Word Is Out (1977) on Netflix
NR19772h 12mDocumentary
Twenty-six gay men and lesbians, ages 18 to 77 and scattered across the country, speak to the camera about their lives. They recall coming out, love, and the prejudice they met.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb8.0/10581 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Made in the years after Stonewall, the film gathers twenty-six gay men and lesbians before the camera. They range in age from eighteen to seventy-seven, in background from housewife to student to conservative businessman to drag queen, and in home from San Francisco to New Mexico to Boston. In a loose chronology they talk about their early years and about fitting in, which some of them attempted through marriage. They describe coming out, for a few of them an involuntary process, and the treatment they met when being gay was classed as a mental disorder. They speak of loves that began and ended, of prejudice and stereotyping and of laws that discriminated against them, and of the place each of them found in society. They also look ahead, weighing what acceptance in the United States might become.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Word Is Out (1977)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Peter Adair's documentary took five years, six co-directors and more than 200 interviews with lesbians and gay men across the country before the final cut was assembled.
- The Mariposa Film Group set out to film only eight interviewees, but test audiences at a trial screening wanted a far wider cross-section, so the team spent several more years shooting the rest.
- It was the first feature-length documentary about lesbian and gay identity made by gay filmmakers, and it became an icon of the gay rights movement then emerging in the 1970s.
- The filmmakers listed a post office box in the end credits and thousands of viewers wrote to it, many of them saying the film had saved their lives. Production assistant Janet Cole said isolated people in Idaho, Utah and Kansas were seeing positive images of gay lives for the first time.
- By the film's 30th anniversary no usable print of it survived, so Outfest and the UCLA Film and Television Archive built a restored 133-minute version, premiered in 2008 at the Castro Theater where the film had first opened.
