Lesbian Olden Days: Two Films Take Us Back to the 80s and Earlier
When documentaries become part of the history they are recording
Film reflections:
Framing Lesbian Fashion (1993). Director and producer Karen Everett.
Last Call at Maud’s (1992). Director Paris Poirier. Producers Karen Kiss, Paris Poirier.
I taught LGBTQ+ history at a west coast university for twenty years. I used a number of documentary films every term. Each year I got older; the films got older; the students stayed the same age. Weird.
You can see where this went. The documentaries that shone at the beginning of my career as contemporary analyses gradually morphed into pieces of history themselves. Our class discussions became as much about the meta-aspects of using older film as about the content of those films.
And that was good.
Last Call at Maud’s is hands down my favorite of these older films. Its only competitors, for me, are Paris Was a Woman (on this, more on another day), Coming Out Under Fire, and Before Stonewall, that classic glimpse of gay life before, well, Stonewall.
(That doesn’t mean there aren’t others. These are just the ones that over time became my personal favorites.)
