Jeff Dupre | Out of the Past / 1998

angelic troublemakers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michelle Ferrari (screenplay), Jeff Dupre (director) Out of the Past / 1998

 

Like many young people of high school age, particularly growing up in politically, religious, and sexually conservative environments, Kelli Peterson grew up knowing early on that she was a lesbian, yet felt she was a freak a nature without knowing any like her. For years she lived a tortuously closeted life, afraid to reveal her sexuality to her parents, her peers, and her community.

     In 1995, however, after finally being able to come out, she began what called the Gay-Straight Alliance which she believed could be an important organization for those like her and others living with gay friends, brothers, and sisters at her Salt Lake City high school.

     Although the organization, after some delay, was approved, the teacher-advisor for her group hinted that there may be difficult days ahead. Kelli and those with whom she met were finding the healing process of simply sharing their experiences with others as an important way to help those who suffering as she had, and helped some from feeling suicidal thoughts. But their’s was a small high school organization; they hardly could imagine what lay ahead.

      Before long the school board was meeting secretly—and illegally—with the state legislature, members of which were calling for a complete ban on the gay organizations—also illegal. In order to get around the fact that they couldn’t specifically discriminate against, they eventually voted to ban all student organizations, while the legislature went further in disallowing any discussion of homosexuality on school grounds. Major student protests arose throughout Salt Lake City, and a general walk-out of students flummoxed authorities. Peterson’s life was even threatened. And suddenly she discovered herself, as a young teenager, on the cover of newspapers across the nation discussing, often quite ineptly, her sexuality and her desires for an open discussion.

     Kelli Petterson’s brave actions are in themselves worthy of a documentary, but as Bob Graham, writing in the SFGATE noted, the film documenting Petterson’s actions “would be of only passing interest, like a reasonably good report on "Dateline NBC," if it dealt solely with the 1996 events in Utah. What makes it worth seeing as a documentary is the cumulative effect of the five historical sequences” director Jeffrey Dupre added to expand the missing historical dimension that Peterson had felt even as she was growing up gay.

      Instead of pulling out the usual well-known names of gay figures, in his film Out of the Past, Dupre chooses to help fill in the missing pages of gay history by focusing on basically unknown gay heroes of the past, some of whom were unable to achieve their goals and one of whom, the 17th-century Puritan cleric Michael Wigglesworth, could only express it in his private, coded diaries, while at the same time warning of the “Day of Doom” for his fellow believers when God’s reckoning would occur, revealing every one of each man’s sins, even those hidden. Strangely, it might almost be a relief to the deeply closeted religious thinker who suffered for his attractions to males for much of his life. Actor Stephen Spinella voices Wigglesworth’s tortured voice.

      Better known is the lesbian relationship between writer Sarah Orne Jewett (provided the voice of Gwyneth Paltrow) and her female lover Annie Adams Fields (Cherry Jones). Although Jewett was married and her Boston home become the center for cultural events, she left for a long voyage of the continent with Fields and upon their return, continued to write intimate letters to her, Fields regularly responding. The two women finally divided their time between Maine and Boston, sharing each other’s lives in what, at the time, was described as a “Boston Marriage,” an allowable relationship between two women which, since men could not quite imagine a sexual component, was perceived as a close feminine relationship that actually protected their wives from the attention of other males. As the film makes clear, however, with the rise of Freud and psychiatric communities such relationships were no longer seen as innocent, homosexuality being defined as an illness, and such “marriages” were now looked upon with great suspicion. After Jewett died, Fields attempted to publish their correspondence but it was suppressed by their publisher.

      Far lesser known is Henry Gerber (with the voice Edward Norton), a World War I soldier, who returning to the US attempted to form the first gay-rights organization, The Society for Human Rights, the first openly gay organization in the US. Working for the postal office, Gerber attempted to find a few men to join him, but fears of public revelation, job loss, and even imprisonment made it almost impossible, although he did finally find a few men to sign on, creating a newspaper.

      Soon after, however, as The New York Times critic Stephen Holden summarizes: “One night the police raided Gerber's home, confiscated his typewriter and other materials, and jailed him for several days without formally charging him with a crime. Upon his release, he was dismissed from his job for “conduct unbecoming'’ a postal worker.” Finally, Gerber perceived that that there was a huge wall between gay men and women and rest of US culture, and he had been defeated by that wall.

      Even sadder is the story of Bayard Rustin, an early associate of Martin Luther King and the other black leaders attempting to create an activist black community of the South. Rustin, a tireless organizer, helped relay the lessons of civil disobedience to King and his associates, and helped form the groundwork of the black southern leadership. There was every reason to believe that he and King would be perceived as equal cohorts in the foundation of the movement. But when competitive elements demanded that King disassociate himself from Rustin because he was gay, King, fearing repercussions, accepted Rustin’s resignation and locked him out his life for several years, bringing many to describe Rustin as “the lost prophet” of the Civil Rights Movement.

       It was only when the movement needed someone to oversee the vast march in Washington, D. C. on August 28, 1963 that Rustin was asked to return. With A. Philip Randolph, Rustin organized, with the help of civil rights, labor, and religious institutions, for buses to take the poor to Washington, arranged for overnight housing for the thousands who poured into the city, and even involved churches and other organizations in creating box lunches for those who had not brought their own food. Working with the police and hundreds of others, it was he who made sure that the day went relatively smoothly so that King could speak his memorable words: “I have a dream.” But even here, leaders in Washington and elsewhere, revealing Rustin’s sexuality, attempted to cut him off from the event which would not have occurred without him.

     Rustin also spoke brilliantly that day, but his words are now forgotten, and he came to realize, as the film reiterates, that gays suffer through their own invisibility, silence, and a lack of history that defines their roles in society. This movie reiterates what so many post-Stonewall documentaries have—and to which the very book you are reading is a testimony—the need “To create a place for ourselves, we have to find ourselves in the past.” In the end, Rustin realized that in devoting all his energies to the issue of race he had also lost part of himself, concluding ”We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.”

     The final figure that Out of the Past features, with an overall narrative voice provided by Linda Hunt, is Barbara Gittings, for years the president of the early lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis, who fought with a few others for years manning picket lines to bring attention to their cause. Even after the advances finally brought about after the Stonewall riots, Gittings continued the battle, attacking in particular the American Psychiatric Association for its refusal to remove homosexuality from being described as a psychological disorder. When she finally won the battle, the Association simply admitted that they had been wrong, and we were all suddenly “normalized,” but few of us turned to bow down to Gittings for her years of lonely and brave battles.

       One of the most touching moments in this work is near the end where Gittings and her companion ride in an open car in a Gay Pride parade to meet up with Kelli Peterson and her lesbian lover who follow behind them for the rest of the parade.

       If this is not a truly great work of cinema documentation, it is an important one among many others in helping to fill in the historical gaps which encourage not only LGBTQ individuals but the general public remain aware of the tireless energy of others who came before them to defeat the centuries of bigotry against sexualities that do not dominate the societies of the world. Even a passing mention of Henry James along with a statement that “it is much easier to think of Henry James as asexual than that he was enamored of men,” is a mind-opening reminder of just how many major world figures have had their lives washed over by the history texts to hide the truths about their sexual lives.

 

Los Angeles, September 14, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).