The first San Francisco Gay Film Festival was held in 1976 in a small community center and publicized with a flyer. It lasted one night. The films were shown on a rented projector, and the screen was a tacked-up bed sheet.

Thirty years later, that event has morphed into the star-studded, eleven-day, million dollar-budgeted Pride month extravaganza known as the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival. Running through June 25, the festival is being held in four different venues in San Francisco, including the historic Castro Theater, and features more than 260 films from around the world. The festival has come a long way from what filmmaker Marc Huestis once called “a ragtag band of hippie fags.”

Many of the changes that made the festival what is today began in the early 80s, when the fifth annual festival moved to the Castro Theater and expanded to a week in length. The first opening night in its new venue was the world premier of the documentary Greetings from Washington, D.C., about the first March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. It also featured a presentation by film historian Vito Russo centered on his recently-released book The Celluloid Closet.

Executive director Michael Lumpkin has been at Frameline's helm through most of its history. He started out as a young film student volunteering to help put on the festival and eventually assumed the role of festival director. In the decades that followed, he saw the organization go through many highs and lows, and a number of transformations.

Lumpkin was there when the changing political waters of the mid-80s brought demands for representation of groups other than gay men, most notably by lesbians. During the 1986 festival, a near-riot broke out at the Roxy Theater, a smaller second venue used by the festival, when a program of short films by lesbians included a scene of two men having sex. The festival's inclusion, or lack thereof, of lesbian programming, and its attitude towards its female audience, was suddenly in the spotlight.

Instead of wasting time on defensive posturing, Lumpkin and Frameline took a long look at their institutional priorities and patterns, and decided to change. “I think hearing what we heard from the lesbian community made us realize we had a responsibility as an organization,” Lumpkin says. “Before that, it was ‘we can only show what's out there.' We realized that, the situation being what it was with women's films, we needed to not just sit back, but to do something. We experienced a real shift in our thinking, organizationally. This wasn't just about showing movies, it was about social change.”

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