we are, where we come from, and
why we love the way we do. We invite you to join us as
we bring them back to life—as we bring them
home.
Gutwillig is the executive director of Outfest. For
more info on the Outfest Legacy Project, visit outfest.org.
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