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Time Travel: When Documenting Our History Brings It Back to Life

Story by Rochelle Lefkowitz, Photos by Nancy Rubin, Video and Editing by Craig Griffith
 

Our youth, while we still feel it so vividly, is already ancient history.  When I was a pre-teen, my parents’ friends began turning into two-dimensional names on stained-glass synagogue windows. In college, I saw donors’ names engraved on campus buildings.  Both left me cold.  To the young, immortality can feel so lifeless, dry and remote. So, how do we share the vivid lessons we learned by living through them with Gen Y, before they vanish in the mists of time?

Ask acclaimed Bay Area documentarian Frances Reid.  For over 30 years Reid produced, directed and shot documentary films.  

Reid, who addressed Ashby Village’s winter Arts & Culture event on Sunday, January 26, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short for “Straight from the Heart”, which explored relationships between straight parents and their gay children. 


We, along with our co-sponsors, Epworth United Methodist Church, invited Reid, who was also the cinematographer for the Oscar-winning film, “The Times of Harvey Milk”, to speak and screen one of her early, iconic documentaries, “Greetings from Washington DC” which documents the first ever National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights in 1979.

 

Said Reid, “This film was made to show the unity of that moment”, a moment in American history “filled with innocence and exuberance”.

Introduced by AV Board Member and long-time US and Israeli lesbian activist Marcia Freedman, on that memorable afternoon, we became the first public audience for Reid’s moving, unpublished memoir. We gave her—and those powerfully joyful times--a standing ovation.



Reid recalled, “We all sleep on the floor…that night.  Or don’t sleep—our sleeping bags jumbled here and there in hasty disarray, few of us in them, too excited…too much to discuss…too much needing to prep our gear and plan our production strategy in the few hours before dawn...We are an ad hoc, thrown together, ragtag group of lesbian and gay fledgling filmmakers…and we form a loose production collective …to capture the first ever March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.”


She added, “Again, the eternal dilemma of the filmmaker…our compelling urgency to record the moment denies us the moment.  For me, this moment, my way of experiencing it, is all about filming it…We film judiciously, sparely—the film is gold and not to be squandered.”

 

Reid concluded, “The day cements my identity as a filmmaker…I am 35 years old and I am doing exactly what I want to be doing being exactly who I want to be it is an exhausting, exhilarating glorious day.  I am home”. 

We then enjoyed a rare privilege—to see Reid’s shot in 16 mm, a little grainy, but vibrant, powerful DVD. It was one of the few public screenings of “Greetings from Washington DC” in over 30 years.

 

Even the parents of the children in our audience on that chilly Sunday weren’t yet born then.  This was also Ashby Village’s A&C’s first LGBTQ event. The lively crowd of well over 100 identified the close friends, musicians and movement idols in the scenes of joyful liberation we intently watched. Folksinger Holly Near sang (as some of our audience lip-synced) the still- reverberating, “There’s something about the women in my life”; an African American mother talked proudly with her five lesbian daughters; a gay couple from Tennessee looked into the camera as one said, “Hi, Mom; surprise!”.


Reid sensitively captured, with memorable detail the vibrant colors on the Mall, the scenery-only vacation photos on the desk at work. She evoked moods of explosive ecstasy, as the Mall overflowed with many men and women of all ages, races, home states and accents, full of life, joy and newly felt power, some coming out to their families and communities for the first time on film, others celebrating their decades-long commitments.

In the Q&A that followed, Reid was asked “how did LGBTQ filmmakers support themselves financially”? She crisply replied, “…with bad, low budget, soul sucking films in LA…as sound people, working in public TV…it was always a challenge.” When asked how she chose what to film, Reid answered, “the films had to have some resonance beyond myself, to cause a shift.” When questioned about how she did the research for her films, she replied, “Research is one of the best parts. It was almost too much fun.  It’s pretty easy now, with Google, but back then (we spent) a lot of time on the phone, ten time zones away; (then) it mostly involved talking to other people”. 

The most chilling eye-opener of our afternoon?  As of 2020, we learned that 16 states still have anti-sodomy laws on the books since the US Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional in 2003: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and South Carolina. The states that target their statutes as same-sex relations only: Kansas, Kentucky and Texas according to Pink News/UK.


Eight years later, in 1987, once again, Reid returned to Washington, DC “to film a quilt spread out across the mall, filling the space that eight years earlier was animated with people.  Now each panel of the (Names Project AIDS Memorial) quilt embodies someone who has died.”

Read Reid, “I wonder how many that were there on that glorious fall day, eight years before, pumping fists and laughing and holding hands and chanting…and feeling terrified and safe all at once…how many are now reduced to a patch on the ground below me, the satin and boas, the sequins and denim, the leather and lace that they work that day now sewn into the cloth of individual and collective grieving.  Standing behind my camera, high on the precarious, chilly little platform…I feel starkly alone, yet right where I am meant to be.”

As were we, on a chilly winter afternoon in Berkeley, California, in Epworth’s Fellowship Hall, as another callous administration takes aim at more recent, hard-won LGBTQ rights, including marriage equality and equal employment opportunity.  And I wonder, what will one of the youngsters coloring that day in January 2020, as their mother watched and listened intently, grow up to document—on some device or platform yet to be invented? What will we come together to do next, to support the LGBTQ community here and beyond, as members and allies? Who will follow Frances Reid to come forward to record the next chapter?








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