David Weissman Papers, 1950s-2020s

Weissman, David, 1954-

David Weissman is an American gay filmmaker, film programmer, public speaker, and activist. He is known for directing the documentaries The Cockettes (2002) and We Were Here (2011), as well as the series Conversations With Gay Elders (2015–2017), an intergenerational project for which he partnered with gay men in their 20s and 30s to create short films profiling men in their 70s and older who first experienced gay life before the liberation movement of the 1970s.

Weissman was born and grew up in the Los Angeles area, the son of an upper-middle-class Reform Jewish family with ties to progressive culture. After attending public elementary and high schools, he moved in his late teens to Venice Beach, California, where he came out as gay and was active in the thriving counterculture and political activism in what was a bohemian seaside town at the time.

In 1976, Weissman moved to San Francisco, where he immersed himself in the overlapping counterculture, gay and activist communities. Over the next 28 years, he was deeply involved in the city's cultural and political life, especially as it developed its GBTQ center and through the start of the AIDS crisis. In 1980, Weissman served as an aide to San Francisco Supervisor Harry Britt (1938–2020), who had been appointed to replace Harvey Milk (1930–1978) after Milk's assassination. Weissman subsequently worked on political campaigns including Britt's 1986 run for U.S. Congress.

By the early 1980s, Weissman began pursuing his filmmaking career. He started out making shorts reflecting San Francisco's avant-garde drag culture such as Beauties Without a Cause (1986), as well as shorts responding to the onset of the AIDS crisis, including Song From an Angel (1988). AIDS also increasingly claimed a central place in his engagement in political and activist pursuits.

In 1984–1985, Weissman lived in Amsterdam, where he worked to establish connections with the European film community and where he made a number of lifelong friends. During this period, he also traveled in Western Europe, furthering his professional and personal contacts on the continent.

In 1990, Weissman was the first recipient of the Sundance Institute's Mark Silverman Fellowship for New Producers, serving as an intern producer on Joel Coen and Ethan Coen's film Barton Fink (1991). He also developed a never-produced narrative feature with filmmaker Richard Glatzer. In the mid-1990s, Weissman produced and directed an acclaimed series of innovative HIV prevention public service announcements as well as trailers for film festivals, including the Frameline Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. In the late 1990s, he started work on documentaries.

In 2004, Weissman moved to Portland, Oregon, where he co-founded and for 10 years co-programmed QDoc: The Portland Queer Documentary Film Festival. Weissman sold his home in Portland in 2017 and has since traveled around the United States and in Europe for a few weeks to a few months at t time, with frequent returns to the San Francisco Bay Area and Portland.

Since the 1980s, Weissman has taught filmmaking at several institutions. He also has introduced his own films and presented talks about his work for universities, museums, cultural organizations and community groups in the U.S. and Europe. In 2019, he gave the George Mosse Lecture at the University of Amsterdam.