A Jihad for Love, Small Town Gay Bar, Trembling Before G-d

If there's one thing Christians, Muslims, and orthodox Jews agree on, it's that gays aren’t welcome. Of course, each group believes the other two are eternally rejected by God too, so what are you gonna do?

Director Malcolm Ingram’s compassionate 2006 documentary Small Town Gay Bar isn’t about religion, per se, but it takes place in America’s Bible Belt, where everything is about religion. As captured by the film, rural Mississippi consists of isolated communities of rustic, backwoods poverty, with a landscape of mobile homes interrupted frequently by churches. In such small, religiously conservative areas, a gay bar sticks out like a sore thumb, and interviews with locals from the town of Shannon (population 1,657 as of the year 2000) reveals a rankled discomfort about the presence of such an establishment: Have I ever been to Rumors? Why would you ask me about that place?

For many residents, Rumors is a nuisance, or an affront, but for its regulars it’s no less than sanctuary. It draws patrons from far and wide because there is no place else for them to gather happily, peacefully, without fear of retaliation. The film points to an intrinsic human need to congregate, to be among peers, to belong. Without such an outlet as Rumors — or the bawdier Crossroads in the town of Meridian — these gay Southerners would be adrift, alone, and perhaps more gravely endangered. How endangered are they? Ingram segues into a crushing segment about the 2004 murder of Scotty Joe Weaver in Alabama, whose homosexuality, according to the Baldwin County District Attorney, was a motive for the crime. The details of the slaying are told plainly, and are excruciating. We’re introduced to Christian community activists whose matter-of-fact hate speech shocks the conscience. They picket establishments — even churches if they are gay-tolerant — use intimidation and harassment. They are more interested in gay sex, it seems, than those who are having it.

These bars are places of comfort for those whose everyday lives are prisons in a very real sense of the word: They are watched, monitored, guarded, and potentially subject to death by those doing God’s work. The film’s most revealing segment cuts between Scotty Joe Weaver’s brother Lum and Fred Phelps, the pastor of Westboro Baptist Church. Phelps preaches about the fearsome hatred of God; Lum explains that you can’t fight hate with more hate — you have to fight it with love. Phelps and his ilk thankfully do not represent mainstream Christianity — or even the right-wing fringe, which looks like the ACLU compared to Westboro — but he and these small towns of the Deep South represent a microcosm of cultural exclusion; the rural Christians have their community but would deny gays and lesbians one of their own. Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association, which recorded and broadcast the license plate numbers of gay bar patrons, claims that gays are unhappy, but doesn’t know why. Anyone care to give him a hint?

Where Small Town approaches homosexuality and religion from the perspective of outsiders, Trembling Before G-d and A Jihad for Love discuss them from within. They detail the lives of orthodox Jews and Muslims, respectively, who struggle to reconcile sexual orientations they can’t change with faiths that regard them as damned unless they do. The films include interviews that describe a similar range of responses: those who look to reform their faith, those who rebel against it, those who retreat from it, and those who never resolve their struggle and live in exile from themselves.

The quality of the films comes down to their focus and the quality of their subjects, and on those counts Trembling comes out ahead. It shows orthodox Jewish life with detail, and it boasts the most compelling character of any of the three films: Israel, a New Yorker who was 58 at the time he was profiled. He suffered abuse from his family and eventually left his faith, though he still gives tours of local orthodox neighborhoods and landmarks. He makes a spontaneous speech about the nature of God with such firebrand passion that he snaps us to attention. I think he might have been a powerful voice for Judaism had he not been pushed out of it.

Israel hasn’t seen or spoken to his family for decades; he breaks our hearts when he confesses that sometimes all he wants is his “daddy.” Another subject, David, has fought his homosexuality through counseling and aversive therapy — including the ritual consumption of figs and flicking a rubber band on his wrist. At last he returns to the rabbi he first came out to and is told that his choices are celibacy or abomination. Those are the options for men and women raised to live in devotion to God only to discover that they are anathema to God.

Director Sandi Simcha DuBowski films many of his subjects with their faces darkened or pixilated, including the recurring image of a Jewish celebration in which the participants are shown in silhouette. This is to protect their anonymity, but it also serves as a metaphor for their lives. They are cast into darkness, exiled from their families, alienated from their God. And yet for many of them faith remains a refuge, which I think is a testament to the strength of their convictions.

DuBowski also produced A Jihad for Love — a title that sounds sort of like an Islamic romance novel — which is also frequently moving, but less successful in that its attention is scattered and its depiction of Islam feels diffuse and lacks clarity. Directed by Parvez Sharma, it documents Muslims in South Africa, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey, and the Islamic rule of law differs from one to another in regard to homosexuality. Better would have been a film that is less anecdotal and more concerned with how each nation has evolved in its approach. For instance, it is mentioned that in Pakistan there are celebrations of the love between 16th Century poet Shah Hussain and his male lover Madho Lal, but there are no indications of how this is reconciled with Pakistan’s criminalization of homosexuality.

Nevertheless, the testimonies of arrest, punishment, and violence in A Jihad for Love are illuminating and unsettling. All three films are. It would be easy — and I am tempted — to come down on religion as a source of hatred, but that would be an unfair generalization. I don’t think religion spawns hatred, though it does a good job of organizing and directing it. Religions, by their very nature, are functions of in-groups and out-groups, where the in-group is beloved and saved and sanctified by a higher power and the out-group — which is to say, everyone else — is excluded from that eternal love and cast down into hellfire. My knowledge and understanding of religion are limited, but my opinion of it, strengthened by these films, is simple: The faithful should listen to everything their God says about love, forget everything He says about hate, and leave the judgment to Him. And if you still think consenting adults who engage in a particular form of sex are doomed to eternal damnation, isn’t that punishment enough?

A Jihad for Love - Trailer