Coming soon to LGBTS-187: QUEENS AT HEART and Mark Quigley

This Thursday, Mark Quigley, Manager of The UCLA Film & Television Archive's Research and Study Center, will be coming to class to speak with us about the many LGBT media-related resources available to scholars at UCLA.

In particular, he'll talk about the archive's enormous Outfest Collection, which includes every film that Outfest (L.A.'s long-running LGBTQ film festival) has shown, among other materials. He'll also be showing QUEENS AT HEART, an extremely rare short documentary about drag culture in New York from 1965 (it will serve as an interesting representation of the period in which Vito moved to New York, and is also a useful precursor to Cruising and Paris is Burning, which both deal with LGBTQ subcultures in New York). It was recently restored by The UCLA Film & Television Archive's Outfest Legacy Project, a fantastic project dedicated to preserving LGBTQ films.

Mark sent over this poster of SHE MAN, which played on a double bill with QUEENS OF HEART. Unfortunately, we don't have SHE MAN in the archive. But if you want it, believe it or not, you can buy it here.


Trailer for QUEENS AT HEART

"A Position of Faith" (1972)

Vito Russo saw this documentary, A Position of Faith (1972), and fell in love with its star: the first openly gay person in history to be ordained to the Christian ministry. He added clips from the film to his Celluloid Closet lecture, and the two became lovers for a time.

"A Position of Faith," Part I
"A Position of Faith," Part II

Rhoda dates Phyllis' gay brother on THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW

Vito interviewed Valerie Harper for The Advocate partly because he was so delighted with her performance in this episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, "My Brother's Keeper." Michael Schiavi writes that "This was exactly the kind of nonchalant visibility he was fighting to obtain for gays and lesbians." (P. 147)

To see "the longest laugh in the history of The Mary Tyler Moore Show," fast forward to Part II, 9:30 (the whole episode is classic!)

The Mary Tyler Moore Show: "My Brother's Keeper," Part I
The Mary Tyler Moore Show: "My Brother's Keeper," Part II
The Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song

Performances by some of Vito's favorite New York cabaret singers of the early 1970s (click on the pics):

Laura Kenyon

Alaina Reed
Baby Jane Dexter

Here is a link to a pretty comprehensive list of films that appeared in The Celluloid Closet, along with links to their pages on IMDB (in case you forgot to write any down...)

Films that appear in The Celluloid Closet

Trailers for films that Vito showed as part of his early lecture series:

Vito screened clips of these films in his early "Celluloid Closet" presentation to illustrate "The Gay Guilt Syndrome" and "Blackmail" subtopics of his lecture (Michael Schiavi, Celluloid Activist, p. 134). Click on the posters below to watch the trailers:


Vito tried to "offer some hope at the close of his presentation" with "Breakthrough" clips of these films:

"The Homosexuals": A CBS documentary from 1967

Vito Russo discussed this documentary, which originally appeared on CBS in 1967, in his first "Celluloid Closet" lectures:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFSCPTZLxGs



Summary taken from YouTube user TheLoverofMovies:
"The Homosexuals" is a 1967 episode of the documentary television series CBS Reports. The hour-long broadcast featured a discussion of a number of topics related to homosexuality and homosexuals. Mike Wallace anchored the episode, which aired on March 7, 1967. Although this was the first network documentary dealing with the topic of homosexuality, it was not the first televised in the United States. That was The Rejected, produced and aired in 1961 on KQED, a public television station out of San Francisco.[1]

Three years in the making, "The Homosexuals" went through two producers and multiple revisions. The episode included interviews with several gay men, psychiatrists, legal experts and cultural critics, interspersed with footage of a gay bar and a police sex sting. "The Homosexuals" garnered mixed critical response. The network received praise from some quarters and criticism from others for even airing the program.

Read about it here: http://www.filmthreat.com/features/1122/