Courtesy Geoff Alexander and UCLA / Legacy Project / Outfest. O'Neal collection (#2002-03), courtesy the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society. “I’d like to see him like that again,” he said.įrom the top: “Vallejo,” 1947 “Tryford/Bush Street,” 1946. I told O’Daniel that it showed a witty and charismatic man meandering through the city on a sunny day.
The footage I’d seen was recorded in the intervening period. He returned to O’Daniel in 1992 as his illness became more advanced.
They split up around 1990, when Habsburg, who was twenty years younger, told O’Daniel that he wanted to be free to try new things while he could. “We had a lot of fun, we had such fun friends.
Habsburg moved in with him, and O’Daniel remembers their social whirl, the new freedoms of the era, the simple fact that they could hold hands in public. A plainspoken Dallas native with a Texas drawl, O’Daniel worked for restaurants and catering firms in San Francisco in the eighties and met Habsburg in a club, in the summer of 1985 he still has two framed invitations from that night. “For me, it was like instant love,” O’Daniel, now seventy-two, told me when I reached him by phone at his home, in Flagstaff, Arizona. It was placed by a “longtime friend” named Larry O’Daniel. That afternoon, checking the archives of the Bay Area Reporter, a local gay paper, I found an obituary for Garrisson von Habsburg, who died in 1993, at the age of twenty-nine. After changing outfits (“I can’t take my pants off in front of the camera!”), he sets out for Castro Street, where he sees a man in a tight tank top run past and quips, “This is the start of the gay Olympic marathon.” At one point, Bérubé’s camera lingers on a poster affixed to a construction fence in the center of the neighborhood-“One AIDS death every 12 minutes.” After the film ended, Raines told me that whenever he watches footage of the Castro from this period, he wonders how many of the people shown would be alive five years later. He playfully taunts a roommate he describes as Rubenesque he shows off his bedroom, which features a James Dean cutout and a Mickey Mouse telephone. “Welcome to my movie!” he exclaims, then leads Bérubé on a tour of his apartment. The movie, shot by Bérubé, shows a mustachioed and exceedingly handsome young man wearing an orange cap and short shorts. “Nobody filmed us,” Smith says in “Reel in the Closet.” “So we really thought that in order to be recorded it was necessary for us to do it ourselves.” There are long-haired men, cops, a leather aficionado. In another clip, from 1978, the documentarian Dan Smith recorded people on the streets of the Castro describing their reactions to the murder of Harvey Milk. A drag king called Jimmy Reynard introduces a chanteuse female patrons with immaculate, gamine haircuts listen at tables there is the twinkle of jewelry.
“Like my generation and the generations around me are not alone in time.” His film includes footage from a tape discovered in an unmarked can at a San Jose flea market, showing the San Francisco lesbian bar Mona’s Candle Light around 1950. “To see those same types of mannerisms and the same types of laughter, and laughter at the same things, just made me feel like I wasn’t alone in time,” Maddux told me. Maddux read about the Society’s work and spent a year digging through the archives. Clips from several of the films also appear in “Reel in the Closet,” a new documentary about gay home movies by the Bay Area independent filmmaker Stu Maddux. With O’Neal’s permission, the movies now live in the GLBT Historical Society archives amid a remarkably varied set of holdings, from a sewing machine used to create the first rainbow flags to the sequinned outfits worn by the disco star Sylvester. “He wants to let go, but he can’t let go, so I’m letting go for him,” Torgerson said. As Stryker was packing up to leave, O’Neal’s life partner, George Torgerson, walked out to the car and handed her paper shopping bags filled with reels. Stein alerted Susan Stryker, who was the executive director of the city’s GLBT Historical Society, and on the drive home from a vacation Stryker stopped in Washington, where O’Neal had relocated, to ask him to donate his films. Only a few minutes of his footage, showing parties, San Francisco street scenes, and O’Neal standing atop Coit Tower, ended up in the film, but Stein realized that O’Neal’s recordings were valuable artifacts of San Francisco gay history. Then, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, a San Francisco filmmaker, Peter Stein, put an ad on local television soliciting historic footage for a documentary he was making about the Castro, and O’Neal responded. O’Neal’s home-movie collection spent decades in obscurity, as home movies often do.