ABOUT THE PROJECT

LOGLINE
The mission of the LESBIAN HOME MOVIE PROJECT (LHMP), to preserve lesbian amateur moving images, was inspired by the discovery of school teacher Ruth Storm's 1888-1981 16 mm reels. Ten years and over 400 films and tapes later, LHMP is still at it.

SYNOPSIS
LHMP is an archival project to collect, preserve, digitize, document, and share home and amateur movies and tapes made by lesbians or depicting lesbian lives. Original media are held in Northeast Historic Film's climate-controlled vault in Bucksport, Maine. Documentation and digital copies, uncompressed or .mov files as well as watermarked and unwatermarked H264 footage, are held in the archive in Blue Hill, Maine, and by donors. When appropriate, watermarked footage and catalog information is streamed at the LHMP website.

LHMP’s films and tapes were shot throughout the United States and beyond from 1937 to the near present. The emphasis on the lesbian is affectionate and pragmatic, its definition broad. Collections include celebrated figures such as Audre Lorde, May Sarton, Marsden Hartley, and Rita Mae Brown, for example—but most of those who appear in the collections would not be recognized beyond their close loved ones. Collections sometimes capture important historic events—marches and demos, for example, as well as concerts and performances, from the legendary Michigan Womyn's Music Festival to unique local events like Gainesville, Florida's uproarious Lesbian Variety Show. Other pieces are extremely personal. Many events took place on famed womyn's lands like Sugarloaf, Pagoda, and Alapine. The project currently holds over 400 tapes and films shot by close to fifty amateur moving image makers. In 2018 the project became a Maine nonprofit corporation and participated in a collaborative grant from Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) with Chicago Film Archives and Northeast Historic Film.

PROJECT TYPE Organization

DIRECTOR Sharon Thompson
PRODUCER Kate Horsfield, B. Ruby Rich, Sharon Thompson

WEBSITE lesbianhomemovieproject.org