Frank Capra article compilation due to the announcement of the now cancelled "It's a Wonderful Life" sequel, "It's a Wonderful Life: The Rest of the Story", in the same year (although Bressan is inexplicably credited as ‘Andrew’ Bressan in this article). Late life and The Bressan Project As the 1980s progressed, Bressan's friends remember him growing increasingly ill and physically weak. He passed away of AIDS-related complications on July 29, 1987 in New York City. Although many of his films fell out of public consciousness after his death, they have received more recent acclaim due to their restoration in the late 2010s conducted by The Bressan Project, led by Bressan's sister, Roe Bressan. Influence and larger themes in works Bressan believed that sexual identity corresponded directly to an individual's overall identity. 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. When at parties in New York, Bressan would unapolagetically introduce himself as a gay pornographer to the people he met, attempting to normalize gay culture to broader straight communities in a somewhat shocking and destablizing manner. 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. 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. This made him a pioneer of destabilizing the hegemonic idea of the queer as being thought of as a cisgendered man. Awards 1984 Gay Producers Association Award, Best Director for Pleasure Beach (HIS Video). See also List of male performers in gay porn films List of pornographic movie studios List of gay porn magazines References External links LGBT film directors American LGBT screenwriters American documentary film directors American pornographic film directors Directors of gay pornographic films AIDS-related deaths in New York (state) 1943 births 1987 deaths 20th-century American screenwriters 20th-century LGBT people