Escaping from a tortured small-town upbringing, a young bisexual hustler named J.C. sells his body to whomever is willing to pay — and in his new home of San Francisco, it’s usually men. But when he finally finds himself in a happy (and heterosexual) relationship, will the baggage of his profession cause him to lose everything and everyone he holds dear?

Along with James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus (also screening at Frameline49), Mike Thomas’s The Meatrack was one of the few high-profile gay softcore sexploitation films to be made during the brief window between the Stonewall Riots in 1969 and the (literal and metaphorical) rise of hardcore gay pornography in 1971. Quite possibly the very first feature-length gay movie to be made in San Francisco, the film features sequences shot in numerous long-gone gay hangouts as well as cameos from legendary queens Charles Pierce, Pat Montclair, and Vicki Marlane. A long-unavailable landmark of early queer cinema, The Meatrack has been newly restored in 4K by Vinegar Syndrome and Distribpix.