[Home movie: Mario Perez Video Collection, 2006, Chely's house]

About

Synopsis

A home movie from 2006 by Mario Perez about a hang out in Chely's house. Chely is the partner of Martica, Mario's cousin. Present at the house was Esteban, Mario's brother who is also gay, a young man named Omar and two other women. Martica puts on a show by making a funny character of an old lady telling stories. Then, they all dance for a while while drinking and smoking. The video is a domestic documentation of a queer group in Cuba. The original version of this home movie included sexually explicit content of Mario. This version has been edited to protect the privacy of the people involved. For inquiries about the original content, please contact Al Larvick Conservation Fund at: info@allarvickfund.org

Collection description

This film (Perez_0030) 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 their own particular brand of masculinity.

3. Funerals – the funerals/memorial services for 1 or 2 men who died of AIDS

4. Return to Cuba – an exile returns to Cuba 2001 – 2009. Footage of friends, relatives, and street hustlers. A rare documentation of ordinary life in Cuba.

5. September 11, 2001 – footage shot outside of St. Vincent’s Hospital after the attacks on the World Trade Center

6. Vacations in Texas, California, and Montreal

Archive

Internet Archive, in Home movies

Licence or status

CC BY-SA 4.0, as the Internet Archive states it.

Credit

Mario Perez

Language

Spanish

Who can watch

The archive gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Teens profiles and older, judged from its collection and subjects. How films are placed