When Oil City native Joe Wilson and Dean Hamer announced their wedding in The Derrick newspaper in summer 2004, a battle erupted on the editorial page between supporters and letter writers who were so outraged they suggested it would be better if the men had never been born.
Wilson was disappointed by the controversy over his same-sex marriage but wasn’t surprised.
He grew up gay and closeted and knew some people, particularly in rural western Pennsylvania, view homosexuality as a violation of Biblical law or a choice.
But after Kathy Springer, the mother of a gay son who was being tormented at Franklin High School, sent Wilson a letter about her heartache over her son’s troubles, Wilson and Hamer, filmmakers who live in Washington, D.C., grabbed their cameras and headed to Wilson’s hometown.
Footage from the couple’s interaction with gays, lesbians, allies and vocal opponents there became “Out in the Silence,” a documentary screened recently at Penn State Shenango in downtown Sharon.
About 100 people turned out to watch the film and talk with the men behind it and activists like Hickory High School senior Matthew Chess and Stephen A. Glassman, chairman of the Pennsylvania Human Rights Commission.
“I believe that this is a struggle about basic human rights,” Wilson told the crowd.
Professor Dr. Missa Murry Eaton said she hoped the movie would stimulate discussion on campus and in a town not unlike Oil City. She said there’s also a possibility of reviving Penn State Shenango’s now-defunct Rainbow Lions club for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered and their allies.
The movie’s subtitle — “love, hate and a quest for change in small town America” — sums up the filmmakers’ motivation.
“If I didn’t shine a light on and try to understand and illuminate the basis for the controversy, it would simply pass away into history’s ether … and silence would settle once again over my hometown in the faded hills of northwestern Pennsylvania, affirming and perpetuating the fear and isolation that I knew too well as a young gay boy in a stiflingly anti-gay world,” Wilson said in a news release.
The movie opens with photos from Wilson’s childhood and captures their drive north, where the audience meets 16-year-old C.J. Bills, an athlete, animal lover and budding mechanic just trying to get the beater he’s bought road ready.
After the hostile reaction at school to C.J.’s coming out, he began cyber school to avoid what he called “eight hours of pure hell” every day.
The filmmakers gave C.J. a camera and he documented his feelings, along with the shenanigans kids in a rural town get into.
Mrs. Springer speaks out for her son and all other children in taking on the school board and Legislature. The self-proclaimed “little back hills mom” said she would continue to “stand up against the bigots until they wake up.”
Her attempts to get diversity training at the district to address sexuality were thwarted by more letters to the newspaper, including one from Sharon school board member and Farrell principal Rev. Lora Adams-King, whose church is in Franklin.
The film also depicts the unexpected friendship struck between the filmmakers and C.J. and an evangelical pastor who authored an angry letter to the newspaper following the couple’s wedding announcement.
A lesbian couple’s emotional journey to restore and reopen an art-deco theater in Oil City and the reaction of the town feature in the film, as well. The women receive great support from some, but others call for a boycott and claim it’s all a ploy to promote “the homosexual agenda.”
The audience responded positively to “Out in the Silence,” which is being shown at colleges and festivals across the state and on public television.
“I believe they should show this in high schools,” said Kristy Martell, who brought her daughter. “If kids saw it, maybe they wouldn’t feel so trapped or alone or dehumanized.
“What they call an agenda, we call our lives,” Wilson says in the film of extremist groups like the American Family Association of Pennsylvania.
Much of the anti-gay propaganda is not based on fact, Stephen A. Glassman, chairman of the Pennsylvania Human Rights Commission, said.
Homosexuality “is not something you choose,” he said.
And while society is more accepting than when one man in the audience’s coming out resulted in emergency school board meetings “to determine if (his) gayness was a threat to their children,” it’s still not easy to be openly out everywhere.
Hickory High School senior Matthew Chess said he’s tried for three years to start an LGBT group at Hickory without success.
“School boards are so reluctant to change because they fear parents so much,” Matthew said.
He said parents need to speak up, get involved and make sure children are being treated well.
Some of the things C.J. talks about happening to him happen in hallways locally, Matthew said. Kids are bullied and throw around jokes and use the word “gay” to mean lame or stupid without thinking.
“These things hurt and leave lasting impressions,” Matthew said. “You’re the one exhibiting strength and maturity by speaking out.
Matthew said the problems are often ignored. A Pittsburgh organization that he’s a part of works to educate teachers and administrators about how to deal with such issues, he said.
One step youth can take is to call classmates out when they call something “gay,” Matthew said.
Glassman urged people who support equal rights to contact their government representatives and make their opinion heard.
Pennsylvania is one of 30 states that does not have laws that provide rights to same-sex partners when it comes to things like taxes, child custody, insurance and medical situations. Wilson and Hamer married April 10, 2004, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
According to the announcement in The Derrick, Wilson and Hamer met in 1996 at an event sponsored by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to honor activists who successfully fought to have sexual orientation included as a protected class in the South African constitution.
They live in Washington D.C. “Out in the Silence” was made with support from the Sundance Institute, Pennsylvania Public Television Network and presented by Penn State Public Broadcasting.
For more information about the film, visit OUT IN THE SILENCE
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