A Queer Blue Light
Radical Gay Television
Two weeks ago, I saw an amazing advertisement for a 1973 Gay Video Workshop on instagram. The workshop took place at Experimental Television Center— a facility in upstate New York that fostered the innovative work of many seminal video artists, like Nam June Paik and Steina and Woody Vasulka. In the press release, the workshop’s organizer David Sasser promised technical instruction for the new Sony Portapak video cameras, and working sessions on “Videotape Uses in Consciousness Raising and Psychotherapy” for gay men and women.
The workshop’s poster slogan, “We must direct our technology or it will be used to destroy us,” obviously brings to mind the much discussed existential crisis of AI. Last month, I got called to potentially meet the founder of ChatGPT, Sam Altman, to discuss a possible documentary. I was intrigued by the premise of following a 38-year-old gay power broker on a national tour to dispel catastrophic anxiety about the technology he’s proliferating. But in the end, I’m probably better suited to delve into the inner lives of a group of gay hippies, who believed that black and white video could revolutionize the world.
I have my own video activist origin story with a collective called Paper Tiger Television. In a previous post, I discussed promoting the bad video art I made in high school to a listserv of queer film festival programmers. In a roundabout way, that lead me to meeting my first friend in New York, the artist Tara Mateik. At the time, Tara was the only person working full-time at Paper Tiger— a ragtag intergenerational group of activists and media educators—who operated dysfunctionally, but affectionately by consensus. The collective started in 1981, seizing the opportunities afforded by public access television, to produce irreverent, handmade, and truly independent media. The collective’s founder DeeDee Halleck once said, “It is one thing to critique the mass media and rail against their abuses. It is quite another to create viable alternatives.”
When I arrived, Paper Tiger was focused on “youth media”—a movement within media arts organizations at the time, which gave teenagers the means of production to tell their own stories. With Tara at the helm, Paper Tiger was facilitating activist videos made by queer and trans youth, notably an extraordinary film called Fenced Out (2001) about the gentrification of the Christopher Street Pier. We eventually collaborated with queer youth at a group home to make a music video for the band Le Tigre.
Paper Tiger members often spoke about the video collectives that came before them during a movement of “Guerrilla TV” in the 1970s— groups like Raindance Foundation, Videofreex, and TVTV. They were empowered by the newly accessible and user-friendly Portapak video cameras, and their approach was influenced by an array of countercultural thinkers, including Marshall McLuhan, and his prophetic notion that WWIII would be “a guerrilla information war.”
The Guerrilla Television movement emerged in the years following Stonewall, and I wanted to find out more about what happened at the early Gay Video Workshop. Back in 2019, I learned about the first gay video collective called “Queer Blue Light” from an archivist at the GLBT Historical Society (a fantastic archive where I have found footage for many of my films). Their Queer Blue Light collection consists of nearly 100 half-inch video tapes.
Some of those videos are featured in Stu Maddox’s great documentary Reel in the Closet (2015). Maddox’s film profiles the dedicated archivists, who salvage and preserve early queer home movies as essential historical artifacts. In the film, Queer Blue Light collective member Daniel Smith says, “Nobody filmed us, nobody interviewed us and so we really thought that in order to be recorded, it was necessary for us to do it ourselves. Who was the audience? I don’t think we cared. This was for history, it was for the future.”
As I started to explore the possibility of making a documentary about Queer Blue Light, I reached out to the group’s founder N.A. Diaman (aka Nikos) to learn more. In the early 1970s, after stumbling into a Videofreex collective screening at a hotel, Nikos wrote an article about Guerrilla Television for the rock magazine Zygote. At the time, Nikos was a member of the Leftist activist organization Gay Liberation Front in New York, and he had just been invited to join the emerging Gay Revolution Party. Nikos was convinced that video would become the revolutionary tool necessary to amplify the gay liberation movement, so he put out a call for fellow activists to join him in creating a video group.
Through the original Raindance Foundation video collective, Nikos procured a Portapak camera. A group of simpatico gay activists convened at Nikos’ commune apartment building in Brooklyn. At the first gathering, his roommate Mark said he wouldn’t join a group if it didn’t include “women and third world people.” So Nikos reached out to a lesbian couple he knew from Brazil—Rita Moreira and Norma Pontes— who had just completed a documentary film called Lesbian Mothers (1972). David Sasser, the organizer of the Gay Video Workshop, also joined the group with technical know-how.
Initially the group chose the name Gay Revolution Video Project, until one member, Ray Dobbins, recalled an essay he read about the inventor of television, Philo Farnsworth. Much like Sam Altman’s recent congressional testimony about AI, Farnsworth was summoned by lawmakers to discuss the political threat of his novel invention. He described the first time he turned on his television set, and how “a queer blue light” bathed the room. The collective unanimously agreed— Queer Blue Light was the perfect name for their project.
When a public access television station in Lower Manhattan invited Queer Blue Light to broadcast one of their videos, Moreira and Pontes’ film Lesbian Mothers was the obvious choice (the collective hadn’t yet produced anything of their own). Pontes was already an accomplished documentary filmmaker in Paris, and she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to start making films in New York. Strangely, the group only had access to her original raw footage, and Sasser took it upon himself to faithfully reedit the film for broadcast.
Apparently he fucked up, because when I corresponded with Moreira about the group, she referred to Sasser as her “EX-friend.” She said, “It is for me very unpleasant to recall that story of such a wrongdoing, a real treason, from someone we thought was a friend!” I suspect there were also weird race and gender dynamics at play in the group. Like most collectives, things were falling apart before they even got started.
A woman who worked on Lesbian Mothers asked to borrow the Portapak camera and editing equipment, but that weekend she stepped on a rusty nail and went to the hospital. When she returned home, the equipment was gone. The increasingly acrimonious collective decided against purchasing a new camera, and with his tail between his legs, Nikos left the commune in New York to start over in San Francisco.
After arriving in California in the fall of 1972, Nikos quickly connected with a fellow Gay Liberation Front activist Daniel Smith, who shared his enthusiasm for documentation. Daniel was eager to interview a young Harvey Milk, whose political profile was rising, and Nikos had connections to another video collective called Video Free America, who lent them a spare Portapak.
After Daniel interviewed Milk, he partnered with Nikos to revive Queer Blue Light, and together they prolifically documented the political and social happenings of the gay community in San Francisco and beyond. They went to a college campus in Bakersfield that denied gay students’ petition to start a club. They captured pride parades, Castro Street fairs, the first Gay World Series, conferences, poetry readings, and drag shows. One of the most arresting tapes features interviews with gay men on Castro Street the day Harvey Milk was murdered.
When I spoke to Daniel in 2019, he told me about his artistic differences with Nikos. “I want to know what’s happening with people right now,” he explained. “Nikos’ approach was to ask about what happened back in the 1960s, and how that affects what’s happening now.” He continued, “I believe that the only thing that exists is the present tense. That’s what I like to deal with.”
Nikos was inspired by Italian neorealism and the French New Wave, and he had aspirations to use video as a storytelling and consciousness-raising art form, rather than a means to an end for documentation. When Nikos’ disagreements with Daniel about the video medium intensified, he decided to leave Queer Blue Light. He told me, “It was like a divorce—I made him pay me $500 for the name. It wasn’t sad for me because I was basically Mr. Gay Video in San Francisco. If people wanted to make something that wasn’t porn, they came to me. I organized a one time only gay video festival too.”
Daniel continued shooting more videos under the Queer Blue Light name (he rarely edited the videos and he wasn’t concerned about distribution). Eventually his focus turned to square dancing and making stained glass windows. When I asked if he cared about anybody watching the footage he dutifully captured in the 1970s, he said, “I’m just so happy they preserved the archives. I felt like what we were doing was historic.” Daniel and Nikos’ modest documentation of their everyday lives may have not been revolutionary, but they created a singular record of the politicized queer community in the decade following Stonewall.
My conversations with Nikos and Daniel happened four years ago. Last week, as I was searching for more information about the Gay Video Workshop, I learned that David Sasser passed away. Like so many filmmakers of his generation, his archives weren’t saved. I tried to reach out to Nikos for his insights, but I learned that he also sadly passed away in 2020. He was 84 years old.
When I met Nikos, I should have asked him what he thought about the proliferation of queer characters and storylines on mainstream television. I suspect that he would have critiqued the respectability politics of gay culture, and that he would still believe that queer people should create counter-narratives to disrupt the banality of commercial television.
In an obituary, fellow Gay Liberation Front activist Mark Segal said, “While our politics in GLF were all radical, as an individual Nikos was a gentle man." Nikos’ son told The Bay Area Reporter that his father published 10 books during his lifetime; a mixture of novels and memoirs. He owned his own production company, Persona Video, where he independently made fictional videos depicting gay characters and their lives.
Another gay activist Perry Brass recalled asking Nikos why he made so many videos and published books. Nikos said, “Because straight people are not going to tell our stories. We have to tell them.”
Personal plug: I produced a movie called The Stroll about the history of New York’s Meatpacking District from the point of view of trans sex workers, who lived and worked in the neighborhood. The director of the film Kristen Lovell was a sex worker in the area for a decade. We met at a screening of the Paper Tiger Television video Fenced Out, which I organized at the Whitney Museum, around the same time that I was speaking to Nikos. I’d like to think The Stroll—which is now airing on HBO and streaming on Max—is the type of gay television Nikos believed could challenge respectability politics, and give agency to queer and trans people to tell their own stories. I hope you’ll check it out.
I just saw Le Tigre the other night. I wish they still showed that Keep on Living film. I remember when they showed it on the tour about 20 years ago. Thanks for another fascinating read about queer culture and history.