Lost Early LGBT Photos Seen Anew in The Invisibles

After winning the Cesar for best documentary, Sebastien Lifshitz finally gets a US release this week for the companion volume The Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride. Gay Couples in the Early Twentieth Century. Lifshitz collected the snapshots over twenty years of trawling flea markets, junk shops, and ebay in France, Germany, Portugal, and the United States. He says, "With each discovery I was stunned, for these images didn’t match the official history of homosexuality as it has been conveyed to us. As a teenager, when I dreamed of my adult life, if I stuck to the literature or the few films that existed on the subject, the future promised to be dark. To be gay or lesbian meant belonging to a genealogy of suffering, to have a dramatic, if not a tragic, destiny. Despite the many battles and certain victories that ensued, the homosexual remained a victim in the collective consciousness; a hidden man. Yet, these images, which I've found through the years, were telling another story -- one about a homosexuality without inhibitions, gentle and playful."