Lionel Soukaz , Race d’Ep – un siècle d’images de l’homosexualité / Race d’Ep – The Homosexual Century, 1979
4:3 Video, 90 minutes
Courtesy  of the artist

In 1973, Lionel Soukaz (1953, FR) began shooting diaristic Super8 films about homosexuality – which was still taboo in France at the time – pornography and social criticism. Later on, Soukaz collaborated with Guy Hocquenghem, the so-called ‘father of queer theory’, on the film Race d’Ep ! (1979), which traces the relationships between the development of photography in the 19th Century and subsequent representations of homosexual desire. The film was accompanied by Hocquenghem’s publication Race d’Ep ! : Un Siècle D’Images de l’Homosexualité and moves from Baron von Gloeden’s nude photographs and early sexology to gay liberation and cruising on the streets of 1970s Paris.