2024 Entry #029 01-21-24“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 went into limited national release in 1978. It also aired on many PBS stations in 1978.
I’ve had this documentary for a couple of years but I finally got around to watching it and I found it quite moving. To hear an interesting variety of queer voices from the 1970s, I was again reminded of how things might have been had AIDS halted our progress for so many years. Many of the people here seem to have come to happy places in their lives, but many of them were ridiculed along the way, ostracized and / or in many instances, tortured for living honestly. To their credit, they survived and that this work allows them to be heard by all of us now…by me, is incredibly satisfying and emotional. I was 3 years old when this was released.
Highly recommended.
In 2022, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.