AutoErotica: We Buy Gay Stuff
HOW QUEER HISTORY SURVIVES
Through magazines, music, film, photography, and personal archives, A Very Oral History explores how one generation's survival becomes the next generation's inheritance.
From Short to Feature
AutoErotica: We Buy Gay Stuff premiered at Frameline Film Festival and has since screened at 23 festivals across the United States, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, earning jury prizes and audience awards along the way.
What began as the story of a single store revealed something much larger. Audiences responded not only to the people behind the archive, but to the histories contained within it. A Very Oral History expands that exploration into a feature-length documentary, using magazines, music, film, photography, and personal archives to examine how queer culture was created, shared, and preserved across generations.
The Story
Hidden up a narrow staircase in San Francisco's Castro District, AutoErotica appears at first glance to be an unassuming shop filled with vintage gay erotica. In reality, it is a living archive containing decades of magazines, films, music, and ephemera that helped shape queer identity, connection, and community before the internet.
A Very Oral History uses this collection as a portal into fifty years of queer culture, exploring how media circulated desire, created language, and allowed queer people to find one another during a time when visibility came with risk. Today, artists, archivists, musicians, and preservationists are working to recover and protect what remains before it disappears.