a lie to ease our conscience
Joel Ashton McCarthy and John Morrison (screenplay), Joel Ashton McCarthy (director) Why Does God Hate Me? / 2011 [16.31 minutes]
If Patterson’s film, reviewed above, uses one of the numerous times in history in which members of the LGBTQ community suffered bigotry and hate by governmental civil authorities which reiterate his rather obvious conclusions, Joel Ashton McCarthy’s commentary on religious fundamentalists’ determined efforts to destroy sexual diversity reads almost like a propagandistic text written by gays for youths suffering those prejudices in their homes and churches. Even the movie’s title, Why Does God Hate Me? appears to be a loaded question which allows any liberal-minded human being to subscribe to the film’s easy answer, which we know even before the movie presents its first image: God doesn’t hate anyone, only bigoted people hate in the name of God.
Particularly given that the mean-spirited parents whom we hardly get an
opportunity to meet in this work are made to represent the worst of hateful stereotypes,
being folk who block all stations not broadcasting religious sermons, chastise
their elder son for arriving home a few minutes late, and lash their youngest
boy, Matthew (Dakota Daulby), for even asking why gays are the subject of his
family’s vitriol, we wonder if there is any flesh and blood behind their views.
As Matthew says in the voiceover in
which he expresses his struggles with his mother’s and father’s values: “I didn’t
know how strict my parents were until they kicked my brother out,” evidently because
of their discovery in his room of small quantity of marijuana.
These are the kind of parents who enjoy
taking their son on an outing to express their hate for women who have chosen
abortion, any faggot still standing, and anyone else might even avert their
gaze in a direction other than the ones upon which they and their fellow church
members are focused. There is simply no room in their cross-eyed view of the
universe for deviation.
Their son Matthew, having grown up
believe such rot, seems amazingly nonplussed to discover his own gay feelings
and is so unbelievably well-adjusted that he is even able to suffer the abuses
of his girlfriend Esther, who kicks him in the balls every time his eyes scan
the handsome school jocks parading down the hall, purposely shares her cold
with him so that he might get out of sharing a few weeks in an all-male summer
camp, drops a cinder block on his leg so that he is refused by the wrestling
coach, and prays over him like she were a vulture impatient for a taste of
carrion.
On their first missionary outing to San
Francisco, he holds back from joining the others ready to scream out their hate
to anyone with a set of ears. And on his second such voyage to San Francisco
with his parents to protest the gay pride parade, he momentarily skips over to
the other side, amazed by a gentle gay man who speaks kindly and honestly to
him and even attempts to call him back after spotting the WE HATE FAGGOTS badge
Matthew has been forced to wear.
Unfortunately, this is not the way young
gays and even heterosexuals escape their parental jailhouse of the mind and
spirit. Many young gays and lesbians forced to survive on the streets and
engage in prostitution just to survive may still feel quite strongly that God
does indeed hate them for simply being who they are.
As nicely as everything seems to come
together for the young hero of this fairy tale, in the real world the bigotry
of belief has deep sinkers on the souls of such innocents, and the pain they
suffer for their so-called sins is real and enduring. A slug in the balls or
any other part of the body, a brick tossed in anger, and a contagion of any
disease such as COVID-16 more often kills than serving as a reminder of what such
youths have abandoned. McCarthy’s film is a lie to ease our consciences.
Los Angeles, October 28, 2020
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
and World Cinema Review (October 2020).
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