Nitrate kisses

Duration: 67

Year Published: 1992

Creator: B. Hammer

Format: 16mm

Color: B&W

Sound: sound

Description: Archival footage, period artifacts and personal recollection are intertwined in Hammer's collagist film that interrogates the erasure of gay and lesbian history and reconstructs its hidden realities. Among the topics uncovered are Willa Cather's lesbianism and the brutal repression of lesbians during the Third Reich. Scenes from James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber's 1933 film Lot in Sodom inform the testimony of gay men who discuss homoeroticism and the strategies of seduction. Exploring sexualities marginalized within the gay/lesbian communities, the film provocatively challenges the absence of erotic imagery of older lesbians, inter-racial desire and S/M by including explicit scenes of safer-sex lovemaking.