By Alexander Mousa and Joseph Frescott
Long Island University communications professor Jean Carlomusto has officially entered “semi-retirement,” after a decades-long career as a professor and a filmmaker.
Carlomusto is originally from Queens but moved to Long Island as a child. She grew up in New Hyde Park and graduated from high school in 1977.
Films were a big part of Carlomusto’s childhood. Her parents were immigrants, and she describes how their love for American films influenced her as a child.
“I come from an immigrant family who loved movies. I mean, that was something that would always spark a conversation. It was films, the movies. They grew up in the movies. It’s part of the way they assimilated to American culture,” she said, looking back fondly on her childhood.
She attended Post as a film student, graduating with a film degree in 1981.
After college, Carlomusto moved to the East Village, near downtown Manhattan, where she worked as a documentary filmmaker. She entered the adult world just as the HIV/AIDS epidemic was ravaging New York in the 1980s.
“It was, you know, your typical college students trying to make it in New York City, kind of story. But it was also the beginning of the AIDS crisis. A lot of people around us, friends, were getting sick, dying… Everybody was scared,” she said.
The nation hadn’t paid much attention to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, leading to many LGBTQ+ people feeling abandoned and marginalized. Carlomusto spoke about how this issue impacted her, as well as many other LGBTQ+ people.
“In the 1980s, when people started dying, my friends started dying, people in my community were sick, and we felt like we were less than citizens. So it’s hard to explain what it was like at that time to feel totally abandoned. I mean, I think if I were to do an analogy, I would look at where trans folk are today, that they are being attacked all over this nation,” she said.
While seeing people she knew, as well as many others in New York fall ill, Carlomusto used her filmmaking skills as a way to contribute to the activism surrounding the AIDS epidemic by producing films bringing awareness to the issue.
“What happened was also this was the time when desktop video, the first portable cameras were coming out. So as I was getting more and more involved in AIDS activism, I was also learning this new equipment…and, you know, ever since then, I’ve pretty much consistently been making documentaries since the 1980s,” she added.
In the years following, she kept in touch with her senior capstone advisor Susan Zeig, who currently serves as chairwoman of the Communications and Film Department. Zeig contacted Carlomusto in 1994, asking her to return to Post; This time as an adjunct professor.
She started teaching that same year. However, in 1996, the television studio in Humanities Hall was built, and Carlomusto began teaching broadcasting classes.
“I believe the first course I taught was a history of cinema class. But around 1996, they finished the television studio and this was so important for broadcasting because before this they used to rent out the television studio and it was very limited,” she said. “Once we had a television studio there, I came on to help manage it and I was adjunct doing courses. Then a position opened up for faculty and I applied for it and was hired and that’s basically how I came to teach.”
Carlomusto said that one of the things she loved about teaching was working with students, and collaborating with them on growth in their art.
“It’s like all of this great energy that somebody sort of found their vision is part of this greater endeavor. We were all looking to help each other find our way, essentially,” she said. “So, like, it’s this mutual exchange. Those have been my proudest moments.”
During her early years as a broadcasting professor, Carlomusto, along with students, created a show on the campus TV station called “Talk Live,” which was a live talk show where students could call in, and speak to the hosts. She spoke about how this show helped the campus community during a tumultuous time.
In the late 1990s, a student on campus was attacked, and her attacker was unknown for some time. The TV station used this platform, “Talk Live,” to engage students in a conversation about the incident. Carlomusto describes this airing of “Talk Live” as her proudest moment as a professor.
“You know, the campus was in a state of panic because they hadn’t caught this guy… and so people were really panicked. This show helped so much because not only were students calling in, but we had the administration participating in the call so students could directly ask questions and say, ‘Hey, what’s going on here? What are we doing here?’” she added. “That to me is what kind of engaged work made me very, very proud.”
Carlomusto continued to work as a professor at Post full-time for the ensuing three decades. This didn’t stop her from continuing to pursue her passion in film, as she produced and directed numerous films, most of which addressed HIV/AIDS activism and LGBT history.
Her most decorated work came when she produced and directed HBO’s “Larry Kramer: In Love & Anger,” which received Emmy nominations for Outstanding Historical Programming and Outstanding Editing.
Carlomusto, who was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival for her work, showed the film at numerous festivals, but none were more memorable than the one on June 28, 2015.
“It was Sunday just as gay marriage was ratified by the Supreme Court. When we walked out of the theater, people were partying in the street. It was just like we had just had this amazing screening of Larry Kramer in Love in Anger,” she said. “Sort of going through the whole history of how this one guy was part of the inspiration that fueled this movement and having the audience be so receptive. I got a standing ovation for it. And then to walk out and see people partying in the street, it just felt like there was this continuum and all of this hard work and all of the shoulders that we stand on now to have this moment where we could like, celebrate something. I’d say I’ve had so many proud moments, but that was one of the best.”
Although Carlomusto doesn’t plan to return as a professor, she doesn’t completely rule it out in the future. For now, the longtime filmmaker plans to continue to do what she loves.
“First thing I’m doing is I have this project ‘Esther Newton Made Me Gay.’ We actually played in over 40 film festivals last year and, this year we are still playing in different festivals… Right now I’ve been actively engaged in delivering the film. It’s a long, involved process,” Carlomusto said. “I’m in discussion on a project with the Leslie Lohman Gallery on a photographer. I don’t want to go into it too much because it’s very much in discussion, and I’m also working on a script and it’s a horror film. I had been working on it years ago, and then I got engaged with the Larry Kramer film, and then I did the Esther film and it’s like, ‘Wait, I never did this horror film’ and I don’t know about you, but I think right now, to me, the shows that really have my attention, frankly, are ‘The Last of US’ and that genre.”
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