Since then the two entities have been dovetailing and repelling -- show business is either a velvet mafia conspiracy or it's been misrepresenting gays since Thomas Edison's 1894 "sissy" film fragment of men dancing cheek to cheek.

[David Secter]'s subsequent personal entry into hippie sexploitation flicks is documented in his nephew's film The Best of Secter/The Rest of Secter. Many of the subjects in The View From Here have had circuitous careers, such as Wakefield Poole, who started out as a dancer in the famed Ballet Russes before directing the first gay porno hit Boys in the Sand in 1971.

The lesbian director of the hit TV show The L Word, Rose Troche, cashes in her mainstream status, lamenting her lost early years of formal experimentation: "I want to be irreverent, I want to be political, gay has become so superficial, it's become: 'what am I going to wear to this event?'"