Frameline Film Festival

Frameline is a nonprofit media arts organization that produces the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, the oldest ongoing film festival devoted to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) programming currently in existence. Frameline's mission statement is "to change the world through the power of queer cinema".

With annual attendance of 60,000 to 80,000 it is the largest LGBT film exhibition event in the world and it is the most well attended LGBT arts event in the San Francisco Bay Area. The 39th annual festival will be held in June 2015 at the Castro Theatre, Roxie Theater, and Victoria Theater.

History

The 1970s

PERSISTENCE OF VISION

Both the festival and Frameline trace their roots to January 1977, when a "rag-tag band of hippie fags" (in the words of co-founder Marc Heustis) formed a group they called Persistence of Vision. Their stated goal was to "provide a forum for our art and at the same time provide a pool of talent, energy and equipment to help each other".

In a 2001 Twenty fifth-Anniversary history of the festival historian Susan Stryker noted that the founders of the group, Heustis, Ric Mears, Wayne Smolen, Berne Boyle, Greg Gonzalez, Billy Miggens, Daniel Nicolletta and David Waggoner, were inspired by the activist ideals of the gay liberation movement of the 1970s, and by Gay activist Harvey Milk’s campaign to become a San Francisco Supervisor and the nation’s first elected gay official. Many of the participating filmmakers took their footage to Milk’s camera shop on Castro Street for development. Nicolletta and Waggoner both worked there.

THE FIRST SAN FRANCISCO GAY FILM FESTIVAL

1st San Francisco Gay Film Festival

File:Cover Page of Program for First San Francisco Gay Film Festival.jpg February 9, 1977 32 Page Street

On February 9, 1977, at a long-gone gay community center at 32 Page Street in San Francisco’s Western Addition, the members of Persistence of Vision staged a "Gay Film Festival of Super-8 films” that is now recognized as the first edition of the oldest and largest gay film festival in the world.

According to Stryker, the organizers of that first San Francisco festival “plastered the city with handbills announcing the free screening of their work, and the event succeeded wildly. Two hundred people crowded into a room meant to accommodate a hundred twenty-five, and a hundred more were turned away at the door. ... In spite of the film splices breaking repeatedly and an unpopular no-tobacco-smoking policy, the response to the first festival was overwhelmingly favorable". Three repeat screenings were held on March 13, June 22 and October 26.

Those early screenings, Stryker wrote, "...had a decidedly homegrown ambiance, tending to feature short films made by the organizers themselves. The documentaries reflected contemporary gay concerns like Anita Bryant’s campaign to push back gay-rights protections in Florida. Some films explored more artistic and experimental themes, while others simply celebrated gay sexuality".

The super 8 movies shown that first year included Miracle on Sunset Boulevard by Marc Heustis (starring Silvana Nova), A Bicentennial Film by Ken Ward, A Woman One Day by Cleve Jones, Changes by Billy Miggins, The Blow Job by Ric Mears, T.K. Perkins, David Waggoner and Stephen Iadereste, and The Assassination of Anita Bryant, a “symbolic comedy, non-violent, of course,” by Berne Boyle.

Marc Heustis also remembers that first San Francisco festival for a film that wasn’t shown. He and the other organizers rejected an early film by Rob Epstein, who would go on to become one of America’s most accomplished gay filmmakers and to win two documentary Oscars for The Times of Harvey Milk and Common Threads. According to Heustis, the jurors felt Epstein’s film, which featured shots of his lover John Wright washing himself in a bathtub intercut with images of their cat grooming herself on a windowsill, "wasn’t gay enough". Fortunately Epstein, who confirms the story, would return to screen many other films in later festivals, while Wright would end up playing a major role at Frameline as a board member and assistant festival director from 1982 through 1985.

THE SECOND SAN FRANCISCO GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 22, 1978

Persistence of Vision presented the second San Francisco Gay Film Festival – a single evening of super 8 movies – on June 22, 1978 at another vanished gay community center at 330 Grove Street (now the site of the city’s Performing Arts Garage).

According to Susan Stryker, the move to June presaged the festival’s future role as one of the City’s premiere annual gay pride events. In addition to repeat screenings of Blow Job (now billed as a POV group effort) and The Assassination of Anita Bryant, the second festival featured Daniel Nicoletta’s Dancing is Illegal (with The Angels of Light), Basket Case by Marc Heustis, Sunday Afternoon by David Waggoner, Mouse Klub Konfidential by Jim Baker, Early Patterns by Ric Mears, and Narcissus Lingerie-Screen Test of Lawanda Rose and How to Cook a Plantain Properly by Berne Boyle.

THE THIRD ANNUAL SAN FRANCISCO GAY FILM & VIDEO FESTIVAL

June 19, 22 & 23, 1979

1979 marked a number of turning points for the now “annual” festival. The organizers expanded the program to three days, moved the screenings out of the Gay Community Centers and into the Roxie Cinema and Lumiere Theater, showed the festival’s first works in the new video format (prompting the temporary addition of "video" to the festival name), and included work by filmmakers from outside the Bay Area – including Long Beach, Staten Island, and Kansas City – for the very first time.

But out of all the historic firsts that year, two stand out: the 1979 festival was the first to screen works by lesbian filmmakers, and the first presented under the group’s new name: Frameline.

Some things stayed the same: it was the third festival in a row to feature a film called Blow Job, this time a new short by San Francisco’s Tim Stirton. Other titles included You Just Love Your Children by Jeff Lunger and Ritch James, Five Minutes, Ms. Lenska by Thomas Gaspar, Breaking by Doug Haynes, WHITE JUSTICE: A Case of Diminished Capacity by Lowell Williams and Joegh Bullock, Kahala by Karen Harding and Sara Banks, Pearl Harbor and the Explosions by Geoff Leighton, Olivia Records: More than Music by Anita Clearfield, Dyketactics and Sappho by Barbara Hammer and Mason’s Life by New York Gay Film Festival founder Peter Lowy.

Unfortunately, putting on the growing festival was taking its toll on the newly renamed but still all-volunteer group. As the original founders began to burn out and drop out, those left behind issued a plea for new recruits to help with the next festival. Two San Francisco State graduate film students, Paul Bollwinkel and Michael Lumpkin, were among those who answered the call.

The 1980s

THE FOURTH ANNUAL SAN FRANCISCO GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 24–26, 1980

The fourth festival new recruits Paul Bollwinkel and Michael Lumpkin helped to stage in 1980 featured screenings at the Roxie, the South of Market Cultural Center and the San Francisco Art Institute’s Canyon Cinematheque.

Highlights included Wedding of the Year: Chuck and Vince by Christine Wynne, a portrait of a gay wedding that was way ahead of its time, and an experimental film by Wayne Justice called Roger: The Death of Wayne described as “The conflict between the personalities and sexualities of a young man who was run over by a bus and came back to life and died in a bowling accident.” Other memorable titles included Greta Schiller’s Greta’s Girls, Susana S. Blaustein’s Susana, John Canally and Marty Monroe’s Nuclear Family and Honey Lee Cottrell’s Sweet Dreams.

But the fourth festival is perhaps best remembered for being the first to include a film from outside the USA – Denmark’s Bogjavlar/Damn Queers – and for bringing Michael Lumpkin to Frameline.

MICHAEL LUMPKIN

Lumpkin, a native of Longview, Texas, had co-founded a student gay rights group called The Denton Gay Alliance as an undergraduate film student at North Texas State University (NTSU), and had already been presenting gay-themed films on campus at San Francisco State, where he was pursuing a graduate degree in film. At Frameline he immediately started looking for ways to raise the festival’s profile and expand the audience for gay films – and not just in San Francisco. Before 1980 was over he would travel to Philadelphia and New York to stage screenings of the fourth festival program under the Frameline banner – an experiment that would never be repeated. But Michael was just getting started.

Over the next thirty years he would devote himself to turning Frameline's little festival into a world-class event, and keeping it going through right wing attacks, economic downturns, internal strife and times of tragic loss. In the process he would play a key role in encouraging the growth of a new LGBT Cinema, the emerging visibility of queers and queer culture, and struggles over gay rights and artistic expression that would echo from the Castro Theater to the Halls of Congress.

THE FIFTH SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL GAY FILM FESTIVAL

5th Annual San Francisco International Gay Film Festival

File:Cover Page of Program for Fifth San Francisco Gay Film Festival.png June 22 - 27, 1981 Castro Theater, Roxie Cinema

By the time the fifth festival opened in June of 1981 Michael Lumpkin had dropped out of San Francisco State and assumed the title of Festival Director (an unpaid volunteer position – he also took a job at Wells Fargo Bank to pay his bills). Lumpkin moved the Frameline “office” into a desk in the bedroom he shared with his lover, Mark Page, and recruited Page and their roommate Gary Rorick as volunteer board/staff members. Rorick would design the fifth festival poster (and the 6th). He and Page laid out the fifth festival catalogue on the kitchen table of their Castro Street apartment – using blue pencils, rubber cement and x-acto knives in those pre-computer days.

But the DIY nature of their efforts didn’t keep Lumpkin and the rest of his new Frameline colleagues from dreaming big. First Lumpkin added “International” to the festival’s title. Then he announced that the fifth edition would include screenings at one of the city’s largest venues, the landmark Castro Theater, for the very first time.

File:Rob Epstein, Vito Russo and Michael Lumpkin at Frameline's 1981 Opening Night.jpg

Rob Epstein, Vito Russo and Michael Lumpkin at Frameline's 1981 Opening Night. Photo by Mick Hicks

The Castro has been the festival’s primary home ever since (though screenings have continued at the Roxie and other venues). But back in 1981, there was no guarantee gay films could fill such an enormous theater. Taking the festival there was seen as a gutsy move on Lumpkin’s part.

As Susan Stryker wrote in 2001, “Although the Castro Theatre had become a fixture of local queer film culture by the late 70s, long-time Castro programmer Bob Hawk notes that ‘moving the Festival there required a leap of faith’. The Castro's 1,500-seat capacity was five times the size of Roxie Cinema, where the Festival had played the year before, and could swallow the combined audiences of all previous festivals. Rising to the challenge, Lumpkin produced a festival designed to pack the house – not just for one night as in earlier years, but for a whole week.”

With film historian Vito Russo acting as Master of Ceremonies, the Fifth festival opened at the Castro with the world premiere of Greetings from Washington DC, a documentary filmed at the 1979 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights directed by Lucy Winer and produced by Winer, Rob Epstein, Frances Reid and Greta Schiller. According to Stryker, “the addition of gala opening night festivities, where viewers could meet celebrities, pointed towards the Festival's future as a red-letter event on San Francisco's cultural calendar".

Over the next five days the Festival presented both features and programs of new independent shorts, including films by Arthur Dong (Public), James Broughton (Hermes Bird), Doug Haynes (Common Loss), Barbara Hammer (Our Trip), Donna Grey (After the Game) and now-celebrated British filmmaker Terence Davies’s early masterpiece, Madonna and Child.

Lumpkin revealed his interest in exploring the history of Lesbian and Gay representation in the movies by including rare screenings of Leontine Sagan’s Maedchen in Uniform (Germany, 1931) and Melville Webber and J.S. Watson Jr.’s Lot in Sodom (USA, 1933), and by bringing Russo back to the Castro stage to present his Celluloid Closet lecture and clip show before an enthusiastic crowd. Stryker called it the festival’s “indisputable highlight.”

Lumpkin also justified the fifth festival’s new International title by presenting a number of films from outside the USA. European titles included French director Phillippe Vallois’s We Were One Man (the handsome Vallois thrilled the Castro audience when he took the stage, setting a precedent for personal appearances at the festival), and three films from the Netherlands.

Two of those Dutch films, Paul de Lussanet’s Dear Boys and Nouchka van Brakel’s A Woman Like Eve were hits with Frameline’s expanded audience. But the third, George Sluizer’s Twice a Woman, was another story.

FRAMELINE'S FIRST LESBIAN RIOT: Twice a Woman

File:Twice a Woman Poster in larger format.jpg

Twice A Woman

Starring Anthony Perkins and Bibi Andersson in a convoluted story of romance and deception, Twice a Woman sparked Frameline’s first “Lesbian Riot” when its manipulative narrative and violent climax caused the mostly female audience in the Castro Theater to erupt in outrage – even though the festival program had explicitly warned them what to expect.

The angry women howled as the credits rolled. Then they poured into the lobby to confront festival staffers, demanding to know why the offensive film had been included in the festival, and who had programmed it. They also called for more lesbian inclusion in Frameline, which they denounced as a group dominated by white men.

Ironically, one male member of the screening committee that year recalls that most if not all of the men who previewed Twice a Woman actually voted against including it. But the women, citing international superstar Andersson’s presence in the lead role and the paucity of Lesbian images of any type on screen, were unanimous in insisting it be shown, a fact the angry lesbians in the audience – who were convinced a man was responsible – didn’t know.

Nor did they know that many of the reforms they were calling for at Frameline were already being put in place.

Lumpkin, who had been a member of an informal “men’s auxiliary” to The Denton Women’s Liberation Union during his undergraduate days at NTSU, had already been working to make the festival more inclusive of Lesbians. He had been aggressively recruiting gay women to join Frameline as volunteer staff/board members (including Chris Olson, Sue Mitchell and Susan Passino) and members of the Festival screening committee (including local businesswoman Kathy Nelsen, Liz Stevens of Iris Films and filmmaker Honey Lee Cottrell). He had also made a point of programming as many works by women as he could find. Barbara Hammer even recalls Lumpkin showing up on her Oakland doorstep one morning to personally solicit more of her films.

The "riot" pushed Lumpkin and his colleagues to ramp up their vital outreach to the women’s community. It also inspired them to take an important step in the festival’s evolution into a truly inclusive event by adding “Lesbian” to the title of 1982’s sixth edition for the very first time.

But Twice a Woman wasn’t the only film in the 1981 Festival that ended up expanding Frameline’s horizons.

FRAMELINE DISTRIBUTION

File:Poster for We Were One Man by Phillippe Vallois.jpg

We Were One Man

Shortly after the fifth festival came to an end Michael Lumpkin was packing up the print of We Were One Man to ship it back to Phillippe Vallois in Paris when it hit him. Sending the only English subtitled print of a wonderful gay film back to France made absolutely no sense at all (especially in the days when getting a bulky 35mm print of a “gay” film through US Customs wasn’t always easy to do). So why not keep the print and act as the film's US distributor? Michael called Phiilippe to get his ok. He said yes, and on that day in 1981 Frameline Distribution was born.

Other titles soon joined Vallois’ feature in Frameline's catalogue, starting with Denmark’s Bogjavlar/Damn Queers. Under directors of distribution Mark Finch, Nancy Fishman, Desi del Valle, Moira King, Alexis Whitham and others Frameline Distribution has expanded in the years since to include hundreds of films and videos from around the world.

In 1998 it introduced Send it Home, an innovative program that recruited gay and lesbian film lovers to buy titles in the Frameline catalogue and donate them to schools and libraries in their home towns.

In 2012 Frameline began offering many of its titles through Frameline Voices, a free online channel dedicated to “showcasing diverse LGBT stories with an emphasis on films by and about people of color, transgender people, youth, and elders.”

THE SIXTH SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 21–26, 1982

Adding Lesbian to its title wasn’t the only innovation Lumpkin and his crew – now including John Wright in his first year as Assistant Festival Director – came up with for the festival’s sixth edition in 1982. They also expanded the programming to six days, presented Frameline’s first screenings in the East Bay (at the Pacific Film Archives), and, not surprisingly, scheduled more programs for women than ever before.

Opening night featured another champagne reception in the Castro mezzanine, followed by a rare screening of Natasha Rambova and Charles Bryant’s Salome (1922) with Bob Vaughn at the Castro organ, and Vito Russo in an on-stage conversation with Making Love screenwriter Barry Sandler on “Hollywood’s entrance into Gay Cinema”.

Other highlights of the year included tributes to Iris Films and Barbara Hammer, a benefit work-in-progress screening of Out of Order, the documentary project that would evolve into Rob Epstein and Richard Schmeichen’s The Times of Harvey Milk, Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle retrospective, and new films by Ulrike Ottinger (Madame X, An Absolute Ruler), Ron Peck (Nighthawks), Alexandra von Grote (Depart to Arrive), and Rosa von Praunheim (Army of Lovers or Revolt of the Perverts).

The 1982 festival also presented the first of two International Exhibitions of Lesbian and Gay photography curated by a subcommittee that included Greg Day, Clare Wren, and Marshall Rheiner, and introduced a series of side bar festivals of works on video curated first by John Canally, and later by Daniel Mangin.

Outside the festival, 1982 marked the debut of Frameline Presents, a one-hour video anthology program broadcast every other Thursday on San Francisco cable station 25, and of a Frameline-sponsored film and video class at San Francisco City College on the history of lesbians and gays in cinema.

THE SEVENTH SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 20–26, 1983

1983’s Seventh Festival opened at the Castro with a rare revival screening of Anders Als Die Anderen (Different From the Others), Richard Oswald’s 1919 German silent that is believed to be the first to tell a gay story on film, followed by the local premiere of Tuija-Maijs Niskanen’s The Farewell (Finland, 1980).

The following days brought a tribute to James Broughton, three more films from Terence Davies, Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (USA, 1983), Eloy de la Iglesia’s The Deputy (Spain, 1980), Barbara Hammer’s Audience (which includes a cameo appearance by Lumpkin working the Roxie Box office at the sixth festival) and Wieland Speck’s The Sound of Fast Relief (West Germany, 1982) – just a selection from an expanded seven day festival offering more films and videos than ever before.

FRAMELINE AUDIENCE AWARDS

The seventh festival’s most enduring innovation came with Lumpkin's introduction of a new Audience Award for Best Feature and the announcement of the first winner, Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames.

Audience Awards for Best Documentary and Best Short were added the following year. Frameline audiences have been casting their votes ever since. The Awards are announced at the closing night party, usually after a frenzied last minute count of the final ballots, led for many years by Rick Solomon, one of Frameline’s most stalwart and indispensable volunteers.

THE EIGHTH SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 18 – 24, 1984

The eighth festival held steady with the seven day format introduced the previous year. Lumpkin’s imaginative opening night program paired the west coast premiere of Mauvaise Conduite (Improper Conduct), legendary cinematographer Nestor Almendros and Orlando Jimenez Leal’s powerful documentary on the plight of gays in Castro’s Cuba, with a revival screening of Kuro Tokage (The Black Lizard), Kinji Fukasaka and gay icon Yukio Mishima’s 1968 intense Japanese drag noir.

International films screened in the following days ranged from Susan Lambert’s On Guard (Australia, 1983) to Margarethe von Trotta’s The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (West Germany, 1978) and Reinhold Schuenzel’s Viktor und Viktoria (Germany, 1933). US and West Coast premieres included Amos Gutman’s Nagua (Drifting) (Israel, 1983), Phillippe Vallois’ Rainbow Serpent (France, 1983), Djalma Limongi Batista’s Asa Branca – A Brazilian Dream (Brazil, 1982) and Antonio Gimenez-Rico’s Vestida de Azul (Dressed in Blue) (Spain, 1983).

Local filmmakers featured in the 1984 festival included Curt McDowell (Sparkle’s Tavern, Stand By), Cathy Zheutlin (Lost Love) and Artie Bressan (Pleasure Beach).

FRAMELINE IN THE 1980S - Part 1

As Michael Lumpkin pushed to expand the SFILGFF in the 1980s, Frameline's all-volunteer staff and board struggled to keep up. So he set out to remake Frameline into an organization strong enough to sustain the festival’s growth – to transform it from an all-volunteer organization, where board, staff and volunteer were one and the same, into a professionalized non-profit with a board and a paid staff (still supplemented by scores of volunteers).

Lumpkin and his colleagues also worked through the 80s to develop a reliable funding stream for the organization from a combination of ticket sales, membership fees, grants, sponsorships and donations. Over the decade the growing flow of funds would make it possible to move the Frameline office from Lumpkin's bedroom to the basement of 16th Street’s Red Brick Building, and then to the former convent of Notre Dame at 347 Dolores, across from Mission Dolores.

THE NINTH SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 21–30, 1985

1985’s ninth festival brought brought another growth spurt with the addition of three more days to the program to create Frameline's first ten-day event.

The festival opened with one of Lumpkin’s odd-couple double bills: Alexandra von Grote’s moving World War II lesbian melodrama November Moon paired with Jim Bidgood’s delirious late-sixties gay art porn extravaganza, Pink Narcissus.

Lumpkin unleashed more historic psychedelia with Steven Arnold’s 1971 avant-garde classic, Luminous Procuress, featuring San Francisco’s own fabulous Cockettes. Then he explored the emergence of sympathetic, if doomed, gay characters in early 60s British cinema in revivals of A Taste of Honey, The Leather Boys, The L-Shaped Room and Victim.

The ninth festival also featured the San Francisco premieres of Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris’ powerful feminist polemic Gebroken Spiegels (Broken Mirrors), British Icon Derek Jarman’s hypnotic Angelic Conversation, German avant garde hero Rosa von Praunheim’s dizzy ode to expressionism, Horror Vacui, and Elfi Mikesh and Monica Treut’s wonderfully cinematic Verguhrung: Die Grausame Frau (Seduction: The Cruel Woman).

On the non-fiction side, Vito Russo returned to moderate “Documenting a Public Forum”, a “discussion on the growing movement in the Gay community to discover and preserve its past.” A diverse range of documentaries, including Rob Epstein and Richard Scmeichen’s recent Oscar winner The Times of Harvey Milk, Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg’s Before Stonewall and Lucy Winer’s Silent Pioneers helped Russo to make his point.

Monica Treut’s Bondage added some welcome lesbian S&M spice to the non-fiction stew. Debra Chasnoff and Kim Klausner’s groundbreaking Choosing Children unleashed a rallying cry for a new movement.

But three other documentaries struck a more somber – and perhaps even more historic – note that year: AIDS: Chapter I and AIDS: Portrait of an Epidemic, by Harvey Marks and For our Lives by Michelle Paymar. Together, they mark a turning point as the first of many films about the new plague sweeping the world’s gay communities that would screen at Frameline in the coming years.

AIDS AND FRAMELINE

The AIDS epidemic took a massive toll on Frameline, as it did on all of San Francisco and communities around the globe. Festival founders David Waggoner and Berne Boyle, staff members Gary Rorick and John Canally, board member Howard Sullivan, filmmakers Artie Bressan, Richard Schmiechen, Curt McDowell, Peter Adair and Marlon Riggs, the Roxie Cinema’s Robert Evans, Castro staffer Jeffrey Sevcik and Celluloid Closet author and festival regular Vito Russo are just a few of those Frameline and the local gay film community lost to HIV. Not to mention hundreds, if not thousands, of audience members.

The epidemic also had an impact on Frameline’s programs. After the first three AIDS documentaries played the festival in 1985, dozens more followed. Features did too, starting with the very first dramatic film to address the epidemic, Artie Bressan’s “Buddies.” Frameline recognized the film’s importance by showcasing “Buddies” in a world premiere screening at the Castro to benefit the Shanti Foundation in late 1985, and then showing it again in the 1986 festival. It would be decades before Frameline would mount another festival without a film about AIDS.

MAKING CONNECTIONS

As Michael Lumpkin began making plans for the tenth festival he took a trip that would change the way he thought about both the festival and Frameline, thanks to a tip from Rob Epstein. Epstein had taken The Times of Harvey Milk to the Berlin Film Festival in 1985. After he got back he urged Lumpkin to check it out. Lumpkin made the first of many trips to Berlin the very next year. The importance of that trip, and of the many others Lumpkin made to Berlin, Sundance, The Toronto Film Festival and other festivals gay and straight in the following years, cannot be overstated. By being an out gay film programmer seeking and promoting queer films, Michael helped to make Lesbian and Gay film in general, and Frameline in particular, key parts of the international film festival scene. He also paved the way for programmers from the many other Lesbian and Gay Film festivals that debuted in Frameline’s wake, including L.A.’s Outfest (founded in 1982), The London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and The Torino GLBT Film Festival (both 1986) who would soon join him on the festival circuit.

Wherever he went Lumpkin worked to burnish the Frameline festival's growing reputation as the premiere showcase for lesbian and gay media – and to lure directors and films to San Francisco. He also developed and maintained key relationships with film professionals around the world that would help the festival to prosper, including a close friendship with a talented young film programmer at the British Film Institute named Mark Finch who would play a major role at Frameline in the 1990s.

Lumpkin’s first trip to West Berlin in 1986 at Epstein’s suggestion was the beginning of it all. The trip had a profound effect on Lumpkin, who came back impressed by the Berlin Festival’s mix of innovative programming and well-organized operations – including events designed to give filmmakers and festivalgoers a chance to schmooze and connect – and its use of awards to celebrate and encourage filmmakers and call attention to their work.

Over the next few years the lessons he learned in Berlin would help Lumpkin complete the SFILGFF's transformation into a world class event.

THE TENTH SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 20–29, 1986

The ten-day tenth festival opened with another champagne reception at the Castro and the introduction of Maria Kellett as the Festival’s new associate director, the “highest ranking” female staffer in Frameline’s history.

The San Francisco premiere of Mexican director Jaime Humberto Hermosillo’s Dona Herlinda Y Su Hijo (Dona Herlinda and Her Son), came next, followed by the first of many retrospective programs in honor of Frameline’s tenth anniversary, a screening of Allan Moyle’s Times Square, which had been a hit at the sixth festival in 1982.

Over the next nine days Lumpkin, Kellett and their team presented hundreds of films and videos at the Castro Theater, Roxie Cinema, Video Free America, and KQED. Highlights included the US premiere of Enrique Dawi’s Adios, Roberto (Argentina, 1985) and the west coast premieres of Orlow Seunke’s Pervola, Sporen in de Sneuw (Pervola, Tracks in the Snow) (Netherlands, 1985), Paul Donovan’s Self Defense (Canada, 1983) and Wieland Speck’s Westler – East of the Wall (West Germany, 1985).

One of the year's most memorable screenings brought the San Francisco debut of Mala Noche, a first feature by a promising new director named Gus Van Sant, who made one his earliest public appearances in the city at the Castro screening.

Noteworthy shorts included Amy Goldsteins’ Commercial For Murder, Michael Rogowsky’s Sleeping Around, Richard Fung’s Chinese Characters and David Weissman’s Beauties Without a Cause starring local “Beauties” Lulu, Silvana Nova and Tommy Pace.

The repeat screening of Artie Bressan’s Buddies lead the way for a wave of films about AIDS, including Peter Adair and Rob Epstein’s The AIDS Show, Marc Heustis’s Coming of Age, Canadian Nick Sheehan’s No Sad Songs and a number of powerful shorts, from Bill Pope’s autobiographical Portrait of a Native Son to Debby Chapnick’s 'The Hero of my own Life.

AIDS also lent a special poignancy to one of the 1986 festival’s most historic moments when Lumpkin took the Castro Stage to present the first annual Frameline Award to film historian, The Celluloid Closet author, activist, and long time festival friend Vito Russo, who had been diagnosed with HIV in 1985.

THE FRAMELINE AWARD

Designed to honor those who have “made a major contribution to LGBT representation in film, television or the media arts”, The Frameline Award has been given at each festival since 1986 to:

1986 Vito Russo

1987 Alexandra von Grote

1988 Divine

1989 Cinevista/Promovision

1990 Robert Epstein

1991 Elfi Mikesh

1992 Marlon Riggs

1993 Pratibha Parmar

1994 Christine Vachon

1995 Marcus Hu

1996 Peter Adair

1997 Channel Four Television

1998 Dolly Hall

1999 Stanley Kwan

2000 Barbara Hammer

2001 The Festival’s Founders

2002 Isaac Julien

2003 Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato

2004 Rose Troche

2005 Gregg Araki

2006 Francois Ozon

2007 Andrea Sperling

2008 Michael Lumpkin

2009 George & Mike Kuchar

2010 Wolfe Video

2011 Margaret Cho

2012 B. Ruby Rich

2013 Jamie Babbit

2014 George Takei

Lumpkin’s presentation of the first Frameline award to the beloved Russo in 1986 was followed by a standing ovation from the Castro audience. Vito then took the stage to present the latest edition of his Celluloid Closet lecture and clip show to the delighted crowd – which rewarded him at the end with yet another round of cheers. But not all of the tenth festival’s programs were so well received.

FRAMELINE'S SECOND LESBIAN RIOT: Ten Cents a Dance (Parallax)

On Wednesday, June 25, a quiet 6 pm screening of Lesbian shorts at the Roxie unexpectedly erupted into chaos when a non-explicit male-to-male sex scene in Midi Onodera’s Ten Cents A Dance (Parallax) caused the mostly female audience to rise up in a protest that would become known as Frameline’s second “lesbian riot.”

As historian Susan Stryker noted in her 25th Anniversary Festival history, “Discontent had simmered for years among some women who felt Frameline paid insufficient attention to lesbian concerns. A film by Canadian-Japanese lesbian Midi Onodera, Ten Cents a Dance (Parallax), became the focus for these long-standing dissatisfactions when it closed a lesbian shorts program one muggy Wednesday evening. As a portion of the film depicted two men having sex in a public restroom, some disgruntled women streamed down the aisles to protest the representation of male sexuality in a lesbian program, while others noisily disrupted the screening. Before the night ended, the Festival's beleaguered staff had been raked over the coals verbally by an angry crowd.”

Kellet and Lumpkin bore the brunt of the anger, which may have been driven in part by the fact that 1986 was a relatively slow year for women’s films. Just two new “Lesbian” features were screened at the festival in `86: Angela Linders’s Mara (Netherlands, 1985), which was only 58 minutes long, and Bruno Moll’s Das Ganze Leben (The Whole of Life) (Switzerland, 1983), which was directed by a man.

Fairly or not, many women blamed Frameline’s male majority for the Festival’s lack of films by and about Lesbians. Seeing male sex depicted in a Lesbian program was all it took to push them over the edge. As author Marc Siegel noted in an insightful 1997 article for Jump Cut, the reaction to Ten Cents a Dance, “cannot be fully understood outside of its festival context, namely that it was screened on a lesbian shorts evening at the Roxie by a festival programming committee already perceived as indifferent to lesbian concerns.”

As Siegel also pointed out, some of the resentment behind the riot had been building up ever since the Festival’s move to the Castro in 1981. “While this shift dramatically increased the festival's scope,” Siegel wrote, “the existence of two very different venues (these are still the two main spaces) also meant films could be divided along a number of axes: feature films vs. shorts, conventional narrative or documentary vs. experimental, films presumed to be of general community interest vs. those for a more specialized audience, and, perhaps most significantly, gay vs. lesbian.”

“The association of lesbian concerns with the smaller, less fashionable venue, the Roxie,” Siegel continued, “came about for a number of reasons. The Roxie is closer to some of the more important women's institutions in the city — the Women's Building, Old Wives Tales Bookstore, and Osento Baths. But, as Stryker notes, since most lesbian filmmakers at the time produced less technically finished products than their male counterparts, their work was already destined for the Roxie, the venue for most experimental work ... these factors combined to create the impression that lesbians were of secondary importance to the festival.”

Lumpkin, Kellett and the Frameline Board knew the women’s concerns had to be addressed if the Festival was to survive as a Lesbian and Gay event. A few months after the riot they sponsored a forum at the women’s building to give the angry women another chance to vent and talk about how Frameline should respond. The feedback confirmed a level of discontent with the festival’s male dominated programming that surprised Lumpkin and the rest of the staff. They had always tried to program every lesbian film they could find. But every year there were more films by and about men than women. The women’s comments taught them that blaming the festival’s gender imbalance on the lack of women’s films – no matter how true – would no longer be accepted. Lumpkin and his team had to become proactive in creating a festival that welcomed and represented women and men on equal terms.

“It was awful at the time," Lumpkin later recalled, "but it was very important because of the changes it brought".

The riot, Marc Siegel noted, succeeded “in motivating Frameline to engage with community concerns about its programming practices. This subsequently resulted in Frameline's greater sensitivity to not only lesbian representation within the festival and within its own organization, but also to its increased concern with minority representation in general. Finally, this level of interaction between audiences, films, and programmers is precisely what marks the lesbian and gay film festival as a community event".

Lumpkin and Kellett knew meeting the women’s demands would be a challenge. But after years of fundraising and development, Frameline’s board and staff were ready to take it on. By 1986 Frameline had achieved a level of financial security that allowed its board to offer Lumpkin a paid position as Festival Director. He accepted, and finally told his co-workers at Wells Fargo Bank goodbye for good.

The now full-time Frameline employee redoubled his efforts to improve the festival and hire more paid staff – including a female co-programmer to help address the need for gender balance that was now one of Frameline’s top priorities. He also started raising funds for a new program he hoped would help ensure his eventual partner would actually have Lesbian films to program: The Frameline Completion Fund.

THE FRAMELINE COMPLETION FUND

In the aftermath of the 1986 controversy over the lack of Lesbian representation at the SFILGFF Michael Lumpkin established The Frameline Completion Fund to provide grants to emerging and established filmmakers. According to the Frameline website, “this program seeks to provide a much-needed source of financial contributions to artists who often struggle to secure funding to complete their works. Grants ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 are available for films that represent and reflect LGBT life in all its complexity and richness.”

"Since its founding the Completion Fund has provided over 120 grants to help ensure that LGBTQ films are completed and viewed by wider audiences. Films finished with assistance from the Frameline Completion Fund include Pariah, Appropriate Behavior, Call Me Kuchu, To Be Takei, Last Call as Maud's, The New Black, Brother to Brother, Kumu Hina, The Cockettes, Vito, Freeheld, We Were Here, and Gun Hill Road."

THE ELEVENTH SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 19–28, 1987

Michael Lumpkin’s campaign to transform the SFILGFF into the premiere showcase for queer media and his second trip to Berlin paid off big in 1987 with the announcement of an impressive festival lineup of films and videos from around the world and every continent except Antarctica - topped off by the local premieres of not one but three new films by the exciting up and coming Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar: Sisters of Darkness (aka Dark Habits), What Have I Done To Deserve This? and Law of Desire.

Opening night at the Castro featured the North American premiere of Sheila McLaughlin’s She Must Be Seeing Things (in a screening to benefit the newly created Frameline Completion Fund), followed by the San Francisco premiere of Yves Simoneau’s Canadian feature, Pouvoir Intime.

The diverse program that unspooled over the following days ranged from Sergio Amon’s Aquele Dois and Sergio Toledo’s Vera (both from Brazil) to Rosa von Praunheim’s A Virus Has No Morals, Lothar Lambert’s Desert of Love, Dagmar Beiersdorf’s Wolfgirl (all from West Germany), Yu Kan-Ping’s The Outsiders (Taiwan), Yannick Bellon’s La Triche, Christine Ehm’s Simone (both from France), Takis Spetsiotis’s Meteor and Shadow (Greece), The Sankofa Black Workshop’s The Passion of Remembrance, Hugh Brody’s Nineteen Nineteen (both from Great Britain) to Lionel Friedberg’s Across the Rubicon (South Africa).

Short works in the eleventh festival included Gus van Sant’s Five Ways to Kill Yourself and My New Friend, John Greyson’s A Moffie Called Simon, three Derek Jarman films to songs by The Smiths, Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss’s International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Michelle Parkerson’s Storme: The Lady of the Jewel Box, Su Friedrich’s Damned if You Don’t, Sally Potter’s The London Story and Tom Rubnitz’s Drag Queen Marathon and Wigstock: The Movie.

Special programs included “MAINSTREAMING: Lesbian Filmmaking in the 80s”, a panel discussion moderated by Debra Zimmerman of Women Make Movies featuring filmmakers Sheila McLaughlin, Alexandra von Grote, Andrea Weiss, Frances Reid and Barbara Hammer, “BLOOD AND ROSES: Under the Spell of the Lesbian Vampire,” a presentation with film clips by Andrea Weiss, a “Lesbian TV Party” and tributes to Women Make Movies, Alexandra von Grote (recipient of the 1987 Frameline Award) and Marc Huestis.

AIDS continued to impact the festival, which was dedicated to filmmaker Curt McDowell and Frameline board member Howard Sullivan, who both died just weeks before opening night. AIDS-themed films included John Canalli’s Heroes, Michael Aue’s I’m Still Alive: A Person With AIDS Tells His Story, and A Plague on You by Great Britain’s Lesbian and Gay Media Group.

Lumpkin’s highly anticipated Pedro Almodóvar triple bill took a hit when the West Coast premiere of Sisters of Darkness (aka Dark Habits) had to be cancelled at the last minute after the print got lost in transit. But What Have I Done to Deserve This? was a huge hit and the San Francisco premiere of Law of Desire provided the festival with one its most unforgettable closing nights.

Almodovar’s brilliant melodrama brought the sold out Castro Audience to its feet for a standing ovation. Their enthusiastic response and the buzz the screening generated helped to bolster the SFILGFF’s growing reputation as a launch pad for new feature films.

THE TWELFTH SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

JUNE 17 - 26, 1988

Frameline’s twelfth festival opened with the enthusiastically received delayed debut of the film that had been held up in transit the year before, Pedro Almodóvar’s Dark Habits, followed by a revival of Geza von Radvanyi’s 1957 version of Maedchen in Uniform starring Romy Schneider and Lilli Palmer.

Other international features in the 1988 festival included Ron Peck’s Empire State and Derek Jarman’s The Last of England (both from Great Britain), Pisan Akarasainee’s The Last Song and its sequel, Anguished Love (Thailand), Stefan Henszelman’s Friends Forever (Denmark), Per Blom’s The Ice Palace (Norway), Karoly Makk’s Another Way (Hungary), Michael Thornhill’s surreal The Everlasting Secret Family (Australia) and Monika Treut’s The Virgin Machine' (West Germany).

The fascination with Lesbian vampires seen in the previous festival continued with a revival screening of Lambert Hillyer’s Dracula’s Daughter from 1936 and the debut of Amy Goldstein’s Because the Dawn (another benefit for the Frameline Completion Fund).

Andrea Weiss returned for two programs: Tiny & Ruby: Hell Divin’ Women, a documentary co-directed with the also returning Greta Schiller, and "A QUEER FEELING WHEN I LOOK AT YOU: Hollywood Stars and Lesbian Spectatorship,” another presentation with clips. Weiss and Schiller also joined Cathy Korniloff, Monika Treut and Barbara Hammer for “Sapphic Celluloid”, a panel discussion on Lesbians on film.

Other special programs included “The Days of Greek Gods”, a look at the physique films made by Richard Fontaine between 1949 and 1962, and a 75th birthday tribute to James Broughton. Daniel Mangin curated a groundbreaking “AIDS Video Symposium”, that included John Greyson’s THE ADS EPIDEMIC (Acquired Dread of Sex) Pratibha Parver’s Reframing Aids, Isaac Julien’s This is not an AIDS Advertisement' and Ellen Seidler and Patrick DuNah’s FIGHTING FOR OUR LIVES: Facing AIDS in San Francisco.

A moving festival highlight came with the posthumous presentation of the 1988 Frameline Award to the fabulous Divine, with director John Waters taking the Castro stage to accept the award for his longtime friend and muse.

But 1988’s most influential screenings may have come with the debuts of Gregg Araki’s Three Bewildered People in the Night and Juliet Bashore’s Kamikaze Hearts – two anarchic and exciting works that were already pointing the way to a “New Queer Cinema” movement that wouldn’t get its name for four more years.

FRAMELINE AND THE NEW QUEER CINEMA

In 1992 a wave of well-received Sundance and Toronto film festival screenings of innovative gay-themed works by out LGBT filmmakers would inspire critic B. Ruby Rich to decree the birth of “The New Queer Cinema” or “NQC”. But those straight film fests were just catching up to a movement given birth in the 80s and early 90s in lesbian and gay film festivals like the SFILGFF. Frameline, as the largest and most influential of these festivals, played a major role in the NQC’s pre-christening rise – and subsequent fall.

The eclectic approach to programming Michael Lumpkin pioneered at Frameline gave the movement’s edgy auteurs the chance to show their work next to filmmakers aspiring to a more mainstream style. As these rival visions played out on screen, Frameline’s ticket buyers never hesitated to make their preferences known. Their passionate and outspoken reactions would help determine the New Queer Cinema’s fate, and shape the future of LGBT film.

THE THIRTEENTH SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 16–25, 1989

The 13th Festival swept Frameline into its teens with an age-appropriate flood of rebellious and hormonally charged works from the filmmakers who were already creating the New Queer Cinema’s first new wave. Trendsetting NQC-ish titles at the `89 festival included Roger Stigliano’s Fun Down There, Isaac Julien's Looking For Langston, Gregg Akaki’s The Long Weekend (O’despair) and John Greyson’s Urinal.

But the NQC wasn’t the only story in 1989. Lumpkin’s opening night program paired the world premiere of Canadian Anne Claire Poirier’s Salut Victor! with a revival of Radley Metzger’s Therese and Isabella (France, 1966). Shusuke Kaneko’s Summer Vacation: 1999 (Japan), Jean-Yves Laforce’s The Heart Exposed (Canada) and Philip Saville’s Wonderland (Great Britain) were among the other new international features that followed over the next ten days.

Ulrike Ottinger’s epic Johanna D’Arc of Mongolia (West Germany) brought the Castro crowd to its feet and emerged as a surprise festival favorite.

Noteworthy shorts included David Weissman’s Song From An Angel, Abigail Child’s Both, Su Friedrich’s Gently Down the Stream, Richard Kwietniowski’s Ballad of Reading Gaol and Sonja Roth’s Interior Decorator From Hell.

Desire, British director Stuart Marshall’s look at the Holocaust through a queer lens, stood out in the year’s strong documentary roster, as did a program of shorts on the growing protests around AIDS, and Laurens C. Postma’s Derek Jarman: Know What I Mean.

1989’s special programs ranged from “Nelly Toons: A Look at Animated Sissies” introduced by Vito Russo, to a lecture on “the lesbian cinema’s search for a new voice” by Dutch film scholar Annette Förster, a history of lesbian erotica with Susie Bright, a panel on Lesbian/Gay media in the 90s, and programs of new shorts from both John Greyson and Barbara Hammer.

FRAMELINE BEYOND THE FESTIVAL

Special Frameline presentations in the year between the 13th and 14th festivals included a Castro screening of Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's Oscar winning COMMON THREADS: Stories from the Quilt; Richard Kwietniowski's seven city tour of "Policing the Bedroom", a collection of British shorts dealing with gay representation and laws of desire; and another presentation of Vito Russo's ever popular Celluloid Closet clip show and talk.

FRAMELINE IN THE 1980s - Part 2

The late 1980s saw two significant turning points in Lumpkin's on-going dual campaigns to secure a dependable funding stream for Frameline and expand its staff.

In 1988 Frameline received the first of a series of grants from The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The much needed funding was welcomed as a sign of LGBT film's growing credibility. But it came with an unexpected price tag. Over the next few years a culture war over federal funding for "indecent" and gay art would erupt in Congress and on talk radio. Frameline's NEA funding would turn it into a target of the Republican right wing.

In 1989 Frameline welcomed Linda Farin as its first Executive Director - a big step forward for a group that had been all unpaid volunteers just a few years earlier. Lumpkin assumed the title of Festival Director. But making Frameline's expanding payroll wouldn't always be easy.

The 1990s

THE FRAMELINE FESTIVAL TRAILER

As Frameline prepared for the 1990 festival Lumpkin - always looking for ways to publicize the festival - decided to try something new: a festival trailer. With little money to spend he turned to poster and program guide designer Tom Bonauro and asked him to whip one up. The result (featuring music by Voice Farm and a cameo appearance by the back of Rex Ray’s head) was a hit with the Frameline crowd and a new tradition was born. Now every year the debut of the latest trailer is an eagerly anticipated event to be greeted with cheers and/or jeers by a festival crowd waiting to weigh in on the relative merits of each annual offering.

Frameline’s trailers can all be seen at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3CF0E0C357FC8D0D

THE FOURTEENTH SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 15 – 24, 1990

Frameline's 14th festival kicked off with Bonauro's infectious trailer, followed by the North American Premiere of a film that was both a historic first, and an equally historic last: Heiner Carow’s Coming Out, the first gay film made in communist East Germany, and the last, since it opened in Germany on the night the Berlin Wall fell.

1990’s opening night also brought the West Coast Premiere of Nocturne, a British TV movie directed by Joy Chamberlain and starring Lisa Eichhorn, which Mary Wings described as “a new benchmark for Lesbian film.”

Highlights among the year’s other new dramatic features included I Am A Man, M.L. Bhandevanop Devakul’s Thai version of Boys in the Band, Miguel Picazo’s Spanish nun melodrama, Extramuros, Erik de Kuyper’s sword and sandal art epic, Pink Ulysses, Beeban Kidron’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Anette Apon’s Crocodiles In Amsterdam.

Lumpkin’s exploration of queer cinema history continued in a “script to screen” retrospective of films inspired by Jean Genet featuring Genet’s own Un Chant D’Amour and three films based on his work: Vic Morrow’s Deathwatch with Leonard Nimoy, R.W. Fassbinder’s Querelle with Brad Davis and Jeanne Moreau, and Joseph Strick’s The Balcony with Shelly Winters, Peter Falk, Lee Grant and Nimoy.

The lesbianesque women’s prison classic Caged got a revival too, along with Prisonnieres and Scrubbers, two even more outrageous if less well known `80s takes on the genre.

The 14th festival also hosted “Rules of Attraction: A Conference on Lesbian and Gay Media.” Organized by Liz Kotz, the ambitious and innovative symposium explored topics ranging from “Feminist Theory/Lesbian Media: Rethinking Sexual Representation” to “AIDS and Media: Strategies for the 90s.”

Aids again took its toll on the festival, which was dedicated to recently deceased founding member David Waggoner. The year’s AIDS films were showcased in a Phil Zwickler-introduced side bar festival called “AIDS: The Passionate Mission”. Titles screened included Rosa von Praunheim’s Silence = Death, Praunheim and Zwickler’s Positive, John Greyson’s The World is Sick (sic), and Catherine Saallfield and Zoe Leonards’ Keep Your Laws Off My Body.

Other special programs included a tribute to 1990 Frameline Award recipient Rob Epstein, a marathon screening of shorts by East Village videographer Tom Rubnitz, and a trio of works dedicated to exploring African American Gay life featuring Marlon Riggs’ transformative and influential Tongues Untied.

But no screening that year was more memorable, or received a more enthusiastic standing ovation from its cheering Castro crowd, than the West Coast Premiere of another film on Black Gay life: Jennie Livingston’s provocative and moving documentary on the Vogueing scene in New York City: Paris is Burning.

NEW FACES/NEW DIRECTIONS: TOM DIMARIA and MARK FINCH

The 1990 festival introduced two newcomers who would go on to play major roles at Frameline in the early 90s: new Executive Director Tom DiMaria and Associate Director/Distribution Manager Mark Finch.

Historian Susan Stryker, writing in her 25th Anniversary Festival History, gives DiMaria major credit for pushing Frameline to become a truly inclusive organization. “When Tom di Maria stepped into the Executive Director position in 1990,” Stryker wrote, “he took the mandate to diversify the organization seriously. Di Maria attributes his multicultural sensitivity to his years with Urvashi Vaid at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. ‘Urvashi first taught me what multiculturalism meant,’ he said. ‘When I came to Frameline, I looked at achieving multicultural diversity not as a burden, but as an exciting goal to attain’.”

DiMaria would also spearhead a number of other major initiatives during his time at Frameline, including funding campaigns and a 1991 road trip to the Soviet Union to present the first Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals in Moscow and Leningrad under the Frameline banner.

Finch, a native of Manchester, England, who grew up in Cambridge, had already made his mark on the international film festival scene as a founding staff member at London’s Picadilly Film Festival and as a founder/programmer of the British Film Institute’s London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, which he had helped to launch in 1987. Lumpkin lured him away from the BFI for a one-year sabbatical by offering him the chance to oversee an ambitious expansion of Frameline Distribution and assist in programming the festival.

Mark’s insight, intelligence, wit, and naughty British Schoolboy charm quickly won him legions of fans at Frameline and across San Francisco. By the time he returned to London at the end of his sabbatical Lumpkin was already looking for a way to bring him back.

FRAMELINE IN THE EARLY 90s - More Programs, More Right Wing Attacks

Frameline’s “continuing effort to bring the work of Lesbian and Gay media artists to the widest possible audience” made the early 1990s one of the organization’s most exciting and innovative eras.

After three years of fundraising and development The Frameline Completion Fund awarded its first grants in 1990: a total of $5,000 dollars to Peter Adair and Janet Cole for Absolutely Positive, Catherine Saalfield for Among Good Christian Peoples and Paris Poirier for Last Call At Maud’s.

1990's special programs included the San Francisco premiere of New Queer Cinema darling Todd Haynes' Poison (warmly received by an enthusiastic Castro crowd), The Second Annual Lesbian TV Party, and a five-month “Best of the Festival” series at the Castro Theater, which included revivals of 12 feature films and a retrospective of the works of German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger.

In early 1991 Frameline partnered with the International Lesbian and Gay Human Rights Commission to organize the first gay film festival in the Soviet Union. That summer Tom DiMaria and long time board member and volunteer Paul Thurston led a Frameline contingent to Moscow and Leningrad to present Queer films and filmmakers to 20,000 eager film fans in in a series of groundbreaking events - a great leap forward for queer film.

In October Frameline joined with the Washington DC-based gay arts organization One in Ten to present Reel Affirmations, the first gay film festival in the nation’s capitol. Frameline provided advice, administrative assistance and financial support to the budding event. Over the next few years it would help the now independent festival grow into the fourth-largest festival of its kind in the United States.

Even where no brick and mortar festival could be imported or established Frameline Distribution, now home to the world's largest catalogue of lesbian and gay films, kept LGBT films available to anyone in the world who wanted to see them.

But opponents of Gay Rights seemed to be taking notice of Frameline's growing success in spreading LGBT media around the globe. The early 90s brought renewed attacks on the organization - and on its funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. "Our latest battle," Lumpkin wrote in the 1990 program guide, "is with conservative elements calling for the suppression of freedom of expression and the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal agency which supports thousands of organizations and artists around the country - including Frameline.”

Frameline fought back by orchestrating a letter writing campaign during the 1990 festival that sent thousands of messages in support of the NEA and Frameline to Washington DC. Tom DiMaria later credited those letters with making “a valuable contribution towards the subsequent reauthorization of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Frameline’s 1991 grant from the endowment.” But he also warned that the SFILGFF continued to be “repeatedly … targeted by organizations and individuals opposed to federal funding for lesbian and gay artists.”

The enemies of free expression and lesbian and gay arts scored a victory when the NEA was finally forced to stop funding the festival in 1992. “For the first time since 1987,” DiMaria wrote in the 1992 program guide, ”this Festival has been produced without support from the National Endowment for the Arts. … At Frameline, we’ve spent a lot of time in the last four months working with NEA staff to respond to the constant barrage of criticism aimed at the Endowment’s funding of our Festival. It is important to remember that these attacks do not originate at the NEA, but come from organizations and individuals who have long opposed lesbian and gay visibility in any form.”

The loss of the endowment’s vital support came as a blow to Frameline’s ambitious efforts for LGBT film. But it was just one of many hits that would make the mid 90s one of the most difficult eras in the organization’s history. A series of crises, controversies, budget shortfalls and tragedies would bring the organization to the edge of collapse – even as the festival it presented experienced a period of unprecedented growth.

THE FIFTEENTH SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 21 – 30, 1991 Castro Theater, Roxie Cinema, Eye Gallery

Frameline dedicated its 15th festival to the memory of LGBT cinema's latest and perhaps greatest loss to AIDS, Vito Russo. In a tribute in the festival program Michael Lumpkin eulogized Russo as “the spiritual founder of this festival and every lesbian and gay film festival throughout the world.”

Opening night brought the West Coast Premiere of “My Father is Coming”, Monika Treut’s pan-sexual comedy about “the quirky assimilation of a German girl into New York’s East Village”, complicated by the arrival of her Bavarian father. Closing night featured the West Coast Premiere of Derek Jarman’s “The Garden”, which Paul Bollwinkel described as “a challenging, ultimately very moving look at the link between homosexuality and religion”.

Cecilia Dougherty’s “Coal Miner’s Granddaughter”, Pina Bausch’s “The Complaint of the Empress”, Bruce LaBruce’s “No Skin Off My Ass”, Jan Oxenberg’s “Thank You and Good Night” Jochen Hick’s “Via Appia” and P.J. Castanaletta’s “Together Alone” were some of the other features that made their debut at the 15th festival.

Stuart Marshall’s “Over Our Dead Bodies”, The New York Testing The Limit Collective’s “Voices From the Front”, and Robert Hilferty’s “Stop the Church” were among the year’s AIDS documentaries. Peter Adair’s and Janet Cole’s “Absolutely Positive” and Catherine Saalfield’s “Among Good Christian Peoples” became the first films funded by the Frameline Completion fund to make their festival debuts.

Notable shorts included David Weissman’s “Complaints”, John Greyson’s “The Making of Monsters”, Pratibha Parmar’s “Khush”, Marlon Riggs’s “Anthem” and Tom Bonauro’s “Free Love” (a music video for Voice Farm). “Passing the Bucks: Funding for Lesbian and Gay Media,” a panel on funding options for Queer filmmakers, and “Psycho Killers and Twisted Sisters: Gay and Lesbian Stereotypes of the Silver Screen”, a clip show with commentary by film scholar Daniel Mangin were two of the year’s special programs.

A MILESTONE FOR GENDER PARITY: ANNETTE FÖRSTER

But the 1991 festival's greatest milestone came with the introduction of Dutch film scholar Annette Förster as Frameline’s first lesbian co-programmer – finally satisfying a demand first voiced by the angry women in the infamous Lesbian riots of 1981 and ‘86 .In addition to sharing general programming duties she put together a retrospective of works by 1991 Frameline Award winner Elfi Mikesh, curated a special program on the films of Su Friedrich, and selected an eight-film series investigating Catholic Iconography in Lesbian Cinema. Förster returned to Amsterdam after the festival, but Frameline has never again been without at least one female co-programmer on staff.

MICHAEL LUMPKIN EXITS, MARK FINCH RETURNS

Soon after the 15th festival came to a close film makers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman asked Michael Lumpkin if he would be interested in serving as co-producer of a documentary they were hoping to make based on Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet. Lumpkin was feeling burned out after 11 years at Frameline’s helm and wanted to say yes – but only if the right person would step in to take his place at the Festival. The one and only qualified candidate for the job, as far as Lumpkin was concerned, was Mark Finch.

After Finch agreed to take his place at Frameline, Lumpkin made his exit. A new era was about to begin – a point Finch seemed eager to drive home with a saucily retro trailer and poster for his first festival featuring the tag line, “that was then, this is now.”

JENNI OLSON

Finch wasn’t the only eager young newcomer who assumed an influential role at Frameline in 1992. Minnesota native Jenni Olson, who had founded the Minneapolis/St. Paul Lesbian, Gay, Bi & Transgender film festival in 1986, was recruited to take Förster’s place as guest lesbian programmer. She and Finch would form a strong professional and personal bond as they worked together to advance the cause of queer film and take Frameline to new heights.

THE SIXTEENTH SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 19 – 28, 1992 Castro Theater, Roxie Cinema, Eye Gallery, Pacific Film Archive

Finch opened his first Frameline festival with a sneak preview of Richard Schmiechen’s inspiring documentary Changing Our Minds: The Story of Dr. Evelyn Hooker, a biography of the crusading straight psychologist whose research proved that homosexuality is not a mental illness.

Screenings over the next ten days ranged from the West Coast premieres of Caught Looking and North of Vortex by Constantine Giannaris, to the Bay Area premieres of Nigel Finch’s The Lost Language of Cranes and The Twin Bracelets, Yu-Shan Huang’s “lesbian version of Raise the Red Lantern.”

Jaime Chavarri’s The Affairs of Love and Rosa von Praunheim’s Affengeil (Life is Like a Cucumber) also screened in the ‘92 festival. Noteworthy shorts included Cheryl Dunye’s Vanilla Sex and She Don’t Fade, Richard Kwieniowski’s Actions Speak Louder Than Words, Chasing the Moon by Dawn Suggs, and Mark Christopher’s The Dead Boys Club, one of the festival’s all-time favorite shorts.

The year’s other highlights included “Sex, Lesbians and Videotape” and “She Likes Girls”, two of a number of shorts programs curated by Olson, a tribute to 1992 Frameline Award winner Marlon Riggs, and four programs of works by Latino/a filmmakers designed by guest curator David Olivares to help the festival “reach beyond its familiar constituency and reach a new audience.”

Special programs such as “She IS Seeing Things: A Panel Discussion on Lesbian Film and Video”, “Barry Walters’ Fabulous World of Queer Pop Video” and “TRUE COLORS: Film And Videomakers Discuss Their Work and Issues of Diversity” took stock of the current state of queer media, circa 1992.

Revivals of 1930’s Borderline, 1936’s Craig’s Wife, 1951’s Olivia, 1969’s That Tender Touch, 1979’s Ernesto and 1980’s Can’t Stop the Music provided a survey of its past.

While a preview of LGBT cinema's possible future came with the premieres of three landmark works from the movement film scholar and critic B. Ruby Rich had only recently dubbed The New Queer Cinema: Christopher Munch’s The Hours and Times, Tom Kalin’s Swoon and Greg Araki’s The Living End, which Finch featured as the closing night film.

As the Castro Theater’s curtain closed on Araki’s edgy road movie, Finch’s first festival ended on a high, if highly-debated, note. Audience members seemed to either love or hate the film. Which probably suited Mark just fine.

“He was truly fearless about wanting to bring to people the broadest range of messages and images and insights about lesbian and gay life,” Danny Mangin later recalled. “A lot of times he made choices that made the gay community very uncomfortable, but he just believed in putting the gay and lesbian world out there, and letting the public, letting audiences decide for themselves what was going on.”

“His friends and colleagues recognized him as a fighter in the trenches for art,” wrote San Francisco Chronicle reporter Peter Stack. “His attitude about homosexual films embraced a surprisingly egalitarian outlook, and the film festivals he helped shape in San Francisco and London in essence took homosexuality itself out of the closet for a larger world to behold.”

“Artists all over the world appreciated him for it,” Mangin continued, “because he gave them a chance that no one else would. If there was one curator in the world who was going to fight for them, it was Mark Finch."

Mark fought for all kinds of queer filmmakers. But the auteurs working on the New Queer Cinema’s cutting edge seemed to excite him the most.

According to Stack, Finch saw the New Queer Cinema as “a distinctive art form driven and shaped by its own activism. … He saw these films as an entire world coming into a light, carrying with it the shadings of an extraordinary humanity, beautiful at times, ugly at others, shallow or flamboyant or tragic, but undeniably vital.”

Finch’s enthusiastic embrace of the New Queer Cinema would have a big impact at Frameline over the next few years. It would also help to shape the future of LGBT film, as the raw indie movies he showcased pushed the festival audience out of its comfort zone … and the audience proved ready to push back.

THE SEVENTEENTH SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 18 – 27, 1993 Castro Theater, Roxie Cinema, Eye Gallery, AMC Kabuki Theater, SF Art Institute, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, Towne 3 Theater, San Jose

The 17th festival brought two key personnel changes to Frameline. Jill Jacobs replaced Tom Di Maria as Executive Director, while Jenni Olson moved up from guest curator to permanent festival co-director alongside Mark Finch. Their first festival as a full-fledged team would be the biggest yet, starting with a first-time expansion to San Jose.

Finch and Olson kicked the festival off in grand style with dual opening night ceremonies at the Castro Theater and the Towne 3 Theater in San Jose followed by the simultaneous two-city West Coast premiere of Forbidden Love, Aerlyn Weissman and Lynn Fernies’s documentary/feature hybrid look at lesbian life in pre-Stonewall Canada and the history of the lesbian sex novel.

They packed the days that followed with an ambitious series of premieres, revivals, shorts programs and special events, including an evening with filmmaker and 1993 Frameline Award Winner Pratibha Parmar, a panel on Funding for Lesbian and Gay artists, “(Mis)Leading Ladies/Self-made Men: Film, TV and Transexuality”, a clip show and talk on transgender representation on film with film historian Daniel Mangin and writer/performance artist Kate Bornstein, and the “steamy, voyeuristic” presentation of “The First Annual Gay Men’s Erotic Safe Sex Video Awards” (with clips) live on the Castro stage.

Olson and Finch’s picks for the year’s revivals ranged from Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche to Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses and George Schlatter’s Norman is that You? They showcased the best of the year’s documentaries in “D-Days”, a series of noon to 8 pm screenings at Eye Gallery – though a few of the docs, including Teodoro Maniaci and Francine M Rzeznick’s One Nation Under God managed to squeeze into the theaters too.

1993’s shorts programs introduced the Frameline audience to a flood of notable new works by Isaac Julien, Todd Verow, Catherine Saalfield, Jack Walsh, Eric Slade, Jim Hubbard, Nancy Kates, Augie Robles, Monika Treut, Thomas Allen Harris, Hirouki Oki, Dawn Suggs, Sadie Benning, Cheryl Dunye, Cecilia Dougherty, Wieland Speck and many others.

Dutch feminist icon Marleen Gorris’s feature length The Last Island received its Bay Area premiere. West Coast debuts included Amos Gutman’s Amazing Grace, Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein (featuring Tilda Swinton), Vince Colyer’s Being at Home With Claude and Irma Achten’s Dutch Lesbian feature Belle – the first of two closing night films.

World premieres included Kris Clarke and Sarah Mortimer’s Confessions of a Pretty Lady with Sandra Bernhard, and closing night’s final feature, Richard Glatzers Grief starring Kent Fuhr, Alexis Arquette, Craig Chester and Illeanna Douglas. Glatzer’s “smart, uncomplicated, old-fashioned comedy” was a stark contrast to Greg Araki’s angry closing night entry of the year before. It set the template for many more gay comedies to come.

Its relatively mainstream (if low-budget) aesthetic and accessible story telling – along with the ‘93 festival’s lack of major features from the New Queer Cinema’s anointed auteurs – left some thinking that B. Ruby Rich’s highly-touted movement had already peaked by the time she gave it a name.

The `94 festival would make them think again.

THE EIGHTEENTH SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 9 – 19, 1994 Castro Theater, Roxie Cinema, Center for the Arts, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, Towne 3 Theater, San Jose

The “New Queer Cinema”, or NQC, which had seemed surprisingly under-represented in the ‘93 festival came roaring back in 1994, for better and for worse. The local premiere of Rose Troche’s Go Fish on opening night led the way.

Triumphant screenings at Sundance and Berlin and an unprecedented distribution deal with Samuel Goldwyn had made Troche's film the NQC’s new standard-bearer and one of the festival’s most anticipated events. Frameline’s opening night crowd cheered the film’s indie black and white look, appealingly diverse cast (featuring co-writer Guinevere Turner) off-kilter romance, and loose ensemble acting.

Their enthusiastic response seemed to prove that the New Queer Cinema could be a hit with mainstream lesbian audiences. B. Ruby Rich – recognizing the San Francisco festival’s unique importance as LGBT film’s “ground zero” – would later describe the screening as the NQC’s “culminating moment.

Other well-received screenings of Bruce La Bruce’s Super 8½ and shorts by Todd Verow (Built for Endurance) and Todd Haynes (Dottie Gets Spanked) showed that gay men could embrace the NQC’s unconventional films too. But the angry response to a sneak preview of Steve McLean’s Post Cards From America during a tribute to 1994 Frameline Award winner Christine Vachon proved that Frameline’s audience could only be pushed so far.

Vachon, one of the NQC’s most influential figures, was an executive producer on Go Fish and the producer of Post Cards From America. But filmgoers who showed up at her tribute looking for another sexy Go Fish style-romp were in for a shock. McLean’s ambitious experimental biopic of poet and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz plunged them deep into its subject’s harrowing and often brutal life.

B. Ruby Rich would call the near riot that followed Mark Finch’s “darkest hour”.

“The lesbians in the house,” Rich wrote in 1999, “were mad at the exclusively male focus, while the gay men emerged furious at the ‘negative’ representations: hustling, drugs, and alienation were not the images of gayness they wanted projected to America.”

McLean’s non-traditional narrative, blunt visuals and raw style – all trademarks of the NQC – didn’t help. The audience’s hostile and vocal response would prove a near fatal blow to the once promising movement’s fragile popularity – just days after it had found its greatest success with Go Fish.

Rich later wrote that the New Queer Cinema movement she had named just two year earlier “gasped its last breath”, at the disastrous screening. (Though Frameline audiences would have to sit through a few more death rattles before the NQC’s coffin was finally nailed shut.)

Lingering anger over McLean’s film cast an unfortunate shadow over the rest of a strong lineup of crowd-pleasing programs and films. The festival closed with the Bay Area premiere of “Desperate Remedies”, New Zealand directors Stewart Marshall and Peter Wells’ “insanely campy bodice-ripper about a turn-of-the-century lipstick lesbian and the ridiculously handsome men who seek to defame her.” By then the 1994 event had broken all previous records to become the biggest yet.

A post-festival press release announced that attendance had reached 55,000, an almost unbelievable leap from 1991’s 19,600. But attendance wasn’t the only thing that shot up in 1994. Festival expenses did too. Paying the bills drove the seemingly successful Frameline to the brink of bankruptcy As the board struggled to keep the organization afloat, festival insiders began to fear that Finch and Olson’s groundbreaking 18th festival might also be the last.

FRAMELINE IN THE MID-90s

“Late in 1994,” Susan Stryker wrote in her 25th Anniversary Festival History, “most outsiders would have seen Frameline as an organization on the brink of a wildly successful future, ideally positioned to amplify - and benefit from - the recent explosion of interest in the ‘new queer cinema.’ Frameline's budget increased geometrically as money flowed in from private and corporate sources, doubling every year during the first half of the 90s. It ballooned from just over $100,000 in 1991 to about $800,000 in 1994.”

“Unfortunately,” Stryker continued, “serious difficulties lay ahead. A chronic deficit reached crisis proportions when bills came due for the 18th Festival. The situation reflected the paradoxes of explosive growth – an organization that generated half a million dollars in one fiscal year could bring in a million the next and still find itself $100,000 in the hole.”

When Executive Director Jill Jacobs left after just one festival Frameline Board member Peter Fowler volunteered to fill the void on an interim basis. Fowler deserves credit for stepping into the breach. But the lack of consistent leadership left the organization adrift at a key moment.

In October 1994 former Los Angeles Lesbian & Gay Film Festival President Tess Martin was brought in as the new ED and given a mandate to balance the books. In November she and the Frameline board announced they were scaling the 1995 festival back and laying-off most of the staff. Jenni Olson was among those let go.

The move surprised the Frameline community, but by early January preparations for the once endangered 1995 festival seemed to be back on track. Finch was even making plans to add an ambitious film market modeled on the one held every year during the Berlin Film Festival. Strand Releasing’s Marcus Hu had already been chosen to receive the Frameline Award. Finch had agreed to present the World Premiere of NQC auteur Todd Verow’s “Frisk” (which Hu had produced) after the presentation of the award on closing night.

It would turn out to be one of the most controversial programming decisions of Finch’s career … and one of the last.

MARK FINCH 1961 – 1995

On the afternoon of January 14, 1995, a security guard discovered a briefcase on the Golden Gate Bridge’s eastern walkway. Inside, he found a suicide note signed by Mark Finch.

It guided the reader to more notes in Mark's office desk. He had apparently spent the morning calmly composing the last of them – some of which included details on his plans for the upcoming festival – while those around him never suspected a thing. Then, he had walked casually out to the street, hailed a taxi to take him to the bridge, left his briefcase on the sidewalk, and jumped to his death. Surprisingly, no one saw him make the leap.

Those who had been with him that morning – and everyone who knew him – were left to wonder how they could have failed to see what was happening, and what could have pushed Finch over the edge.

“Rumors abounded about his green-card status, a positive HIV test, and scandals involving gross financial misconduct at Frameline,” Susan Stryker wrote in her history of the festival. “The far less sensational truth was that Finch had suffered his entire life with a serious clinical depression. Notes left for friends and co-workers stressed that his own inner dynamics, not the recent turmoil at Frameline, lay at the root of his decision.”

San Francisco Chronicle reporter Peter Stack called Mark’s final notes “an eloquent yet curiously methodical last statement by a man who sought release from a long, compounding depression.”

“Finch asked friends and colleagues not to blame themselves or feel guilty or speculate about why he chose to jump” Stack wrote. “The notes -- there were 10 of them, some typed, some handwritten -- said there was no single reason for his actions, and he seemed almost as astonished as anyone about the fact that he was doing it.”

“A world of friends and artists and co-workers was stunned at the loss,” Stack continued. “They wept or could not speak. When they did speak, they broke down as they talked about their friend.” Jenni Olson's grief over the loss of her friend and former colleague would inspire her award winning film, The Joy of Life and drive her to become an outspoken advocate for the installation of a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Finch was idolized by young filmmakers for his unflagging support of new work,” Stryker recalled. “Only 33 at the time of his death, Finch was also respected by senior colleagues. He left a distinct imprint on Frameline, the Festival, and the wider queer film industry.”

On February 26, fans, co-workers and friends from every corner of Mark’s world joined his mother and younger brother in the Castro Theater for a moving celebration of his life. They shared their memories of Mark through eulogies and film clips, and mourned the loss of a son, a brother, a friend, a colleague, and a visionary advocate for queer film.

By then, efforts to salvage the 19th festival Finch had just started to program were already underway. Finch’s programming assistant Boone Nguyen had agreed to step in as Programming Director. Long time volunteer, intern and press assistant Jennifer Morris had assumed the duties of Festival Co-programmer.

Finch's ambitious plans for a film market were scrapped, But with the support of Executive Director Tess Martin and Frameline veterans Bob Hawk, Marcus Hu and Michael Lumpkin, Nguyen and Morris would go on to create a diverse and exciting festival worthy of his memory.

THE NINETEENTH SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 9 – 18, 1995 Castro and Victoria Theaters, Southern Exposure Gallery

The still traumatized and cash-strapped Frameline’s 19th festival got off to a great start with the debut of one of the festival crowd's all-time favorite trailers, David Weissman’s The Short, Short Trailer starring Marga Gomez as Ricky Ricardo and Lulu as Lucy. Both Weissman’s trailer and the festival were dedicated to Mark Finch.

Opening night continued with Maria Maggenti’s Lesbian Rom Com, The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls In Love (which proved to be a major hit with the opening night crowd – if not with B. Ruby Rich S). It ended it with Barry Shils’ delirious feature length documentary, Wigstock: The Movie, an unforgettable journey through the East Village Drag underground, by way of the band shell in Tompkins Square Park. In between, the opening night gala kept spirits high.

In the days that followed rookie programmers Boone Nguyen and Jennifer Morris treated festivalgoers to “more features and premieres than ever before”, and an “unprecedented number of lesbian feature films.” Highlights included Aerlyn Weissman and Lynn Fernie’s documentary, Fiction and Other Truths: A Film about Jane Rule, Maria Luisa Bemberg’s Argentine period lesbian nun drama, I The Worst of All, and Midnight Dancers, Mel Chionglo’s “powerfully erotic indictment of the effects of crime and poverty on the lives of three brothers,” that had been banned in its native Philippines.

The 19th festival also saw the first appearance of two programs that have gone on to take a cherished place in the festival calendar: “Fun in Boys Shorts” and “Fun in Girls Shorts.” In every festival since these upbeat collections of the year’s most entertaining shorts have been featured in eagerly anticipated screenings on the mornings of the festival’s first Saturday and last day. And every year the festival directors take to the stage to introduce the program wearing shorts – a tradition first introduced by Mark Finch and carried on by Nguyen and Morris.

As 1995’s closing night drew near the low budget festival the two newcomers had put together was already a hit with the Frameline crowd. “Given the circumstances,” wrote Susan Stryker, “the 19th Festival was a resounding success. Attendance figures were only a few thousand tickets short of 1994's record of 55,000, and corporate sponsorship levels hit an all-time high.”

But once again, an otherwise popular festival would be overshadowed by a controversy sparked by Mark Finch’s unwavering support for the New Queer Cinema, when the closing night screening of Todd Verow’s Frisk Finch had programmed before his death sparked a mass walk out by outraged members of the Castro crowd.

According to San Francisco Examiner film critic Barry Walters the evening began on a positive note with the presentation of the Frameline Award to Marcus Hu, and a tribute to Finch. “Not only was the emotion in the room high,” Walters wrote, “but the crowd had been primed for something special … the featured film on the festival's closing night, which, of course, intentionally falls on Gay Pride Day.”

As Verow’s grim and grisly tale of a remorseless gay serial killer played out on the screen, the mood quickly soured. “At least half of the Castro Theatre's 1,500 sold-out seats were abandoned,” Walters wrote, “as filmgoers left seething with anger, some even screaming at the screen.”

Filmmaker Magazine columnist Charles Lofton wrote that the enraged audience “demanded an explanation for Frisk’s violence and technical flaws.” Marcus Hu later told B. Ruby Rich that the intensity of the crowd’s fury had him literally fearing for his life.

The controversy over Frisk would leave a pall over both the 1995 festival and the struggling New Queer Cinema (which B. Ruby Rich had already declared dead). Barry Walters panned the film in his Examiner review as “an awkward and often boring exercise in pretention by marginal talents who take themselves too seriously.”

Unfortunately for Verow and his colleagues in the NQC, lesbian and gay filmgoers were beginning to see their entire movement in the same light – thanks in large part to publicity around the poorly received Frameline screenings of films like The Living End, Postcards From America and now Frisk.

But in 1995 what mattered most at Frameline was that Martin, Nguyen, Morris and their team had made it through closing night. Their heroic efforts had saved the festival. Now the job of rebuilding the troubled organization could begin.

Though first the revolving door in Frameline’s executive office would have to take a few more spins.

JENNIFER MORRIS

By the end of the 19th festival Jennifer Morris had clearly found her calling and her cause. The Downey, California native had already made a name for herself on San Francisco’s queer scene as a DJ under the rubric Junkyard. She would have an even greater impact in the years to come as a high profile member of the festival staff, where she would become known for her passionate advocacy for lesbian films and filmmakers, embrace of the trans community, skillful programming, and dapper suits.

But Tess Martin and Boone Nguyen had had enough. Soon after the festival ended Martin announced she was leaving the non-profit world to start a business. Nguyen, who had come to Frameline right after getting his BA in American Studies at Yale, revealed he was moving to San Diego to pursue his MA in ethnic studies at UCSD. As the Board began looking for their replacements, one candidate for both jobs stood out. Former Festival Director Michael Lumpkin.

MICHAEL LUMPKIN RETURNS

Lumpkin, who had finally wrapped up his duties as co-producer of The Celluloid Closet documentary, had been watching Frameline’s decline with growing concern. In late 1995 he accepted the board’s invitation to return to the organization as both ED and Festival Director – a two-for-one arrangement designed to help cut down on payroll.

“I came back knowing that I would be here for an extended period of time,” he told Filmmaker Magazine columnist Charles Lofton a few months later, “because I think Frameline’s biggest problem of the past few years was an annual turnover of directors and staff. There’s been no stability at the top of the organization.”

Lumpkin would devote more than a decade to stabilizing and rebuilding the struggling organization. He would also oversee the programming of a series of increasingly popular festivals – starting with the 20th edition in 1996.

THE 20th SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 21–30, 1996 Castro Theater, Roxie Cinema, Victoria Theater

Lumpkin and Morris opened their first festival as a team with the local premiere of Cheryl Dunye’s Watermelon Woman, “one of the first (openly acknowledged) feature films by a black lesbian”, preceded by a video clip of Republican Congressman Peter Hoekstra denouncing the film – and its NEA funding – from the House Floor.

Frameline’s opening night crowd booed Hoekstra, then stood to cheer as Watermelon Woman came to a close. Dunye’s eclectic mix of genres, unconventional narrative style and focus on the politics of sex and race proved that the much talked about demise of the New Queer Cinema wouldn’t keep LGBT filmmakers from creating innovative and ambitious works.

Exciting new offerings from festival and/or NQC veterans John Greyson, Barbara Hammer and Rosa von Praunheim backed that message up. First time filmmaker Susan Streitfeld’s Female Perversions seemed to do the same, thanks to its sometimes-opaque narrative and wonderfully stylized star turn by the still underground Tilda Swinton. But the presence of Field of Dreams actress Amy Madigan in the role of Swinton’s depressed kleptomaniac sister hinted at a different story.

As the NQC faded away, some “LGBT” movies weren’t just going mainstream. They were going Hollywood – and straight. Two of the 1996 festival’s most talked about “lesbian” films were made by straight men and featured heterosexual Hollywood stars in lesbian roles.

The neo-noir Bound was written and directed by brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski (in the days before Larry became Lana). Straight actresses Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon starred as a gangster’s moll and a plumber who meet, fall in love, have a couple of steamy sex scenes, take on the mob and hit the road to a happy ending. Michael Winterbottom’s Butterfly Kiss starred Amanda Plummer as a murderous lesbian who takes to the road to terrorize everyone she meets as she frantically searches for a long lost love.

These straight gay films had B. Ruby Rich and others wondering if the innovative LGBT film culture nurtured in festivals like the SFILGFF was being coopted by outsiders eager to cash in. But the enthusiastic reception for Bound (The San Francisco Chronicle’s Edward Guthmann wrote that the “Castro exploded” ) seemed to prove that the Frameline crowd was eager for more technically polished and coherent films in the Hollywood style – no matter who made them or where they were from.

Even perennial Canadian bad boy Bruce la Bruce seemed to be cleaning up his act. The San Francisco Examiner’s Barry Walters praised la Bruce’s Hustler White for its the “cleverly scripted dialogue and striking cinematography” and called the “sweet and playful” feature la Bruce’s “most accessible and professional film.”

But LGBT cinema’s apparent rush away from the fringe and into the mainstream wasn’t the only story unfolding across the festival’s screenings of 55 features and over 150 shorts. San Francisco Chronicle reporter Peter Stack noted an increase in films “on transgender themes” and quoted “festival organizers” who told him films on “trans-sexuality, cross-dressing and transgender lifestyles appear to be the biggest growth segment in the homosexual film industry”. This trans film boom would explode in the years to come.

Documentaries in the 1996 festival included Debra Chasnoff’s It’s Elementary, I Shall Not Be Removed: The Life of Marlon Riggs, first time filmmaker Karen Everett’s tribute to her late teacher and mentor, and Family Values, Pam Walton’s look at her relationship with her homophobic right wing Christian father.

Lumpkin and Morris’ only nods to the festival’s historic 20th anniversary came in two nostalgic programs of shorts. “The First Festival” recreated the line-up of 8 mm films shown back in 1977. “Your Shorts Are Showing” presented a selection of favorite shorts from the decades since. Otherwise, just about everything in the festival was brand new – much to the surprise of critic Dennis Harvey, who praised the festival for showing “great films” but expected the landmark year to inspire Frameline to spend more time looking back. “The major disappointment of this year’s festival” he wrote in The Bay Guardian, “is the minimal lip service it pays to its own illustrious history. ” The truth was, the flood of new LGBT films in 1996 had left Lumpkin and Morris little time for retrospectives.

Closing night was dedicated to filmmaker Peter Adair, winner of the year’s Frameline Award, who had died due to complications of AIDs just three days earlier. The award had been presented to the already seriously ill Adair the previous January during a special tribute at the Castro Theater.

The festival wrapped at the Castro with the local premiere of Stonewall, Nigel Finch’s stirring, sincere and straightforward retelling of the modern gay movement’s founding battle that would win the year’s audience award for best feature. As the Castro crowd applauded the film’s final credits, relief that Lumpkin and Morris had spared them the pain of another Frisk fiasco surely added to their joy.

Their enthusiastic response brought a successful festival – which racked up 28 sold out screenings and 50,582 attendees – to an upbeat close.

FRAMELINE IN THE LATE 90s: REBRANDING AND REBUILDING

As Michael Lumpkin worked to put Frameline’s financial house back in order in the late 1990s America’s ongoing culture wars over government funding for queer art continued to make grants from traditional non-profit funders like the National Endowment for the Arts hard to come by. (A point driven home by Frameline’s screening of Hoekstra’s tirade against Watermelon Woman before its opening night premier.)

Lumpkin and the Frameline Board were forced to look to new sponsors – including businesses eager to bond with Frameline’s increasingly well-heeled crowd. The resulting rise in corporate branding that began with the 20th festival caused observers like B. Ruby Rich to wonder what the future would bring, even as she acknowledged the realities that made the money hard to resist.

“The term,” Rich wrote, “ is niche marketing,” while listing festival sponsors Charles Schwab, Suburu and a new “Rainbow” credit card as obvious examples of the trend. “Not that I think the arrival of money automatically spoils the goods, nor that these festivals can survive without this help, despite cherished notions of purity. Still, the bottom line should be the aesthetic quality and importance of the films and the nature of the audience response.”

Rich was happy to report that Frameline – in spite of its growing dependence on corporate sponsors – still made the grade. “This festival is still ground zero,” she wrote, “… I’m convinced this festival is crucial, now more than ever, as box-office figures assert more and more clout … the SFILGFF has got to keep everyone honest.”

As major sponsors such as AT&T and Wells Fargo played greater public roles at the Festival in the coming years, Morris and Lumpkin would do their best to keep everyone “honest” by balancing the needs of filmmakers, filmgoers and funders while never losing sight of the festival’s founding ideals. Some would always be ready to grumble about the corporate branding at the festival, but over the next few years the money these new relationships generated would help Frameline to make it out of its mid-90s slump alive.

THE 21st SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 20–29, 1997 Castro Theater, Roxie Cinema, Victoria Theater

Michael Lumpkin and Jennifer Morris packed the 21st SFILGFF with an impressive program of premieres, retrospectives and tributes to create a festival critic B. Ruby Rich called “the best in years”.

Opening Night at the Castro showcased the world premiere of Brian Sloane’s gay college reunion comedy, I Think I Do, the first of ten first time features in 1997 by directors who had made a splash at a previous festival with a popular short. (Sloane’s Pool Boys had been a hit in 1993.) Victor Mignatti (Broadway Damage), Ela Troyano (Latin Boys Go to Hell) and Ira Sachs (The Delta) were a few of the year’s other promising filmmakers making the short-to-feature leap. Their return highlighted the vital role being played by the SFILGFF and the rest of the gay film festival circuit in incubating new queer talent.

But to Variety critic Dennis Harvey this new queer talent’s general rejection of the New Queer Cinema’s edgy aesthetic seemed to mark the end of an era. “… pics like opening-nighter I Think I Do and the next evenings It’s in the Water,” Harvey wrote, “rep a new spirit amongst indie gay filmmakers – one far more slickly commercial in production values and broad-appeal tenor than titles from the prior decade.”

Whether or not that strategy could ever actually bring a gay film major cross-over success in straight markets was debated by reps from Miramax, Fine Line, Paramount, October, Strand, Goldwyn, Trimark, First Look, Gramercy and Orion Classics at a “Selling Out: The Marketing of Queer Cinema” forum at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Transgender issues got their now annual festival workout in a “Gender Bender” shorts program, Candace Schermerhorn and Bestor Cram’s documentary You Don’t Know Dick: Courageous Hearts of Transsexual Men, and a trio of foreign films. Riyad Vinci Waida’s A Mermaid Called Aida, told “the real life story of India’s most famous transsexual”. Yon Fan’s Bugis Street told a fictional story of transsexuals and transvestites sharing a sleazy Singapore hotel in the 1970s. British TV director Richard Spence’s first theatrical feature , Different For Girls, told an entertaining tale of two school chums who unexpectedly reconnect years later after one of them has transitioned from male to female.

The choice of Spence’s film for closing night seemed to affirm the importance of this growing transgender genre within queer cinema. Though a shorts program dubbed “Hermaphrodites With Attitude” suggested that transgender might not be the festival’s final frontier.

A number of milestones inspired Lumpkin and Morris to bring back the retrospectives critic Dennis Harvey had missed the previous year.

The 100th anniversary of the founding of the modern homosexual movement by German scholar Magnus Hirschfield sparked a retrospective of German films. The soon-to-be-completed reversion of Hong Kong to Chinese control provided the “opportunity to look back at the complex and exciting depictions of homosexuality and gender in recent Hong Kong cinema in a special six-film series.” The presentation of the Frameline Award to Britain’s Channel Four allowed for the screening of a number of the gay-themed shows that had won the channel the award. The joint 20th anniversary of their debuts called for revivals of three landmark documentaries: the Mariposa Film Group’s Word Is Out, Elizabeth Stevens, Frances Reid and Cathy Zheutlin’s In the Best Interests of the Children, and Artie Bressan’s Gay USA.

New documentaries included Macky Alston’s Family Name, Monte Bramer’s Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer’s End, long-time festival favorite Andrea Weiss’ A Bit of Scarlet and David Furnish’s intimate portrait of life with his future husband, Elton John: Tantrums and Tiaras.

Fire, Deepa Mehta’s brilliant dramatic feature about two women struggling for freedom and self-expression in modern New Delhi, proved to be one of the year’s highlights. Its cliff hanger ending had the members of the sold out Castro Crowd holding their breath – then exhaling as one as the outcome was finally revealed – and rising in unison to cheer as the credits rolled.

Other standout features included Martin Waltz’s German horror spoof, Killer Condom, Ronnie Larson’s “humorous, touching and – best of all – explicit” Shooting Porn, Tony Vitale’s straight/gay roommate sitcom Kiss Me Guido, Kristine Peterson’s “fresh, honest look at bisexual love” Slaves to the Underground, David DeCoteau’s "boldly explicit" Leather Jacket Love Story, Yvonne Rainer’s “skillful, crafty and thought-provoking” MURDER and murder, and John Greyson’s “candy-colored pop explosion” Uncut.

But Lillies, Greyson’s second film in the festival, topped them all. Set in a Canadian prison in 1952, it told a sometimes surreal story of inmates staging an elaborate theatrical production in hopes of convincing a Catholic Bishop to confess a long ago murder. Critic B. Ruby Rich called it intensely cinematic”. Frameline filmgoers, who gave Greyson’s masterpiece both a roof shaking standing ovation and the 1997 audience prize for best feature, obviously agreed.

They seemed to agree with Rich’s “best in years” review of the 21st festival too. Frameline’s wrap up press release reported that attendance had skyrocketed to 75,000 – an amazing increase of nearly 20,000 over the previous year.

THE 22nd SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 18–28, 1998 Castro Theater, Roxie Cinema, Victoria Theater

The jump in festival attendance in 1997 inspired Festival Director Michael Lumpkin to add a day to the 1998 edition by moving opening night from Friday to Thursday for the first time.

The now 11-day event – which B. Ruby Rich dubbed “unusually strong” – opened with the presentation of the 1998 Frameline Award to Dolly Hall, producer of The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love, All Over Me and 54. The local debut of Hall’s latest production, director Lisa Choldenko’s High Art, followed. Cholodenko and stars Ally Sheedy and Radha Mitchell joined Hall on stage to introduce the film.

Rich called Cholodenko’s highly praised feature about a lesbian photographer and her bisexual “Eve Harrington” “a sexy film, and a daring one.”. It proved to be just the first in a number of films focused on sexually adventurous characters that gave bisexuality a higher on screen profile at the festival than ever before.

Some of the others included Waris Hussein’s Mumbai-set Sixth Happiness, Ferzan Ozpetek’s Istanbul bathhouse-set Steam, Angelina Maccarone’s German lesbian romance Everything Will Be Fine, Hilary Brougher’s New York based low budget sci fi charmer, The Sticky Fingers of Time, Moira Armstrong’s story of a romance between two women in a small British town, A Village Affair, Jimmy Smallhorne’s portrait of a confused Irish American construction worker, 2by4, and Erotica: A Journey Into Female Sexuality, a documentary investigation of “women’s erotic fantasies and sexual practices”.

A Bi Girls and Bi Boys shorts program added even more titles to 1998’s flood of switch-hitting films, which finally came to an end on closing night as stars Jennifer Tilly, Lori Petty and Mitchell Anderson took to the Castro stage for the premiere of P.J. Castellaneta’s delightful pansexual ensemble comedy, Relax…It’s Just Sex.

The boom in transgender-themed films continued in 1998 too - and not just with stories of men becoming women. Female to male transsexuals (FTM) were at the heart of Hans Sceirl’s Dandy Dust, which the festival described as “an Alex-in-Wonderland romp through a genderfucked universe” and Christopher Lee and J Zapata’s Alley of the Tranny Boys, “the first-ever trans-on-trans FTM porn flick”. The festival also showcased a number of shorts on the topic, and presented "Tranny boyz talk sex, porn and videotape", a panel designed to give FTM filmmakers a chance to talk about bringing their stories to the screen.

But when it came to telling FTM stories, Susan Muska and Greta Olasfsdottir’s brilliantly crafted documentary The Brandon Teena Story, the “profoundly disquieting” tale of the rape and murder of an FTM teenager and two of his friends”, couldn’t be beat.

Other documentaries in the 1998 lineup ranged from Jochen Hick’s downbeat Sex/Life in LA to We’re Funny That Way, a profile of gay standup comics. Barbara Hammer’s The Female Closet investigated the impact of life in the closet on three women artists. Donna Deitch’s Angel On My Shoulder took an unflinching look at the last 18 months in the life of her friend, Nashville and Desert Hearts actress Gwen Welles. Dear Jesse recorded New York filmmaker Tim Kirkman’s return to the North Carolina hometown he shared with archconservative and homophobic Senator Jesse Helms. Lone Star Hate went to Tyler, Texas to uncover the truth behind “the gruesome 1993 gay-bashing murder of Nicholas West”.

Frameline’s examination of LGBT history continued with "Queer Innovators", a six part series designed to reintroduce festival audiences to the lesbian and gay pioneers behind many of the classics of underground and experimental cinema. Jean Cocteau, Jack Smith, Maya Deren, James Broughton, George Kuchar, Barbara Hammer, Marlon Riggs, Jan Oxenberg, Cheryl Dunye, Warren Sonbert, Ulrike Ottinger and Chantal Ackerman were some of the auteurs earning a place in the canon.

The 22nd festival’s international premieres included Zhang Yuan’s East Palace, West Palace, the first gay film from Mainland China, French filmmakers Phillip Brooks and Laurent Bocahut’s Woubi, Cheri, a documentary visit with some of the queer citizens of the Ivory Coast city of Abidjan, and Dakan, filmmaker Mohamed Carnara’s story of two Guinean school mates who fall in love, which the festival showcased as the “first West African feature film to deal with homosexuality."

The year’s new US features were all over the map too. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s Party Monster told a “chilling morality tale” based on the true story of a New York Club kid who murdered his drug dealer. Sara Moore’s Homo Heights took viewers into “a rarefied dream world of drag queen glitter and lovelorn lesbian longing”. Tanya Wexler’s Finding North followed a grieving gay boy and his wannabe fag hag on an ill-conceived trip to Texas. John Huckert’s Hard told the “gruesome, suspenseful and totally absorbing” story of an ill-advised romance between an LA cop and the suspect in a string of gay murders.

David Moreton’s Edge of Seventeen took viewers all the way back to 1984 and Sanduskey, Ohio for a “charming and poignant coming out piece” that won the hearts of Frameline festivalgoers and the 1998 Audience Prize for Best Feature. Variety critic Dennis Harvey called the film “unpretentious, funny and touching” and rated it as “a quintessential American Indie sleeper.”

But the year’s biggest surprise hit may have been its shortest film: the 1998 Festival trailer, Two Couples.

TWO COUPLES

Conceived, written and directed by Jeff Iorillo, produced by Cheryl Rosenthal, shot by Michael Knight, edited by Jonathan Hinman, graced with a perfectly synchronized Hollywood-worthy score by Alex Lasarenko and starring Sheryl Ann McDonald, Jennifer Joy, John Sabin and Galisteo Vitor as the title quartet, Two Couples took just 66 dialogue-free seconds to tell the hilarious story of two “straight” couples who get their sexual preferences sorted out during a chance encounter at the movies (making it a perfect fit with the 22nd Festival’s tagline, “movies that can change your life”).

The Frameline crowd cheered and howled when the trailer debuted in 1998 – and every time it was repeated over the next 10 days. Years later Iorillo and Rosenthal’s brilliant little film continues to inspire the same explosive reaction each time it is reprised with other past trailers on festival opening nights.

No Festival Trailer before or since - not even other well-received Iorillo and Rosenthal efforts such as Jesse Goes to Heaven, The Queer Witch Project or Game Show - has equaled Two Couples’ enduring popularity and impact, or achieved its cult status among Frameline fans.

THE FESTIVAL IN THE LATE 90s: KEEPING UP THE PACE

The trailer wasn’t’ the only thing fans and critics loved about the 1998 festival, but Lumpkin’s hope that adding an extra day to the schedule would bump up attendance didn’t pan out. The final tally came to 70,000 attendees – still a spectacular total but down from the ten-day festival the year before.

Michael would devote a lot of time over the next few years to trying to drive that number up – and keep it from falling.

THE 23rd SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 17–27, 1999 Castro Theater, Roxie Cinema, Victoria Theater

Morris and Lumpkin’s run of hit festivals continued in 1999 with a 23rd edition San Francisco Examiner critic Wesley Morris called a “comprehensive, masterfully programmed festival” in which “nearly every sexual experience is substantially represented". Starting with the frustrating sexual experience at the heart of the opening night film, Jim Fall’s Trick – the story of two newly acquainted young men searching in vain for a place to hook up.

Morris praised Fall’s “wholly conventional boy-meets-boy boy-looks-for-place to shag-boy love story” for capturing “the contagious ecstasy of a reciprocated crush” and called it “a great way to jump-start a festival, particularly one accentuating the positive, exhilarating aspects of an international lesbian-gay cinema.”

But fellow critic Dennis Harvey, who still seemed to be carrying a torch for the New Queer Cinema, once again expressed doubt. “A lot of observers,” he wrote in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, “have wondered: whither the radical statements, aesthetic and otherwise of that Poison, Swoon, Go Fish ‘renaissance’ of a while ago? Do we really need more formulaic adolescent coming-out demi fantasies?”

Harvey worried that in an era when “Hollywood is chockablock with homo sidekicks and indie features are pinker than ever” too many of the filmmakers in the festival seemed to be “shooting, however mistakenly for the demographic, rather than from the hip". But even he had to admit that the 1999 edition got “deeper the further you go” and held its “surprises”.

The year’s first surprise came with opening night’s dedication to the memory of recently deceased experimental filmmaker and poet James Broughton, and a screening of his three-minute film, High Kukus.

More gay elders took to the screen in Golden Threads, Lucy Winer’s profile of 93-year-old lesbian activist Christine Burton, I Know a Place, Roy Mitchell’s look at Bob Goderre, gay godmother to the queer community in a small Canadian steel town, and Yvonne Welbon’s Living With Pride: Ruth C. Ellis @ 100 – highlighted by an on stage appearance by centenarian Ruth Ellis herself.

John Scagliotti’s After Stonewall, Steve Yeager’s Divine Trash, Marco & Mauro La Vllla’s Hang the DJ, Greta Schiller’s The Man Who Drove With Mandela and Laura Plotkin’s Red Rain were a few of the festival's other noteworthy documentary films.

Guest curator Karl Bruce Knapper’s “The Color of Sex” took a “major look at race and sexuality” in LGBT cinema in a multi-program mix of retrospectives, panel discussions, premieres and a “special 10th anniversary screening and discussion of Marlon Riggs’ landmark film Tongues Untied.”

US dramatic features making their debut included Tom Donaghy’s The Story of a Bad Boy, Thom Fitzgerald’s Beefcake, Nick Katsapetses’ The Joy of Smoking and Victor Salva’s Rites of Passage.

Critic Wesley Morris found evidence of LGBT cinema’s evolving relationship with AIDS in what he didn’t find in any of these films. “AIDS is rarely if ever, used as a narrative subject or a plot point,” he wrote. “While none of the features or programmed shorts would purport to be post-AIDS of HIV, taken as a whole they also manage to take homosexuality into more fantastic, experimental, transcendent realms that refuse to give in to the disease and would rather be spooked by more cinematic (or literary) ghosts.”

Screenings of 1999 Frameline Award honoree Stanley Kwan’s new feature Hold Me Tight and new documentary Yang + Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema led off the year’s roster of international films from 27 countries. A strong South Asian flavor was added by Filipino director Gill Portes’ Miguel/Michelle, Nisha Ganatra’s Chutney Popcorn (“the first feature length film to represent the Indian American lesbian experience”), the Hindi drama Long Live Life, and Madras Eyes, the story of an Italian film director fascinated by a community of Indian eunuchs.

Other international highlights included the US debut of all eight hours of the much talked about British TV series Queer as Folk, the return of American director Rose Troche with her British made Bedrooms and Hallways, French director Francois Ozon’s Sitcom, the story of a family obsessed with a pet rat, German director Hermine Huntgeburth’s The Trio, a tale of three grifters Dennis Harvey described as like Paper moon, albeit “with excellent Winnebago-shaking sex scenes”, and Head On, Australian director Ana Kokkinos’ “narcotic ride through a power keg of racial tension, police homophobia and sexual abuse” that won Frameline’s first ever Dockers Khakis First Feature Award and a $10,000 prize.

In a year “laden with women’s work” centerpiece honors went to Aimee & Jaguar, German director Max Faberbock’s fact-based story of a World War II lesbian romance between a Nazi super-mom and a member of the Jewish underground. Anne Wheeler’s Better Than Chocolate, Mary DiLullo’s Dollface and Lea Pool’s Set me Free were just a few of the other films that made 1999 a banner year for lesbian film.

Monika Treut’s Gendernauts headlined the by now expected transgender lineup. Scott King’s Treasure Island kicked things off for the bisexuals. But 1999’s surge in films about queer youth proved to be the year’s most talked about trend.

Wesley Morris noted that opening night’s Trick was just the first of “an overwhelming number of films feasting on gays, lesbians and bisexuals way below a certain age”. Taiwanese director Lin Chen-Sheng’s Murmur of Youth, Nickolas Perry’s Israeli/American Speedway Junky, and Francisco J. Lombardi’s Peruvian/Spanish Don’t Tell Anyone were just a few of the other films that made “the unique joys and sorrows of queer youth” one of the 23rd festival’s dominant themes.

The trend reached its peak on closing night with the “US premiere of an equally romantic and charming story of young lesbian love from Sweden,” Lucas Moodyson’s Show Me Love.

Its sold out screening helped push 1999's festival attendance back up to an impressive 74,000 - just slightly below the record set two years before.

The 2000s

THE 24th SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

June 15-25, 2000 Castro Theater, Roxie Cinema, Victoria Theater

A wave of smart, well-made, and appealing movies helped transform the first SFILGFF of the new millennium into another landmark event for LGBT film.

Guest Lauren Ambrose in 2000

Opening night’s Punks, Patrik-Ian Polk’s “hot, new black comedy that breaks ground for both black and queer cinema”, Big Eden, Thomas Bezucha’s appealing fantasy about coming home, coming out and finding true love, Common Ground, Donna Deitch’s look at three-generations of gay life in a small Connecticut town, and closing night’s But I’m a Cheerleader, Jamie Babbit’s “hilarious swipe at so-called lesbian and gay rehabilitation camps” starring Natasha Lyonne, RuPaul and Clea Duvall, all seemed eager to prove that a queer film could be both subversive and fun to watch.

Psycho Beach Party, screenwriter/star Charles Busch’s parody of 60s beach movies co-starring Laura Ambrose as Chicklet, The Attack of the Giant Moussaka, Greek director Panos H. Koutras’ “drag UFO musical” featuring the title moussaka on a murderous rampage through the streets of Athens, and a "Slapstick Lesbians" short program showed Queer filmmakers still knew how to camp it up.

While the presentation of the 2000 Frameline Award to Barbara Hammer along with a retrospective of her work and the world premiere of her latest film, History Lessons, reminded festivals goers of queer film’s roots in both feminism and the avant garde.

Other noteworthy American features included Beat, Gary Walkow’s story of William S. Burroughs and his ill-fated wife starring Kiefer Sutherland and Courtney Love, The Broken Heart’s League, Greg Berlanti’s story of a West Hollywood gay softball team, Get Your Stuff, Max Mitchell’s tale of gay adoption, Just One Time, Lane Janger’s bi-sexualish marital comedy, Could be Worse!, Zack Stratis’ Greek American coming out story, and Julia Jay Pierrepont’s Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel, based on the life story of, and starring, queer icon Leslie Jordan.

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Paragraph 175 led the way for the year’s documentaries. Its saga of gay men trying to survive under the Nazis found its female match in But I was a Girl, Toni Bouman’s story of Dutch Jewish symphony conductor, lesbian, and resistance fighter Frieda Bellinfante.

Apostles of Civilized Vice, Zackie Achmat’s documentary history of South Africa’s queer community, took Frameline festivalgoers to a time and place on the other side of the world. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s brought them back to the USA and the present day with The Eyes of Tammy Faye, with its touching portrait of its tear stained star, and 101 Rent Boys, with its poignant interviews with its titular LA-based male prostitutes.

2000’s special presentations included the return of Queer as Folk, a multi-program look at “Gay Images in Spanish Films” curated by Alberto Calero Lugo, and “Killer Lesbians”, a B. Ruby Rich clip show on one of cinema’s most enduring stereotypes, accompanied by a retrospective of the films in which Rich’s deadly dykes made their debuts.

Julie Wyman’s A Boy Named Sue gave its name to one of the year’s transgender shorts programs. “Crossing the Gender Divide” was another

International premieres included French director Francois Ozon’s latest features, Criminal Lovers and Water Drops on Burning Rocks, Filipino director Mel Chionglo’s Burlesk King, Spanish director Miguel Garcia Borda’s Todo Me Pasa A Mi (Everything Happens to Me), Canadian director Rodrique Jean’s Full Blast, German director Jochen Hick’s No One Sleeps, Australian director Samantha Lang’s The Well and British filmmaker Aisling Walsh’s Forgive and Forget.

THE 24th SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN AND GAY FILM FESTIVAL

25th Annual San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival

File:Cover Page of Program for 25th San Francisco Gay Film Festival.png June 14 - 24, 2001 Castro Theater, Roxie Cinema, Victoria Theater, Herbst Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Frameline Award: The Festival's Founders Audience Awards: Best Feature: Iron Ladies Best Documentary: Scout's Honor Best Short: No Dumb Questions

In 2004 the festival changed its name to the shorter Frameline28, the festival being the 28th annual event. Subsequent festivals have followed this naming pattern.

In 2007 Frameline in conjunction with the Bay Area Bisexual Network hosted Bi Request a program of short films curated by Amy André, comprising a selection of films made by bisexual directors and/or about bisexual subjects. In their introduction to the evening, Frameline noted that "Bi Request was inspired by Frameline’s ongoing commitment to promote bisexual visibility and display bi images in film".

Additionally, two other bisexual themed feature films were presented, The DL Chronicles and The Two Sides of the Bed (Los dos lados de la cama). In March 2007, Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism and the South West Asian, North African Bay Area Queers (SWANABAQ) initiated a campaign to pressure Frameline to end its relationship with the Israeli government.

In an open letter signed by more than 100 artists and writers, including Sophie Fiennes, Elia Suleiman, Ken Loach, John Berger, Arundhati Roy, Ahdaf Soueif, Eduardo Galeano, Brian Eno, and Leon Rosselson, Frameline was asked "to honor calls for an international boycott of Israeli political and cultural institutions, by discontinuing Israeli consulate sponsorship of the LGBT film festival and not cosponsoring events with the Israeli consulate". In June 2007, Frameline made the unprecedented decision to pull a juried and listed film, The Gendercator, directed by Catherine Crouch, from the 2007 Festival weeks before the opening. Protests and debates surrounded the decision about the film came from mainly transgender activists and community members. Some denounced the 20-minute science fiction piece as demonising and slandering transgender people while others in the same communities protested what they saw as censorship. The film subsequently was both shown and pulled from other LGBT-related film festivals and continues to be used as a source for discussion on transgender issues, perspectives and censorship.

In October 2008, K. C. Price, former director of the SF Ninth Street Film Center, was named executive director of Frameline, joining Jennifer Morris as artistic director. In September 2011 Frameline announced the departure of Jennifer Morris, after seventeen years with the organization. Desiree Buford was named the new Director of Exhibition & Programming, and would oversee the festival along with K.C. Price.

Awards

The festival gives out four awards; "Best Documentary Award", the "First Feature Award", the "Audience Award", and the "Frameline Award" given annually to an individual who has played a key role in the history of LGBT cinema.

See also

• Cinema of the United States

External links

• Frameline, the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival website