accepting our vulnerabilities
by
Douglas Messerli
Daniel
G. Karslake and Nancy Kennedy (screenwriters) Daniel G. Karslake (director) For
They Know Not What They Do / 2020
The
evangelical churches throughout the United States, as we have seen previously
on film and television, continue to insist that gay marriage and gays,
lesbians, bi-sexual, Transgender, or other non-binary figures are a rising
threat to Christianity. They continue to spout Bible passages as their proof,
quotes that do not at all speak out against the LGBTQ communities of today—or
even the gay sex of ancient times.
Trump, in his attacks on the LGBTQ
community, and most recently against transgender individuals, along with his
continued statements that the Christian communities are being threatened by the
general societal acceptance of these and various other sexualities that lie
outside the boxes of male and female embraced by evangelicals, has stirred the
ashes of long-smoldering feelings in a community that blames the general
populace for own growing isolation.
Beyond the hostility they embrace in these
attacks, what about their own children, raised in such an environment, who
happen to suddenly perceive they are gay or transgender?
Daniel G. Karslake’s new film For They
Know Not What They Do explores this very issue. Not all of this excellent
film is new to us; we’ve long heard about the level of suicides, and distress
for these often-rejected religiously-raised children.
But Karslake’s film takes us also into
new dimensions, showing these families up-close as they come to terms with
realities in they never before imagined they might be involved.
The strange thing here is that Linda’s
brother, a policeman, came out to them several years earlier and was accepted
into the family as a loving uncle and friend. He surely might have been someone
to whom they might have turned for help and advice, and, perhaps even more
importantly, as a guide to Ryan. Instead, without telling him why, they cut him
off from their family life, fearing that he might be a “bad” influence upon
their son.
Instead, they work hard to make Ryan see
the error of his ways within their narrow Christian perspective. Eventually,
they even insist, with Ryan’s agreement, that he enter a conversion therapy group
named Exodus. That organization’s proselytizing and messages did not work, and
Ryan grew into an even greater depression, eventually taking a wide range of
drugs while living on the street and for weeks at a time disappearing from
their lives.
Oddly enough, by the end this difficult
film, the director of Exodus himself (whom to me seemed like a gay man and at
one point he expresses envy for those he is supposedly trying help) abandoned
the organization and realized the evils he and such conversion therapy groups
had done. I was shocked to hear that in 41 states they are still legal.
Finally, the Robinsons seek out the uncle
to find and help their son. He does so, getting him off drugs. But when the
young gay boy makes the mistake of returning to his old friends, he overdoses,
and his hospitalized for weeks before, finally, dying. In a sense it is a kind
of suicide itself.
One of the sub-themes of this work is
that these evangelical parents are not always homophobic, but are simply
unprepared, given the weekly sermons with which they are served up, have no
experience to help save their children, no way to even properly empathize with
them. Hence the title, quoting Christ at the moment of his death on the cross, forgiving
those who have killed him: “For They Know Not What They Do.”
After their son’s death the Robinsons
broke with their former church and joined a church that welcomes and celebrates
with figures from the LGBTQ community.
Other families handle it better, but in
the beginning are just as clumsy in their response, and are still filled with
shock and fear. Almost by accident all of the individuals Karslake and his
co-writer/editor Nancy Kennedy become larger-larger-than-life figures by film’s
end, suggesting a broad range of the dangers that LGBTQ people must face.
Victor Febo was born and raised by his
parents in Puerto Rico. When his parents move, with him, to Florida, he finds
the new world he has entered alienating and confusing, particularly since he is
gay, without having come out to his parents. He is fearful of doing so since,
as he puts it his father is terribly macho and his mother was very close to his
devout Catholic grandmother. He is fearful that if he told them he would be
locked out of their home.
He has no choice, obviously but to
return to Florida to live with his family. But when he tells them of his
sexuality, he is pleasantly surprised that his father amazingly supportive as
is his mother Anette.
Victor graduates, finds a good job, and
rents a beautiful apartment which two of his women friends help him decorate, celebrating
his good fortune with a group of friends who joined him with music, dance, and
good food.
Finally, as it was getting late, and the
noise increasing, he suggested they all go out to a local bar to continue their
celebration. The club they attend is Pulse in Orlando on the very night when another
kind of hater of gay life enters with a gun, killing 49 people and wounding 53
others. Victor found a small closet in which he successfully took cover; yet
three of the friends from his apartment party were later found dead. Depressed,
and unable to work, and desperate to leave the apartment he had once so loved,
he is given support by a local organization and begins to move on with his
life.
After the Pulse murders a local
evangelical pastor, Roger Jimenez of the Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento thanked
the gunman for making Orlando a safer place, suggesting that these gay,
lesbian, and transgender should been murdered. As the reviewer for the
Roger Ebert sight added, “His appalling words encapsulate the fear-mongering
tactics that have fueled hundreds of anti-LGBT bills introduced by the Trump
Administration, along with the rescinding of bathroom bills hinging on the
prejudicial belief that anyone who isn’t a heterosexual is a sexual deviant.”
Born a female, the now renamed youth
Elliot Poacher, grew up in the bi-racial society which represented his parents’
marriage. But they too, when he finally opened up to them, at first had
difficulties. Yet when they heard why he had chosen to tell them that he had
always wanted to be male, an feared for his life when he hear about a
trans-sexual girl who committed suicide, they quickly come to perceive that for
him there is no turning back, and they gradually come to accept him.
And, as this film progresses,
moreover—and here I should mention that none of these narratives are told as a
long singular history but are presented to us in bits and pieces interspersed
by the others—Elliot’s mother becomes one of the very strongest voices among
the parents, arguing that if we might just accept our own and others’
vulnerabilities, we might grow to love one another in a way that would entirely
change the society at large.
Perhaps the easiest transition was made
by a former male who decided to come out as president of her American
University class as Sally McBride. Her parents argued that she should, a least,
wait until graduation, but she insisted she could longer wait. She won general
and admiration from her colleagues, and went on speak before Obama’s Democratic
Convention, the first transgender woman to address such a body.
Yet she too encountered deep sadness.
She fell in love with a handsome transgender male who worked with her at the
Center for American Progress, and the couple soon begin planning marriage. Yet
her lover gradually becames infected in both lungs with a variant cancer, and
the upped the date of their marriage, he being married in a wheelchair, while
her father proudly walks the bride down the aisle.
The two are married just a few days
before her husband dies.
I watched this sad and yet, at many
moments, utterly exhilarating film, quite by accident, streamed from the Los
Angeles Laemmle Theater (which before the COVID crisis we regularly attended)
the very day the Supreme Court voted 6-3 that members of the LGBTQ community
were covered by the Civil Rights Act.
Los
Angeles, June 16, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (June 2020).
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