Doc Corner is celebrating Pride Month with a focus on documentaries that tackle LGBTIQ themes. This week we are looking at a classic that has been recently restored by the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project.
By Glenn Dunks
Pre-AIDS accounts of queer life and pride that aren’t about the Stonewall riots are rare. Understandably, the violent anti-police uprising of 1969 by (primarily, at least at first) drag queens, lesbians and transgender individuals was the most significant moment in the public’s understanding of LGBTIQ people until the epidemic (gosh, a lot of these things sound familiar, don't they?). But while there is a lot to be found about the queer experience through films that interrogate both Stonewall and AIDS, just as vital to the fabric are films like Gay USA from 1977.
Directed by Arthur J. Bressan, Jr., this compendium of gay pride wraps itself in a rainbow flag of its own making and sets out to celebrate the experience of nation-wide parades and marches that for many were once an unimaginable dream.
Bressan, who died of AIDS in 1987 after his glorious fictional feature Buddies, assembled camera crews across the country to capture the (pun intended) gaiety of pride when the future looked hopeful.
Predominantly set in San Francisco, but with detours to New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Diego, Gay USA is a rather structureless film as Bressan, also working as editor, cuts and glides between the celebrations with ease. With cameras focused on the parades themselves as well as road-side interviews with participants of all sexual persuasions, this thoroughly unheralded documentary classic is a movie full of hugs, kisses, caresses and gyrations in the crowd. But it also opens up offers genuine moments of introspection to the very concept of pride and sexuality. It is a film where interview subjects occasionally ask harder questions than the one with the microphone. Where everyone has a coming out story that sings as universally familiar and uniquely individual. Where older homosexual men and women speak with heart-breaking surprise at even getting the chance to see a day like this after years of societal domestic duty and hard-fought queer independence.
Perhaps tellingly, and in spite of his film’s own name, Bressan features within early within his film a wonderfully modern nod to what we may now describe as the fluid nature of sexuality. Throughout the film, in fact, the question is asked, “Are you gay?” to a resounding mix of answers. From plain and simple yes or no, to “none of your business”, “I could be but I don’t have any experience” and, most amusingly, “Sure…?” It’s part of what helps make Gay USA feel radically contemporary, something that is only enhanced by the knowledge of everything that came after for LGBTIQ people and the America more broadly.
If he perhaps relies too much on white cisgender subjects, the appearance of black, brown and Asian individuals, drag queens and femme gay men later in the picture reads as something of an accidental acknowledgement to the ways LGBTIQ spaces would eventually open up (albeit obviously not anywhere near enough) for those without the benefit of being a white and perceptibly ‘masculine’ man. Allowing black poet Pat Parker to recite “For the Straight Folks Who Don’t Mind Gays But Wish They Weren’t So Blatant” right there on the street is smart, a choice that grows more rewarding as the years progress and the erasing of queer identifying women of colour from the narrative becomes more obvious and infuriating.
The film is a brisk 70 minutes and covers a lot of ground. Bressan is clearly keen to not linger on the ugliness, although as his cameras and microphones highlight antagonistic words and voices amid the crowds, it’s impossible to truly escape. Just as in life, I suppose. We can curate our lives around people who love us, but the others will always peek through. Like another queer-themed doc from 1977, Word is Out, Gay USA unfolds to modern eyes as a time capsule when it seemed like the worst was behind the gay people. It has been beautifully restored and is a must see for those who want to live Pride vicariously through cinema this month.
Release: Can be rented or purchased on Vimeo.