“Queens and presidents wives and movie stars - he was always around fancy places and fancy things,” Seagraves said. Louis’ “hairdresser to the stars.”įrom Eleanore Roosevelt to Ethel Merman, whenever celebrities and dignitaries came to town, they all went to Walton’s salon at The Chase, said Walton’s niece Susie Seagraves. It was at the Lindell Boulevard home of the now-deceased Buddy Walton, widely known as St. Story stumbled upon the films in the mid-1990s, a half century after the pool party, at an estate sale.
Watch a clip from the 1945 home movies of gay men at a pool party. “I kind of couldn’t believe I was seeing it.”
“There was such a beauty in that moment,” Story said. Louis filmmaker Geoff Story has begun weaving the films into a documentary, “Gay Home Movie.” It offers a rare glimpse into a largely invisible world, a time when same-sex relationships were not only looked at as immoral - they were illegal.Īs a gay man, Story is fascinated by the brittle, flickering scenes that include a uniformed World War II soldier kissing another man.
