Dorothy Louise Taliaferro "Del" Martin and Phyllis Ann Lyon were an American lesbian couple based in San Francisco who were known as feminist and gay-rights activists.
The Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses is an international association of LGBT choruses founded in 1982. In its inaugural performance 14 choruses performed together in September 1982 in San Francisco as part of the first Gay Games. It aims to foster artistic and organizational development within its member choruses. The association includes almost 10,000 vocalists in over 100 associated choruses singing as male, female and mixed ensembles in a wide variety of styles. GALA Choruses produces a large festival every four years, in addition to a number of smaller annual workshops and conferences.
Jenni Olson is a writer, archivist, historian, consultant, and non-fiction filmmaker based in Berkeley, California. She co-founded the pioneering LGBT website PlanetOut.com. Her two feature-length essay films — The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) — premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Her work as an experimental filmmaker and her expansive personal collection of LGBTQ film prints and memorabilia were acquired in April 2020 by the Harvard Film Archive, and her reflection on the last 30 years of LGBT film history was published as a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema from Oxford University Press in 2021. In 2020, she was named to the Out Magazine Out 100 list. In 2021, she was recognized with the prestigious Special TEDDY Award at the Berlin Film Festival. She also campaigned to have a barrier erected on the Golden Gate Bridge to prevent suicides.
Yours Emotionally is a United Kingdom-Indian co-produced film written by Niranjan Kamatkar & Sridhar Rangayan and produced by arts charity Wise Thoughts (UK) & Solaris Pictures and directed by Rangayan. It stars Premjit, Pratik Gandhi, Jack Lamport, Ikhlaq Khan, and Ajai Rohilla. The film was selected for participation in LGBT film festivals in San Francisco, New York (NewFest), and others.
The Frameline Film Festival began as a storefront event in 1976. The first film festival, named the Gay Film Festival of Super-8 Films, was held in 1977. The festival is organized by Frameline, a nonprofit media arts organization whose mission statement is "to change the world through the power of queer cinema". It is the oldest LGBTQ+ film festival in the world.
Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives is a 1977 documentary film featuring interviews with 26 gay men and women. It was directed by six people collectively known as the Mariposa Film Group. Peter Adair conceived and produced the film, and was one of the directors. The film premiered in November 1977 at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco and went into limited national release in 1978. It also aired on many PBS stations in 1978.
Catherine Crouch is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, and actor. She has been active in independent film-making for over two decades. Most of her work explores gender, race, and class in lesbian and queer lives. She is known for Stranger Inside (2001), Stray Dogs (2002), and The Gendercator (2007).
Teodoro Maniaci is an American cinematographer and documentary director. He is best known for the directing One Nation Under God, a documentary on the ex-gay movement.
Arthur J. Bressan Jr. was an American director, writer, producer, documentarian and gay pornographer, best known for pioneering independent queer cinema in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. He wrote and directed the 1985 feature film Buddies, which was the first American film to grapple with the subject of the AIDS pandemic. Other directorial endeavors include the largely influential 1977 documentary Gay USA, and the 1983 feature film Abuse. He died on July 29, 1987, at the age of 44 due to an AIDS-related illness.
Fruit Fly is a 2009 musical film with gay and Asian-American themes, directed by H.P. Mendoza, who wrote the screenplay for Colma The Musical (2007). The film, made entirely in San Francisco, premiered on March 15, 2009 at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. It had a limited one-week run in New York on September 24, 2010.
Marc Huestis is an American filmmaker, camp impresario and social activist. He is best known for his motion picture Sex Is... and his in-person tributes/benefit events feting celebrities from Hollywood's Golden Age and cult personas at San Francisco's Castro Theatre.
Christopher Hines is an American documentary film director and a journalist
The Adonis Factor is a 2010 documentary film produced and directed by American director Christopher Hines through his own production company Rogue Culture Inc. Filmed at various locations, it was shown at a number of gay and documentary festivals. The television premiere was April 2, 2011 on the gay channel Logo.
Gender roles in non-heterosexual communities are a topic of much debate; some people believe traditional, heterosexual gender roles are often erroneously enforced on non-heterosexual relationships by means of heteronormative culture and attitudes towards these non-conformative relationships.
Khush is a 1991 British short film directed by Pratibha Parmar. It portrays lesbians and gay men from India and other parts of Asia, discussing their coming out and their acceptance and embracing of their sexuality. Khush also discusses homosexuality in the Indian diaspora.
Maud's was a lesbian bar at 937 Cole Street in San Francisco's Cole Valley neighborhood which opened in 1966 and closed in 1989. At the time of its closing, which was captured in the film, Last Call at Maud's, it was claimed to be the oldest lesbian bar in the United States. Its history, documented in the film and other media, spanned almost a quarter-century of LGBTQ events.
Butch Mystique is a 2003 documentary directed by Debra A. Wilson. The documentary explores the lives of a group of African American butch identified lesbians within the Oakland/San Francisco Bay area.
Johnny Symons is a documentary filmmaker focusing on LGBT cultural and political issues. He is a professor in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University, where he runs the documentary program and is the director and co-founder of the Queer Cinema Project. He received his BA from Brown University and his MA in documentary production from Stanford University. He has served as a Fellow in the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program.
Purple Skies is a 2014 movie directed by Sridhar Rangayan and produced by Public Service Broadcasting Trust and Solaris Pictures. It documents the opinions of lesbians, bisexuals and trans men in India. It was broadcast on Doordarshan in 2015.
It's Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School is a 1996 American documentary film directed by Debra Chasnoff and Helen Cohen. It provides educators with information on how to teach elementary schoolchildren to be tolerant of gay and lesbian people. The film was noted as the "first of its kind" and was generally well received, although there was some backlash from conservatives. It was released in several film festivals, and had screenings in the 2000s.
