by Jessica Carreras
Dustin Lance Black will probably never pen a James Cameron-esque blockbuster. He'll never bank off of the vampire craze or direct the latest date night rom-com. But there's definitely something to be admired about his brand of filmmaking activism, which brought gay rights history into the hearts of America with "Milk," scoring the 36-year-old San Antonio native an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
The openly gay Black never saw his advocate side while growing up closeted in a Mormon household. However, since coming out while in filmmaking school at the University of California, Los Angeles, he has stood on the front lines of the fight against Proposition 8, testified to make Harvey Milk Day a statewide holiday and spoken out for LGBT rights whenever given a chance to. At the National March on Washington. At the Academy Awards. Even in Holland, Mich., while directing his latest film, "What's Wrong With Virginia?"
On March 10, he'll speak out once again as part of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan's 50th anniversary Legacy Lecture series. The event, "Activism and the Creative Class: The Art of Building Inclusive Communities" will tackle Black's favorite topic: how to use art to ignite change.
He took a few minutes from his home in New York and spoke with Between The Lines about combating Mormonism, how he became an activist and why dialogue is the best bet for creating inclusion.
You've tackled some pretty serious topics in your films – Mormonism, gay rights history, AIDS – so what are you working on currently?
Well, I'm not doing "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." I read that a lot and that's not happening. I hear that all the time.
"What's Wrong With Virginia?" is a far more personal film and tackles some of my issues growing up as a kid in the South with a single parent. It's highly fictionalized, but highly personal. It has a lot of Mormon stuff in it, but it doesn't have a lot of gay stuff in it.
So I'm working on that and there's some other movies coming out, but I don't think I'm supposed to talk about that. "What's Wrong With Virginia?" will come out in the fall. And then I wrote a movie – I don't know what you'd call it, maybe my follow-up to "Milk." It's another political figure who is far more well-known, and I call it "The Cautionary Tale of the Closet Case."
I just heard that "8: The Mormon Proposition," which you narrate, was picked up by a distribution company. You were raised in a Mormon family, so how does it make you feel to know that Mormons are partially responsibility for taking away the right for gays and lesbians to marry?
When I was little, on Sundays in Mormon Church, they would beam in the president of the church on special Sundays and he would give an address to the entire congregation nationally – and likely, internationally, because it was beamed in via satellite, and he said that homosexuality is sin; next to the sin of sexual impurity comes the crime of murder. So he compared it to murder, to a capital offense, and said that if you were gay, you would face the same repercussions in hell.
So it was pretty clear where the church stood on this issue growing up, and that's what made it hard growing up in that church. I think that motivates me a lot to know that there are kids out there still hearing those messages, that are seeing that the Mormon Church really created this coalition that sought to have rights stripped away from gay and lesbian people in California. That sends a really strong and hurtful message to those kids. It's difficult to know that the church I grew up in that was so incredibly loving in certain ways and held family in such high esteem is causing that sort of damage to gay and lesbian families. That's really tough.
But the dialogue can't stop – that's the thing. Just because they're doing this horrible thing doesn't mean we can just be angry and cut off ties. We have to keep the lines of communication open. That's a good lesson for a lot of congregations, because God knows it's not just the Mormons that are anti-gay. But also for so many of the other conservative churches, I think that a good many of the folks – just the everyday followers and the people who are running the churches on the ground, they see the real-life damage of these policies. I think it's them that we need to talk to about change, and by changing those minds and emboldening these people and dispelling stereotypes and fears of these people, that change will start to trickle up.
Which is sort of what you did in Holland while filming there. But what's interesting is that even though Hope College banned you from speaking, you said you didn't think the city was homophobic. What do you think it takes to label a city as unwelcoming and homophobic?
This goes back to my basic belief that most people are not homophobic. A lot of people are still voting based on what they learned in their mosque or church or synagogues or just having grown up in a certain family and they're not passionate about voting anti-gay; they're just doing it because it's the tradition. They do it because it's what they've always grown up believing. It doesn't take very much to change those minds. It just takes being introduced to a gay or lesbian person, and that's what I found in Holland.
In Holland, I found that whenever I met people who traditionally would have voted anti-gay and I introduced myself and we talked and a lot of times, we'd start working together because of the film, that prejudice melted away. What I found was that they had never met an out gay person before.
I feel like probably every region – there are very few that you could call homophobic. Now, there are people within those communities who are and clearly, that did exist in Holland. But I think that very soon, those sort of people will become dinosaurs; they'll become extinct.
In Holland, it became clear that there was so much support when I came back and spoke and screened "Milk" twice, and it wasn't just the traditional support from gay and lesbian people. There was a lot of support from conservative, Republican people who you would assume might be anti-gay, and they just weren't.
Why did you feel the need to go to such lengths to come back to Holland and screen the movie?
I don't know. I mean, that's the position that I find myself in these days. I feel so fortunate that I'm in a position to perhaps create some change, and this looked like a great opportunity to do that. I knew a lot of people in the community wanted some healing to happen. I couldn't do it when I was shooting the movie because I worked 16 hours a day, so I thought it would be wrong and I would regret it if I didn't take this opportunity to aid in healing what had happened in this town. And I think we were successful in doing that.
You're known for your use of film to ignite these changes and spark these conversations, and yet you didn't come out until well into your studies at UCLA. What came first – your desire to be a filmmaker or to be an activist?
To be a filmmaker, for sure. I was in theater since I was a teenaged kid, and that kind of storytelling is something I've wanted to do since a very early age. I always knew that I was gay, but I hadn't gotten past all of the fear that I was taught as a kid. I didn't actually come out until I was almost 21. At that point, I was already making movies, but being an activist was still a long way away. First, I had to go through my own journey, that journey of healing that most LGBT people have to go through still, sadly, which is rediscovering your self and your self-esteem – rebuilding that – and then hopefully you come out on the other side of it strong enough that you can start to do activist work.
So you had no idea that you would be a prominent activist some day, did you?
No, never. Are you kidding? I was so scared just to tell my mom. I would never have thought that I could start to tell my story nationwide or try and encourage other people to do it. No way.
Now you're giving this talk in Detroit, where there's been a lot of talk about inclusive communities. You grew up in Texas, lived in California, spent time in Michigan and now you're in New York, so how do you think that conversation changes depending on where you live?
I can speak to Michigan and my experience there. It reminds me of San Francisco in the 1970s. San Francisco, in the early '70s, was not a very liberal place. Most of the leadership in the city was rather conservative, but it was incredibly diverse and it had a really strong workers' movement. And really, the work that was done to make that one of the most inclusive and accepting cities in the world was coalition building. It was having leaders start to see that by all of these minority groups having each other's back, all of them could get what it was they needed and wanted. It was really about coalition building and it was about getting out the message that this coalition cannot be beaten at the ballot box.
Do you think a vibrant LGBT community is key to a city's success in being inclusive and creating culture?
Whenever the gays move into a neighborhood, it used to be because they needed safety, so they'd create these ghettos and the art would improve and the buildings would improve and the property value would skyrocket and oftentimes, it gets so nice that the gays have to leave because they can't afford it. So that's gotta be good for a city.
I'll tell you my point of view: We're part of this world. Whatever you believe in religiously, this is how God made us and there's gotta be a purpose. And if it's to make life a little more beautiful, so be it. What a great reason to be here.
Activism and the Creative Class
6 p.m. March 10
Museum of Contemporary Art, 4454 Woodward Ave., Detroit
$15-40
