"Word Is Our" 45 Years Later: Not as Dated as You Might Think

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives was a pioneering documentary, filmed over a five-year period and released in 1977 whose imdb.com page describes it as, “Twenty-six diverse Lesbian and Gay people are interviewed about their lives and the challenges they experience in a homophobic culture. A ground-breaking documentary is now an artefact of a different time.” Not as different as we’d like to think; though the overall Queer community (to give it the name I use as an all-inclusive term for Lesbians, Gay men, Bisexuals and Transgender people because I hate the ugly and preposterous acronym “LGBTQ+ people” that has regrettably become standard in most media depictions of us) has won an extent of legal, social and political recognition that few people would have dared imagine in 1977, we still have a long way to go and, as one woman who survived the McCarthy-era witchhunts and the mass discharges of Lesbians from the Women’s Army Corps says in the movie, whatever acceptance we’ve gained is fragile and could just as easily be snatched away. I’ve often cited the example of Germany, which during the Weimar Republic era (1919 to 1933) was the most Queer-accepting country in the Western world, only when the Nazis took power that suddenly reversed itself and Queer people were marked for elimination in the Holocaust along with Jews, Communists, Gypsies and others the Nazis considered scum of the earth.

Warning bells about the fragility of our acceptance went off big-time when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case last June, and Justice Clarence Thomas (one of the most thoroughly evil people who has ever sat on the Supreme Court) published a concurring opinion saying that now that the Court had got rid of Roe v. Wade it was time to re-look at the decisions that had banned anti-Queer sodomy laws and found a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. That sparked the U.S. Congress to pass the “Respecdt for Marriage Act” in the waning days of 2022, but though that protected the right to same-sex marriage as a matter of federal law, it did not (as the Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision did) require states to allow same-sex marriages themselves. It just says they legally can’t refuse to recognize a same-sex marriage performed in a state where such marriages are legal.

My personal involvement with Word is Out came not from the film itself, which I didn’t see for many years after it was made, but from the accompanying book the so-called “Mariposa Film Collective” (the six people who made it: Peter and Nancy Adair, Andrew Brown, Rob Epstein, Lucy Massie Phenix, and Veronica Selver) published. This was one of the first books I read when I finally decided, as a 30-year-old in late 1982 who’d been involved in a live-in relationship with a woman for nearly five years, that I was going to accept the reality that I was a Gay man. (She and I remain good friends and my husband and I recently spent Christmas having dinner with her and her daughter.) The book was structured differently from the film; whereas the film intercut between the interviews (not always clearly: the filmmakers didn’t use chyrons to tell us who was talking – they just put everybody’s picture in a single title card at the start of each of the three parts of the film, and good lu9ck trying to remember who was who), the book presented each subject in their own chapter and allowed us to get more of a “feel” for each one as an individual. The filmmakers deserve credit for attempting to show the sheer diversity of the Queer community; there are older people, younger people and middle-aged people, and there are Black, Latino/a and Asian people as well as white people. (One of the clearly demonstrably wrong impressions a lot of people have of the Queer community – especially by its political enemies – is that it’s all, or nearly all, white.)

However, it pretty much dodges the question of Bisexuality (two of the male interviewees hint that they’re actively Bisexual, but the filmmakers don’t press them on the subject) and includes virtually no Transgender people. The one man in the film who seems Trans when we first meet him explains that, though he likes to present as both male and female, he had eventually decided to self–identify as a Gay man. (I suspect if a similar person came out today they’d identify either as Trans or as “non-binary.”) Yet one of the most progressive aspects of Word Is Out is that, even among the people in the film who say they were “born this way,” a lot of them talked about the major parts of their lives they lived as heterosexuals, including marrying opposite-sex partners and having children with them. One of the saddest moments of the film is when a Southern-born woman who got married, had children and then fell in love with a female partner had all her children taken away from her and given to their father – so while she’s raising her partner’s children as a co-parent, she’s cut off from any contact with her own. It’s also fascinating to me that both the Lesbians and Gay men in the family who have children regard them as an integral part of their lives and don’t at all consider them a burden; in fact, the people in the film who do have kids talk up the experience to their partners or friends who don’t and say how much their children have added to their lives even though they’ve walked away from the world of reproductive sexuality.

Another elephant in the room that’s inevitably going to come up is the impact of AIDS on the Queer community; as the “Trivia” section on the film’s imdb.com page notes, “In a special feature of the thirtieth-anniversary DVD of Word Is Out, Rick Stokes discusses the impact of AIDS on the Gay male community in San Francisco. Images of the film's interview subjects who died of AIDS appear on the screen as he speaks: Donald Hackett, Tede Mathews, Michael Mintz, and Stokes' own lover, David Clayton.” The imdb.com page also lists “Deceased Cast & Crew” members, though many of them died not of AIDS comlpications but simply of old age: Pat Bond, John Burnside, Sally M. Gearhart, Elsa Gidlow, Donald Hackett, Harry Hay, Rick Stokes, George Mendenhall, Nadine Armijo, Tede Mathews, Michael Mintz, and co-director Peter Adair. I was especially gratified that Harry Hay was extensively featured – in 1994 I chose him as the cover boy for the first issue of Zenger’s Newsmagazine because he had more to do with starting the Queer liberation than any other individual (in 1950 he founded the Mattachine Society, the beginning of continuous Queer liberation activism in the U.S.) – and the Word Is Out filmmakers co-interviewed him with his partner, John Burnside, for an example of growing old as a Gay male couple my husband Charles and I can use now.

It was also interesting to see Rick Stokes as a hero because in the late Randy Shilts’ biography of Harvey Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street, he’s presented as essentially a villain: the Gay member of the San Francisco political establishment who was put up as a candidate against Milk when he ran for the Board of Supervisors of the City and County of San Francisco in 1977. Though Stokes wasn’t that conservative – he was still a Democrat, after all – he comes off in the movie asd representative of the sorts of Queers who were repulsed by the more flamboyant participants in the Pride parades, but he still comes across as a multi-dimensional figure and an example of how even a relatively “conservative” man or woman in their personal presentation can identify with the Queer movement and be a part of it.

Word Is Out is an unexpectedly relevant movie for our own time in that, even though we seem to have reached a plateau of acceptance, there are mass social and political forces in this country who aim to take it all away from us. The same year Word Is Out was released – 1977 – former orange-juice spokesperson Anita Bryant launched the so-called “Save Our Children” campaign against Queer-rights legislation. Bryant argued that “homosexuals cannot reproduce’ therefore, they must recruit,” and she said that we needed laws to repress the Queer community because otherwise we’d recruit so many children the very existence of the human race would be threatened. Bryant’s rhetoric lives on in the governor of her own state, Ron DeSantis of Florida, who’s positioning himself to run for President as a Republican in 2024 largely on a promise to stop the so-called “grooming” of children by unscrupulous Gay men. DeSantis pushed through the Florida legislature the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which bans discussion of sexual orientation oir gender identity not only in the first three grades of elementary school but throughout the curriculum. Opponents of the bill argued that it could be used to fire a Gay or Lesbian teacher who honestly answered a student’s question about their marital status. One of the film’s interviewees answered the so-called “grooming” charge by saying that as a 12- to 14-year-old he aggressively cruised older Gay men, and he was the sexual aggressor.

He also recalled his days as a “regular” at the Black Cat Café in San Francisco, where Imperial Court founder José Saria put on parody operas and led the crowd at closing time with a rewrite of the British national anthem called “God Save Us Nelly Queens,” Black Cat Café “regular” George Mendenhall said in Word Is Out, “It sounds silly, but if you lived at that time and had the oppression coming down from the police department and from society, there was nowhere to turn ... and to be able to put your arms around other Gay men and to be able to stand up and sing 'God Save Us Nelly Queens' ... We were really not saying 'God Save Us Nelly Queens.' We were saying, 'We have our rights, too.” In 1963 Saria became the first openly Queer candidate to run for poiitical office – the San Francisco Board of Supervisors – and despite the fact that police regularly maintained a blacklist of just about everyone who publicly advocated for Queer rights in any way whatsoever, he got enough people tosign his nominating petition and he made it onto the ballot. All in all, Word Is Out 45 years later is an extraordinary document, at once a slice of history of the pre-AIDS Queer community and a reminder that, however much progress we think we’ve made, it could all be snatched away from us pretty easily and we may have to learn from our foremothers and forefathers how to fight these struggles all over again.