From U-matic Tapes to the Big Screen: Preserving Lavender Lounge Archives
Earlier this summer, the BAVC Media Preservation team attended the Frameline50 screening of Here, Queer, and On TV. The documentary short explores the legacy of Lavender Lounge, a San Francisco public access television show that aired throughout the 1990s. This groundbreaking queer variety show captured everything from dance parties to San Francisco’s first Dyke March and the first official Pride video. As part of the project, BAVC Preservation Director Tim Lake digitized the show’s original U-matic tapes, helping ensure this remarkable archive could be preserved for future generations.
After digitizing the Lavender Lounge archive, Tim reflects on how this preservation project became a powerful reminder of public access television’s role in documenting community and why preserving these stories matters more than ever.
BAVC Preservation Team: Chris Castro, Sophie Mayer & Tim Lake
BAVC Media – home to both BAVC Preservation and San Francisco’s public access broadcast station SF COMMONS – sits at a unique intersection where (and when) community media collides and converses across generations. We don’t consider ourselves archivists in the professional sense, but with our own 50-year history as a community-driven media nonprofit, we inevitably have our collective hands in all manner of productions big and small that are woven into this city.
So you can imagine our surprise and delight when the phone rang about a very gay, very glam, and very televised public access variety show from the 1990s that had been trapped on aging U-matic videotapes ever since. In my mind, it was like uncovering a formative document revealing San Francisco’s beating heart. The show in question was called Lavender Lounge, produced and hosted by Mark Kliem, and it’s an understatement to say that the colors and sounds explode to life immediately upon pressing play.
Directors Cassandra Herrman and Kelly Whalen & Host of Lavender Lounge, Mark Kliem
The resurgence of this footage comes by way of a new documentary short called Here, Queer, and On TV, co-directed by filmmakers Cassandra Herrman and Kelly Whalen. Upon making contact with Kliem, they discovered his trove of taped episodes spanning 4 years, documenting some of the most challenging days of San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ community. Oftentimes, Kliem would introduce Lavender Lounge as “the TV Dance Party for Gay Boys and Girls” – and while the content certainly delivers on this premise with infectious results – the trajectory of the show with its growing audience and resources over time capture a much wider range of San Francisco history.
The charmingly scrappy, DIY nature of Lavender Lounge shares the same DNA that remains present at BAVC Media to this day. It is a proudly local source of messaging, celebration, communion (due in no small part to frequent appearances by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence), culture, and, of course, dance that remains a vital time capsule. The immediacy and directness of its production is baked into its impact, a testament to the public media format that faces ever-taller hurdles.
Its continued relevance is also a testament to the power of preservation. Physical tape formats are one of the few hurdles that no longer exist as they did for Lavender Lounge, so as stewards of history with the advantage of foresight, we have a responsibility to protect and buoy these stories from sinking into degradation and obsolescence. It’s a small miracle that Kliem’s closet of U-matic tapes retained such vivid colors, as if the dance parties within could no longer be contained. A shrinking number of collections survive in stable condition, and once they’re gone – they’re gone. It’s no particular surprise that the tape collections at most risk of loss also contain some of the most unique, impactful stories. In this way, Here, Queer, and On TV reveals not a bygone era, but the unshakeable bond between public media and preservation.
