Out in the silence

The Sundance Institute helped fund Out In The Silence, a 2009 one-hour documentary report of a gay man's return to his small-town home-town of Oil City, Pennsylvania. Provocatively, Washington-resident Joe Wilson had announced his homosexual marriage in the local paper, triggering angry letters and an appeal for help from the mother of a bullied gay student.

Back "home" 25 years after fleeing the town, with his partner (Dean Hamer) holding the camera, he meets with townsfolk and homophobic bigots, wondering whether life is any easier for minorities in the US hinterland.

Hamer is credited with a couple of other gay short films and it can be assumed he encouraged his partner's documentary project. Three years earlier, Hamer had made We Belong, focusing on the efforts of a young schoolboy, Charles Bills playing himself, to come out. The same student in 2009 is called CJ Bills, who's also credited with additional camerawork.

It's suspiciously convenient for the movie-makers' narrative that Wills's mother "wrote", presumably unsolicited, to Wilson: it's clear that the teenager is a tough kid who can fight for himself. He needed help in the school board meetings, though, where school discrimination and abuse were being wilfully ignored in a community nourished on Christian and family "values".

Another dramatically convenient local connection is the lesbian whose house lies two doors away from Wilson's old Catholic family home. She and her new girlfriend had bought and renovated a long-closed downtown Art Deco theatre with a stupendous period chandelier. The building's revival is a convenient symbol of a backwoods Rust Belt town's struggle to find a new role and personality for itself. One of the DVD extras notes the toughness of the struggle: the state is 50th in rankings for mobility, 48th for economic growth.

By covering a variety of local angles, the documentary lacks a focal point and a clear storyboard. Its producer-directors stirred up a hornet's nest, upset the local American Family Values flag-wavers, exposed small-town prejudices and pettiness, and went back to Washington without indicating whether Oil City deserved to learn and grow or fester and die.

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Hamer subsequently made two documentary shorts about twins described as "developmentally disabled" (in the 2010 short) and "differently abled" (in the 2011 follow-up report).