Mosse Lecture David Weissman: From Activist Filmmaker to Queer Community ‘Elder’

David Weissman is an Emmy Award nominated filmmaker and long-time activist. He is best known as producer of the acclaimed documentaries We Were Here (2011) and The Cockettes (2002). The latter chronicles San Francisco’s legendary theater troupe of hippies and drag queens, 1969-1972. We Were Here revisits San Francisco a decade later, as its flourishing gay community is hit with an unimaginable disaster.

Currently he is working on a project called Conversations with Gay Elders: a series of in-depth interviews and conversational documentaries focused on men whose journeys of sexual self-discovery precede the era of Stonewall and gay liberation. In his talk, David will reflect on what he calls his ‘unexpected journey’ from being an activist filmmaker to a ‘queer community elder’.

After the lecture, we will screen an episode of David’s Conversations with Gay Elders, featuring 77 year-old Kerby Lauderdale of Portland Oregon. Two days before the lecture, on Monday 16 September, the Queer & Migrant Film Festival will screen We Were Here and The Cockettes at the Cinema of the Dam’d in Amsterdam.