Ellen Broidy

Produced on 16mm film in 1971, this film is a wonderful piece of LGBTQ history that chronicles some of the first pride parades and gatherings of queer groups at the forefront of the movement in the post-Stonewall ripple. Some of Your Best Friends starts with the Hollywood Gay Pride Parade of 1970 and ends with the Venice, CA Gay Liberation front in its protest and takeover of a meeting of psychologists at the Biltmore Hotel; there to see how to use aversion therapy to treat homosexuality. In between these two events, Some of Your Best Friends stretches to include two gay activist group meetings in New York City. There are interviews with a variety of activists and one extraordinary recreation of how police entrapped vulnerable gay men in Griffith Park.

Jan Oxenberg’s charmingly raw, politically-charged and remarkably funny celebration of the American lesbian experience validates the nuanced voice of a community otherwise underrepresented in the Wild West of mid-’70s independent filmmaking. In an attempt to combat the pervasive misconception of the “humorless, angry feminist,” the vignettes in A Comedy in Six Unnatural Acts experiment with self-aware yet playful depictions of common stereotypes, such as the “Stompin’ Dyke” or the butch-femme couple. In the process, Oxenberg’s short film reclaims those insults and assumptions as newfound, loaded weapons—to deploy on her own terms, of course. (UCLA Film & Television Archive)