Uncle Roy

😁 Uncle Roy, dir. Keri Pickett, 2026, USA, 87 min.
Thursday, June 18, 2026, 3:00 PM, Roxie Theater
🌊 West Coast premiere

Uncle Roy: one of Roy Blakey’s photos

Frameline blurb: To the world, Roy Blakey is “one of the grandfathers of gay photography” and a professional ice skater who amassed the world’s largest collection of theatrical skating memorabilia. But to award-winning filmmaker Keri Pickett, he’s beloved Uncle Roy.

Through vivid archival footage and contemporary interviews, Pickett reconstructs her uncle’s remarkable life: from his beginnings as a young boy in Oklahoma inspired by the movies to skate, to a 30-year career traveling the world with the Ice Capades, and finally his personal reinvention in the 1970s as a groundbreaking photographer whose dramatic male nudes graced the pages of Honcho, After Dark, and Dilettante magazines — as well as in his own self-published photo book He.

But after a health emergency, it becomes a race against time to secure permanent homes for his vast photography archive and over 44,000 items of ice-skating memorabilia. As Roy’s memories begin to fade, the making of this documentary becomes a way of recounting his legacy back to him — and sharing it with us.

My take: One detail that isn’t in the trailer caught my attention. Keri Pickett saw her uncle Roy hailed as “one of the grandfathers of gay photography” on the pages of RFD magazine, which is a longtime publication of radical faeries. (Indeed, the magazine’s name can stand for Radical Faerie Digest, or an ever-changing cast of alternate expansions of the acronym.) Keri Pickett in 1994 published a book titled Faeries, with photos and stories from faerie gatherings over several years. A noted photographer in her own right, Pickett cared for her uncle in his last years, taking that time also to assemble footage of him over the years and add to it with new interviews. Blakey’s memory was clearly fading, so she took the opportunity to tell his own stories back to him and let us watch.

Roy Blakey was a professional ice dancer, in a time when that was just about the pinnacle of show business, but when he hung up his skates, he shifted to photography, adding his own flair to the nascent genre of male nude art photos. That’s not to say that Honcho was an art magazine, but Roy’s photos always had an artistic aesthetic, rather than only an erotic intention. On top of both of those, he was a serious collector, amassing an unequaled store of skating memorabilia, a huge library of photos over decades, and plenty of other stuff.

Keri Pickett balances the personal reminiscences with a real feel for the importance of her uncle’s legacy. It’s a stirring tribute to his work and to his humanity, and a touching reflection on mortality and aging. Definitely highly recommended.

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