In a locked storage room at the San Francisco Public Library's annex building South of Market sit 94 white cardboard boxes. A yellow Post-It note affixed to one reads "Jenni's high priority list."
Inside is a collection of rare and notable LGBT films that filmmaker Jenni Olson, a lesbian who co-directed the city's Frameline LGBT Film Festival in the early 1990s, has deemed to be of significant importance to the LGBT community's cinematic heritage.
"It is really emotional to be here. A lot of these films are from my time doing Frameline," said Olson as she showed off the cinematic archive to a reporter and photographer from the Bay Area Reporter . "If you pick some up, there is my handwriting."
Being among the VHS tapes brings to mind her co-director at Frameline, Mark Finch, who died by suicide in January 1995 after jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Olson funneled her grief over Finch's death into her 2005 film The Joy of Life that brought renewed attention to the fight to install a suicide barrier on the iconic structure, which she noted, "we are finally about to get."
One film in the archive that Olson has deemed to be of particular interest is Arthur J. Bressan Jr.'s Abuse (1982), a film about child abuse with a gay love story that a reviewer for the B.A.R. called "a miracle of independent filmmaking."
"The film was not in distribution, so no one knows how to get a hold of it," said Olson, noting that it was one of gay film historian Vito Russo's "favorite gay films."
Bressan's iconic title is just one among roughly 6,000 films now in the collection of the public library's James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center. In 2005 Frameline donated nearly 5,000 videos from its collection to the center.
"This included not only the movies shown in past festivals, but films submitted to the Frameline festival which were never screened," according to an online description of the Hormel center's Frameline Movie Archive Project.
"It's been a pretty huge process," said Olson of curating the collection and tracking down the copyright holders for each title. Without the permission of the filmmaker or owner of the copyright, the library is barred from publicly screening the title.
"There is a category of orphan films where it will be extremely unlikely we will find whoever made them or who owns the copyright," said Olson, noting that Abuse is one such film that is available for researchers to watch but can't be publicly screened.
Four years ago the library's trove grew by another roughly 1,000 titles after Frameline donated the films it had received between 2006 and 2011. That year the Hormel center brought on Olson to help it process the film titles and determine which of the movies should be digitized for use by researchers and historians.
"We own films even the filmmaker didn't have anymore. It is a really big deal," said Karen Sundheim, the Hormel center's director since 2007. "We heard from a man in China about a film he made about being gay in China. He didn't even have it, and it turned out, we had it."
Prior to her leaving Frameline in 1994, Olson had already suggested that the festival partner with the Hormel center to serve as a repository for its film archives. The idea came to fruition when the film festival relocated its offices, forcing it to address what to do with the aging VHS tapes and other outdated film formats it had saved over the years.
"Being based at the library, this recognized center of LGBT research where we knew that LGBT researchers already come there or contact them about various projects, it just made sense," said Olson. "They would be able to take care of the materials and help people connect with the work."
To date, just 38 films have been digitized, which cost the center $10,000, by the Bay Area Video Coalition.
"It may not seem like a big number, but truthfully, it is very expensive to do," said Sundheim. "We look for materials of importance to our history and save things in danger of deterioration."
In addition to Abuse, Olson has selected the 1985 British documentary A Plague on You by Cas Lester to be among those next on the digitization list.
"It is no longer available," explained Olson.
Some of the rare film gems in the collection �" as identified by Olson and highlighted online by the Hormel center �" include the censored 1986 BBC TV production Two of Us; the 1988 Thai gay feature, I Am a Man (described as the Thai remake of The Boys in The Band); and the obscure 1980 Japanese lesbian feature, Afternoon Breezes.
There is also a copy of another Bressan film, Buddies , the first ever American feature film about AIDS. Released in 1985, it starred Geoff Edholm and David Schachter.
"The HIV/AIDS collection in particular we highlighted as important," said Olson. "So many short films, documentaries, and activist stuff from the 1980s people would otherwise be unaware of."
Due to the condition of the films, anyone who wants to watch them, particularly those still on VHS tape, needs to make an appointment to do so with the Hormel center.
"Some of these are too precious to handle right now," said Sundheim.
The Hormel center would like to raise another $15,000 to digitize the next batch of film titles. It plans to highlight its film holdings next April when it celebrates its 20th anniversary and is currently seeking funds to assist with the film preservation project.
"Some people have donated already to that project," said Sundheim. "It would be wonderful if more people did."
The Hormel center is working on putting the entire database of its Frameline film holdings online by mid-October. It has already uploaded three short documentaries in its collection for viewing on its website.
For more information about the project, or to watch the trio of films, visit http://sfpl.org/index.php?pg=2000360401.