DAVID WEISSMAN, born on this date, is a filmmaker best known for his queer historical documentaries We Were Here (2011) and The Cockettes (2002), as well as Conversations With Gay Elders (2015-2017)—a cross-generational collaboration on which then 63-year-old producer/ director Weissman worked in partnership with gay men in their 20s and 30s to profile gay men in their 70s and 80s, whose journeys of navigating being “different” preceded the era of Stonewall and Gay Liberation. 

David moved from Venice Beach to San Francisco as a long-haired 22 year old in 1976 and over the next 28 years was deeply involved in the city’s cultural and political life. In 1980 David was Legislative Aide to San Francisco Supervisor Harry Britt, who had been appointed to replace Harvey Milk after Milk’s assassination. David worked on a number of political campaigns including Britt’s campaign for US Congress in 1986, but also took a different path in the early 1980s to explore filmmaking.

He began by making short quirky comedies, without any specific plan or goal in mind, and after making a number of varied short films, HIV prevention Public Service Announcements, Film Festival trailers, and an attempt to make a narrative feature film, unexpectedly moved toward making documentaries.

In 1990, David was selected as the first recipient of the Sundance Institute/ Mark Silverman Fellowship for New Producers, and spent four months as a trainee Producer on Joel and Ethan Coen’s Barton Fink. Having experienced living in San Francisco through Harvey Milk’s election and assassination, followed by the darkest years of the AIDS epidemic, David increasingly grasped the importance of documenting our LGBT history for younger, and future generations, which influenced his choices to make We Were Here and Conversations With Gay Elders.

David moved to Portland OR in 2004, where he co-founded, and for 10 years co-programmed QDoc: The Portland Queer Documentary Film Festival—the only film festival in the world exclusively devoted to LGBT documentaries.   David has taught various aspects of filmmaking, and been a guest lecturer at many universities. David was invited to give the prestigious 2019 George Mosse Lecture in Amsterdam. Both The Cockettes and We Were Here were nominated for Independent Spirit Awards in the Best Documentary category, and The Cockettes received the LA Film Critics Award for Best Documentary in 2002.