Mark Olmsted and Thomas F. Sailer | 1980 / 2022

one of the very first of the contemporary coming out films

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark Olmsted (screenplay), Mark Olmsted and Thomas F. Sailer (directors) 1980 / 2022 [32 minutes]

 

For years I have been arguing that the first of the more contemporary B versions of the “coming out” film came into being in the late 1990s with Hettie McDonald’s Beautiful Thing of 1996, Simon Shore’s Get Real of 1998, and David Moreton’s Edge of Seventeen from the same year.

     Yet I always suspected that given the common experience shared by gays long before that, including my own coming out to my parents long before in 1970 and my husband Howard’s even earlier experience, that there must have been earlier films. I even observed an earlier, quite different version of the same subject, half-way between the A and B versions in the documentary from 1980, Bruce Glawson’s A Gay Son; and since then I have discovered even others.

      But recently I came across even an earlier one, filmed by Mark Olmsted, co-directed by Thomas F. Sailer, at New York University as a graduating senior film from their famed school of film in the late 1970s titled …and he’ll grow up to be big and strong. In those days before the numerous gay and lesbian film festivals such films were released to extremely small audiences, and when, some years later, the young filmmaker Mark Olmsted requested a copy, he was told the film was destroyed in storage.

      In 2021 he wrote an essay for an AIDS memorial site for his brother Luke who had died 30 years earlier, and was contacted by Adele DeWitt Racheff, the actor who played the central character’s, Max Rockman’s sister in the film. She had a pristine copy of the film and sent him a version, thus restoring a film that had been thought to be lost.

     He made some modest changes concerning the sound, small changes in dialogue, and added music, retitling it 1980 and re-released it to the public.

       Here, in fact, we see all the standard forms and structures of the modern, B version, of the genre, without any traces of the A version. And other than some further earlier documentaries, this might be said to be, to date, my nomination for the earliest contemporary “coming out” film, which was finally released only in 2022.

    Max Rockman (Keith Jones) is living in a small apartment with is lover David Marks (Greg Schaffert), jogging some mornings along with his more athletic friend—he doesn’t like jogging—when he suddenly receives a letter from his sister Madeleine (Racheff) that she and her mother will soon be arriving in the city for a visit.

     Max does not necessarily panic, but suggests to David that he will simply dine out with them at restaurants for their stay, with no need for them to visit and see the single double bed they share. David even suggests that he can easily get lost for an evening or so if they decide to visit, but he is the cook of the two, and how to explain the double bed.

     Indeed, after a cold wait for a taxi, so common for those who are not urban dwellers who attempt to hail a taxi while mildly stand back on a corner, as others hastily push forward. My parents in Paris once spent more than an hour attempt to hail a taxi, while I, angry with their timidity, walked the long distance back to our hotel, and even after observing one of the major protests of 1965, walking through the crowds and still returning to the hotel before they did.

      And suddenly they do show up at his door, he finally suggesting he will cook for them and they tour the small apartment, he quickly calling his friend to tell him how to fix flounder.

   His mother, Simone (Marjorie Fierst) immediately imagines that he is seeing or sleep with a girlfriend. But Max honestly explains, particularly when she dares him to shock her, that he is sharing the space with another male. She asks the obviously question, who sleeps on the couch, to which he finally replies that he shares the bed, Madeleine praising him for his opened-mindedness since, after all, it is the 1980s! But he calmly explains that actually the other male is not just a friend but his lover which quickly turns the mother into a homophobic gorgon, who insists that he can’t say he’s gay being just 20 years old. He demands she stop trying to pretend he’s something else. When she demands to know how long it has been going on, he admits since he was working, which clearly dates back to his high school days. She immediately stands and leaves, very much the reaction of my parents, as I have written elsewhere in these pages, upon just such announcement, who rose up from a dinner table in Washington, D.C. and drove back to Iowa.

     His sister is completely accepting of the situation, but he sends her back to help her mother digest the facts.

      The next day, after meeting with Madeleine at Columbia University, where she also plans to attend school, they discuss the situation, and the mother soon calls for a meeting. She cannot even comprehend when he tells her, surely one of the first such admissions on film, that he likes being gay because he knows who he is and can live with himself.  But she only makes things worse by questioning whether he, at his young age, can really imagine what love is—even though his parents have had a rocky relationship for most of their lives—insisting he come back to Chicago and seek out the help of a psychiatrist. He angrily replies that she is even questioning his own emotional feelings, explaining to her that he has long known he was gay, that it is not something to “cure” or “fix,” and that she is still unable to comprehend that he truly has a full and fulfilling relationship with his lover. When she still refuses to believe it, he simply walks away from her.

     Returning, he finds David away, evidently on a luncheon date, and despite his dislike of jogging, goes for a long run, returning to find his lover back home. When he explains what has happened to him, David attempts to assure him that he shouldn’t cut her off since he is certain she still loves him, Max becomes angry, suggesting perhaps that his mother was right, there is no true love there, but David finally stops him, explaining in an emotional scene something that he has never told his lover previously.

      After they begin to arrange meetings with a very nice girl, he felt disturbed that he was being forced to hurt her feelings, particularly since it was apparent that she really liked him.

     He too came out to his parents before moving to NYC, which did not work out well at all. His father told him to immediately pack and leave, while his mother stood quivering in fear and shame behind him, finally saying that “It should have been me.” Since she was a German concentration camp survivor, the works have a very particular meaning, that she should have been one of them to die instead of being a survivor.

      As David packs up to leave his father hands him a $1,000 check, suggesting it is for help in curing him, he throws the check back at him, and leaves, never to talk to either of them again.

      The film ends with Max calling his mother and attempting once more to make a meeting with her to help her understand who he is.

      This is a truly excellent coming out film long before the others. It doesn’t quite share their humor or the release that comes, particularly in Get Real, of announcing one’s gayness to his entire school community and their parents; but then at the beginning of the 1980s or particularly the late 1970s being gay was certainly nothing to be taken lightly or even laughed at, acceptance being rare a painful event that often took months and even years to occur—if ever. How wonderful it might have been if this short work had truly had distribution when it first appeared. But, at least, we now have it back to help understand how difficult and brave it was to come up in those early days when young men dared to break the quietude and painful suffering of the first A version of the coming out films.

 

Los Angeles, August 5, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).