100 Years of Men in Love: The Accidental Collection

For more than two decades, Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell quietly assembled something no one had set out to build: a collection of vintage photographs of male couples, now numbering roughly 3,000 images from the 1850s to the 1950s. It began with a single century-old picture found in an antique shop and grew into the acclaimed photo book Loving. In this Here TV documentary, Emmy-winning director David Millbern sits with the couple as they page through portraits, tintypes and snapshots of men holding hands, embracing and gazing at each other in eras when such affection could cost a man his freedom. Handwritten notes on the backs of photographs and small visual clues become evidence of lives lived in love and in secret. Warm, tender and quietly moving, the film makes the case that gay men have always had a history worth seeing.