Queer Blue Light and Radical Joy
Still from the Leap Day 1980 Party at 346 Castro Street, World Series 1 tape, February 29, 1980; footage by the Queer Blue Light Collective, Daniel Smith and Queer Blue Light Videotapes (1999-52), GLBT Historical Society.
Queer Blue Light and Radical Joy
by Megan Needels
In the late 1960s, the Sony Portapak—a self-contained videotape recorder—appeared on the market, and not long after, guerilla television followed. Guerilla television sought to subvert the top-down distribution of information in broadcast media and, instead, build a democratized television where activists, artists, and otherwise ordinary people could produce media by and for the people. Video collectives began to organize across the country, utilizing the compact, portable Portapak to report on issues that were important to their local communities. Queer Blue Light was one such collective in the Bay Area.
The Daniel A. Smith and Queer Blue Light Videotape Collection in the GLBT Historical Society’s archives consists of nearly 100 half-inch video tapes documenting the politics and culture of the local queer community in the 1970s. During my stint as an intern and then as a project archivist at the society in 2020 to 2021, I surveyed the digital transfers of the tape collection and assisted in publishing a curated selection of the videos online.
The content is striking and historically significant. One tape includes a documentary about a group of students organizing to form a gay student union at a college in rural, conservative Bakersfield. Another shows Queer Blue Light members hitting the streets in the hours after the assassination of Harvey Milk to interview people in the Castro. As Daniel Smith remembered in Stu Maddux’s 2015 documentary Reel in the Closet, “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.”
The historical record is riddled with silences and misremembrances. As an archivist, I reckon with this all the time. Mainstream media has consistently failed to represent the lives of marginalized communities, and even when it has, it has often reflected the views of those in power and perpetuated narratives of discrimination and oppression. The Queer Blue Light videotape collection represents the determination of a small group of rambunctious and unrestrained radical queers who recognized that history was unfolding around them.
But they didn’t only capture the community fighting for their rights and protesting in the streets. They also recorded moments of pure queer joy – something that was rarely represented in what little coverage of the LGBTQ community did make it into the media. These are some of my favorite tapes. They show intimate moments of Collective members making jokes and dropping innuendos as they prepare a veggie platter for a dinner party, giggling through Saturday Night Live parody skits and weaving through the crowds at the first Castro Street Fairs. These unfiltered views, untouched by the biases of broadcast corporations, are imperative to queer memory-making.
Everyday footage of queer people simply living is just as important as the better-known images of crisis, violence and struggle that are often associated with our queer past. To incorporate these moments of the ordinary into our collective memory is to celebrate our queer joy.
View a curated selection of footage from the Daniel A. Smith and Queer Blue Light Videotape Collection here!
Megan Needels was an intern at the GLBT Historical Society’s archives from July to October 2020, and then project archivist from November 2020 to March 2021. She will complete her master’s in library and information science at UCLA in June 2021.