EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is by a grant recipient in a program launched in 2022 by The G&LR, now the Charles S. Longcope Jr. Writers and Artists Grant, which was awarded to two recipients in 2024. Awardees are expected to produce an article for this magazine as part of their project, of which this is the second to appear.
A MAN IN JEANS and a plaid flannel shirt opens a driveway gate, smiling at the camera, then leads us toward the backyard, unbolts a second gate, and invites us in. Three men in button-ups and jeans enter the yard, and the man in plaid soon removes his shirt and throws it on the ground. Facing the camera, he starts unbuttoning his jeans but turns away before pulling them down. In the next shots, three men are sunbathing nude by a pool, two lying on the concrete deck and one in the water. The three men—one black-haired, one blond, and one wearing a cap—are facing each other, laughing, engrossed in conversation. The blond takes a drag from his cigarette before passing it to the black-haired man, who splashes in the water with his foot. Then all three are in the water, swimming, diving, playing. One soon lights the stone grill and cooks burgers, bacon, eggs, and tomatoes while the others lounge on cots or continue swimming. The men enjoy their brunch, then one prunes the hedges while another sews new sling fabric for a wooden lawn chair, and they spend the rest of the afternoon lounging about, swimming, dancing, posing, cleaning the pool, and messing around.
Breakfast in San Fernando is just one of almost 300 reels of film shot by Harold T. O’Neal, documenting his adult life from the late 1930s until the late 1980s. This twenty-minute reel, recording a private backyard party with O’Neal’s friends in July 1947, is a remarkable document of queer life at mid-century. The men are beautiful, and their nudity gratifying to watch, but the film is not erotic per se. While there are a few scenes of physical contact—one of the men helps another rub suntan lotion on his back and buttocks—the reel is generally innocent.
The excitement of watching the men comes from the freedom they exude—their sense of security and camaraderie, their ability to be themselves, to be completely open with each other, at ease and unabashed, secluded from the outside world in their private oasis, behind the tall hedges and trees. Preserved by the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, O’Neal’s massive collection of home movies is a unique and important record of queer history. In addition to capturing his everyday life, outings and social gatherings with his partner, family, and friends, and travels across the U.S. and internationally, they document important queer spaces in San Francisco and early gay liberation parades in the 1970s, as well as the relocation of Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II.
Since the introduction of the first amateur film formats in the early 1920s, several generations of home moviemakers have documented their private lives with moving images, first with film, then videotape, and finally digital files. While sometimes catching significant public events on camera—like Abraham Zapruder’s 8mm film of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination—more often these recordings capture ordinary events such as holidays, birthdays, vacations, and everyday family life. Archivists and scholars of queer history realized early the historical value of home movies shot by queer people and had the foresight to collect and preserve them for posterity. Archivists and scholars of film similarly realized that home movies were not only valuable visual records of the past century; they also represented unique creative impulses.
These playful, artful, intimate, and sometimes erotic snapshots of queer life are evocative records of same-sex affection, friendship, and love at a time when tenderness was strictly policed, heteronormative expectations of gender reigned supreme, and visual evidence of one’s “perversion” could result in the loss of one’s job, family, and social networks, or worse. Some amateur filmmakers also staged narratives that rejected, countered, and parodied the tired stereotypes and pathological tropes of Hollywood and evinced early and sustained attempts at positive self-representation. Both types of film reveal a serious concern with aesthetics, narrative, and technique through intentional strategies of composition, direction, action, and editing.
Queer amateur film production and home moviemaking between the 1930s and 1960s represents a particularly exciting period of experimentation with self-representation, after the standardization of the classical Hollywood feature film and its strict moral codes in the early 1930s, but before the emergence of the gay independent filmmaking spurred by the post-Stonewall gay liberation movement, the rise of hardcore pornography, and the introduction of consumer video technology in the 1970s. At a time when the few available publicly images of queer people were at best pitiful and at worst derogatory, inaccurate, and offensive, amateur and home moviemaking allowed queer people to envision and produce positive images of themselves on screen.
Alongside the postwar avant-garde and underground cinemas that frequently mark the beginnings of gay cinematic self-representation, amateur and home moviemakers like Harold T. O’Neal, Cyrus Pinkham, Jerett Robert Austin, and François Reichenbach were producing extraordinary images of themselves and their communities. Through staged “photoplays,” documentary recordings, and outrageous satires, these gay filmmakers articulated alternative visions of queer filmmaking and representation.
Cyrus Pinkham was among the earliest of these gay filmmakers, shooting more than a dozen reels of home movies and a few amateur films in the late 1930s. Primarily recording family events and travels around New York, Maine, and broader New England, he also shot several short films with the assistance of his friends and family. These include Hunting (1937), A Day in a Young Boy’s Life (1937), and Be Beautiful? (1938), which starred his sister as a young maid who dozes off and dreams she is an affluent woman, maintaining her looks, attending to her busy social calendar, going on dates, and eventually becoming pregnant. In the final scene of her dream, she walks onto a snow-covered front yard with her two children and a swaddled baby in her arms—perhaps on their way to school, church, or the store—before one child pushes the other over. She scolds them by exaggeratedly wagging her finger, but rather than behaving, the children start throwing snowballs. Frustrated by the responsibilities of motherhood, the woman tosses her baby into the snow before running back inside. The image fades to black, and the maid wakes from her nightmare and resumes dusting.
Nothing about this six-minute comedic skit is overtly gay. Yet Pinkham’s depiction of the conventions of femininity, bourgeois social and courtship rituals, and the constraints, responsibilities, and labor of the mother within domestic life reveals a poignant critique of the structure of heterosexual society and evince a gay sensibility—an outsider’s perspective—at work in his filmmaking. This sensibility is also at play in the elliptical intercourse scene—reclined on a sofa with her male suitor sitting next to her, the woman exhales cigarette smoke, seemingly says “Oh,” blushes, and turns away from the camera, as a clever intertitle indicates the passage of a year—poking fun at cinematic conventions and modes of propriety.
A very different vision of queer filmmaking is offered by Jerett Robert Austin’s Camille (1953)—written about in greater detail by Carl Luss in this magazine’s May-June 2017 issue—an almost all-male drag satire of the 1936 film of the same title directed by George Cukor, himself a famously gay Hollywood director. Austin shot the film between New York, where he lived and worked as a designer, and Cherry Grove on Fire Island, where he vacationed and filmed frequently. The cast and crew were made up of his friends.
Austin’s fifty-minute color version of Camille largely follows the plot of the Cukor original, itself based on Alexandre Dumas fils’ 1848 novel La Dame aux Camélias. In 1847 Paris, the titular courtesan mistakes an average society man at the opera for a rich baron, and their chance encounter sets both their hearts aflame. Although she initially pursues the baron for his money, our tubercular heroine eventually lets the man she loves take her to the countryside to convalesce, but his mother intervenes and pleads with her to leave him so as not to soil his reputation. Camille agrees and returns to the baron to spare her love a life of ill repute, but she is miserable. When he finally learns of his mother’s plot, the man rushes to Camille’s side, but it’s too late; she is already on her deathbed.
Austin’s film is remarkable not only for the fact that it was made at a time when cross-dressing was illegal in most jurisdictions, but also because its production values are quite impressive, featuring elaborate costumes and props and making clever use of its multiple locations—something the film is humorously self-reflexive about, as when the same staircase is staged with different décor to represent five different floors, and a handmade paper sign on the wall changes from “1-er” to “2-me” to indicate Prudence Duvernoy’s long journey upstairs.
With its Franglais intertitles (“Was this woman a fille de joie or merely a femme du monde?”) and histrionic drag performers, whose exaggerated gestures and silent-cinema acting poke fun at Hollywood’s melodramatic conventions, Austin’s film is an outrageously campy comedy. It thus can be seen as part of a lineage of satirical drag filmmaking that later includes the Gay Girls Riding Club and its early 1960s parodies, like What Really Happened to Baby Jane (1963), as well as Milton Miron’s early 1970s satire of Tricia Nixon’s White House wedding, Tricia’s Wedding (1971), starring The Cockettes. As such, and predating the New York underground by a decade, Austin’s film forces us to reconsider the conventional historiography of queer cinema.
Not far from Cherry Grove, composer-turned-art-dealer-turned-filmmaker François Reichenbach realized a different kind of amateur fiction film in New York City, Yonkers, and New Jersey in the early 1950s. Reichenbach was part of the social circle of gay author Glenway Wescott, his partner, curator Monroe Wheeler, and their close friend and past lover, photographer George Platt Lynes. As such, he was only a few degrees removed from Austin, who was a friend of Wescott’s chum, artist Carl Malouf. Malouf and his partner Jay assisted on the first day of the Camille shoot but were barred from further involvement with the production after Jay got drunk and “did various things.” Whether Reichenbach and Austin crossed paths is anyone’s guess, but as they were both part of the same gay New York arts world, it’s not unlikely.
Reichenbach’s 22-minute black-and-white film Last Spring (1954) stars real-life couple John Connolly—Wescott’s younger ex-lover—and Richard “Dick” Kushner. The lovers live an idyllic rural life on a farm— Wescott’s New Jersey property—until Kushner’s character leaves for New York, the gay metropolis, and both men must confront their anxieties about modern gay urban pleasures. The film is unusual for its unambiguous depiction of male same-sex intimacy, for its technical sophistication, and for its avant-garde ambitions, featuring several extended, anxiety-induced dream sequences as Connolly tries to catch up to, reunite with, and save Kushner from the perils of urban temptation, while Kushner goads him to follow. The film also offers a particularly homophile vision of filmmaking, with its tender portrayal of gay love and its nuanced representation of queer desire.
Throughout the early 1950s, Reichenbach also shot home movies documenting his encounters with beautiful men in picturesque settings across France, Italy, and the U.S. Evocatively titled Nus masculins (“Male Nudes”) by the Cinémathèque française, the surviving reel of vibrant Kodachrome film features several portraits of young men posing for the camera, some clothed and some nude, some alone and some in pairs. Whether sitting on the rocks of Capri, standing among the statues at the Stadio dei Marmi, walking on the streets of Paris, or cruising on a spring day in Central Park, Reichenbach’s images are exhilarating, haunting records of same-sex tenderness and friendship at a time when visible affection toward another man would have been regarded with great suspicion.
Harold T. O’Neal’s home movie collection undoubtedly represents the largest output by a single filmmaker, but the GLBT Historical Society has preserved several other collections of home movies, including eight reels of film in the Empress Reba Collection documenting 1960s drag performances, holiday parties, and a picnic at a secluded pool featuring more than a hundred men, tight speedos and briefs galore. The Lesbian Home Movie Project has also preserved more than a dozen collections of home movies shot by women like Ruth Storm, Margaret Whalen, and Loraine Sumner, documenting family events, weddings, holiday parties, vacations, gay pride parades, sports games, concerts, performances, and much more. In all these instances, the activity of filmmaking was not only a means of creative expression or historical documentation; it also served as a means of bringing people together in their own collective self-fashioning.
While it’s amazing how many of these films have survived, many more have been lost, or have yet to be recovered, or are currently at risk of disappearing. But it’s not too late to save them. Stu Maddux makes this case forcefully in his 2015 documentary Reel in the Closet, which features home movie footage from more than a dozen archives across the country, documenting dinner and pool parties, nightclub performances, drag shows, protests and parades, family visits and vacations, and holiday celebrations—proving that queer people led rich, happy, and fulfilling lives even if they often had to do so in secret. Maddux’ interviewees testify to these films’ unique historical value and chronicle the many challenges to preserving these kinds of materials, including neglect, physical decay, lack of resources, the difficulty of identifying anonymous film materials once they end up on eBay or at estate sales and flea markets, and the discomfort of relatives who would rather discard and destroy their family members’ films than let it be known that they were queer.
Geoff Story encountered many of these challenges as he developed his own documentary about a gay home movie he purchased at an estate sale thirty years ago. The 22-minute reel, shot at a private pool outside St. Louis around 1945, features some fifty men enjoying each other’s company in the summer sun and provides a rare glimpse of gay life in the Midwest. Story has spent the past eight years trying to identify the men in the film, or other queer elders who can speak about their experiences as gay men in the Midwest at mid-century. While he has been able to identify the filmmakers—Sam Micotto, a dog groomer, and Buddy Walton, a hairdresser—and some relatives have been willing to speak about their family members on camera, many others have turned down his requests because they don’t want to out their relatives. Story’s efforts to tell their story persist, and when completed the documentary will help preserve and shed light on an important chapter of queer life in America.
More queer home movies and amateur films undoubtedly remain to be recovered and brought to light. Only last year, Jean Béranger’s Lafcadio, a fifteen-minute French gay avant-garde film from 1948, was rediscovered in the archives of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. We can all help preserve these films by advocating for their importance, by ensuring that friends and elders in the community develop plans to donate their materials to an archive, and, perhaps most importantly, by safeguarding our own moving images. We all need to be stewards of our shared legacy.
Hugo Ljungbäck is a doctoral candidate in cinema and media studies at the University of Chicago.
