Out of the Closet and Into The Co-op: Early Queer Cinema at The Filmmaker’s Cooperative

Programmed by Matt McKinzie and Conor Williams

The Film-Makers Cooperative (a.k.a. The New American Cinema Group), founded in 1961 by a group of artists including Jonas Mekas, Jack Smith, and Ken and Flo Jacobs, is an essential New York organization for experimental film. In 1964, Mekas and the Jacobses were arrested for screening Smith’s queer classic Flaming Creatures at the New Bowery Theater. The ensuing court case catalyzed a national conversation surrounding censorship and freedom of artistic expression, and solidified the Cooperative’s reputation as a countercultural nexus for filmmakers on the margins. As the Cooperative enters its 65th year in operation, this program seeks to highlight the exceptional way in which the organization served as an incubator for early queer cinema in the wake of that groundbreaking trial. Queer and trans Americans are currently under threat from the federal government in ways not seen since the time of the Cooperative’s founding. In the 1960s, when most of these films were made, LGBTQ+ people faced intense repression and police violence. These short films, born out of that atmosphere of oppression, found new ways of formal expression that encouraged queer artists to be out and free.

Un chant d’amour (1950)
Dir. Jean Genet
25min; 16mm

The only film by the famed French writer Jean Genet, Un chant d’amour’s depiction of the erotic fantasy of a gay male prisoner and that of his captor influenced everyone from Robert Bresson to Kenneth Anger. A print of Genet’s film arrived in the United States in 1964 for distribution at The Film-Makers’ Cooperative. Earlier that year, Coop co-founders Jonas Mekas and Ken and Flo Jacobs were arrested for screening another queer classic, Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures. In order to raise money for a legal defense fund, Mekas hosted a benefit screening of Genet’s film—and was once again arrested.

Amphetamine (1966)
Dir. Warren Sonbert
10min; Digital

The transgressive debut film of Warren Sonbert depicts a group of preppy, young gay men lounging, kissing, and taking intravenous drugs in an enclosed space, underscored by the lush music of the Supremes. A groundbreaking pre-Stonewall document of queer intimacy, euphoria, and community-building that pays visual homage to none other than Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Song for Rent (1969)
Dir. Jack Smith
7min; Digital

In this subversive and tongue-in-cheek short, Jack Smith appears in drag as cadaverous matron Rose Courtyard (inspired by Rose Kennedy). Dressed completely in red, the wheelchair-bound Rose sits ceremoniously under an American flag, the floor littered with corpses, while Kate Smith sings “God Bless America” on the soundtrack.

Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts (1966)
Dir. Edward Owens
6min; Digital

Edward Owens, a Black gay filmmaker and integral yet long-overlooked figure in the early history of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, sumptuously crafts (in the words of his mentor Gregory Markopolous) a “sensitive, poetic evocation” consisting of “a montage of still and moving images, mixing and alternating Black people and white people, fantasy and reality, a presidential suite and a mother's kitchen.”

Jerovi (1966)
Dir. José Rodriguez-Soltero
6min; 16mm

A sexual probe of the Narcissus myth, this astonishing early short by gay Puerto Rican filmmaker José Rodriguez-Soltero depicts a young man—clothed at first in rich brocade, and later nude—practicing self-love in a garden. Like Edward Owens, Rodriguez-Soltero was a key figure in the early history of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative whose oeuvre was nearly lost to time.

Behind Every Good Man… (1966–67)
Dir. Nikolai Ursin
7min; 16mm

This groundbreaking short, recently inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, follows a day in the life of a Black trans woman. As noted by Maya Simone Cade of the Black Film Archive, Ursin’s film is a “hopeful documentary [and] vital cultural document” wherein the subject is allowed to “narrate her own life, desires, and ambitions.”

All Women Are Equal (1972)
Dir. Marguerite Paris
15min; Digital

Recently digitized in 2K by The Film-Makers’ Cooperative in collaboration with Cinebox and the London Short Film Festival, All Women Are Equal offers a portrait of Paula, a trans woman living in Nottingham, England in the early 1970s. Produced, directed, shot, and edited by veteran lesbian filmmaker Marguerite Paris, the film is historically significant for its sensitive and non-expolitative treatment of its subject.

Dyketactics (1974)
Dir. Barbara Hammer
4min; Digital

Created at the height of both the second-wave feminist movement and Seventies gay liberation, Barbara Hammer’s Dyketactics is a landmark filmic evocation of sapphic intimacy and desire. Described by the filmmaker as “a popular lesbian ‘commercial,’” the film depicts “110 images of sensual touching montages in A, B, C, D rolls of ‘kinaesthetic’ editing.”