"Framed Youth": Unearthing an ancient gay artificact

In my never ending quest to seek out and procure every piece of 80's memorabilia that's ever existed (I'd say I'm about 60% there), I present a rarely seen British documentary from 1983 called Framed Youth: The Revenge Of The Teenage Perverts. Despite the title, it's not an early film from Larry Clark, but an experimental film from The Lesbian and Gay Youth Video Project, which was basically a bunch of arty young gay Brits.

One of those youths, Jeff Cole, had this to say about the experience:

"We were challenging the ways that conventional documentary makers were showing lesbians and gay men on television documentaries and so wanted to include ourselves as makers and as subjects, not in any way trying to be balanced. We found ways to film each other that helped us feel comfortable and we did loads of experiments using the new VHS and Betamax cameras. When the editing came to be done the new technology of the freeze frame helped disguise some dodgily shot interviews but also had the great effect of helping the viewer to concentrate on what was being said. So what with adding in clips of tv and films as comment and videoing what we shot in the street on a monitor (to highlight the outside ’straight’ world) we were throwing away all the conventions in the book, not to mention chopping up what we said underneath all the freeze frames to make it sound better - we ended up getting an award for Best Documentary from the BFI in 1983.

The result is a fascinating time capsule. They interview Jimmy Somerville from the iconic 80's group Bronski Beat, as well as artist/director Isaac Julien. For me, though, the most compelling part of the 45-minute documentary is the "man on the street" interviews, where they ask random people about their opinions on gays. To hear the ignorance and hostility in some people's voices (a few actually scream and run away when they find out they're being interviewed by a "gay") is horrifying, and my first thought was "well, at least it's better today". Then I remembered watching Borat (in which much the same thing happened), and realized that as far as we've come, we've still got a long way to go.

You can see Framed Youth in its entirety after the break, or if you're having trouble watching it, you can see it HERE, but there are two things you have to consider. It's a British doc, which means the language is NSFW, and it's not exactly a polished, Hollywood production, so the video is of low quality.