1962/2007, 16mm transferred to video, color, silent
Curated by Bradford Noreen

Julius'
4PM - 4AM, continuous loop

Tearoom consists of footage shot by the police in the course of a crackdown on public sex in the American Midwest. In the summer of 1962, the Mansfield, Ohio Police Department photographed men in a restroom under the main square of the city. The cameramen hid in a closet and watched the clandestine activities through a two-way mirror. The film was used as court evidence against the defendants, all of whom were found guilty of sodomy, which at that time carried a mandatory minimum sentence of one year. The original surveillance footage shot by the police came into the possession of director William E. Jones while he was researching this case for a documentary project. The unedited scenes of ordinary men of various races and classes meeting to have sex were so powerful that the director decided to present the footage with a minimum of intervention. Tearoom is a radical example of film presented "as found" for the purpose of circulating historical images that have otherwise been suppressed.

William E. Jones is an artist and filmmaker who teaches film history at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He has made two feature length experimental films, Massillon (1991) and Finished (1997), several short videos, including The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998), the feature length documentary Is It Really So Strange?(2004), and many video installations. His films and videos were the subject of retrospectives at Tate Modern, London, in 2005, and at Anthology Film Archives, New York, in 2010. He has worked in the adult video industry under the name Hudson Wilcox.

The structure that is now Julius' has been welcoming folks since 1840, first as a grocery store and then, in 1864 as a bar. During Prohibition it was a popular speakeasy and was frequented by many of the jazz and literary legends of the era. It started to attract a gay clientele in the 1950s and it is surely the oldest gay bar in the city. Both Boys In The Band and Next Stop Greenwich Village were filmed here. On April 26, 1966, four homophile activists staged a "sip in" at Julius' to challenge the NYS Liquor Authority's regulation that prohibited bars and restaurants from serving homosexuals. Accompanied by five reporters, the group visited a number of bars until they were denied service at Julius', a longtime Greenwich Village gay bar. The incident drew a denial from the SLA chairman that his agency told bars not to serve homosexuals and precipitated an investigation by the chairman of the city's Human Rights Commission.