As one of the first commercially regarded features to emerge from London's gay underground in the '70s, Ron Peck and Paul Hallam's remarkable 1978 film Nighthawks had to tread a thin line between challenging public misconceptions and presenting an accurate portrait of the gay community. To pull off such a politically loaded project without compromise is almost impossible; for a recent example, look no further than the first mainstream AIDS drama, 1993's Philadelphia, which lost credibility with its guarded speeches and meaningful shoulder-squeezing. Nighthawks sidesteps these pitfalls by focusing on the double life of Ken Robertson, a closeted geography teacher, as he navigates through the straight and gay worlds. At night, he descends on the few gay bars and discos, nursing a pint of beer while anxiously scanning the dance floor until someone catches his eye. Since bars and discos, by nature, encourage one-night stands over long-term relationships, Robertson's frequent sexual encounters become routine and dissatisfying. With intimacy and compassion, Peck and Hallam explore the romantic dilemmas of marginalization, using a minuscule budget and few locations to show the suffocating limits of homosexual life. Twelve years after Nighthawks was released and subsequently hailed as a landmark in gay cinema, Peck returned to direct a fascinating companion piece, 1990's Strip Jack Naked. Ostensibly a "making-of" documentary, this loose assembly of outtakes, photographs, sketches, film clips, and newsreel footage evolves into a far more ambitious and personal history of gay culture in England. Tracing back to his adolescence, Peck begins with a riveting account of his peculiar attraction to the same sex, well before homosexuality was decriminalized in 1967, and goes on to explain how the gay community continued to flourish, even in the grim moral climate of the Thatcher Era. Nighthawks was his snapshot of the movement; Strip Jack Naked shows the full album.