Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives debuted in 1977 as the first feature-length documentary about lesbian and gay identities and lifestyles, made by openly gay filmmakers.

The Mariposa Film Group, comprising Peter Adair, Nancy Adair, Andrew Brown, Rob Epstein, Lucy Massie Phenix (Winter Soldier) and Veronica Selver, sought to create a film that would be free of political didactics, one that would simply tell the stories of what it means to grow up gay in America.

After conducting hundreds of interviews, the filmmakers selected twenty-six people of various lifestyles, races, ages and backgrounds. What they achieved was a cornerstone in the then relatively new Gay Rights movement.

Audiences were startled and moved by these stories, told by the film’s participants. The documentary was released in theaters around the world in film festivals and also shown on public television. It helped untold numbers of people to accept themselves, their friends and their families and had an impact on American culture.

Word is Out quickly went on to become a landmark work in gay and indie cinema, but, unfortunately, time had subsequently taken its toll on the quality of the few existing prints.

In 2008, the Outfest Legacy Project and UCLA Film & Television Archive restored Word is Out with the generous contribution of the David Bohnett Foundation, creating a high-definition video for this DVD premiere. It became the second Milestone Cinematheque release with Oscilloscope Laboratories.

Ripe for rediscovery by new generations of spectators, the film serves as a record of past struggles, an occasion for reflecting on how far gays have come and still have to go, as well as a masterpiece of the documentary format. Viewers are still charmed, touched, and perhaps even galvanized to action, by the film’s emotionally breathtaking blend of candor, humor, love and humanity. 

In 1975, producer Peter Adair envisioned a short film about gay people that would be used mostly as teaching material in schools. After two frustrating years of seeking institutional backing for the project, he resorted to getting funding from private investors. An initial investment of $30,000 was raised from people who believed in the idea, which allowed for the hiring of assistants.

Adair’s motivation was, as he explained: “In the early 1970s 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 was on its surface the very simple idea of answering a simple question, ‘Who Are We?’ For the film, I, and the five other people, spent years doing research interviews on videotape of 250 lesbians and gay men all across the country.”

The original number of interviewees was only eight, but after the initial footage was screened to test audiences, their great interest indicated that a much larger and more diverse cross-section of interviewees was needed. Several more years were then devoted to shooting the rest of the interviews and intercutting them with each other in order to create a documentary that was sort of a mosaic. In the process, what had begun as a modest presentation of positive role models for gay people became a chronicle of the vast range and diversity of the gay experience.

Committed to collectivist organization, the filmmakers decentralized the shooting and editing processes. Of the pre-interviewed persons, they jointly selected 26 women and men. The choice of locale and props – meaning, mostly, clothes – was made in consultation with the interviewees. To make the subjects feel at ease, a stationary camera was used and, since the camera operator was also the interviewer, communication proceeded smoothly.

Along with interviews, the footage was assembled about the subjects’ working and living situations. The Mariposa Group spent over a year editing 50 hours of footage down to 2 hours and 4 minutes. Various cuts were screened for gay audiences and responses solicited, allowing the community to participate in determining the structure and nature of the final cut.

Structurally, Word is Out, whose restored version runs 133 minutes, is divided into three sections: “The Early Years,” “Growing Up,” and “From Now On.”

Subjects were carefully chosen to display diverse lifestyles; their interviews were then broken up and used in more than one section. Frontal medium to close-up shots were used, providing the impression of a collective portrait in which the subjects address the camera directly, providing an intimate rapport between subjects and viewers.

Interviewees include Elsa Gidlow, then 79, the oldest subject; lesbian mothers Pam Jackson and Rusty Millington; drag queen Tede Mathews; happily-partnered-middle-aged couple Harry Hay and John Burnside (shown picking berries in the country fields).

The depiction of stereotypical dykes, such as Pat Bond, and effeminate men, such as Roger Herkenrider, suggests the complexity and diversity of role-playing in gay life. There are also Donald Hackett, a Black truck driver, and Linda Marco, both of whom were married before coming out (another pattern among the cast).

But the documentary was also marked by challenges and biases. Despite diversity along ethnic and sexual lines, certain patterns emerged, illustrating what some militants complained was a middle-class value system. The large number of stable couples in the film suggested a more common pattern of traditional matrimony; only one character spoke up for casual sex, which was then the norm for some gay men in big cities (this was in the pre-AIDS era).

The final section, “From Now On,” focuses on various dimensions of gay politics. Powell, of the National Gay Task Force, relates her “coming out” of a heterosexual marriage. Her assertion that “lesbians and gay men have a great deal to offer in terms of restructuring the world culture,” is also articulated by feminist Sally Gearhart, who claims that all human beings may be born with a bisexual potential but are made half-persons by society’s strict gender programming.

Interestingly, while the film’s most intellectually cerebral arguments come from women, the strongest emotional moments are from men. One male confesses: “In high school, I thought I was just one of those people who could never love anybody. When I fell in love with Henry, it meant I was human.”