Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives
Encyclopedia
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 Theater in San Francisco, and was released in 1978.
The interviews from the film were transcribed into a book
of the same title, which was published in October 1978.
men and lesbians. The interviewees range in age from 18 to 77, in location from San Francisco to New Mexico to Boston, in type from bee-hived housewife to student to conservative businessman to sultry drag queen, and in race from Caucasian to Hispanic, African-American, and Asian. Writer Elsa Gidlow
, professor Sally Gearhart
, inventor John Burnside
, civil rights leader Harry Hay
, and avant-garde filmmaker
Nathaniel Dorsky
are among the interviewees.
The interviewees describe their experiences of coming out; falling in and out of love; and struggling against prejudice, stereotypes, and discriminatory laws. The participants deliver their testimony with intelligence, grace, honesty, and conviction, creating an engaging and moving oral history.
came up with the idea for the film. According to Adair:
The directors of the film, collectively known as the Mariposa Film Group, were Peter Adair
, Nancy Adair, Andrew Brown
, Rob Epstein
, Lucy Massie Phenix, and Veronica Selver. An initial investment of $30,000 was raised from people who believed in the idea and wanted to see the film made, and assistants were hired and production began. The original number of interviewees was only eight people, but when the trial film was screened to test audiences, the response and interest generated indicated that a much larger and more diverse cross-section of interviewees was desirable. Several more years were then involved in filming the rest of the interviews, and intercutting them with each other to create the final product.
declared in The Advocate
, a national gay magazine.
When audiences saw the film, thousands wrote to the Mariposa Film Group’s post office box number listed in the end credits to express how much the film meant to them — and many of them related how viewing the film saved their lives. "People who were alone and hopeless in Idaho, Utah and Kansas for the first time saw realistic
and positive images of gay people on screen," said production assistant Janet Cole.
In the New York Times, David Dunlop wrote in 1996: "Understated though it was, Word Is Out had a remarkable impact, coming at a time when images of homosexuals as everyday people, as opposed to psychopaths or eccentrics, were rare."
Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives was one of the very first gay-focused nonfiction books sympathetic to gays published in the U.S. The book reached many people who were unable to view the film, and remained a popular gay nonfiction text for many years, helping many gays and lesbians realize that they were not alone.
The book also helped members of the heterosexual community to relate to the normalcy of homosexual lives, and to also understand gay persons' struggles, pain, marginalization, ostracism, professional concerns, and frustrating need for secrecy when in a climate of homophobia
and illegality
.
and the UCLA Film and Television Archive
, premiered on 26 June 2008 at the Frameline Film Festival at the Castro Theater in San Francisco.
The DVD
edition of the documentary was released in June 2010 by Milestone Films
. The filmmakers, known collectively as the Mariposa Film Group, released the commemorative DVD featuring the restored and remastered digital print of the original film. In addition, the DVD includes as special features exclusive updates on the cast and the filmmakers and an homage to Peter Adair
, originator and producer of Word Is Out, who died of AIDS
in 1996.
1977 in film
The year 1977 in film involved some significant events.-Events:*In the Academy Awards, Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway and Beatrice Straight win Best Actor and Actress and Supporting Actress awards for Network....
documentary film
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
featuring interviews with 26 gay
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...
men and women. It was directed by six people collectively known as the Mariposa Film Group. Peter Adair
Peter Adair
Peter Adair was a filmmaker and artist, best known for his pioneering documentary, Word Is Out.-Career:Adair entered the film industry in the 1960s and first gained critical attention with his 1967 documentary Holy Ghost People, a film record of a Pentecostal snake handler worship service in the...
conceived and produced the film, and was one of the directors. The film premiered in November 1977 at the Castro Theater in San Francisco, and was released in 1978.
The interviews from the film were transcribed into a book
Book
A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page...
of the same title, which was published in October 1978.
Film description
Word Is Out intercuts interviews with 26 very diverse people, who speak about their experiences as gayHomosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...
men and lesbians. The interviewees range in age from 18 to 77, in location from San Francisco to New Mexico to Boston, in type from bee-hived housewife to student to conservative businessman to sultry drag queen, and in race from Caucasian to Hispanic, African-American, and Asian. Writer Elsa Gidlow
Elsa Gidlow
Elsa Gidlow was a poet, who in 1923 published the first volume of openly lesbian love poetry in the United States: On A Grey Thread. She promoted alternative spiritualities including Buddhism and Goddess Worship. In the 1940s she founded a rural retreat center, The Druid Heights Artists Retreat,...
, professor Sally Gearhart
Sally Miller Gearhart
Sally Miller Gearhart is an American teacher, feminist, science fiction writer, and political activist. In 1973 she became the first open lesbian to obtain a tenure-track faculty position when she was hired by San Francisco State University, where she helped establish one of the first women and...
, inventor John Burnside
John Burnside (inventor)
John Lyon Burnside III was the inventor of the teleidoscope, the darkfield kaleidoscope and the Symmetricon, and, because he rediscovered the math behind kaleidoscope optics, for decades, every maker of optically correct kaleidoscopes sold in the US paid him royalties...
, civil rights leader Harry Hay
Harry Hay
Henry "Harry" Hay, Jr. was a labor advocate, teacher and early leader in the American LGBT rights movement. He is known for his roles in helping to found several gay organizations, including the Mattachine Society, the first sustained gay rights group in the United States.Hay was exposed early in...
, and avant-garde filmmaker
Nathaniel Dorsky
Nathaniel Dorsky
Nathaniel Dorsky is an experimental filmmaker and film editor who has been making films since 1964. He intends that his 16mm silent films "create a state of prayer" not by treating Buddhism as a subject but by expressing "the view that comes from Buddhism".Dorsky was born in New York City,...
are among the interviewees.
The interviewees describe their experiences of coming out; falling in and out of love; and struggling against prejudice, stereotypes, and discriminatory laws. The participants deliver their testimony with intelligence, grace, honesty, and conviction, creating an engaging and moving oral history.
Production
Word Is Out took five years, over 200 interviews, and six co-directors to make. Documentary filmmaker Peter AdairPeter Adair
Peter Adair was a filmmaker and artist, best known for his pioneering documentary, Word Is Out.-Career:Adair entered the film industry in the 1960s and first gained critical attention with his 1967 documentary Holy Ghost People, a film record of a Pentecostal snake handler worship service in the...
came up with the idea for the film. According to Adair:
In the 1970s when the modern gay movement was just beginning, our biggest problem was invisibility. Who homosexuals were was largely determined by straight people. It was bad enough that the public image of gay men and lesbians was defined largely by stereotypes — after all, I want other people to have an accurate picture of who I am. But these stereotypes created by outsiders largely defined our perceptions of who we thought we were. What a state of affairs. One's reference for "What was Gay?" was a few nasty images, and, if
your were lucky, your immediate circle of queer friends.
Word Is Out, finished in 1977, was on its surface a very simple idea answering the simple
question, "Who Are We?" For the film, I, and the five other principle people I worked with spent
a year doing research interviews on videotape of 250 lesbians and gay men all across the
country. In the end, [26] were chosen to tell their stories in the film.
The directors of the film, collectively known as the Mariposa Film Group, were Peter Adair
Peter Adair
Peter Adair was a filmmaker and artist, best known for his pioneering documentary, Word Is Out.-Career:Adair entered the film industry in the 1960s and first gained critical attention with his 1967 documentary Holy Ghost People, a film record of a Pentecostal snake handler worship service in the...
, Nancy Adair, Andrew Brown
Andrew Brown
Andrew Aaron Brown is a professional baseball relief pitcher who is currently a free agent. He has played parts of three seasons in Major League Baseball for the Cleveland Indians and Oakland Athletics....
, Rob Epstein
Rob Epstein
Rob Epstein, also credited as Robert P. Epstein, is a director, producer, writer and editor. Epstein has won two Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature for the films The Times of Harvey Milk and Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt....
, Lucy Massie Phenix, and Veronica Selver. An initial investment of $30,000 was raised from people who believed in the idea and wanted to see the film made, and assistants were hired and production began. The original number of interviewees was only eight people, but when the trial film was screened to test audiences, the response and interest generated indicated that a much larger and more diverse cross-section of interviewees was desirable. Several more years were then involved in filming the rest of the interviews, and intercutting them with each other to create the final product.
Impact
In 1978, Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives startled audiences across the country when it appeared in movie theaters and on television. It was the first feature-length documentary about lesbian and gay identity made by gay filmmakers, and had a large and pioneering impact when it was released. The film became an icon of the emerging gay rights movement of the 1970s. "The silence of gay people on the screen has been broken," Vito RussoVito Russo
Vito Russo was an American LGBT activist, film historian and author who is best remembered as the author of the book The Celluloid Closet ....
declared in The Advocate
The Advocate
The Advocate is an American LGBT-interest magazine, printed monthly and available by subscription. The Advocate brand also includes a web site. Both magazine and web site have an editorial focus on news, politics, opinion, and arts and entertainment of interest to LGBT people...
, a national gay magazine.
When audiences saw the film, thousands wrote to the Mariposa Film Group’s post office box number listed in the end credits to express how much the film meant to them — and many of them related how viewing the film saved their lives. "People who were alone and hopeless in Idaho, Utah and Kansas for the first time saw realistic
and positive images of gay people on screen," said production assistant Janet Cole.
In the New York Times, David Dunlop wrote in 1996: "Understated though it was, Word Is Out had a remarkable impact, coming at a time when images of homosexuals as everyday people, as opposed to psychopaths or eccentrics, were rare."
Book
In 1978, a book containing transcripts of the interviews was published, under the same title. The book also details how the film and book were created by the successful collective.Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives was one of the very first gay-focused nonfiction books sympathetic to gays published in the U.S. The book reached many people who were unable to view the film, and remained a popular gay nonfiction text for many years, helping many gays and lesbians realize that they were not alone.
The book also helped members of the heterosexual community to relate to the normalcy of homosexual lives, and to also understand gay persons' struggles, pain, marginalization, ostracism, professional concerns, and frustrating need for secrecy when in a climate of homophobia
Homophobia
Homophobia is a term used to refer to a range of negative attitudes and feelings towards lesbian, gay and in some cases bisexual, transgender people and behavior, although these are usually covered under other terms such as biphobia and transphobia. Definitions refer to irrational fear, with the...
and illegality
Sodomy laws in the United States
Sodomy laws in the United States, which outlawed a variety of sexual acts, were historically universal. While they often targeted sexual acts between persons of the same sex, many statutes employed definitions broad enough to outlaw certain sexual acts between persons of different sexes as well,...
.
Restoration of the film and DVD release
For the 30th anniversary, a restored 133-minute version of the film, which was produced by OutfestOutfest
Outfest is an LGBT-oriented film showcase and festival in Los Angeles, California. Founded in 1982 as the "Gay and Lesbian Media Festival and Conference", the name was changed to Outfest in 1994.-Programs:...
and the UCLA Film and Television Archive
UCLA Film and Television Archive
The UCLA Film and Television Archive is an internationally renowned visual arts organization focused on the preservation, study, and appreciation of film and television, based at the University of California, Los Angeles. It holds more than 220,000 film and television titles and 27 million feet of...
, premiered on 26 June 2008 at the Frameline Film Festival at the Castro Theater in San Francisco.
The DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
edition of the documentary was released in June 2010 by Milestone Films
Milestone Films
Milestone Films is an independent company, founded in 1990 in the United States by Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, dedicated to researching and distributing quality cinematographic material from around the world, including silent movies, films of the postwar foreign film renaissance, to contemporary...
. The filmmakers, known collectively as the Mariposa Film Group, released the commemorative DVD featuring the restored and remastered digital print of the original film. In addition, the DVD includes as special features exclusive updates on the cast and the filmmakers and an homage to Peter Adair
Peter Adair
Peter Adair was a filmmaker and artist, best known for his pioneering documentary, Word Is Out.-Career:Adair entered the film industry in the 1960s and first gained critical attention with his 1967 documentary Holy Ghost People, a film record of a Pentecostal snake handler worship service in the...
, originator and producer of Word Is Out, who died of AIDS
AIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
in 1996.
See also
- List of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender-related films
- List of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender-related films by year
External links
- Word Is Out – informational PDF