Cinemattachine/Seven Committee (Hal Call/San Francisco Underground Adult Film Venue/IYKYK)

Cinemattachine / Seven Committee — San Francisco Tee

Part film society, part private club, part sex-positive experiment, Cinemattachine was one of the stranger—and more fascinating—chapters in the history of San Francisco’s Mattachine Society.

In 1973, longtime Mattachine activist Hal Call opened Cinemattachine behind the Adonis Bookstore at 384 Ellis Street in the Tenderloin. The name combined cinema and Mattachine, and the project grew out of the organization’s earlier sex-education film programs. It screened gay erotic films alongside Mattachine newsreels and other material at a time when simply producing and showing explicitly gay films was still a politically charged act. Sage Journals

Cinemattachine was presented as a project of the Mattachine Society and its Seven Committee, a private social organization for gay men. The Seven Committee had originally been formed within Mattachine to organize social gatherings—an extension of the idea that gay liberation wasn't only about fighting discrimination; gay men should actually be able to meet, socialize, have sex, and enjoy the freedom they were fighting for. Making Gay History

By the mid-1970s, the Ellis Street operation had become considerably more than a little screening room. Membership advertisements listed films, lockers, showers, a music room, television lounge, gay information center, community-events box office, travel club, and other facilities. In 1974, Cinemattachine reported membership had passed 1,200; by 1976, the organization was describing a membership of more than 5,600. Digital Collections

The films themselves ranged from erotic features and short loops to Seven Committee travel films and footage of San Francisco's Gay Freedom Day celebrations. In 1976 the group filmed the San Francisco parade and planned to do the same at Los Angeles Gay Freedom Day, then screen the footage for members in both cities. Digital Collections

Eventually Cinemattachine evolved into the Circle J Cinema, but that wonderfully awkward original name captures a very specific moment in gay history—when activism, sexual liberation, pornography, community organizing and a neighborhood bookstore could somehow all exist under the same roof.