Arthur J. Bressan Jr. (May 27, 1943 – July 29, 1987)[1] was an American director, writer, producer, documentarian and gay pornographer, best known for pioneering independent queer cinema in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s.

[citation needed] Despite his love of filmmaking, Bressan never received any formal education or training relating to it, instead acquiring his filmic skillset from personal experience.

[4] Bressan began to live an openly gay life in the early 1970s, correlating to the start of his time in San Francisco, a city known for its vibrant queer communities.

Bressan's debut feature is one of the first notable examples of his (at the time) unique tendency to integrate pornographic sequences into conventional queer narratives.

Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the United States, helped spread awareness for the film by selling premiere tickets at his shop, Castro Camera.

One of the main proponents of the anti-discrimination law repeal was pop singer and Save Our Children coalition president Anita Bryant, who is implicitly compared to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Ku Klux Klan members in the film.

Bressan found it important to incorporate this sequence into the film as to remind the queer population of their history, using their existing fear to motivate a more powerful progressive agenda.

[3] Bressan submitted Gay USA to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in hopes of winning an Oscar in the 1977 feature documentary category.

The contents of each letter track an aspect of their sexual and romantic history through coloured softcore porn sequences, with the rest of the film, which takes place in the present, in black and white.

Lifeguards Steve (Johnny Dawes), a closeted queer, and Todd (Michael Christopher), a comfortably gay man, grow a fondness for one another.

- Arthur J. Bressan Jr. quoted in Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet[8] Copies of Abuse and Buddies are held by the Hormel Center at the San Francisco Public Library as part of a collection donated by the Frameline Film Festival.

[9] Prior to committing to filmmaking full-time, Bressan worked as a high school teacher at Power Memorial Academy, as well as for the US Department of Education.

For this reason, the entirety of his body of work was, to varying degrees, concerned with validating queer (mostly gay, in terms of relations between two cisgender men) existence in of itself.

[6] This was also his aim in Gay USA; through aerial shots, he wished to demonstrate that the queer community was composed of hundreds of thousands of individuals across American, which shocked many.

[3] Although Bressan was mostly concerned with gay being in his films, he consciously and actively validated other queer subcultures, due in part to input from his lesbian female friends who felt as though they were underrepresented in everyday culture.