Interviews and Pics from the 19th Annual GLAAD Media Awards in San Francisco

Speaking of groundbreaking moments in gay media history, I was happy to see Academy Award-winning gay filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman on the red carpet. I've known Rob and Jeff for so many years I'm reluctant to count them as it makes me feel old (although Theater Rhino executive director John Fischer, there to receive a Special Recognition Award for the group's 30-year commitment to grassroots LGBT theater, told me to refer to myself not as "old" but "long-running"). Back in 1984, Rob made gay history by thanking his then-partner John Wright in his Oscar acceptance speech for The Times of Harvey Milk on the nationally-televised Oscar awards ceremony.

Epstein and Friedman also won an Academy Award in 1989 for their film about the AIDS quilt, Common Threads, and went on to make the critically-acclaimed film The Celluloid Closet.

Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein (Photo: KT Jorgensen)

I took the opportunity to ask them about Howl, a film they have in development. Jeff called it a "hybrid" of feature and documentary about Allen Ginsberg's revolutionary poem and the obscenity trial it prompted against bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Howl recently received funding from both the Rockefeller Foundation and the Sundance Institute Documentary Film program.

Rob and Jeff have been looking around for a fiction feature for all the years I've known them, and I asked what the status was with another project they're working on, which would be their first fiction feature. It's a film based on the Lambda Award-winning novel The World of Normal Boys by K.M. Soehnlein.

"We're not done with documentary film making," said Rob. "We're still very immersed in it. But we're very interested in feature film making as well." He laughed when I reminded him how long he'd been talking about it. "Yeah, I'll be talking about it until I'm in my grave, probably."

"Howl is kind of a transitional film," said Jeff. "It has everything."

Sex and the City's Jason Lewis, who played gay as Kevin's boyfriend on Brothers & Sisters, was there as well, but he didn't want to talk to AfterElton.com, saying something that appeared on our blog had "disappointed" him.

Jason Lewis (Photo: KT Jorgensen)

When I pressed him as to what he'd read here that made him feel that way, he said, "I didn't bother reading it, but it was really disappointing that someone from that community would ... I was really disappointed with AfterElton." It's a mystery to us, since all the guys here I've talked to have the Jason Lewis love, even if he did let Kevin get away.

Despite the fact that he's mad at us, and given that he has appeared as a straight ally of our community at two GLAAD events this spring and is undeniably photogenic (that's journalistic code for "seriously pretty"), we at AfterElton.com continue to wish him well.