The aesthetic of camp associated with urban gay men in the 1930s and its reflection in the life of a young man in rural Maine is the subject of a lecture at the Rose O’Neill Literary House on March 7. “Not-at-Home Movies: Queer Aesthetics and Amateur Movie-Making in the 1930s” will feature speakers Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, both teachers in Penn State University’s English department.

This event, which begins at 4:30, is part of the Sophie Kerr Lecture Series and is free and open to the public.

The talk focuses on a collection of home movies from the Northeast Historic Film Archives in Bucksport, Maine, a nonprofit archive dedicated to collecting, preserving, and sharing northern New England’s moving image heritage and especially lesser-known, amateur, and found films. The talk will examine “the ways that camp aesthetics usually associated with gay men in big cities bring out the queer beauties of family life for a young man in the early 1930s.”

Castiglia and Reed are co-authors of If Memory Serves: AIDS, Gay Men, and the Promise of the Queer Past (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Reed is also the author of Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas (Oxford University Press, 2011) as well as books on the Bloomsbury Group and publications on Japanism. Castiglia is the author of Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst (University of Chicago Press, 1996) and other publications on American literature and culture.