GAY
FILM REVIEWS BY MICHAEL D. KLEMM
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GAY
FILM REVIEWS BY MICHAEL D. KLEMM
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Word
Is Out Millarium
Zero / Milestone, A
film by the Mariposa Film Group: Starring Unrated, 132 minutes |
The
Way We Were
Documentaries about the gay experience are fairly common today but this was not the case in 1977 when Word Is Out: Stories Of Some Our Lives premiered at the Castro Street Theater in San Francisco. Word Is Out was the first positive American documentary ever made about homosexuality, and it was also the first to be produced and directed entirely by gay filmmakers. In honor of its 30th anniversary, the film has been restored and now it has been released as a special edition DVD. |
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Given
the time, the film's participants are to be commended for both their candor
and their courage. The gay civil rights movement was still in its infancy
and their voices were ones that desperately needed hearing. The era's
mass media wasn't exactly charitable towards gay people. Vito Russo wrote
in The Celluloid Closet that we were "starving" for positive images
and visibility on the screen, and Word Is
Out was more than just a tentative step in that direction.
It was a giant leap. |
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Old photos are sometimes cut in, there are a few musical segments and the film ends with footage from a San Francisco pride parade, but most of its running length consists entirely of the interviews themselves. The settings are as varied as the people - a dance studio, a cabin, an idyllic park. A businessman named Mark Pinney wears a suit, sits behind a desk in his office and looks very conservative while Betty Powell, the black lesbian, displays a "Black Power" fist inside the feminine circle/cross symbol on her window. Another woman is seen taking down a tree with a chainsaw. |
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It goes without saying that audiences of the day must have been pleased to see themselves in at least one of the people interviewed on screen. If I had been out back in 1977, and had seen the film then, I would have identified with the student who didn't want to be called a sissy "because sissy meant girl and [he] wasn't a girl." (True confessions time: throughout high school I had to put up with being called "Klemm the fem" and was so far in the closet as a result that I didn't even figure out that I was gay until I went to college.) |
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The filmmakers want to hear your stories. To contribute, log on to Wordisoutmovie.com.
See
also these documentaries: |
Word
Is Out
is an impressive historical document from the Mariposa Film Group, led
by director Peter Adair. This was a true film collective; Adair shared
the directing, interviewing, filming and editing duties with his sister
Nancy Adair, Andrew Brown, Lucy Massie Phenix, Veronica Selver and 
As
one of the film's subjects points out: "To the doctor, you were sick;
to the lawyer, you were criminal; and to the minister you were wicked."
All of this would have sounded depressingly familiar and hearing these
tales must have been cathartic to the film's first audiences. The 26 participants
share many similar stories. A surprising number came from small towns.
Many were once married because they bought into societal demands, did
what they were expected to do, and then wondered what it was that was
missing in their lives. Some led difficult lives but, for the most part,
Word Is Out dispelled the
lie that all homosexuals were unhappy, maladjusted people who lived in
the shadows. 
Although
one of the women expresses concern because she is the only black
lesbian in the movie, the film is noteworthy for its inclusiveness. Films
of this nature often tended to be rather white - usually white and male.
Here, the male to female ratio is pretty much split down the middle, with
a very androgynous teen thrown in for good measure. At least one of the
women is Hispanic, two of the men are black, and one is even Asian. (In
the more recent documentary, 
Many
of the participants came of age during very oppressive times; namely the
1940s and 50s. A man named Rick Stokes relates a number of horror stories.
Though he was married, he also enjoyed a sexual relationship with his
boyhood friend. When this was discovered, Stokes' father-in-law had him
committed to a mental hospital where his doctor told him that they could
castrate him but they'll try some treatments first. He speaks of
having repeated shock treatments. A woman, identified only as Whitey,
talks about "escaping" to Greenwich Village from the small town where
she lived. She was only a teenager; her father found her and put her in
a state hospital for the insane where the threat of shock treatments was
used to keep her in line. She also mentions a psychiatrist who prescribed
a diet of green salads in order to make her straight. 
For
Pat Bond, "the thing to do was escape into the Women's Army Corps and
go to Paris where Gertrude Stein had been." She talks of the Army recruiter
looking like "all my old gym teachers in drag" and how all the women who
were enlisting wore argyle socks and pin-striped suits and had their hair
cut like men. She describes the pressure to look butch in the Army and
comically demonstrates walking like John Wayne. But then she talks of
crackdowns, and 500 women in Tokyo being sent home on dishonorable discharges.
She is happy that times have gotten a bit more liberal but, having
lived through McCarthyism and the Army inquisitions, it scares her that
the brave people who are coming out now might be on some list in another
ten years if things get bad again. Things did get worse again
of course; but one thing that she couldn't possibly foresee was the coming
of the AIDS pandemic. 
The
film is never boring and the talking heads are refreshingly honest. They
bare their souls, often holding nothing back. Some of this is painful.
One man weeps, overcome with emotion, as he recounts police harassment
and "nelly queen" drag solidarity in a 1950s gay bar. Two women from broken
marriages became a couple when they babysat each other's kids. Their unique,
and nourishing, family was ripped apart when one of the ex-husbands sued
for custody and the mothers had no legal recourse. Much of Word
Is Out is also funny and many of these witnesses to history
have terrific senses of humor - some of it undoubtedly the result of years
of having to thicken their skins. Dennis Chiu, whose many randy comments
add considerable mirth, talks about insults to his Chinese heritage while
growing up and how it helped him to deal with later being called a fag.
The
emphasis seems to be more on personal stories rather than activism. Harry
Hay is interviewed but his role in the founding of both the Mattachine
Society and the Radical Fearies, oddly, never comes up. Rick Stokes is
seen, near the conclusion, campaigning for office but the film doesn't
mention his political connections with 
Word
Is Out is not a dry time capsule; it is a vital
and entertaining document that hasn't lost its edge, even after more than
three decades. Because the movie was made before AIDS, some might dismiss
it as being dated but this is hardly the case at all. The issues addressed
by the principals still haunt us today and many gay people still endure
a torturous coming out process. Homosexuality might not be reason enough
to be institutionalized anymore but teens are often sent to Ex-Gay camps
to be deprogrammed, gay parents still lose custody of their children,
and gays are still being drummed out of the military.
Word
Is Out
is also, quite frankly, a superbly structured documentary that set a high
bar for all the films that would someday follow in its fabulous footsteps.
Its restoration by the 
This
is not to say that none of the participants questioned their motives.
The lines of reality and cinema blur during one of Word
Is Out's most interesting moments when Elsa Gidlow, the
film's oldest subject, asserts her identity and confronts the filmmakers'
methods. "You want to fit me into a structure which you have," she says.
"Just as if I'm writing a novel, or you're writing a novel. We use our
characters that way. We want to fit them into this work of art; you have
a structure and you want to fit your characters into it. But this
[she points to herself] happens to be a character that doesn't want to
be pushed around or put into a context where she doesn't feel it's true
to her." (Perhaps she had seen the notorious 1967 CBS television documentary,
The Homosexuals, and was aware of how several of the interviews
had been re-edited in such a way that distorted the original meaning.)
In
1967, Peter Adair made an acclaimed documentary entitled Holy Ghost
People about a Pentecostal service, complete with snake handling,
in the Appalachians. He worked on Word Is
Out from 1975-1977. In 1984, Adair was a consultant and
cameraman on his former Mariposa cohort