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For the first time in two decades, Outfest is returning to UCLA.

The Los Angeles-based showcase for international lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender film and video has joined with the renowned UCLA Film and Television Archive to create the Outfest Legacy Project, the largest publicly accessible collection of LGBT films in the world.

The project, announced on the first day of the 2005 Outfest Film Festival in early July, marks the return of Outfest to UCLA.

“In a way (Outfest) is coming back home,” said Tim Kittleson, director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. The original Outfest was founded by a UCLA archivist in 1982 with full archival support, and the first three years of screenings took place on campus. Bringing Outfest back to UCLA demonstrates the school’s continual involvement in gay cinema.

“The Legacy Project is a major addition to UCLA’s commitment to diversity,” Kittleson said.

This commitment was demonstrated by a large grant from the UCLA Center for Community Partnership, an organization uniting UCLA faculty, staff and students with community organizations to address matters of concern and better the quality of life in Los Angeles.

The Community Partnership grant “allows us to cover the intake of the study collection,” Kittleson said.

The study collection is the main attraction of phase one of the Legacy Project. By the end of the summer, the archive hopes to create a publicly accessible grouping of Outfest’s existing library of more than 3,300 preview tapes and discs.

Gay cinema can be defined as “of interest to members of the LGBT community,” according to Outfest executive director Stephen Gutwillig.

This definition allows the label to encompass films made by both gay and straight filmmakers, as well as those addressing LGBT issues in a variety of ways.

In line with the project’s objective of community involvement, several student interns from UCLA’s unique archive studies master’s program are participating in the phase.

This compilation alone will already represent the largest group of LGBT cinema worldwide and will be available to students, researchers, and the media.

“You can’t have this kind of collection unless you make it accessible,” Kittleson explained.

The second phase of the project will involve attaining, restoring and preserving LGBT film prints, starting with those in highest demand, particularly from the 1970s through ’90s, and expanding from there.

UCLA is additionally charged with storing these archive-quality 16mm and 35mm prints in perpetuity.

Rare prints will be digitized and the archive will create online finding aids and study guides for searching the catalog and conducting research.

Meanwhile, print donations will be solicited from filmmakers, collectors and distributors and new prints will be made of titles whose components are intact and accessible. Outfest’s initial research has identified several films needing immediate restoration to prevent ultimate loss of the work itself.

This continuous phase will also feature noncommercial public screenings by both the archive and Outfest.

“There is a vast public that is hungry for viable prints that have not been showable for many years,” said Gutwillig.

According to Gutwillig, because most gay films of the past 30 years have been independently produced, they are in danger of being lost without a program dedicated to their preservation.

Even pivotal films, such as Bill Sherwood’s 1986 “Parting Glances” and John Scagliotti and Greta Schiller’s 1984 documentary “Before Stonewall,” are in danger of being forgotten due to a perceived lack of commercial value by the industry.

The main goal of the Legacy Project, to Gutwillig, is “to reverse the LGBT community’s unwitting complicity in the erasure of our own history.”

Outfest’s other projects are certainly dedicated to preventing an erasure of LGBT cinema from mainstream society as well. Outfest’s Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the oldest and largest continuous film festival in Los Angeles, has presented over 4,000 films to audiences of more than half a million people since its founding.

Additionally, the nonprofit organization sponsors such events as Outfest Wednesdays, the only LGBT-themed weekly screenings in the country, Fusion: The Los Angeles LGBT People of Color Film Festival (the first festival of its kind), and the Outfest Screen Idol Awards, honoring the best performances in LGBT roles.

Political radicals have succeeded in removing a lot of LGBT media, especially films, from the realm of public access, Gutwillig said.

“And there is a lot of queer media that never even made it to the shelves in the first place,” he added.