GLR March-April 2026

ESSAY

The Lives They Filmed H UGO L JUNGBÄCK

travels across the U.S. and internationally, they document im portant queer spaces in San Francisco and early gay liberation parades in the 1970s, as well as the relocation of Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II. Since the introduction of the first amateur film formats in the early 1920s, several generations of home moviemakers have documented their private lives with moving images, first with film, then videotape, and finally digital files. While sometimes catching significant public events on camera—like Abraham Zapruder’s 8mm film of President John F. Kennedy’s assassi nation—more often these recordings capture ordinary events such as holidays, birthdays, vacations, and everyday family life. Archivists and scholars of queer history realized early the his torical value of home movies shot by queer people and had the foresight to collect and preserve them for posterity. Archivists and scholars of film similarly realized that home movies were not only valuable visual records of the past century; they also represented unique creative impulses. These playful, artful, intimate, and sometimes erotic snap shots of queer life are evocative records of same-sex affection, friendship, and love at a time when tenderness was strictly po early and sustained attempts at positive self-representation. Both types of film reveal a serious concern with aesthetics, narrative, and technique through intentional strategies of composition, di rection, action, and editing. Queer amateur film production and home moviemaking be tween the 1930s and 1960s represents a particularly exciting pe riod of experimentation with self-representation, after the standardization of the classical Hollywood feature film and its strict moral codes in the early 1930s, but before the emergence of the gay independent filmmaking spurred by the post-Stonewall gay liberation movement, the rise of hardcore pornography, and the introduction of consumer video technology in the 1970s. At a time when the few available publicly images of queer people were at best pitiful and at worst derogatory, inaccurate, and of fensive, amateur and home moviemaking allowed queer people to envision and produce positive images of themselves on screen. Alongside the postwar avant-garde and underground cinemas that frequently mark the beginnings of gay cinematic self-repre sentation, amateur and home moviemakers like Harold T. O’Neal, Cyrus Pinkham, Jerett Robert Austin, and François Reichenbach were producing extraordinary images of themselves and their liced, heteronormative expectations of gen der reigned supreme, and visual evidence of one’s “perversion” could result in the loss of one’s job, family, and social networks, or worse. Some amateur filmmakers also staged narratives that rejected, countered, and parodied the tired stereotypes and patho logical tropes of Hollywood and evinced

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is by a grant recipient in a program launched in 2022 by TheG&LR , now the Charles S. Longcope Jr. Writ ers and Artists Grant, which was awarded to two recipients in 2024. Awardees are expected to produce an article for this magazine as part of their project, of which this is the second to appear. A MAN IN JEANS and a plaid flannel shirt opens a driveway gate, smiling at the camera, then leads us toward the backyard, unbolts a second gate, and invites us in. Three men in button-ups and jeans enter the yard, and the man in plaid soon removes his shirt and throws it on the ground. Facing the camera, he starts unbuttoning his jeans but turns away before pulling them down. In the next shots, three men are sunbathing nude by a pool, two lying on the con crete deck and one in the water. The three men—one black haired, one blond, and one wearing a cap—are facing each other, laughing, engrossed in conversation. The blond takes a drag from his cigarette before passing it to the black-haired man, who splashes in the water with his foot. Then all three are in the water, swimming, diving, playing. One soon lights the stone grill and Breakfast in San Fernando is just one of almost 300 reels of film shot by Harold T. O’Neal, documenting his adult life from the late 1930s until the late 1980s. This twenty-minute reel, recording a private backyard party with O’Neal’s friends in July 1947, is a remarkable document of queer life at mid-century. The men are beautiful, and their nudity gratifying to watch, but the film is not erotic per se. While there are a few scenes of physical contact—one of the men helps another rub suntan lo tion on his back and buttocks—the reel is generally innocent. The excitement of watching the men comes from the free dom they exude—their sense of security and camaraderie, their ability to be themselves, to be completely open with each other, at ease and unabashed, secluded from the outside world in their private oasis, behind the tall hedges and trees. Preserved by the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, O’Neal’s massive collection of home movies is a unique and important record of queer history. In addition to capturing his everyday life, outings and social gatherings with his partner, family, and friends, and Hugo Ljungbäck is a doctoral candidate in cinema and media studies at the University of Chicago. cooks burgers, bacon, eggs, and tomatoes while the others lounge on cots or continue swimming. The men enjoy their brunch, then one prunes the hedges while another sews new sling fabric for a wooden lawn chair, and they spend the rest of the afternoon lounging about, swimming, dancing, posing, cleaning the pool, and messing around.

Queer amateur movie making between the 1930s and 1960s was an exci ti ng period of experimenta ti on withself representa ti on.

March–April 2026

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