‘Outliers and Outlaws’ Comes Home

It certainly wasn’t easy for the older queer generation, says Courtney Hermann, a film instructor at Portland State University and director of the documentary Outliers and Outlaws. And yet, she adds, “They had joy. They had their lives.” The nine narrators in the documentary are the pioneering lesbian women who settled in Eugene from the 1970s to the 1990s, leading the city to be referred to as the “lesbian mecca” during that period. The film — which has a free screening and a Q&A afterward Feb. 2 at the University of Oregon’s Straub Hall — is another platform for the popular Outliers and Outlaws: Stories from the Eugene Lesbian History Project at the UO’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History in 2023 as well as an award-winning digital humanities project with the same name from the Oral History Association in 2024. The nine women in the film, Hermann notes, “speak to certain parts of history. It’s a further distillation.” The documentary first showed at the invitation-only QDoc Film Festival in Portland in November 2024, then played seven times (with five showings sold out) at Portland’s Cinema 21. Among the nine women spotlighted in the documentary is the late Sally Sheklow, who wrote the “Living Out” column for Eugene Weekly from 1999 to 2017.

Outliers and Outlaws screens 2 pm Sunday, Feb. 2, at room 156 at Straub Hall on the University of Oregon campus. A Q&A session with some of the film’s participants and filmmaking crew follows. FREE. Outliers and Outlaws also plays 5 pm Friday, Feb. 28, and 5 pm Saturday, March 1, as well as 2 pm and 7 pm Sunday, March 2, at Art House, 492 East 13th Avenue. $8-11.

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