P.S. Burn This Letter Please

Beautiful history told through personal stories, photos and letters. These gentlemen are true survivors.

P. S. Burn This Letter Please (2020) was co-written and co-directed by Michael Seligman and Jennifer Tiexiera.

It's a documentary about the life of gay men and drag queens in the 1950's and 1960's. A gay man named Reno Martin was friendly with many other gay men, and especially with drag queens.

They sent him dozens of letters, that he kept in a storage box. The box came to light recently, and the contents are fascinating. The letters were a time capsule of the (very difficult) life led by gay men, especially drag queens, when it was illegal for a man to be gay or to dress like a woman. It's hard to believe now, but that was the reality 60 years ago.

Of course, there's no lack of homophobia today, but at least being a drag queen doesn't put you at risk of being arrested. Many things are worse than today than they were then, but there has been progress.

The filmmakers were able to track down many of the men who had written those letters decades earlier. Some had died, and one remained unidentified. However, we hear interviews with older men who had lived long enough to finally see a new era. Their stories are very moving.

We saw this film virtually as part of ImageOut, Rochester's great LGBT Film Festival. It worked well on the small screen. The movie has an IMDb rating of 7.1. I thought it was better than that, and rated it 8.

Imagine suddenly having access to the lives, feelings, and friendships of female impersonators in the 1950s. We don't get a lot of media about Pre-Stonewall queer people, so this film is a total treasure trove. It's also hilarious and has so much fun in how they're presenting the letters. I loved it.

This documentary has a really strong style in how it conveys the letters, and I kind of feel like you either get on board with it or you don't. I was very on board. The letters are total treasure troves, and to have present-day participants dishing on the letter is just divine. I honestly didn't expect to love it as much as I did. Brava to the filmmakers.

Although some of this documentary was a bit repeated, which made it feel longer than it is, I still found it to be extremely interesting and well worth watching. You can't help but come out of it feeling sadness over the unnecessary suffering that so many in the gay community had to endure in the past. But you also gain even more respect for how they continued to survive and eventually thrive in a world that often belittled them. I highly recommend this film for anyone truly interested in the struggle for equality among those who did not choose to be born to be different than the average, but embraced it despite the odds against them.