Item Data

Caren McCourtney

written by on December 21, 2018

Caren w still camera

Caren began her film memoir in the late 1970s when she came upon a Super 8 camera in a pawnshop soon after she chose to cede custody rather let her young daughter’s life be torn apart in a vicious legal battle. Caren retained visitation rights and used the camera to film visits with her daughter and other events in her life. She also loaned the camera to friends to film the Seneca Falls Women’s Peace Encampment. After filming her daughter’s college graduation and completing the home she and her partner shared until her death, she gave the camera away.

Categories:
  • Title: Caren's Collection
  • Date Range: 1977-1993
  • Collection Summary: Caren's Collection spans the time between 1977 when Caren bought a Yashica Super 8mm camera in a pawnshop after losing custody of her daughter and 1986 when her daughter graduated from college and Caren and her last partner Gabrielle Wellman would share. The footage documents visits & vacations Caren spent with her daughter and the long periods in between, which she spent in the company of friends and lovers, initially in Florida and Missouri and later in Maine.
    In 2004 Caren and Gabrielle had their home movies transferred to VHS. The lab succeeded in keeping their two collections separate but it did not transfer Caren's reels in chronological order. When Caren donated the VHS tape to LHMP in 2010, she agreed to work with us to return the footage to the order she had shot it in. That process involved several in-depth life history interviews, some in combination with scrutinizing the footage, others focusing on her life history. On the basis of those interviews, LHMP worked with a tech to restore Caren's footage to chronological order and add a few slates to identify locations and dates. Soon after tech Gemma Perretta did a personal edit of Caren's footage, which Caren also okayed. About a quarter the length of Caren's original footage, Perretta's edit focuses on Caren's relationship with her daughter. After Caren's death in 2012, discrepancies were noticed in the original full length edit. These were corrected in 2018.

    This database inventories versions 1, 2, and 3. We consider version 3 the most accurate. We do not have permission to share Gabrielle Wellman's childhood home movies.
  • Description: Caren began her film memoir in the late 1970s when she came upon a Super 8 camera in a pawnshop soon after she chose to cede custody rather let her young daughter's life be torn apart in a vicious legal battle Caren retained visitation rights and used the camera to film visits with her daughter and other events in her life. She also loaned the camera to friends to film the Seneca Falls Women's Peace Encampment. After filming her daughter's college graduation and finishing building house she and her partner shared until her death, she gave the camera away.
  • Biographical/Historical Note: Caren McCourtney was born in St. Louis, Missouri, August 11, 1947. She grew up primarily in Sarasota, Florida, where she attended St. Martha's and the Out of Door schools. In 1962 she entered Sacred Heart Academy, a girls' boarding school, in St. Louis. Her first lesbian experiences took place there. When she graduated in 1964, she matriculated at the Bristol, Virginia junior college, Sullins College. In 1965 her mother died and Caren flunked out of Sullins. "I couldn't stay focused," she said. "Always roaming around and visiting my friends." She switched to Maryville College in Tennessee; spent 1966-1967 traveling in Europe; and then returned to Maryville where she remained until the summer of 1969 when she and a boyfriend from St. Louis, spent the summer traveling in British Columbia. An artist and a fan of Jack Kerouac's, her boyfriend was concerned about the draft and they headed for Canada. In December 1969, their daughter was born. A week later they married. They lived together for a couple of years and then he returned to, in Caren's words, "living out his Kerouac fantasy," effectively leaving Caren and their daughter on their own. A year or so later, her husband turned up in Louisville, KY, where Caren had joined friends. They lived separately and Bill soon continued his travels. Caren and her daughter then joined her brother's family in Sarasota, Florida, where she began a lesbian relationship and became involved in the burgeoning women's community. In 1975 her husband turned up again. Their daughter decided she wanted to live with him for a while. He agreed and they headed to St. Louis. In 1977 -- the year Anita Bryant launched her "Save the Children" campaign, he sued for custody on the grounds that Caren was lesbian. Neither Missouri nor Florida had ever granted lesbian custody, and Caren's lawyer advised her to accept an agreement to alternate custody. But when the time came for her husband to relinquish their daughter, he sued again. This time he played hardball and hired an attorney who threatened to expose her friends if she continued to fight for custody. In the middle of a particularly contentious meeting, Caren's lawyer called her out of the room for a conference. If you want to take Keelie and run, her lawyer told her, I'll stall them. Caren could not imagine disrupting Keelie's childhood to that extent and settled for seeing Keelie on holidays and vacations. Bereft, she bought a Yashica Super 8mm camera in a pawn shop and began to film her times with her daughter and her life with her friends and lovers. In 1980 at a Kay Gardner concert, Caren ran into a woman she had known slightly in Florida years earlier, Gabrielle Wellman. They were both involved with other people but stayed in touch and got together a few years later. They remained life partners until Caren's death. When her daughter graduated from college, Caren gave the camera away & had her footage transferred to VHS. She devoted subsequent to earning an American History degree from the University of Maine (2000); playing for 26 years with Blue Hill's Flash in the Pan; volunteering at the Blue Hill Library and historical societies; funding an Onward Fund for Single Mothers Scholarship at the University of Maine; and helping many indvidual women get by and many organizations survive. She died December 16, 2012.

  • Genres: Memoir, Amateur Films
  • Subjects: Lesbian mothers, Lesbian custody, Lesbians, Peace movements
  • Places: Sarasota, Florida; St. Louis, Missouri; East Blue Hill, Maine; Blue Hill, Maine; Belfast, Maine; Seneca Falls, New York; Baltimore, Maryland
  • Creators: Caren McCourtney
    Blue Hill Mainers Seneca Falls Encampment Group
  • Collaborators & Participants: Anna Dembska
    Sharon Fitelson
    Helena Lipstadt
    Julie Morris
    Janice "Gal" Perry
    Jane Smilie (now Hirschl)
    Karin Spitfire
    Lynda Suzanne
    Nancy Killoran
    Kathryn Wetzel Robyn
    Gabrielle Wellman
    Deborah Wiggs
    If you or friends were present for any of these events, we hope you'll email us at info@lesbianhomemovieproject.org & let us know. We'll share your input if that's okay, or just preserve it.
  • Primary Format: Originally Super 8mm. LHMP received a jumbled VHS transfer & worked with the filmmaker on 3 major edits
  • Physical Length: 1 60-minute VHS tape, 4 digital edits, totaling 199 mins 4 secs.
  • Arrangement: 1 VHS tape that combines Gabrielle Wellman's family's home movies and "Caren's Collection," which includes the following digital records (1) the drugstore's jumbled version of her Super 8 footage; (2) an edit done by LHMP in collaboration with Caren to return the footage to the chronological order in which it was shot; (2) a severe cut, carried out by Gemma Perretta, then of Northeast Historic Film, that focuses on Caren's times with her daughter after she lost custody; (3) a 2018 edit that corrected for a few verifiable errors in the initial LHMP edit.
  • Access & Use: Contact Lesbian Home Movie Project (LHMP) info@lesbianhomemovieproject.org. No re-use without permission.
  • Rights: Lesbian Home Movie Project (LHMP) holds all rights.
  • Related Links: David L. Chambers & Nancy D. Polikoff, "Family Law and Gay and Lesbian Family Issues in the Twentieth Century, Family Law Quarterly, Vol 33, #3, Fall 1999

    "Mom's Apple Pie: The Heart of the Lesbian Mothers' Custody Movement," directed by Jody Laine, Shan Ottey, Shad Reinstein, 2006.
  • Preferred Citation: Caren McCourtney Collection, Lesbian Home Movie Project (LHMP), Orland, ME.
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