Audre Lorde (right) and friend in New York City, circa 1950s (Audre Lorde/First Run Features)

This award-winning and newly restored documentary is being rereleased 35 years after its original run. It takes the viewer back to the early 20th century, before the pivotal riots in the summer of 1969 that gave rise to the queer liberation movement of the 1970s and onward. The film is a collage of interviews, photos, home movies, and news footage of the events described. Through first-person accounts, it weaves a narrative of LGBTQ history to inform the viewers of today just how much different those times were for queer people.

Director Greta Schiller takes us inside the gay speakeasies during Prohibition, where queer people congregated to drink bathtub gin and behave as freely as they pleased behind closed doors. More and more major cities were developing gay communities during this time, and gay rights groups quietly and steadily started to form. World War II was crucial in the formation of gay communities within the ranks of the armed forces. I’ve seen Before Stonewall several times now, and the story of the mostly lesbian army unit still puts a smile on my face.

The documentary goes through many facets of queer life, exploring how people sought each other out and learned about themselves in popular pulp novels with lesbian and gay themes, subversive queer plays and films, books by gay authors (William Burroughs), the poetry of beatniks like Allen Ginsberg, and the breakout studies on human sexuality by scientist Alfred Kinsey.

Perhaps the film’s narrative arc could be pinned on its discussion with several of the interviewees about living in the time when LGBTQ people were considered by the medical establishment as mentally ill. (It was still classified as a mental illness until a few years after Stonewall.) Those who lived outwardly risked imprisonment, loss of jobs, or could be institutionalized without due process of law just by admitting they were homosexual. Many might be shocked to found out that even within the queer liberation movement, members disagreed with each other over whether or not they were in fact mentally ill. That startling nugget is why Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community should be required viewing for any course on LGBTQ history.