"The most important LGBTQ documentary that you've never seen is available to watch right now and you absolutely should. This movie is quote widely considered to be the first feature film about gay people by gay people and quote had a huge impact when it was released and became an icon of the emerging gay rights movement in the 1970s. But for some reason this only has 1200 logs on Letterboxd. So one of the most horrifying things I've learned from doing this channel is how cyclical history is and how much we lose by not knowing history. Tony Gilroy commented on this for the show Andor actually. When someone asked how he'd be so prescient about the rise of fascism he said that he wasn't trying to make a show about the present but instead he merely studied how fascist movements arose in the past and the comparisons wrote themselves. A huge part of the way the right wing seizes power and oppresses people is by erasing history. This becomes so effective that it literally seeps into the judiciary even. Like recently a judge in Britain banned the group Palestine Action by comparing them to the suffragettes saying that the suffragettes operated transparently in the open and didn't engage in property damage. Which is completely nuts. Quote, This is the reason the right wing in America cares so much about Confederate statues and LGBTQ books in school libraries. They don't want you to know this history because then you'll understand that all gender and sexual identity is inherently socially constructed and political. So when I watched this movie, Word is Out, Stories of Some of Our Lives, I was frankly shocked not just by the movie but by reading the history around it too. The movie was made by six LGBTQ filmmakers and it's pretty simple conceptually. They interview 26 queer people about their life and experiences with gender and sexuality. This being 1977, it was the first movie to do this. So the radicalness comes not from the content but from the choice of subjects. Quote, And Russo would know, at the same time he was developing his book and it's heartbreaking reading the intro for it. He talks about how it was so hard to get people to talk about homosexuality even for a book. Quote, The response seldom varied. Or really, they would ask with a leer, are using people's real names? So when you see a woman born in the 1800s talking frankly about her experiences as a lesbian, it's radical in its simplicity. Because when have you ever seen video of a woman born in the 1800s talk about her experience as a queer person? Oh, I'm 77. I was born in December of 1898. How long have you been a lesbian? I never understand what that means because as far as I'm concerned, I was born that way. Or listen to queer people talk about their experiences with electroshock therapy or being threatened with chemical castration or being institutionalized as multiple of them do. But it is also incredibly heartwarming at times. You see interracial queer couples, lesbians with happy mixed families and, my favorite, an older queer married couple that holds hands while picking berries in a meadow. Some people have it all. Implicitly, what this film gets across most of all is how being queer is a political act inherently because being anything is a political act. An act that, unless we make an effort to learn from history, we will be doomed to repeat the bad parts of needlessly. This is streaming on Criterion Channel or Canopy through your local library."