Free for All: The Public Library

Paragraph 175

During the Nazi regime, there was widespread persecution of homosexual men, which started in 1871 with the Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code. Thousands were murdered in concentration camps. This powerful and disturbing documentary, narrated by Rupert Everett, presents for the first time the largely untold testimonies of some of those who survived.

Blue Diary

Through voiceover and static San Francisco landscapes this experimental narrative short tells the melancholy story of a butch dyke pining over a one night stand with a straight girl.

The Royal Road

A fascinating and unlikely reinvention story, The Royal Road simultaneously explores cinematic spiritual channeling, the conquest and colonization of Mexico and the American Southwest, fading historical Californian urban landscapes, and the passions found in butch identity to achieve an achingly beautiful and poetic defense of remembering. Probing roads from El Camino Real, to the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, to the road right outside the front door, Olson crafts a deeply intelligent and transcending observation of the human condition that reaches for redemption in the embrace of history, nostalgia, mindfulness, and sheer beauty. If you give yourself over to it, it will crack you wide open.

Hope Along the Wind: The Story of Harry Hay

Harry Hay was one of the founding fathers of the gay rights movement, and for more than 50 years was synonymous with the term "gay pride." Director Eric Slade's documentary about Hay looks at both his life and the movement he did so much to define. In 1948, Hay founded the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles; the goal of the organization was to establish a "Golden Brotherhood," one that sought to redefine homosexuality as a normal, healthy way of life. The problem, Hay famously maintained, was not homosexuality itself, but the way it was treated by society. Dramatizations, photographs, archival footage, and interviews with original Mattachine Society members are all incorporated to tell Hay's remarkable story, one whose legacy continues to be felt in the treatment of gays and lesbians in culture today.

Neighborhoods: The Hidden Cities of San Francisco - The Castro

Now known internationally as the world's first "gay hometown," San Francisco's Castro District was a quiet, working-class neighborhood of European immigrants only a few decades ago. In this documentary, the story of the Castro's transformation is told by those who lived it, young and old, straight and gay. It's a tale of social upheaval, exuberant street culture, political assassination, and the inspiring coming-of-age of an entire community an ongoing saga even today.

Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

The true story of the neighborhood that inspired David Simon's fictional HBO television series "Tremé", from slave revolts and underground free black antebellum resistance through post-Katrina rebuilding, set to a fabulous soundtrack of New Orleans music through the ages.