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Produced for the Psychological Cinema Registry at Penn State, this unusual film is an actual documentation of a gay college student’s first therapy session with the pioneering psychiatrist Dr. Carl Rogers. “Mr. Lin” is a twenty-something piano student at the University of Chicago, where Rogers was a professor. Nerdy but handsome, the bespectacled and chain-smoking Mr. Lin slouches in his chair and fusses with his glasses as he talks about his struggle to overcome his homosexual tendencies (“My problem is homosexuality. I want to change.”), as well as his depression and fear of being excluded from society (“When you say that you’re queer it automatically sets you apart.”) A fascinating document, The Case of Mr. Lin intimately offers a glimpse into the internal life of a young gay man in the mid-1950s. Known as the originator of client-centered psychology, Carl Rogers demonstrates his groundbreaking method of “unconditional positive regard,” in which the therapist reflects back in positive ways what the patient has expressed, employing active listening and affirmation. It is especially notable that in 1955, decades before the eventual 1973 removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association's DSM, Rogers validates the experience of his patient. The first twenty minutes of the fifty-five-minute film will screen.

A remarkable series of fragments of home movie footage featuring a young butch on vacation with her father in New Jersey.

This quintessential homophobic stranger-danger educational film is in some ways hilarious in its melodramatic, alarmist premise that gay men and lesbians lurk around every corner waiting to prey on unsuspecting grade schoolers. But of course, the part that is not funny is what a familiar, baseless and false fear-mongering trope this is—and all the more disturbing that sixty years later the same baseless anti-LGBTQ bigotry is so resurgent and being actively weaponized by the political right. When it played at LGBTQ film festivals in a campy vintage shorts program in the 1990s a program note joked that: “It's a children's educational film from the 60s that teaches kids that meeting a homosexual is worse than falling into a ditch or getting hit by a speeding car.”

The year Anita Bryant launched her nationwide “Save the Children” attack on gay rights, this earnest educational film was released. As two teenage boys prepare for a rafting trip, one of them repeatedly argues that their friend McBride is “a fag” and should not be invited to join them. The film concludes with a well-meaning, if slightly dated, plea from popular young (straight ally) actor Beau Bridges urging tolerance of homosexuals.

Winner of the Best Short film award at the San Francisco LGBTQ Film Festival, Bertrand disparu is anchored by a standout performance from Nini Crépon as a flamboyant drag queen and bon vivant named Boris who offers his platonic protection of a (straight) twelve-year-old boy runaway wandering the streets of Paris.