(Tell Me Why): The Epistemology of Disco

The video revolution of the 1970s offered unprecedented access to the moving image for artists and performers. This Is Not a Dream explores the legacies of this revolution and its continued impact on contemporary art and performance. Charting a path across four decades of avant-garde experiment and radical escapism, This Is Not a Dream traces the influences of Andy Warhol, John Waters and Jack Smith to the perverted frontiers of YouTube and Chatroulette, taking in subverted talk shows and soap operas, streetwalker fashions and glittery magic penises along the way.

In 1995, Kelli Peterson started a gay and straight club at her Salt Lake City high school. The story of her ensuing battle with school authorities in interspersed with looks back at the diary of Michael Wigglesworth, a 17th-century Puritan cleric, at the 30-year love affair of Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Adams Fields, at Henry Gerber's attempt after World War I to establish a gay-rights organization, at Bayard Rustin's role in the civil rights movement, and at Barbara Gittings' taking on of the American Psychiatric Association's position that homosexuality is illness. One person comments, "To create a place for ourselves in the present, we have to find ourselves in the past."

In the spring of 2004, Massachusetts began the final battle of its journey towards legalizing same-sex marriage. This documentary follows a few local couples & their families through the months leading up to & shortly after that defining occasion in LGBTQ+ history, culminating in their respective weddings. Also includes interviews with active opponents attempting to discourage the movement (& failing, of course). Premiered at the Independent Film Festival of Boston in April 2005, just a month short the decision's one-year anniversary.

On the eve of 1987's Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, surviving families and friends of people who have died of AIDS prepare panels to be added to a large-scale memorial quilt project. Drawing from the sea of names memorialized, director Robert Epstein focuses on the lives of six people. Alongside the intimate profiles offered, through news footage and interviews, Epstein puts the AIDS crisis in the larger context of social and government response to the disease.

The high society court case that scandalised the mores of the day, electrified the nation and changed the course of British history.

Marsha P. Johnson was a drag queen, sex worker, and LGBT activist who fought at Stonewall and knew Andy Warhol. She was a New York fixture who made her motto her middle name: "Pay it no mind". This documentary about her life includes the last interview she gave before the suspicious circumstances of her death in 1992.

The film is a portrayal of Zanele Muholi, a lesbian photographer working in the South African GLBT community. This thin, combative woman is already a world-wide famous artist. She defines herself as a "visual activist" in order to highlight her commitment to politics, to communicating ideas and to art. Her work includes: provocative nudes (like a female Mapplethorpe); young Zulu couples, dressed in traditional costumes, embracing each other; a homeless socially excluded lesbian couple; a dignified portrait of Victor Mukasa, the gay human rights leader from Uganda; wonderful shots of Zanele with her white partner. Beautiful and poetic pictures which are "militant" in nature since they condemn homophobia, poverty, and the public and private conflicts of a country divided between tradition and modernity.

United in Anger: A History of ACT UP is an inspiring documentary about the birth and life of the AIDS activist movement from the perspective of the people in the trenches fighting the epidemic. Utilizing oral histories of members of ACT UP, as well as rare archival footage, the film depicts the efforts of ACT UP as it battles corporate greed, social indifference, and government negligence.

A story about 4 gay men who try to lead a normal life in Korea, the conservative and harsh country for LGBT in Asia. In the middle of making a queer film Jun-moon, a director, loses his self-confidence due to social scrutiny regarding his sexual orientation. Byung-gwon, a gay rights activist, has been participating in movements to establish equal rights for homosexual laborers. Young-soo, a chef who moved from the countryside 15 years ago, lived a lonely life but he finds happiness after joining a gay choir. Yol, who works for a major company, dreams of the day him and his partner, can have a legal wedding with overcoming the prejudice against people living with HIV/AIDS.

Over the course of a year, film follows Vancouver Pride Society president Ken Coolen to various international Pride events, including Poland, Hungary, Russia, Sri Lanka and others where there is great opposition to pride parades. In North America, Pride is complicated by commercialization and a sense that the festivals are turning away from their political roots toward tourism, party promotion and entertainment. Christie documents the ways larger, more mainstream Pride events have supported the global Pride movement and how human rights components are being added to more established events. In the New York sequence, leaders organize an alternative Pride parade, the Drag March, set up to protest the corporatization of New York Pride. A parade in São Paulo, the world's largest Pride festival, itself includes a completely empty float, meant to symbolize all those lost to HIV and to anti-gay violence.

In the year 2008, the mayor of the island of Tilos in the Aegean Sea agreed to perform the first gay and lesbian civil marriages ever held in Greece. The film follows the story of these two civil marriages through visual material that was shot ad hoc, but also through footage from the Gay Pride of the same year, Press conferences and other demonstrations regarding the same topic.

The Advocate for Fagdom unites the puzzle pieces one by one. Testimonies are combined with rare archive images. Art galeries present movie extracts that are succeeded by images shot on location. And the other way round. Writers, film makers, art galeries owners, actors and actresses, photographers, producers, friends and loved ones all join in a game of interpretation, analysis or simple anecdotes. John Waters, Bruce Benderson, Harmony Korine, Gus Van Sant, Richard Kern, Rick Castro and others deliver their impressions, theories and confessions. Everything blends into the fascinating portrait of a singular person blessed with singular talents. A complex personality at war not with a system but all systems. The portrait of a man constantly moving between his punk attitude and extreme sensibility.

With an experimental treatment looming to cure her aggressive cancer, Jamie ventures to the lake where her and her girlfriend, Grace, fell in love, fearful it will be the last time she ever sees it.

A feature-length documentary film-in-progress chronicling the birth and development of LGBTQ comics through the eyes of several of its pioneers. The film was inspired by the Lambda award-winning book of the same name, and dives deeper into the personal stories at the heart of this unique underground artistic scene. Featuring Alison Bechdel (Fun Home), the recently departed Howard Cruse (Stuck Rubber Baby, Gay Comix), and others, this film aims to show how DIY queer cartoonists have represented, poked fun at, and celebrated LGBTQ lives and experiences in challenging, humorous, and profound ways.

Learning can be fun! This package of woman-to-woman safer sex videos features a spicy batch of public service announcements (PSAs) and an international sampling of smart and sexy erotic videos, including Girls Will Be Boys, a drag king date where they skip dinner and a movie; and the silent horror spoof, Cunt Dykula. She's Safe! also features excerpts from Well Sexy Women, the first British-produced lesbian sate sex video; and excerpts from the bold, German-produced Truth or Dare. She's Safe! contains the hottest and most educational safe sex videos ever compiled.

Between reality and animation, the story of Nidhal is told, a young homosexual Tunisian who defended individual freedoms in Tunisia through his work in radio. He found himself under a lot of pressure which forced him to leave the country and seek asylum in the Netherlands.

Her ex-wife won’t meet her. Her daughter rejects her. Her mother still calls her “son.” As Marianna transitions from male to female, she is abandoned by her loved ones, alone in a world unwilling to accept her true self. This multi-award-winning documentary is an intensely sympathetic and powerful account of one individual’s struggle to gain acceptance—even in the midst of profound physical hardship.

Several elderly homosexual men and women speak frankly about their pioneering lives, their fearless decision to live openly in France at a time when society rejected them.

Queer My Friends portrays a very important chapter of Kang-won’s life: his coming out as gay and the changes he goes through from the eyes of his best friend Ah-hyun. This 30s coming-of-age buddy film draws how these two from such different backgrounds grow up together by questioning, exploring, and, of course, fighting each other. While Kang-Won struggles to embrace his sexuality, nationality, and identity, Ah-hyun asks herself what it means to find oneself and accept others for who they really are.

A documentary that looks at the lives of gay cops; cops who are out, cops who are closeted and cops who are somewhere in between the closet and the cruiser. Over the course of one year, starting and ending with the Gay Pride Parade, the documentary surveys how much the landscape has changed and looks at the different challenges gay cops face - along gender, race and class lines.