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).
