It inspires a range of sight gags: a maid’s costume reveals her shapely booty a mirror cracks when it encounters Mrs. Stone (1961), Warner Brothers’ adaptation of the Tennessee Williams novel about an aging American actress who escapes to Italy and falls for a handsome gigolo. Stone (1963), a take-off of The Roman Spring of Mrs.

The gang assembled an even larger gaggle of feminine personae for The Roman Springs on Mrs. The film’s goofy home-movie quality has since allowed it to age into an accidental documentary, giving twenty-first century viewers a rare peek into a night at a pre-Stonewall hangout.įuri Cote as the bartender in the Gay Girls Riding Club’s Always on Sunday, 1962 The drag is loose and raw, with big messy wigs and teetering high heels, and the gag is that the hunky workingman and sailors the girls desperately try to solicit instead end up going home with one another. Without much redecoration, The Brownstone, then a gay watering hole in Hollywood, stands in for a portside taverna. The GGRC’s eight-minute satire focuses on the latter character and her squad as they dance and flirt in a bar full of men. (Tragically, their Liz Taylor send-up Suddenly, Last Sunday has yet to be recovered.) Remembered today mostly for its bouncy, bouzouki-powered theme song, Dassin’s racy feature relates a love story between an uptight American professor and a fun-loving local prostitute in the Greek city of Piraeus. Always on Sunday (1962) is a spoof of Jules Dassin’s Never on Sunday (1960) the club gathered, and filmed, weekly on Sundays. The Riding Club’s first efforts were shot without sound, on black-and-white 16mm film, with music and sound effects added later.

Recently their films have resurfaced in gorgeous digital restorations, thanks to the efforts of UCLA’s Film and Television Archive, the American Genre Film Archive, and the assiduous research of the queer film historian Elizabeth Purchell, who has chosen five of the group’s six extant films to screen on Metrograph’s streaming service for Pride Month.

Many of the club’s members worked in the entertainment industry, and in the early 1960s they started making their own amateur films: increasingly elaborate spoofs of popular American and European releases of the time, with the GGRC and their friends as the cast and crew. Formed in the late 1950s and lasting until the 1980s, the GGRC was a private social club of Hollywood homosexuals whose activities included horseback riding in Griffith Park and holding dinners, notorious Halloween costume parties, and drag performances. For decades the zany underground comedies of the Gay Girls Riding Club were all but lost to history.

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