Over the past two years, we have been gradually digitizing the Nelson Sullivan Video Collection (Fales, MSS.357) in the Media Preservation Unit.  The tapes are a treasure trove of documentation of LGBTQ (and other) life in downtown Manhattan (and elsewhere) in the 1980s.  Tomorrow marks the 30th anniversary of Nelson Sullivan’s untimely death from a heart attack, so this felt like a good moment to report on the progress we’ve made on his collection, and to honor his invaluable work.

Beginning in 1983, Nelson documented the life around him on video, first on a VHS camcorder (237 tapes from 1983-86), which was so heavy that he suffered a hernia after three years and had to replace his camera with a new Video8 camera (364 tapes from 1986-89).  (Indeed, in the earliest Video8 tapes, Nelson goes around showing the surgical incision from his hernia repair to everyone he speaks to!) The videos also have a bit of a prequel, if you will, in the form of 59 reels of Super-8 film that Nelson shot (or, in a few instances, purchased and edited) in the 1970s.  Nelson had hoped to use his tapes to create a Manhattan cable access show, a dream which he was poised to realize at the time of his death. One can only imagine what it would have been like, but we are fortunate still to have these 660 recordings!

The tapes may be best known for their documentation of shows and personalities in the downtown scene in the 1980s, and indeed, they provide an abundance of documentation of John Sex, Dean Johnson, Tish Gervais, Cookie Watkins, Michael Musto, Albert Crudo, Holly Woodlawn, the Fabulous Pop Tarts, RuPaul, the Now Explosion, Joey Arias, Ethyl Eichelberger, Lady Bunny, and countless others.  But there are also visits home to South Carolina, long drives in the car, walks with Nelson’s dog Blackout (which are wonderful, simultaneously capturing miles of NYC streets and the chatter of a lovely person talking to his lovely dog), and countless minute close-ups of details of the spaces where the tapes were shot. There is an entire tape shot while shopping in a mall in Columbia, South Carolina, and another documenting the entirety of a Monopoly game played by Nelson and two friends (he reflects that, “it’s fun because I have a record of how many times we’ve cheated each other, you know? It’s fun to watch people cheat on television.”)  The collection is incredibly rich as a record of history that might otherwise be lost, but also as an expression of one amazing person’s life and sensibilities over the course of years.

L to R: RuPaul Backstage at the Pyramid Club (MSS.357, tape 0173); Nelson with his Video8 camcorder (tape 0372); a video game machine at the grand opening of the bowling alley in Port Authority (tape 0052); Joey Arias performing with a very futuristic robot at the 1986 New Music Seminar (tape 0079)

Before the collection was acquired by Fales in 2012, the collection was cared for by a group of Nelson’s friends, including his lifelong friend and fellow videomaker, Dick Richards.  Somewhere along the way they had the tapes “ripped” to DVD and have been posting clips to the 5 Ninth Avenue YouTube channel for nearly a decade, providing a crucial continuous access point to the collection.  There is something wonderful, though, in viewing the tapes in their entirety — many are full 90 and 120 cassettes.  Their very duration provides a feeling of being there, yet Nelson’s discriminating eye and appreciation for small details and sense for in-camera editing, rarely make them tedious.

But, furthermore, our efforts on this collection — and all media collections on which we work — are not only to make the content accessible, but to create the best digital surrogates that we can for the analog video content, so that it will not be lost if and when the tapes degrade and playback decks are no longer available. And having created those uncompressed digital files from the analog source tapes, we maintain them for the long-term, uploading them along with associated metadata and derivative files to the university’s digital preservation repository.

I’ll leave you now with a diverse selection of clips from the collection.  Enjoy!

The Fales Library & Special Collections finding aid can be accessed here.

Raw footage of Larry Tee, Judy Lagrange, and Lahoma van Zandt dancing for the music video for La Palace De Beauté’s song “The Playboy”.
(MSS.357, tape 0426)

Martha P. Johnson marching in the 1986 Pride parade.
(MSS.357, tape 0371)

Recording session of downtown artists and personalities recording the Petula Clark song “Downtown” to raise money for AIDS research.
(MSS.357, tape 0420)

Dean Johnson performs at the Pyramid Club’s “Downtown Dukes and Divas”.  Song contains profanity!
(MSS.357, tape 0085)

Nelson and Dick Richards buy barbecue on the way from Kershaw, SC to Atlanta, GA.
(MSS.357, tape 0429)

The collection was recently discussed in a piece by Matthew Terrell for Slate, which is well worth a read.