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The poster for The Christine Jorgenson Story (1970) is emblematic of that tone of sensationalism with which Hollywood historically approached LGBTQ lives and stories-it’s pretty much the worst of the worst. The first batch of posters you’ll see here gives a glimpse of the olden days and an impression of how backwards and sensational (tho also often graphically interesting) those marketing campaigns could be. The oldest trailers I could find in 35mm film format really only went back to the 1960s, but with posters it was possible to unearth even older items-including many of the images in this slideshow.
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I had started collecting vintage LGBTQ movie trailers around this time, and I also began searching out and acquiring the posters for those same films. And sometimes the kit would also include an image of the poster art. It would also include a set of 8” x 10” production stills to bring back to the office so we could run an image with the review. Generally the press kit included all basic credits, synopsis, often a director’s statement and sometimes even an interview with the director.
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you had to have it on hand (more than once I even had to call the publicist asking them to track down info I needed). Yes, this was before the Internet Movie Database existed so in order to be able to cite the names of the actors, writer, director, etc. One of the best parts of attending these screenings was being given the press kit materials on arriving at the theater, to be able to do a quick bit of deeper research before the film started and then to take home and use as a resource for writing the review. I got to see and write about films like I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, Waiting for the Moon and Longtime Companion. I don’t remember when I acquired my first queer movie poster, but I do remember that at some point I realized that the marketing of LGBTQ films to the mainstream was a uniquely problematic art form.Īs the film critic for one of the local gay newspapers in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the late 1980s, I was the happy recipient of invitations to press screenings for all the upcoming LGBTQ indie movie releases. This sampling included here covers seventy years-starting with a movie theater pamphlet from the original US release of the 1931 German classic, Maedchen in Uniform (which is considered to be the first lesbian film ever made) up through the 2001 modern American butch/trans classic, By Hook or By Crook, on which I served as a consulting producer. When I was commissioned by Chronicle Books to create that volume, I hired a museum photographer to shoot large-format rostrum shot transparencies of the full-size posters in my collection those transparencies and their corresponding digital files are now all part of the Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection, along with a significant number of the actual posters. These are just a few of my favorite items from my 2005 soft-cover coffee table tome, The Queer Movie Poster Book. The following selection of thirty+ LGBTQ movie posters offers a vibrant snapshot overview of the evolution of LGBTQ movie marketing history.