Take a glimpse into our queer past, with footage from Pride parades nearly 50 years ago

The Set-Up

This week, we revisit the 1978 documentary Gay USA, a simple yet immensely powerful collection of interviews and footage from various pride parades across the country on the same day. Seeing these people live through what is now our history provides a necessary retrospective on how much we’ve changed. But at its heart, it’s about how similar things still are, for better and for worse.

Gay USA, directed by Arthur J. Bressan, Jr., doesn’t follow a straightforward narrative, nor does it have any one subject at its center. It captures the crowds at various Pride parades in 1977 (including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Dade County, Florida), and through a very simple yet candid man-on-the-street style interviews, it’s able to provide a comprehensive idea of what the social and political climate was at the time.

We’re able to witness an eclectic collection of communities gathered to celebrate each other through this time capsule: From butch lesbians to effeminate drag queens, from children that had never seen gay people before to elders that fought in World War II.

There are also radical progressives trying to get their voices heard, and hateful conservatives spewing rhetoric that feels oddly familiar these days. The film was shot in the wake of Anita Bryant’s spiteful hate campaign and her efforts to repeal anti-discriminatory policies in Florida, so the mood among the crowd is raw and sensitive.