# \[Home movie: Mario Perez Video Collection, April 22, 1996, Jose's birthday at St. Vincent's Hospital\]

Synopsis A 1996 home movie by Mario Perez in which he visits his friend Jose on his birthday. He was hospitalized at the St. Vincent's Hospital because he suffered from AIDS. Mario records Jose doing a prayer and reading the bible. At another scene, it shows men joking around at a sex shop. It also includes documentation of a normal day on 14th Street in Manhattan, New York. Collection description This film (Perez_0002) is part of the Mario Perez Video Collection . The Mario Perez Video Collection consists of 20 8mm videotapes and 28 mini-DV tapes. The tapes capture Mario and his friends in the gay community from about 1996 to about 2009. They are very personal and show Mario and his friends hanging out on Christopher Street, on the piers, at the Chelsea Gym and in the gay bar called Sneakers, which was on West Street at the corner of Christopher Street. The collection includes video on the following subject matter: Christopher Street and environs – gay bars, bookstores, and street life in the late 1990s including footage of bars with an ethnically and gender diverse clientele that no longer exist. These provide a view of gay life that has disappeared from Greenwich Village. 2. The Closing of the Chelsea Gym – the Chelsea Gym was an important part of New York City Gay Culture. Gym culture was a crucial corrective to the abuse and bullying that many gay men received in Phys. Ed. at school when they were children. It was a place that gay men could be themselves and assert…

- Kind: Home movie
- Year: 1996
- By: Mario Perez
- Genres: Religion
- Archive: [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/ALCF_Perez_0002)
- Licence or status: [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) (as the archive states it)
- Who can watch: Adult profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/ia/ALCF_Perez_0002?play=1)