Something New Under the Sun: Bay Area Queer Filmmaking Across the 1970s will be a critical history of queer filmmaking in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1970s. The book will argue that film was one of the main ways queer people experimented with new forms of visibility during the heady first decade of gay liberation. The project will eschew standard distinctions between the personal avant-garde and activist documentary, insisting instead that queer film production, especially in the first half of the decade, was almost always an experiment designed to transform both the self and the world.
Greg Youmans is a writer whose essays on queer history and experimental cinemas have appeared in Camera Obscura, e-flux, Found Footage, Jump Cut, and Millennium Film Journal, as well as in the collections Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories (SUNY Press, 2015) and Porno Chic and the Sex Wars: American Sexual Representation in the 1970s (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016). His book on the gay and lesbian documentary Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (dir. Mariposa Film Group, 1977) appeared in 2011 as part of Arsenal Pulp Press’s Queer Film Classics series edited by Thomas Waugh and Matthew Hays. He is an assistant professor of English and film studies at Western Washington University.