[Home movie: Mario Perez Video Collection, 2008, Cuba]

About

Synopsis

A home movie from 2008 by Mario Perez about his trip to Cuba. It starts with the day before his trip at this house in New York showing his and David's bedroom. There is footage of him with some family members in the United States. He records them with the purpose of showing the video the next day to the family in Cuba. After he arrives in Cuba, he spends time with his family and explores La Lisa, Marianao and La Habana with his cousin Martica, her partner Chely and his brother Esteban, who is also gay. This video documents how Cuba has changed in terms of sexual freedom and acceptance of the LGTBQ+ Community.

Collection description

This film (Perez_0041) 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 Adult profiles and older, judged from its collection and subjects. How films are placed