Gay Boys in Oil City

[marmar]

from In These Times:



Gay Boys in Oil City
The fight for GLBT rights in rural America is far from over.

By Gary Barlow


Forty years ago, the Stonewall Riots sparked a revolution in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) rights in the United States. Since then, gays and lesbians have seen laws passed across the country protecting their right to work, to associate freely and live where they want, and even, in some places, to marry. Coinciding with those transformations, gays created huge urban communities to openly celebrate their lives, with New York’s Greenwich Village, Chicago’s Boystown, San Francisco’s Castro and similar neighborhoods around the country becoming meccas of queer culture.

The progress has been remarkable, to the point that one of the primary arguments anti-gay activists use against non-discrimination laws is that gays and lesbians are no longer a disadvantaged minority. The anti-GLBT crowd relies on this argument because they are aware that in this age of gay celebrities and corporate-endorsed pride parades, it seems on the surface to be true. It is not, of course, and Out in the Silence, a new documentary by Joe Wilson and Dean Hamer, brings home that point in a complex 57-minute portrait of GLBT lives and issues in small-town America.

The film takes place in Oil City, Pa., a Rust Belt town in the rough hill country north of Pittsburgh. It is Wilson’s hometown, a place he left after high school. Although he and Hamer lived in Washington, D.C., after they got married in Canada in 2004, they decided to publish a wedding announcement in the Oil City Derrick, which led to an onslaught of negative letters to the editor in the paper.

But then Wilson received a letter from Kathy Springer, the mother of an Oil City student who had faced unrelenting harassment in the town’s high school. Her gay son, C.J. Bills, was forced to drop out and enroll in an online GED program because every school day had become, in his words, “eight hours of pure hell.” The letter spurred Wilson, accompanied by Hamer, to return to Oil City to see if there was a story to tell. There was, and then some. Out in the Silence details the ultimately successful battle of Bills and Springer, with help from the ACLU, to get the local school board to implement comprehensive diversity training. It also documents the efforts of a lesbian couple there to re-open a landmark Art Deco theater and Wilson’s own realization that stereotypes work both ways. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4905/gay_boys_in_oil_city