Mario perez video collection

CONSERVATION & CAPTURE

Grant year: 2023

Grant category: Al Larvick National Grant

Grant recipient: Mario Perez

Project Manager: Jim Hubbard

Collection title: The Mario Perez Video Collection

Primary maker(s): Mario Perez

Original format: Video8 and MiniDV, color, sound

Circa: 1996-2009

Collection size: 20 Video8 tapes, 28 MiniDV tapes

Grant support: Cleaning and repair as needed, and digital capture of approximately 20 hours of the videotape-based collection

Digital capture: Uncompressed Quicktime .MOV at original aspect ratio

Lab: Media Burn Archive

Status: Conservation and digitization yet to commence

Online Access: Coming soon

Creative Commons Coming soon

GRANTEE & FILMMAKER

Mario Perez was born in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba, a village outside of Havana.  He came to the U.S. during the Mariel Boatlift in 1980.  He was briefly incarcerated in a refugee camp at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas and then, at his request, relocated to New York.  He was given $100 and a bus ticket. 

He worked as a naked dancer at the Show Palace on 42nd Street from 1980 – 1983.  Through a friend he obtained a job as a file clerk for AIG in 1983.  He worked at AIG until September 11, 2001 and then worked for AHRC (originally the Association for the Help of Retarded Children) until 2013.  He became a United States citizen in 1999 and started making annual return trips to Cuba in 2000. 

He began filming his friends and community in the 1980s.  He has videotaped his friends and the Queer community especially around Christopher Street and in Cuba since 1994. 

He lives in Kew Gardens, Queens with his husband of 25 years, David Prestigiacomo.

collection

The Mario Perez Videotape Collection consists of 20 8mm videotapes and 28 mini-DV tapes.  The tapes capture Mario and his friends in the gay community from about 1996 to about 2009.  They are very personal and show Mario and his friends hanging out on Christopher Street, on the piers, at the Chelsea Gym and in the gay bar called Sneakers, which was on West Street at the corner of Christopher Street. 

The collection includes video on the following subject matter:

1. Christopher Street and environs – gay bars, bookstores, and street life in the late 1990s including footage of bars with an ethnically and gender diverse clientele that no longer exist.  These provide a view of gay life that has disappeared from Greenwich Village.

2. The Closing of the Chelsea Gym – the Chelsea Gym was an important part of New York City Gay Culture. Gym culture was a crucial corrective to the abuse and bullying that many gay men received in Phys. Ed. at school when they were children.  It was a place that gay men could be themselves and assert their own particular brand of masculinity. 

3. Funerals – the funerals/memorial services for 1 or 2 men who died of AIDS

4. Return to Cuba – an exile returns to Cuba 2001 – 2009.  Footage of friends, relatives, and street hustlers.  A rare documentation of ordinary life in Cuba.

5. September 11, 2001 – footage shot outside of St. Vincent’s Hospital after the attacks on the World Trade Center

6. Vacations in Texas, California, and Montreal

Mario’s collection also contains a number of reels of Super-8 film that are not part of this grant.  Mario first started filming on Super-8 in the 1980s. He was working as a nude dancer at the Show Palace on 42nd Street.  Customers would give Mario and the other dancers Super-8 film.  The customers would then give the dancers copies of the films. Mario is hesitant about having the Super-8 digitized because it contains footage of men who have died or who could not be located in order to obtain permission.