Montreal Main

Montreal Main: A Queer Film Classic considers the brilliant yet neglected 1974 Canadian film set in Montreal's bohemian neighborhood "The Main" and hailed at its premiere at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The movie, directed and starring Frank Vitale, is both a great indie film and a great queer film; a fascinating cinema vérité take on North American social mores and relationships in the 1970s, about a twentysomething photographer living among the outcasts, junkies, and artists populating the Main, and his growing obsession with Johnny, the young son of acquaintances, a relationship that is doomed from the start. Disarming in its matter-of-fact treatment of potentially sensational themes, Montreal Main is a quiet yet powerful look at human relations among the post-flower power generation.

The book, a collaboration between Thomas Waugh and Jason Garrison, details the nuanced history of this peculiar film, which was released on DVD for the first time in 2009. It also considers the politics and aesthetics of the trope of intergenerational love that director Vitale and collaborators Allan Moyle and Stephen Lack so brazenly probed, in a way that would make the film virtually impossible to produce in present day.

The QUEER FILM CLASSICS series, begun in 2009, consists of critical yet populist monographs on classic films of interest to LGBT audiences written by esteemed film scholars and critics. The series is edited by authors Thomas Waugh (Out/Lines, Lust Unearthed) and Matthew Hays (The View from Here).