There will be no Academy Award for young filmmaker Stephen Cone’s considerable achievement: Best Movie Depiction of the Evangelical Subculture Without Lampooning It. Cone’s small, heartfelt film, “The Wise Kids” (available on Netflix and iTunes), gives conservative Christians a largely sympathetic but sharp-eyed treatment. Evangelical Christians will find the music familiar. Also, the propensity to end discussions with: “I’ll send you the verse.” And the tendency of evangelical youth to end public prayers: “In Your awesome, holy, amazing, awesome, awesome name we pray.”
But the movie is important because it depicts a traditional religious community in the midst of a moral earthquake. The film’s protagonist (Tim) is a gay, Christian high school senior and not particularly anguished about the whole thing. In part, this reflects Cone’s own experience as the gay son of a Southern Baptist preacher in South Carolina, which was considerably less traumatic than you might imagine. “At the age of 12,” Cone told me, “I wanted to see ‘Philadelphia’ [a groundbreaking movie about a gay man with AIDS], and my dad took me. Afterward, there were no lessons offered, no discussion of immorality. He just let it be.”
Source: A heartfelt look at how evangelical gays are finding their place – The Washington Post
For years, I cared what anti-gay Christians thought about me. Deeply. I spent countless hours arguing the finer points of scriptural history and interpretation with them – especially the “clobber passages” – those six or seven passages that they claim unequivocally condemn homosexuality. I cared so much that I created an Whosoever, an online magazine – back in 1996 with the mission of arguing against anti-gay Christians and equipping my fellow LGBT Christians to do the same. I even wrote a book, Bulletproof Faith: A Spiritual Survival Guide for Gay and Lesbian Christians, to help others who deeply cared about what anti-gay Christians believed and said cope with the ongoing battle for our right as LGBT Christians to actually exist.
