In 2005, the UCLA Film & Television Archive partnered with Outfest (founded at UCLA in 1982) to create the Outfest/UCLA Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation. It is the largest publicly accessible collection of LGBT films in the world—a vital resource for students, faculty, and researchers interested in LGBT moving images.
The first of its kind and landmark in its scope, the Legacy Project contains a diverse range of LGBT media, including rare titles (the Gay Girls Riding Club's Spy on the Fly, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and Always on Sunday) to more well-known films (Jamie Babbit's But I'm A Cheerleader) to seminal independent works (Sankofa's The Passion of Remembrance).
Material available in the Legacy Project includes: submitted and accepted festival entries, features and shorts, Pat Rocco films, exhibition prints, activist and experimental works, television programs, public service announcements, commercials, music videos and electronic press kits that provide a unique perspective on issues concerning gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex and gender variant identities and experiences.
Collections
With over 20,000 holdings in the collection, the Legacy Project has established itself as the leading archive for LGBT media preservation.
Download an informal list of holdings in the Legacy Project as a PDF document or an Excel spreadsheet.
To arrange onsite research viewing of Legacy Project titles at UCLA, please contact the Archive Research and Study Center (ARSC).
Legacy Project: Sample Areas
Highlights include the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives Collection, the GLAAD Trans and Intersex Media Collection, oral history interviews conducted by media scholar Alexandra Juhasz and home movies by Pat Rocco.
General Collection: LGBT Resources
The UCLA Film & Television Archive has extensive holdings relevant to LGBT studies, including motion pictures, television productions, news broadcasts and public affairs programs. To search for additional titles, please visit our Archive Catalog.
Restoration
Because the components of many notable LGBT titles are degraded, altered or missing, the Legacy Project is working to raise funds to restore these films to their initial release forms.
UCLA Film & Television Archive has restored a number of films for the Legacy Project, including Parting Glances, Word is Out, Choosing Children, Queens at Heart, Of Heaven and Earth: Films by Tom Chomont, The 1st Christopher Street West Parade Footage, and arguably the earliest surviving full-length film that features a gay protagonist, Different From the Others.
Learn more about the unique history behind Different From the Others on our blog.
Screenings
UCLA Film & Television Archive offers The Legacy Project Screening Series, a bi-monthly showcase at the Billy Wilder Theater.
Symposia
While mainstream films are both collected by nonprofit archives and cared for by the commercial film industry, independent films are largely overlooked. LGBT independent films are in particular peril because of a perceived lack of commercial value by the industry and/or the filmmakers’ inability to maintain their work themselves. In 2006, the Archive Research and Study Center (ARSC) co-sponsored "Out of the Closet, Into the Vaults," panel discussions between filmmakers and archivists who addressed potential strategies to insure LGBT cinema is preserved for future generations.
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