![vintage full gay movies vintage full gay movies](http://img.thedailybeast.com/image/upload/v1493058024/galleries/2011/11/07/most-unintentionally-homoerotic-movies-photos/immortals-most-homoerotic-movies_kbxxuj.jpg)
One videomaker recorded images of the handsome men in suits, soldiers, and Mexico border guards he encountered. There are the home movies of Christine Jorgensen, America’s first high-profile transgender woman, video of Act Up demonstrations, video of relaxing at the Golden Gate Bridge in 1950, sunny picnics, and images of women (dressed in the “butch” and “femme” codes of the time) at Mona’s Candle Light, a San Francisco lesbian bar of the 1950s. Others film the quotidian nature of their intimate relationships: we see happiness, contentment, cooking, reading, doing chores” “There are countless parties with people having fun, drinking, joking. It reminds Raines of a more fun time, before “politics and plague” necessarily became defining hallmarks of LGBT life as the 70s and 80s progress. There’s so much asphalt, no pedestrianized sections.” There’s a paint store, automobile garage, places you can’t imagine being on the street now. “It is not the entertainment district it is now. “It’s exciting to see videos of the Castro from the 70s,” said Raines.
Raines’ favorite tapes include one where a gay couple make a film to explain their daily lives to straight viewers, and one of pop star Sylvester performing at the opening of the Castro Street Muni station in 1980. “History gets telescoped and compressed into moments of extreme good and bad, but there was lots of everyday living too as we walked through a lot of bad times.” “We can also see how resilient our community is, it’s so important for us to see,” said Maddux. The home videos mean that the familiar newsreels of LGBT people being put in paddy wagons after bar raids, or demonstrating, or leading shadowy lives do not stand alone. “History gets telescoped and compressed into moments of extreme good and bad, but there was lots of everyday living too as we walked through a lot of bad times” Raines’ job, he said, is like bringing all these real-life, filmed ghosts “back to life.” It’s a pretty powerful feeling, watching these home movies and feeling like you’re part of a community that’s been around for a while.” Until I saw the films, I’d never seen myself in 1948 before. With these movies, we see LGBT people back then doing the same, and also for me it’s nice to see them behaving just as we do today. You see straight versions of this all the time, like Christmas, birthdays, and Thanksgiving. Maddux’s favorite moments on the tapes are “mundane moments and day-to-day things. Archivists hope older LGBT people today will save what they have and donate it, at the right time, to organizations like the GLBT Historical Society, and other societies like it the same for family members who may have such material in their possession. It’s a pretty powerful feeling, watching these home movies and feeling like you’re part of a community that’s been around for a while”Īlthough such familial homophobia and shame has thankfully lessened in recent times, one can only guess at how much LGBT home-shot video has been lost. “Until I saw the films, I’d never seen myself in 1948 before. As one of the documentary’s contributors describes it, the videos are like “marks on cave walls.” Maddux’s film is a fascinating, intimate survey of lives lived within and also outside the pages of history, and a reminder that LGBT people lived full lives, even as society ignored, persecuted, and discriminated against them.
![vintage full gay movies vintage full gay movies](https://pad.mymovies.it/img/image/?size=500&image=https://pad.mymovies.it/filmclub/Fantafilm/1951/59-26/imm.jpg)
Daily Beast readers can watch the documentary, free, here for a few days. But back then, when same-sex intercourse was illegal and LGBT people the subjects of widespread stigma, violence, and legislative prejudice-and all this long before the Stonewall Riots of 1969-LGBT people still not just lived their lives, but also some recorded them.ĭocumentary-maker Stu Maddux sifted through around 300 hours of homemade video material for his film Reel In The Closet, which shows LGBT lives at home, on vacation, on political demonstrations, out on the streets, and in LGBT bars back when such bars were very hush-hush places. The men are beautiful, happy, and were it today we may have seen their taut, glistening bodies captured on Instagram. A handsome man in a checked shirt beckons the camera through a gate, and inside a sunny garden are all kinds of other handsome men, skinny dipping, clipping hedges, and throwing themselves around on the grass. “Breakfast In San Fernando,” flashes the title card.