Guilford filmmaker John Scagliotti will present the Vermont Premiere Screening of Before Homosexuals: The Prequel to Before Stonewall on Saturday, July 22, at 4 p.m., at the Latchis Theatre. After the screening, he will be joined by members of the crew for a lively Q&A session. The event is presented by the Brattleboro Film Festival. Tickets are available online at www.beforehomosexuals.com/screenings.

While Scagliotti was news director at WBCN Boston in 1975, he was arrested by the vice squad and charged with “soliciting to commit unnatural and lascivious acts.” A jury dressed in festive St. Patrick’s Day attire quickly brought a verdict: guilty as charged. Scagliotti fought that conviction all the way to the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, and with the help of the ACLU, the initial ruling was overturned. It was a landmark decision for gays and lesbians, and for personal freedom.

In his latest film, Before Homosexuals: The Prequel to Before Stonewall, Scagliotti brings the Boston arrest full-circle while ruminating on a bit of ancient graffiti on the Greek island of Astypalaia at the start of the film. Standing over this affirmation of same-sex love etched in stone some 2,500 years ago, he ponders the naturalness of homosexuality among the ancient Greeks, in contrast to his arrest and conviction in the US in 1975.

Presented by the Brattleboro Film Festival and benefiting local non-profit Kopkind’s CineSLAM LGBT Short Film Festival, the film takes viewers on a tour of erotic history, poetry and visual art expressing same-sex desire from ancient times to Victorian crimes. It is a searching, thoughtful, humorously edgy point-of-view documentary, in which Scagliotti (who received an Emmy Award as a producer of Before Stonewall) explores how the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the growth of LGBT political power in the decades that followed cleared the path for artists and scholars to re-discover the pre-20th century history of same-sex desire.

This film was produced in association with Boston’s Center for Independent Documentary; major funding was provided by LEF Foundation, located in Cambridge.