Pride 2024 - Extras - Pride Movie Night: Word is Out

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The Human Rights Alliance is collaborating with the New Mexico History Museum to screen the ground-breaking 1977 documentary Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives. More than 40 years ago, the film startled audiences when it appeared in movie theaters and on television. The first feature-length documentary about queer identity made by gay filmmakers, the film was created by the Mariposa Film Group, a collective comprised of three lesbians (Veronica Selver, Lucy Massie Phenix, Nancy Adair) and three gay men (Rob Epstein, Peter Adair, Andrew Brown). Featuring candid interviews with 26 gay men and women across a wide range of demographics, it became an immediate flash point in the emerging gay-rights movement of the 1970s and forever altered the cultural conversations about LGBTQ+ issues.

The interviews conducted for the film were compiled into a book with the same title and released in October 1978. In 2022, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
The interviewees describe their experiences of coming out, falling in and out of love, and struggling against prejudice, stereotypes, and discriminatory laws. In addition, The Human Rights Alliance, working with Hannah Abelbeck, curator of photo archives at the New Mexico History Museum, uncovered videotapes of four interviews conducted in Albuquerque that never made it into the original film. These interviews have been notated and edited these interviews and produced an additional, never-before-seen 20-minute segment unique to New Mexico.

Filmmaker Peter Adair said, "In the 1970's when the modern gay movement was just beginning, our biggest problem was invisibility. Who homosexuals were was largely determined by straight people. It was bad enough that the public image of gay men and lesbians was defined largely by stereotypes—after all, I want other people to have an accurate picture of who I am. But these stereotypes created by outsiders largely defined our perceptions of who we thought we were. What a state of affairs. One's reference for what was gay was a few nasty images and, if you were lucky, your immediate circle of Queer friends. Word Is Out, finished in 1977, was on its surface a very simple idea answering the simple question - Who are we? For the film, I and the five other principal people I worked with spent a year doing research interviews on videotape of 250 lesbians and gay men all across the country. In the end, 26 were chosen to tell their stories in the film."

In the New York Times, David Dunlop wrote in 1996, "Understated though it was, Word Is Out had a remarkable impact, coming at a time when images of homosexuals as everyday people, as opposed to psychopaths or eccentrics, were rare."

​​Word is Out 
Friday, June 21, 2024
New Mexico History Museum 
113 Lincoln Ave
Santa Fe, NM 87501
5:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Tickets are free at bit.ly/pridemovie2024
Sponsored by: La Montanita Co-op