Independent Lens
The Grocery List Show
Host Chrissy Camba, former Top Chef contender, and guests visit international grocery stores across the U.S. and cook together, illustrating how cuisine can forge cultural connections.
Odd Man In
Odd Man In explores the complex double life of Donald Webster Cory, a mysterious writer who helped ignite the early gay rights movement—and then betrayed it.
- Length
- 25 minutes
- Funding Initiative
- Short-Form Open Call
Producer/Director
Matt Nadel
Matt Nadel is a filmmaker and journalist from Florida, now based in New York. His work has been distributed by The New Yorker and New York Times and has been featured on Vimeo Staff Picks and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. His latest documentary short, Cashing Out, premiered at the 2024 Provincetown International Film Festival.
Producer
Luke Hodges
Luke Hodges is a filmmaker based in New York City, with roots in South Carolina. With Matt Nadel, he is the co-founder of Nine Patch Pictures, a small documentary production company focused on queer stories. Nine Patch films have been supported by the Catapult Film Fund, NBCUniversal, and the New York Public Library, among others.
Producer
Peter Lansworth
Peter Lansworth is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker whose production company Sligo Studios specializes in documentaries, commercials, and music videos. His director credits include campaigns for Yahoo, Sephora, Prada, Paco Rabanne, L'Oréal, Walmart, and ESPN, as well as shows streaming on Roku and YouTube.
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The Film
In 1951, Donald Webster Cory published The Homosexual in America, one of the first nonfiction accounts of gay life in the United States. The work was a surprise bestseller during a time of widespread censorship and anti-gay hysteria. Its mysterious author—a self-proclaimed homosexual—argued that gay people are neither sick nor sinful, but an oppressed minority that must fight for equal rights. His book helped ignite the early gay rights movement, inspiring a generation with its radical message of self-acceptance. Adoring readers and activists called Cory the father of their movement.
But in the mid-1960s, under the influence of a controversial psychoanalyst, he began to assert that homosexuality could be cured. The movement repudiated Cory, relegating him to a historical footnote.
“Donald Webster Cory” was the pseudonym of Edward Sagarin, a closeted sociology professor with a wife and son. Aware of the consequences of coming out, Sagarin chose a “secure” straight life over the truth of a gay one. Though he courageously imagined a liberated queer future, he would never reach it himself.
Odd Man In reconstructs Edward’s life through the eyes of his only son, Fred. As he explores his father’s archive, Fred tries to make sense of Edward’s transformation and asks what today’s LGBTQ+ movement owes him.
