Frameline is thrilled to partner with guest bloggers from the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire during this year's festival! We've invited students from the LGBTQA Studies: San Francisco Travel Seminar at UWEC to share their experiences of Frameline and their thoughts on San Francisco's queer community. As they attend Frameline and experience San Francisco, they will be creating LGBTQ-themed documentaries, as well as vetting films for their second Eau Queer Film Festival in the fall. For more information about the contributors, click here.
Eau Queer Festival: "It was really amazing seeing something I recognized on a screen here! Seeing my professors and students that I know sharing this monumental project with us, the same one that I'm participating in now! It really made things hit home for me and revitalized how important the work I do here can be. I wish we could have heard more in the short from and about the students, but understand that there was limited time and it was about the festival, not just them." -Brooke Verwiel
“Johnny and Lyman: A Life Together and Coming Out in the 1950's: Stories of Our Lives were two of my favorites. I very much enjoyed the historical references and learning about how different life as an LGBTQ individual was. More than one of the interviewees stated how lucky we have it today that you can actually be out without losing your job or being blacklisted. Hell, you can even go to the bar with your partner. Johnny and Lyman are an inspirational couple that also lived through this era, nurturing a love worth 63 years. The love and trust between them is truly a miracle for the modern world and seeing a relationship survive the worst of times for the queer community is nothing less than amazing.” -Elizabeth Albert
“Tenderloin: Forgotten History was an insider’s look into the “tenderloin district” and how it came to have a lasting impact on the San Francisco community. Coming into this course I became passionate about learning about this foreign community that we were about to become submerged in. This film along with interactions with numerous community members I’ve been fortunate to of had conversations with, have really opened my eyes to the vibrant culture and rich history that runs through the veins of all the inhabitants of this city.
“Johnny and Lyman: A Lifetime Together was an excellent story that truly struck a chord with me. Watching the two gentlemen interact, even after 65 years together, was a very humbling experience. While watching and remembering back to a discussion I took place in back several months ago, I remember the first time realizing that a piece of paper doesn’t make what two individuals share any less real. Walking away from the film, I found myself truly impacted by their effects on one another’s lives and their hope for others couples like them to keep going and hold on to the connection they share. For those reading this post I would like to leave you with this quotation from the film that still continues to resound in my heart: ‘Life really started for me after I met him.’”-Megan Chilman
“Although this short was not filmed in the typical sense, The Hook-Up was poetry in motion, mixed with reading between the lines. The main character is writing poetry as the short goes on and he experiences his own surroundings; the artistic shots only give way to even more expression. One of the things that I kept thinking about, even after seeing the film, was how two people can see the same exact thing, but in completely different contexts. Seeing one young guy looking for a hook-up, trying to turn it into love, and having his hook-up already be in love makes me think about how we are constantly searching for that one person in life, yet we never know where they may be.” -Bryton Fredrick
The first film to send me into tears at Frameline, was Johnny and Lyman: A Life Together. Chalk it up to me being an emotional, lover type, but I could not stop when I started welling up the first time. I think what I came to realize was that I was first overjoyed to see this couple getting married after all these years of being together and then quickly became saddened. I realized that they are living a life together, beautifully completing each other as halves of a whole, bonded just as any other couple. I began to wonder, why is it that I was so much more moved by this couples relationship? I wouldn’t have this reaction if I was watching a straight couple walking down the stairs of a courthouse finally getting married after all those years, well maybe I would, I am a sap, but despite that fact it forced me to think about what it is to be a gay couple FINALLY receiving the validation of marriage after decades of being dedicated to each other. It was an excellent film to force contemplation and reflection. It was well directed and filmed and the elements of history within were so amazing. Having the original photos of them together during the 40s, 50s, and onward were phenomenal. To see these men so in love so long ago and in a time when it was so widely unaccepted just showed the capacity of human love to triumph. Because they had each other, they had so much more will power to live their life and be authentically themselves, not what was society necessarily believed was the norm. -Brianna Mueller