YOUNG STAR: How did you first hear about Jerry Pritikin? What inspired you to tell his story?

PAT: I actually met him while taking photos in a park in Chicago. He was alone, sitting on a bench, and wearing a technicolor propeller hat. I immediately wanted to take a photo of him. I actually walked away first because I was a bit shy. After circling the general area a couple of times and seeing that he was still there, I finally asked him and he said yes. He told me he took the iconic photo of Harvey Milk, a historic gay rights activist and the first openly gay politician in San Francisco. I sat down with him and he shared his condensed life story in a span of 45 minutes. When he told me he had hundreds, if not thousands, of unprinted slides of the gay rights movement, most of which are still unseen by the public, I remembered the story of the Chicago nanny and photographer Vivian Maier whose photographs were discovered in a storage facility after she died. I instantly knew I had to see those photos. He showed me some of his photographs and told me the stories behind them. When I saw how beautiful and how historically significant they were, I knew his work had to be seen.

There were many parallelisms between that protest and the era that Jerry documented. It shows that although we’ve come a long way since the gay rights movement in San Francisco, as Jerry said, the fight is not over and “once you come out of the closet, there’s no reason to ever go back in the closet.”

YS: Your documentary also tells the story of an important part of Chicago’s LGBT history. Can you tell us about your connection to the city of Chicago?

P: I moved to Chicago in June 2016 to start my master’s in journalism at the Medill School of journalism in Northwestern University. I’ve moved to Washington, D.C. for an investigative journalism fellowship since graduating, but I’m still very much connected to Chicago because of how much I’ve grown as a journalist and as a person there. In Chicago, I met mentors in the industry, broke out of my shell, and learned how to scour the streets for untold stories and approach them in different ways.