I don’t recommend films.

I saw a film entitled

Latter Days.

Warning!

This film is

Sexually explicit

Gay friendly

In it God is a Girl

 Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

 It’s about a love affair between a Mormon missionary and a party guy.

Why do I say such a film is noteworthy?

1. Many gay-lesbian teens suicide or attempt suicide. Homosexuality is a choice?  In this homophobic society, who’d freely choose a life of self-loathing, rejection, isolation, discrimination?
2. The film deals with the question: how do religious families and churches confront homosexual kids? There’s more than a snicker in the name of the ex-gay detention center Davis is sent to after being ex-communicated, Dyer Treatment Center.
3. Jacqueline Bisset (arguably the God or Christ figure) represents what I wish church could be.
4. Steve Sandvoss, one of the stars, is Harvard educated. This is not fluff stuff.
5. The missionaries do a lot of religious activity. They set an example of zeal for us more traditional “Christians.” But what counted most: the guy saw a woman in tears, stopped to listen, didn’t give any canned presentations, reached out in love. In the end that mattered most.
6. One of the truth-tellers is the person living with AIDS. He says to the party guy: “Hey, you’re depressing me!? You gotta do something!”

For several years in the early 1990s I volunteered with AIDS patients. In San Francisco, the Southern Baptist president had pronounced that “AIDS is God’s judgment on homosexuals,” and I couldn’t stand it! I had to do something to oppose such pornographic statements.

During the training sessions I sat in a sunlit room, the fellowship hall of Holy Comforter Church here in Richmond. I was literally bathed in light.

Back then, much less was known about the disease.

I started volunteering. My first visit was to a former pastor, who now weighed 90 pounds, who rolled on his bed in a DEPENDS moaning “Lord, have mercy! have mercy!” He asked for food, I mistakenly gave him a bit of cheese. He choked on it, and I had to reach my bare hand into his mouth and retrieve the cheese—or watch him choke to death.

When I got home, I washed my hands compulsively. I couldn’t stop shaking. I was terrified.

It took me several months to volunteer again.

This time I worked at an adult residence that was accessible. I was assigned to a man who had lived on the streets and done drugs. He had a bright mind and a broad smile. He’d learned to survive any way he could.

We were taught nonjudgmental acceptance. Another word for that is “grace.”

He made me laugh. Sometimes he tried using my white middle class guilt to get me to buy him some trinket or other. Once in awhile it worked.

He left the residence, returned to the street.

Then, months later, he called me. He was on his own but wanted to get clean again. I didn’t feel safe negotiating the area he lived in; by then my walking was significantly impaired. So I couldn’t help him.

But he turned to a humongous man, a pastor of a storefront Baptist church, from whom I learned later that before his death my friend was saved, baptized; and his parents gave him a key to their house on Thanksgiving. He never ”repented” of being gay—nor should he have done so.

One reason I wanted to work in AIDS ministry was to meet some gay people with commitment and spirituality.

There were many.

Like all suffering, AIDS teaches us all better than many life experiences.

I remember my friend wth gratitude. He enriched my life.

I don’t recommend films. But this one you should see. My friend would have loved it, too.

Check out the link to the right to The Blue Book. It’s a great source of info about homosexuality.