THE BELL CURVE:Film tries to change homophobia

Almost three years ago, I described in this space the efforts of a local woman named Robin Voss — born, bred and educated in Newport Beach — to offer a minority voice in the debate on the stand of the members of St. James Episcopal Church, in which Voss had once been confirmed, to drop Episcopal from its name and go its own way. The main reason for this move was anger at the policy of the national church for opening its arms to homosexuals in general and a gay bishop in a New England diocese in particular.

Voss had just attended a program at Newport Beach’s St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church titled “Homosexuality and the Bible.” She was there because her best friend was gay, and she wanted to sample his world. She came away appalled by the exposure of what she saw as a highly un-Christian attitude toward an entire group of people on the basis of their sexual preference alone.

When this attitude surfaced in what she had once called her own church, she was determined to provide people who were honestly looking for clarity some balance in considering this question. She failed to do that at St. James, which is no longer Episcopal, but she has quite remarkably succeeded in reaching out to the whole country with that message. In three years, Voss has moved from a single voice in a church fixed in its views to a two-hour documentary film titled, “For the Bible Tells Me So,” that will begin to appear in American movie houses in October.

I saw an advance screening of that film in Los Angeles last Tuesday. It will no doubt be reviewed on release so I’ll just offer an emotional response here. The film uses the intimate stories of five families with gay children to dramatize the price laid on our fellow humans who happen to be born gay by a homophobic society. And it deals particularly with the handful of Biblical passages that are used over and over to support the homophobia.

The film offers such heavy hitters as Harvard theologian Peter Gomes and Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu to point out the historical background implicit in the meaning of these Biblical quotes, along with a litany of professional organizations that attest to the genetic nature of homosexuality. But the heart of the film is in the very human struggles of families to adapt to a homosexual member in a homophobic society — and the abundance of familial love that is generated in that process.

The gay bishop, the Rev. Gene Robinson, whose appointment moved a handful of Episcopalian congregations to withdraw from the national church, attended the screening Tuesday night. He turned out to be decidedly nonthreatening, answering questions from the audience with humor and a kind of wistful optimism. He compared the ultimate victory over homophobia with the struggle for women’s rights and civil liberties and said it would happen, “but probably not in our lifetime.”

He was joined on the stage by director Daniel Karslake, whose vision permeated this film and who told us that his intent was to make a movie “that spoke to the middle of the country” and not “another film that would separate people.”

Robin Voss, who put together the team that made all this happen and whose determination got the project moving, agrees strongly with her director. “This film,” she told me, “is about inclusiveness and love.

“We’re not out to marginalize people. We just want to get to open minds and make people think. And that’s what has been happening at our screenings. It keeps conversation going afterward.”

There’s a lesson implicit in all this that transcends the Biblical dispute and even the impact of national homophobia: that one person, sufficiently motivated and intelligently directed, can, indeed, have an impact in a society like ours.

In her career of corporate marketing, Voss had no experience in filmmaking and only marginal connections with people who did. But she did have a vision that she articulated with such determination and enthusiasm that it carried her, finally, to people who shared those feelings and were willing to invest both money and creative skills to put them before a mass audience.

The critical moment was the lunch in May, 2003, when she first met Karslake.

“I believed,” she said, “from the day I left that meeting, that this message could be delivered, that it would get done, that its time had come.”

All this message needs now is an audience. Its reception as it opens across the country in October will determine if, indeed, its time has come. But whatever happens, Robin Voss has brought off a near miracle. And it is very good.