Why “8: The Mormon Proposition” Inspired Me

I saw a documentary at the Sundance Film Festival that disturbed and ultimately inspired me. Reed Cohen’s “8: The Mormon Proposition” investigates the Mormon Church’s hidden activist involvement in California’s “Yes on 8” campaign, which would only allow a man and a woman to marry. What disturbed me was the film’s tone, which pointed the finger at Mormons (understandably so) but without the degree of compassion for which I was hoping.

This gets personal for me. As some of you may know, I am bisexual and have made several documentaries about and for the gay community. What you may not know is that I used to be a Mormon. I converted at age 14 and left the church seven years later when I embraced my attraction to women. It was the most difficult experience in my life.

I’m grateful that “8: The Mormon Proposition” will inform many people about the Mormon Church’s alleged abuse of their tax-free status. It’s a well-made documentary and I urge you to see it.  And… I think that we as filmmakers can do better, certainly better than my own film about gays and Mormons (“My Femme Divine”), and better than repeating images of sobbing, heartbroken gays (which I saw as people stuck in feeling victimized), or red-faced angry gays accusing Mormons of hate, or Mormons who engage in electroshock therapy to change gay people.

So what would an even better documentary about this topic look like? What kind of film would I like to see? And perhaps produce some day? This documentary would not shy away from the pain of queer people who are rejected by their families and denied civil liberties. But it would also show the anguish of faithful Mormons who are struggling with the fact that their friends and relatives are gay and their church sees homosexuality as a sin.

We on the left may think that these believing Christians have a lot of work to do in coming to terms with this painful contradiction, and we would be right of course. What we may not realize, however, is that we have a lot of work to do.  To be most effective in facilitating change, we need, in my opinion, to move beyond our own self-righteousness and enter deeply, with curiosity and compassion, into the experience of a faithful Christian.

The documentary that I would love to see would seek to understand the experience of believing Mormons.  This might include the conversion experience, the joy of moving beyond one’s limited ego to embrace a power greater than oneself, and — what may be most difficult for many of us — the experience of living in line with one’s principles–what Mormons call “obedience”. A great example of this kind of filmmaking is Jill Orschel’s “Sister Wife”, a film about polygamy that debuted at Sundance last year.

I invite filmmakers to exploit what the documentary medium does best: take us somewhere we’ve never been before, and show us what it’s like to be “the other”. I know this is no easy task, in part because I have a sister who gravitated toward a fundamentalist view on life. It is difficult but I think worthwhile for me to go back into my own experience as a 14-year-old of embracing God, so that I may relate with heartfelt understanding when she objects to my female partner and I showing affection in front of her kids.

I am excited that the documentary that I want to see, one that can help heal this iconic, polarized American experience of Christians vs. Gays, is brewing out there somewhere, and possibly even in production today.  If so, I’d love to hear from you, so I can donate to your film, and from others who are seeking to end the divides (bipartisan or otherwise) that have disturbed us human being on both sides.