An Evening with Melissa Anderson
Tuesday, December 2, 2025 at 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Gay USA, Arthur J. Bressan, Jr., digital projection, 1977, 73 mins
To celebrate the publication of The Hunger, Melissa Anderson’s new book of essays, Light Industry will be hosting a screening of Gay USA. Her piece on Arthur Bressan’s groundbreaking documentary is among the many lavender offerings in this collection, a volume that cements Anderson’s reputation as one of our most distinctive film critics and a leading sapphologist.
“This dense, exhilarating collage of sights (throngs of Pride revelers primarily in San Francisco but also in New York and Chicago, among other metropolises) and sounds (so much spirited talk, both on-screen and off-, and—trigger warning—some of the gooiest gay/lez folk love songs I’ve ever heard) reflects the liberationist fervor of the ’70s, utopian hopes not yet extinguished. Or, at the very least, not yet co-opted and marketed: no ghastly rainbow-hued merchandise, no corporate slogans soil these festivities. A typical gay-power banner in ’77 carries a message unlikely to be emblazoned on any Starbucks commemorative Pride tumbler in 2019: DOWN WITH THE NUCLEAR FAMILY—ROOT OF ALL SEXUAL OPPRESSION.
And yet, for all the furiously, ecstatically alive people in Gay USA, the film is inescapably haunted by death. The great Black lesbian poet Pat Parker appears here, reciting some puckish verse about the hypocrisy of squeamish heterosexuals; by 1989, she would die, at age 45, of breast cancer. Arthur J. Bressan Jr. perished, also in his mid-40s, from AIDS-related illness a decade after Gay USA was shot. Watching the documentary, I was consumed with morbid thoughts, wondering how many other young guys seen and/or interviewed (but never named) in Bressan’s documentary—the chevron-mustached clones, the nursery school teacher, the ballet-trained dancer, the twink who fled Kansas for the hedonistic promise of California—would also not live beyond early middle age.”
- MA
Followed by a conversation between Anderson and writer Wayne Koestenbaum.
Copies of The Hunger will be available for sale at the event.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.