Get Used to It: Ep. 40, "All God's Children"

oh [Applause] [Music] hi i'm sheila cule and i'm your host for get used to it as you probably know i hope because you watch the show every minute of your lives this is a discussion show about issues of interest in the gay and lesbian community to our community but i hope to everybody else as well you may also know because we've seen a lot especially over the past several months about how the right wing has been more and more using images in order to sell their point of view the gay agenda video was distributed to everybody in congress and judges and all kinds of opinion makers and gay rights special rights supposedly you know films about our community we all know these are not films about our community in order to fight back we are seeing a number of films that tell the truth about our community and i have two filmmakers here with me today to talk about why we even use this kind of imagery and media work in order to tell the truth about our community and also to give you some examples my guests are dr d mossbacker who is a physician and a filmmaker who's made several award-winning films including straight from the heart and the one that we're going to look at a little bit today all god's children welcome dee thank you to have you here thanks and dr sylvia rue everybody's a doctor here but me i guess i'm a doctor too right who is a counselor a mental health professional and filmmaker worked at the gay lesbian community services center here in los angeles and their counseling center long history both of these women of activism in our community welcome welcome thank you um d i'm interested in i think everybody wants to know when we first start out on a show like this well who are these people you know we just heard their epithets but tell me a little bit about your background and what brought you into the notion of filmmaking as a way of working for our community well i've often occasionally in the last particularly the last several elections wondered if i was adopted because my family are all very very proud and active republicans although perhaps not so proud of the party as it is now because i don't think they really identify as i think mossbacker's a familiar name isn't it just your father though yes he was he was uh the head of commerce under president bush and has run a lot of the campaigns for the republican national party and he he and my brother are very very active in politics and my sisters are somewhat active as well but all as republicans so i am not a republican i i always feel i have to do that disclaimer these days particularly but but i um i've really been an activist for a very long time and and sort of way back in the era of the vietnam war um and then as uh stonewall happened and and we started to to come out as a movement i became active in the gay and lesbian movement but then went to medical school in 1979 started in medical school and thought that i would put my activism and myself back in the closet for a little bit because i thought i really needed this okay i needed to stop this political stuff and just study medicine and i just found i couldn't do it because there was so much homophobia in the school so one of the things i did during my tenure as a medical student was to make a a actually a slide tape presentation that we turned into a video that's been used in medical schools all across the country to talk about the issues of homophobia in medicine and to train young phys young physicians and medical students about how to deal and work sensitively with gay and lesbian patients so you did a slide show to illustrate that yeah because you it's a slight taste was not going to say again going one person at a time was probably not going to get the message across right exactly and and there was you know i i was active when i when i decided i had to be active i was very active in the american medical student association as a trustee at large and one of the things i would do is travel around the country to different medical schools and i you know won't forget going to oklahoma university of oklahoma medical school and saying you know we don't we're not like even houston or new york or any of those places we don't have the people who are not the gay and lesbian folks even in the community who are not afraid to be out and come and speak at something like this and that was kind of my inspiration for doing the slide tape presentation and it is the voices of physicians and lesbian and gay medical students physicians talking about their experience and talking about how they think um it's best to work with uh gay and lesbian patients you've clearly chosen a documentary format as opposed to to a fiction yes and you did a show i mean a film about about that athletics yes on homophobia in sports yes in women's sports and i'm actually just in the process of uh trying to raise money to do a a companion piece on homophobia in men's sports i've interviewed greg louganis and hope to interview some some more folks as well so how'd you get to straight from the heart tell us a little about that well i was in the middle actually of making out for a change which is the homophobia in women's sports and i saw and was completely inspired by the gay agenda i was so upset when i saw it i thought it was very slick very effective of course full of lies and distortions and i um i got really depressed and then i thought now you know gotta do something about this or i could be really depressed or i could do something about it and i decided to do something about it and talk to award women winning filmmaker francis reed and together we we made the film and and uh it ended up being the first pro gate you talked about the gay agenda being uh distributed among the uh at the congress and this was uh straight from the heart was the first pro gay lesbian film that was shown uh to an audience of of senators and congress people bipartisan audience and the academy got to view it too that's right yeah it's nominated for an academy award as well so sylvia how did you get involved in this in this video work not just what what dee has done but from your sort of your own path through going to the institute for the advanced study of human sexuality part of becoming a sex sexologist was to look at all kinds of sex educational films and i would say 95 percent of them were rotten they're just boring and terrible and i said oh i know i can do better than this so i decided to start doing my own films not necessarily sex education films but more of the documentary about african-american lesbian and gay people and i convinced them to have as part of my dissertation work to do a video on black lesbians and then i've done others like for the black gay and lesbian leadership forum we have a legacy which is a history of uh historical and contemporary african american lesbian and gay people and so i've been in video for 10 years actually as a producer and you know from beginning to end from pre-production production editing and but i've also been an activist for about 20 years starting with working with dr martin luther king i was part of his welcoming committee to los angeles in the 60s i was a high school student and my friends and i would take off from school and go meet him at the airport and we were actually had we were able to spend time with him and he wrote us a letter and and then we'd raise money for him and and then of course the women's movement and then getting more involved with the movement for uh equal rights for lesbian and gay people well it's interesting to me that you're both mental health professionals who've decided that in addition to your own individual work with you know with clients or patients that there's something more that you want to do but there's got to be a connection um why imagery why you know why film what is it about it that you feel is a more effective way to do your movement work than i don't know being the executive director of the center or making a speech at a rally all of which i know you could do as well i mean why film well you asked first about the connection between being mental health workers and i think the connection for me is um and being an activist and and using film the connection for me seeing people who have been so harmed by the rhetoric of the radical right and reading about people and then and then eventually interviewing people who had been really harmed people who almost killed themselves and and made it through and of course we all know of people who didn't make it through so that touched me very deeply as a as a psychiatrist um and and as a person who i guess my my sort of overriding principle if i had one would be fairness and and it really touched me in that way and i grew up as uh you know television really became you know came into being about the time i did so so i grew up with it and i know how powerful it can be and how how it can touch people and i think what we've done with this is make something that can touch people but also that can start a conversation about these kinds of issues that are difficult to deal with and sometimes you can't find the people who can you know sit there in front of a large group of folks and say it so eloquently or bring up the hard questions that need to be brought up but so this is a way of shaping the message exactly right exactly through those images but they're real images i mean that's what the documentary sort of has over everything else absolutely is that it's real yes and for me in terms of i am also a licensed clinical social worker and i was the assistant director of counseling at the center so i'm the person who read everyone's history because i had to make the decision as to which counselor there see and i've probably i've read all the horror stories and over the five years i've read thousands of people's histories uh life histories about what happened to them in terms of dealing with their orientation coming out people being uh kids thrown through the window onto the front lawn not just being said get out but throw them through the window or just kind of things that you don't even want to hear about they're so devastating and the levels of pathology that people either incorporate into themselves or the because of what society and their families and the church has put on them and to really see it face to face read it see the people and see the consequences of the kind of distortions and hate and the images that are out there that really tell lies about us and they'll be able to do something about that i mean today about television and how it works yeah that the what most people don't know is with film you're actually seeing a picture that has already been formed and then it goes into your brain and you're able to process it in a certain way with film but with television you're actually your brain is seeing dots and they get reassembled in your brain and they go even deeper into your consciousness but pat bypass some of the screening that goes on with film and other pictures so we we really don't know or we're just learning some of the detrimental consequences of how television affects us internally and can go to the more primitive parts of our emotions and affect us deeply well it's interesting then to use this as a tool to combat because fear and discrimination is really part of the same thing i mean it's at a level where you sometimes don't get at it with just logical yes you know sit down you don't get it because they didn't come to it logically right it's and it's somewhere that a lot of people don't even know where it's at exactly yeah exactly take it out and examine it you first have to say it's like coming out to yourself about being exactly right you have to yeah you have to find it yes and it's in there and so i would assume choosing to to get at it through these images it's almost like a shortcut that you don't get with just intellectual another thing in terms of art you know one definition i read about art is that the purpose of art is to make the comfortable uncomfortable and to make the uncomfortable comfortable heterosexism is comfortable and homophobia or dealing with sexuality is sometimes very uncomfortable and so if you use art to to make people more um i guess calm and sane and at least trying to discuss it instead of going crazy as some people do i think that's very helpful and that's a very good use of art yeah and i think that's what we are trying to do i i talked about using this as sort of a starting point for a conversation about what is obviously a very difficult uh issue and that that is homophobia and heterosexism and and um we purposefully made it made them both under 30 minutes so people could sit people with um like most of us with a short attention span and sit and then what we want to do is go around the country and actually train local activists how to sit with those folks watch the film and then facilitate a really meaningful discussion about people's fears and concerns well let's talk about all god's children for a minute and in that or for more than a minute actually lots of minutes um in that context because we had heard and i guess there there's some evidence through through their film that the right wing was very cynically targeting black churches for homophobic you know education i suppose they would call it if they were nazis um and and as a to really i think as as you indicated to me to drive a wedge between that very important uh aspect of the black community and the black community itself and our community i think recognizing the really close relationship in terms of the civil rights issues but so is is all god's children a kind of response to that or tell me how it kind of came about well um we had done um straight from the heart and uh it had been um pretty successful in terms of you know people's uh uh perception of it and um out there was just this this cry from the front lines about needing something that we could take to the african-american church-going community as straight from the heart was for the the white church-going community when we first started doing straight from the heart i think i had the fantasy that it could be all thanks to all people and quickly got that you know even though we have an african-american family and straight from the heart it the issues and the communities are in some ways in many ways so different that we really couldn't you know we couldn't make it all thanks to all people so um i uh actually melinda paras executive director of the gay and national gay and lesbian task force approached me and said you know you could do this film and i said i'm white hello and uh you know i i was really anxious about it but um i and i i talked with um some you know sort of i think real role models for me mandy carter who's is a wonderful organizer deborah johnson who was then co-chair of the national gay and lesbian task force um and other african-american women and men lesbians and gays who who said go for you know go for it you can make it happen we've been trying to make it happen for years and it hasn't happened so the luckiest day of my life was when debra suggested that i contact sylvia and talk to her and it's just been the greatest association for me and just it's been just uh she's just been an inspiration to work with so i'm just well see aren't you glad you're here i have it on she knows that's right so what was how did you decide to structure this um this film so that it would achieve really what you came to want it to do uh i i'd really have to say indeed i don't know if you'll agree or not but it kind of dictated itself in a lot of ways of how it got structured first of all in terms of white churches and black churches always point out that it is a reality that 11 o'clock on sunday is still the most segregated hour in the united states and there's a reason for that and that's why one size does not fit all so as we we when we first started sheila we had no idea that anyone would talk to us we had no idea if any minister would speak to us and what we found was doors open swung wide open i mean people welcomed us with open arms the minister said we need a tool give us a tool and they uh it was just incredible how it all worked and you know how it gets structured uh well one of the main things is the use of the music was very important and how you utilize it so when i knew i knew about lavender like choir the lavender light choir in new york and we got one of their cds and i heard when i heard all i've been buked i knew that was going to be part of the centerpiece of which to structure uh the the film around so but so that's an aspect as well i think of getting right to people beyond sort of going through their head because music is clearly one piece of that i mean you hear music and especially i mean you you need to talk about it yeah especially if you're talking about talking african-american especially uh churched people that the music is the way i mean we just know how important that is a lot of people go to church to hear the music and the minister uh may not be that great a draw but if the choir is good they will be there you know and people who leave the church miss the music i know i was raised a fundamentalist in a you know a black church course and i miss the music and actually it's because going through this process i rejoined uh actually first ame church here in los angeles with reverend murray who is one of the center pieces of the film because he and his church welcomed me they were so incredible and uh now i have a church home and five choirs but there's another go ahead and that's how it got sort of got started i mean that's how we start the film as well with the story of the lavender light choir because their story is so many people's story of being disaffected um and and sort of disowned and having to leave the the church because of the expert their experience of heterosexism and homophobia so they've found a sort of a spiritual home in le in lavender light and also with unity fellowship um church as well i mean that are that is predominantly african-american lesbian and gay church i mean people have found a home where they didn't have one so um i guess what we kind of want to do is is in both the white and black churches allow people to be able to go home again if that's if that's what they want to do well i know when you were talking about talking to ministers that a lot of uh the people interviewed in the film are ministers and especially ministers who that people respect and know and it's almost as though well they say it so that makes us okay uh it's you know it is authority and it is leadership that's what leadership is but you've used other people from the community as well to to speak i want to show a clip of marjorie hill but maybe you can tell a little about who she is before the folks see her do you want me to yeah it's dr marjorie hill she's a psychologist she was probably the first openly lesbian psychologist president of the black psychologist and she was david dinkins mayor david dinkins liaison to the lesbian and gay community and she has a major a great history of activism as an open lesbian and has done just incredible work and she is one of the linchpins of the film too i mean people always respond to some of the things she says and you just see how strikingly both beautiful and brilliant she is and that really comes through with her personality and the things she says and it's just it works well let's take a look at dr marjorie hill i just want to say i am your sister i am the little girl next door i am the older woman next door i am the neighbor the person on the subway the person who plants their garden next to your garden that gay and lesbian african-americans are intertwined throughout our community and we need we need the church see what i tell you we'll have more in just a couple of minutes from all god's children i see what you mean about the music i mean it's a it's a very important thing but there's really more to it in a way because that you've used music all through the film it's not just so that people feel good there's something well we interweave the music and stories and the music also plays upon uh it's an underlying theme of of what we're trying to say in terms of for instance i've been buked we we use spirituals and gospel spirituals are um coded or coded forms of communication that might everyone who's not uh in the church culture of african americans may not get and that's the point that was the point for 250 years for the dominant culture not to understand what they were saying spirituals are slave songs from the slave experience and the majority of them are about escaping getting away about pain and suffering and about how things would be in another life and with i've been buked uh it it dovetails on the experience of lesbian and gay people in terms of having been rebuked and talked about and uh basic and scorned and thrown out yet not giving up and not giving up their their faith and um it's just you cannot that's really the best way to get to that particular uh culture is through the music and there is other music that we we put in there purposely and and the way we did it and interwove and edit it in so you're having uh tapestry and an unfolding of a story that is i don't know i think that's why it won two awards with the black arts festival and the black international cinema because they got it they knew what we were trying to say and um and it's not that other people don't get it because white audiences says applaud and but it's just that i've been told about how african-americans say oh i see what you did how you interwove the story and the gospel music and what you're trying to say and who did it and that it really makes for something that's not just culturally relevant but culturally literate and culturally respectful we respect the masonry you know of what we built on and in respectful of what gospel and spiritual music is it's also very powerful message i mean music is powerful anyway because it goes through those screens that you might have you don't think about music music just gets in but the other thing is it's the message from the black community in the music was we're e we're equal we're as all god's children was tolerance and acceptance made by god and our good and now that message comes back to them about gays and lesbians in a way that says okay yes and i it is very powerful it's also very powerful i think the way you've used um examples of people who are as i said opinion makers or models from the communities that this must be a you know a meant to be kind of thing i mean it's the first time in history that african-american leaders heroes have said it's okay to be gay that it's a historical first on that point so what do you think happens to people when they listen to i can tell you what the audience uh people have looked at it have said to me they said these are people my mother would listen to these are people my parents respect this is a film i can take home and show it to them and that's very powerful and they say it with tears in our eyes very often you took one of your movies home didn't you dee yes i did as a matter of fact the last time around yeah i i yeah i did i took um it had sort of a rough go of it four years ago when i'd been very apt and really criticizing the republican party for their anti-lesbian and gay rhetoric and their mouthing uh family values but really uh espousing hate and violence and um so the the we were my fathers and my relationship was on the mend definitely after the election but um it really i think taking straight from the heart home was kind of a watershed in a way it was actually as it happened we were i was speaking in houston and with the film and it was very well received in houston it happened to be on his birthday and he came happy birthday yeah he came home right exactly he came home he'd actually been out of town came home and saw it watched it with the tears in his eyes and after said a couple one thing that kind of tickled me which was um he said it was so powerful and moving where on earth did you get all those great actors and i said dad that's life not art but it's art but it's also live so he was shocked but also he said you know i i really understand now that you really are just asking for equal rights nothing special and i i was i was thrilled that um that message had come through loud and clear from the film but also a little disturbed that it hadn't come through loud and clear before but well but that's the point isn't it i mean it's interesting even in your own family yeah where it's you it's your message you've been saying it it's my life and instead you say dad sit down and watch yes exactly together with me and then it gets in in a place that even talking to your own right doesn't get in right and maybe clearly it's it was able to say some things that i either wasn't able to or wasn't able to get across in a way that could be heard and felt in the way that the film was well there's some real people too in your film in the all god's children yeah because and i so there's a i the choice of role models from the community especially civil rights leaders or people who are so respected uh maxine waters um carol mosley braun reverend jesse jackson each of them hammering home the the notion that this is civil rights too gay and lesbian rights are civil rights too um why is that important do you think to the to the black community to use those particular role models well like i said because it is historical we uh have never seen this before we um you know we're raised in the same culture that everyone else is and you know we're told too that no one important likes us and that means your own leaders and and when you have a lot of uh the religious right the far-right giving homophobic black ministers checks for a half a million dollars to just be even more homophobic and they get in the press and they get news and they get quoted uh then you might think that gee they're right you know the church hates us and here we are saying no that's not true in fact i would say the majority of definitely the majority of the politicians because the congressional black caucus has been the most progressive on lesbian gay rights consistently in their voting record and that's very important to know and another thing is that african americans own the civil rights movement and if black people say this is not a civil rights movement you lesbian and gay people out there then it's not but if african americans say it is and they have in this film then we also have the moral authority to say we are a legitimate civil rights movement and that's one of the bottom lines of this film to get that point across because then the homophobic ministers cannot say you're not a civil rights movement we can say no the civil rights leaders who've been in it with martin luther king from the beginning are saying you're wrong it is a legitimate legitimate civil rights movement well i thought you also had a wonderful piece in there um that cornell west did i mean here's your intellectual leader here's the man who's dialoguing with the jewish community i mean you know with uh with michael lerner and his dialogues and books etc who is so authentic about the intellectual content really of uh of civil rights and and the experience of equality um so i want to show that piece that that uh cornell west piece and then ask you to tell me what you think of it so take a look at dr cornell west well if i have one word for fellow christians i would ask them to keep their eyes on the love of jesus and to not confuse the blood at calvary with the kool-aid of the homophobia in america because kool-aid is thin and shallow and it's linked to scapegoating and it's linked to trashing other people but the blood as thick as it is is open enough for everybody and by being open enough to everybody it means that we have to call into question our own particular prejudices that we inherit that have nothing to do with the loving gospel of jesus and i think that's a challenge to the black church and it's a challenge that is at work i mean it's a challenge for the country as a whole in the world but it's a challenge for the black church precisely because we've got too many black folk who are suffering because of the inability to talk about sexuality and we have too many black gay brothers and lesbian sisters who are suffering because of the petty prejudices that lead us to lose sight of their humanity and therefore our support and our embrace and our welcome don't you wish you could talk like that though so that's just so fine now what what do you think was going on with the why did you choose that 60-second piece for the film because that was actually a sermon there was a 60-second sermon that i call an african-centered critique of european thought and behavior which is it he uses so brilliantly the what i call the um apex of western christian theology using christ and the love of jesus and the nader of western civilization kool-aid in a rather illiterate illiterate christ and kool-aid juxtaposition of the two in terms of showing what is the good and what is not and not to do it and it was just brilliant well it's it's um wonderful the the sort of the interweaving as we talked about the the sort of the role models uh messages about how gay and lesbian rights are truly civil rights the message is in the music but there's a whole another piece that weaves through the film that has to do the same with straight from the heart with what is really the essence of the documentary style i think and that is real people talking about themselves their feelings etc tell me a little about some of the pieces or the people that you chose to do that piece of it and how how you wanted to use that well i think a number of them kind of bordered on i mean the real people i sort of ten i think one of the reasons i like doing documentaries is that i think real people are heroes and sort of i i just um and i think we interviewed a number of them who um are both real people and role models like phil wilson the founder one of the founders of the black gay and lesbian leadership forum and his family you know who were just wonderfully open and accepting and um just a couple of families of folks who as it happened were two men who died of aids who who came out to their family and whose family dealt very sensitively i think with the issue and in different ways that we wanted to you know that we wanted to to talk about on the film and then the other person again um sort of the border between hero and role model and and real person is linda villarosa and her mom who um i think just did this wonderful thing and coming out in essence magazine as as mrs villarosa coming out as a mom and and linda coming out as a lesbian and um you know they're just uh just had wonderful things to say and you could see the love and and that's what you know we hope and and we think because we see the tears that gets through to folks um in a way that um you know in a way that the the heroes don't you know because it's a little bit more impersonal and intellectualized well it it's much more i mean i know that there's a lot of emotional impact when a leader says to me do your best you know be your best get rid of your hatred or big bigotry etc and it does an enormous amount for my soul when music gets into it but i think of the three kind of elements of this that the stories that of real people just talking about and i don't mean we're not all real if we're role models or musicians but talking about their experience now maybe it's because i'm just so sentimental and but that gets to me because i can identify so directly with some piece of what they say and i'm assuming that's why you even choose the documentary style tell me if you can though some of the responses that you've gotten from people who've seen the film and what they respond to sylvia you've got some great stories from oh yeah uh just when you by the time they get to joseph beam's mom dorothy beam and using mahalia jackson and also the uh beale family talking about their son that's when we've noticed that the we we've been uh criticized for not having enough tissue in the world feedback right right right you're not supplying tissue because if people are crying at that point then you know it's just they were beautiful people giving a story of such love and heartfelt feeling that and people really identify with that and i think really we get most the feedback on the parents and what they said about the two the parents and their sons um and and then of course adding mahalia jackson singing there is a balm and gilead i mean it's something i i there there are certain scenes in the film that i can watch a thousand times myself well how about a thousand and one okay let's take a look at that scene if i had known my son would have only lived 33 years i would have been out there on a soapbox saying this is my son he's gay but he's good he's kind he's well learned this is my son i would have done that so what i do now everywhere i go i carry papers in my bag this is my son he was gay he died of aids at 33 but he was a wonderful young man and i elaborate on all the wonderful day things that he has done in his life and everybody says how can you do that how can you do that because he was mine and i birthed him and i brought him in the world and i loved him unconditionally [Music] he is [Music] joe beam was a poet he was a lecturer he was a writer he was a singer [Music] but after my son died and and the cause was so severe out here i asked the lord to help me to get out and speak to people and now i go out i speak at churches i speak at meetings i speak anywhere that they will anybody will ask me to come i go and speak and when i go out to speak i say to them love your child love your daughter love your son unconditionally so here we don't want to be accused of not having enough kleenex here that was wonderful that was just wonderful now um tell me how do we use this film now what where is this film going and what are you doing with it well as i said in the the beginning i mean i think the the most important thing about this is it's a way to start a discussion and what we've got in mind is to get it in and heart is to get it into as many particularly churches church communities as possible around the country and to that end we're going around the country doing community showings but more importantly we're recruiting local african-american and white activists to come together to learn how to use both straight from the heart and all god's children in their local church communities and how to take it and how to lead that discussion and how to do the follow-up in terms of you know really starting to change people's hearts and minds i'm on a 20-city tour right now taking it around premiering it and doing some trainings uh to deal with doing anti-homophobia work in the church and um talking about some of the the the most pithy issues that people are dealing with what we found is that people really fear losing their faith they fear losing the bible they fear losing their god and we're saying you don't have to do that and it's really just a matter come let us reason together and talk about it and if you want me to i can run down something really quick sure give you an idea of what i cover in terms of uh like when we talk about the bible especially with black people it comes down to what they've been taught about the bible that's like the bottom line and i say okay which bible because most people don't know that there are 105 different bibles printed in english and most people say well the king james version well that's 66 books 31 176 verses of which .0002 have been interpreted as being about homosexuality and when you break those down they're not really you've got um one levitical law in leviticus of 617 that most people and maybe orthodox jews subscribe to but most christians don't a story that has nothing to do with homosexuality and one man in the new testament paul who called himself the chief of all sinners and i say who died on the cross christ or paul so i just run it down and then we can go well it's provocative religion is another thing that exists in inside people's character in a way that it's also very difficult to get out i mean it's funny how and i can see why as mental health professionals this would be something you would be interested in in in addition right to the fact that you both experience right homophobia how do you get to those deeply held beliefs because i don't even know everything that i believe yeah until i'm called upon to take it out and look at ways yeah i mean but they're deeply healthy feelings absolutely and that's part of the point you do not if you want to be homophobic be homophobic but don't hit us in the head don't bash us can we ask you not to vote against us bottom line things we don't need everyone to not be homophobic we don't need every 100 percent of the votes we need 51 percent of the votes and we need people to be comfortable with their they have to deal with their own theology and denominational beliefs in their own way and we respect that and we give them the space to do that but we also need to give them some basic information you got to remember sheila a lot of americans think that christ spoke english that's right that the bible was written in english and one texas legislator even said uh and when he's passing trying to pass in english only law said well if it's good enough for jesus it's good enough for us and we're dealing with people who have that kind of feelings and ideas about the bible and not everyone is that unsophisticated but i can i ca i can out bible and out verse any of them so you know the other thing that you said too really struck me and that is i know that one of the ways that that society tries to make certain that we won't be gay or lesbian to keep us from even admitting or living in that part of ourselves is to punish us for doing it punish us when we come out and we imagine that we will be punished by everyone before we come out you know our family will disown us and that does happen to a lot and as you said it's not just that you will you will lose your religion if you come out from our side of the equation but that you run an enormous risk of losing especially in the african-american community this real center of spirituality social life and really sort of community meaning and it is a real thing i mean the choir forming itself because they could not be part of their own churches and so many people telling the story exactly that they were kicked out and this is a way of saying hopefully to a you know congregation or a church you don't need to expel your children and you should absolutely that is not what god and if you did you would have a pretty empty and and songless church you know even silent church i mean that's the thing i mean if if we had a day where all the lesbians and gays stood up and walked out of their churches and came out you know they would be pretty empty probably not terribly well funded may even lack preachers and and certainly would lack choir members and directors and organ players and stuff like that i mean if we could get people to really start having this discussion and realize you know the resources the enormous losses that they've already taken and that they could take you know well it is a terrible loss but i but homophobia doesn't care about the loss to society and doesn't care about the damage that it does the interesting to me thing to me is that good people do care and that's why i think the film is so powerful is that your your own hope that people will see it and say maybe i want to explore again why i believe that and whether that's a good thing so you're going all around the country that's right and now i know that people are watching this in parts of the country that you may not even have planned to go to uh honolulu for instance i don't know if you're going there but um how would people find this film can we we'll show a phone number yes absolutely there's an 800 number that people can call to get that and or straight from the heart or the homophobia sports film as well so what's next for you both well now it's my job to not just premiere it but go into the churches and the historically black colleges and universities to to deal with these subjects and not just historically black but that's going to be the thrust we are actually just scheduled right now to go to dartmouth and princeton and present these and have workshops and training sessions and to talk about it and i've been asked to come to atlanta for king week to be there a whole week and go to spelman and morehouse and emory and we just i'm booked till march now people start talking about march so uh we really are going to get this out there and have people at least address it and talk about it it really is a dream and another dream that i have is to to really in in bringing together activists in the community to be trained about using these films to also take the opportunity to bring black and white activists together because i think we are still in my personal opinion way too segregated as well and i think you know it's something that we could um get together and and share in terms of of a common purpose and goal and maybe you know make some inroads in in terms of our own racism in the white lesbian and gay community as well and i i hope that that that happens and so that's that's a corollary to what we we want to be doing or actually really one of the central things that we want to be doing well in that respect you're both role models as well i mean it's interesting i do try to do the same thing with this show in a way that you were that you were talking about and that is that people that see you uh hopefully think about their own ability to be activists i'm sure none of us set out and said gee you know i'm seven years old and what i want to be when i grow up is a gay lesbian activist but the way you've chosen to do it it's also i think inspirational because i'll bet you there are a lot of people out there with video cameras who have a notion that it's a very powerful way to say something and it it's almost like an extension of your own personality a way to extend your own personal message by capturing something and showing it and i think that it probably is what what drew you as well absolutely absolutely it's a real opportunity to go where we otherwise couldn't couldn't go or wouldn't wouldn't go so yeah well i'm i'm very happy that you were on the show i'm happy that we got to see uh several pieces of all god's children i hope that people get to see straight from the heart as well and all the the work that you will do in the future now remind people if they want to get hold of you there's going to be a phone number so you should go get a pen and paper right now because i'm going to thank dr d mossbacker dr sylvia rue and this is dr sheila cuell signing off and remember now you're not even safe in your own church you're going to have to watch these films and get used to it [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you