Lesbian Home Movie Project (LHMP) started when filmmaker Sheila McLaughlin inherited a cabin in downeast Maine from her mother’s high school Latin tutor, Almeda “Meda” Benoit (1910-2007). Meda had shared the cabin with her last partner, New York City schoolteacher & filmmaker Ruth Huntington Storm (1888-1981). Ten of Storm’s edited 16mm reels were inside, along with Storm’s camera, projector, and screens. McLaughlin had expected more reels, including a reel of herself as a toddler. When she happened to mention the missing reels to longtime friend B. Ruby Rich, Ruby suggested contacting a NYC acquaintance who had recently moved to Maine, Sharon Thompson, who tracked seven missing reels to Northeast Historic Film where a neighbor had abandoned them. McLaughlin had the reels digitized and gave a copy to Thompson, who, besotted with the footage and the idea of a lesbian filmmaker born in 1888, began to show it to local lesbian friends. When they in turn began to pull their own home movies out of their closets, Thompson was amazed. How had these women had the courage to film their illicit hijinks & winks & kisses on the fly? And given that they had, why weren’t they in an archive? Film critic B. Ruby Rich agreed the reels were important, and the two started an informal project to locate and preserve lesbian home movies and amateur films, drawing on NHF’s expertise and services. When media Thompson didn’t recognize & NHF didn’t handle turned up, 1/2″ open reel tape, Ruby contacted another old friend, recently retired co-founder of the Video Data Bank, Kate Horsfield. Together the three expanded the project to include tape and formalized the endeavor as the non-profit Lesbian Home Movie Project to find, preserve, digitize, and document as much amateur film and tape made by lesbians or depicting lesbian lives as possible. In 2017 the project collaborated with Northeast Historic Film and Chicago Film Archives on a larger effort to begin to locate & digitize footage shot by women in regional archives. The Council on Libraries and Information Resources funded the first stage of the project and allocated money for Lesbian Home Movie Project (LHMP) to build this website and its underlying database.
In return for the original media and help documenting collections, the Project offers donors digital copies of their collections and shares rights during their lifetimes. The collection now includes over 500 films and tapes from all over the United States.
If you have or know of film or tape that fits our mission, please get in touch. Film & tape degrade with time, and the older a collection is, the more important it is to document while there are still people who can tell its stories. If you’re looking for something specific or have memories or details to share, shoot us an email. This is your project too. It’s info@lesbianhomemovieproject.org.