Peter Adair

Wikipedia article about Peter Adair, downloaded 2009

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Adair

Peter Adair (22 November 1943 – 27 June 1996) was a filmmaker and artist, best known for his pioneering documentary, Word Is Out.

Early life

Adair was born in Los Angeles County in 1943.

Career

Adair entered the film industry in the 1960s and first gained critical attention with his 1967 documentary Holy Ghost People, a film record of a Pentecostal snake handler worship service in the Appalachians. From 1975 to 1977, he collaborated with his lesbian sister Nancy Adair and other members of the Mariposa Film Group to produce and direct Word Is Out. The film, the first of its kind to present gays and lesbians in a positive light, was a critical hit nationwide. Word Is Out inspired Nancy to collaborate with Casey Adair, Peter and Nancy's mother, on a companion book, published in 1978. Peter Adair always chose the subject matter for his film based on his current passions, and Word Is Out was as much a vital part of his own coming out process as it was an attempt to show gays and lesbians in a very human and non-sensational manner.

In 1983 Peter Adair produced Stopping History and in 1984 acted as consultant and did additional camerawork on The Times of Harvey Milk, directed by his former protégé Rob Epstein. That same year he worked with the Project Read adult literacy program of the San Francisco Public Library to produce a series of tutoring videos.

Late career

As he began to see his friends in the art and film communities succumb to the plague of AIDS, Adair co-directed, with Rob Esptein, The AIDS Show: Artists Involved in Death and Survival, one of the first films to examine AIDS' impact on the arts community, in 1986. When he became aware of his own HIV status, he wrote and directed Absolutely Positive, an examination of how asymptomatic HIV positive people live with uncertainty.

On 27 June 1996, Peter Adair finally succumbed to complications of AIDS at the age of 52 in San Francisco.

Another web page about Peter

http://www.docurama.com/filmmakerdetail.html?filmmakerid=33

says (2009):

Peter Adair began making films when his parents gave him a movie camera for his high school graduation. His first major film, "Holy Ghost People," made when he was just 21, was an anthropological study of Christian fundamentalists who test their faith by drinking strychnine and handling poisonous snakes. Margaret Mead invited the young filmmaker to show the movie and to lecture at her class at Columbia, where she said it was one of the finest ethnographic films ever made. It was all downhill from there, for a while anyway, including 18 horrible months directing a documentary on Dionne Warwick and two disastrous years working for a PBS station.

Adair finally decided he had to do his own films, about subjects that mattered to him. In 1978, he produced and co-directed "Word is Out," winner of numerous prizes including a Columbia Dupont Citation for Broadcast Excellence and the Prix l'Age d'Or, and in 1983 he completed "Stopping History," a PBS documentary about anti-nuclear activism. In 1986, Peter co-directed (with Rob Epstein) "The AIDS Show: Artists Involved with Death and Survival." In the late 80s, Peter caught the computer virus, which led him to create interactive computer games. Adair was also a recipient of the James D. Phelan Award in filmmaking and a founding board member of the Independent Feature Project.

Peter wrote:

"The nice thing about having a serious disease is that it's ok to say anything you want and people put up with it. I don't know if it's because they feel sorry for you, the extra-cake-at-the-birthday-party-'cuz-you've-been-sick syndrome, or because they think, since you're facing death, you're somehow wiser. Both attitudes should be encouraged however."