Here is my Friday May 22 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of Kirby Dick's new documentary film, Outrage. I'll have more on this film, and the censorship of reviews and discussion of it by National Public Radio and NPR's Terry Gross, here soon.
Caught with their pants down and lying in the process
'Outrage' rails against politcos in the closet
Magnolia Pictures presents a documentary written and directed by Kirby Dick. Running time: 90 minutes. No MPAA rating. Opening today at the Music Box Theatre.
Bauman was a right-wing Republican congressman from Maryland's Eastern Shore and a staunch campaigner for what came to be called "family values." A founder and leader of the Young Americans for Freedom and other arch-conservative groups in the '60s, he was on the cusp of 40, a rising GOP star, a Roman Catholic father of four, a master of parliamentary rules, and a gifted gabber eager to engage in conversation with young people.
He was also a heavy drinker and a closeted homosexual with a taste for teenage boys. Bauman, who had actually been a congressional page as a teenager, managed to hit on me physically once at a reception. When I reported this to my office, people just rolled their eyes.
Three years later, Bauman was busted for soliciting sex from a 16-year-old boy. Blaming alcohol, he refused to resign his seat and was defeated for re-election. He later divorced and wrote a book on being, in his words, "a gay conservative."
Three decades later, politicians drunk on power, if not alcohol, too, still play the two-faced game. Sanctimonious campaigners against "the gay agenda," they live gay lives with various degrees of visibility as Kirby Dick shows in his new documentary Outrage.
What has Dick, a straight man and a maker of such inquisitive films as This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006) and Derrida (2002), and many of his interview subjects outraged is not so much the sexual antics of these elected officials -- as former Democratic New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey (above, right), who resigned after his own sex scandal, makes crystal clear in the film, living in the closet is not healthy -- but the blatant hypocrisy of these politicians and how they damage the lives of others to serve their own vanity.
The arrest of Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho; top) in a Minnesota airport men's room stall in 2007 underscored this issue in the public eye. One of the strengths of Dick's film is that he helps us to understand the psychology not only of the Larry Craigs but of Florida's smarmy Republican governor Charlie Crist (above, left). Craig comes off as a man who is clearly tortured by his identity: "I am not gay. I do not do these things" (i.e., I did not do what I just did), we hear him tell the arresting officer whom he had just solicited for sex.
The trim, tanned Crist, however, seems to relish his game of catch me if you can. A bachelor, he wines and dines young male lovers, promising them state jobs, and then makes sure they get out of the state when an election rolls around. Women whom Crist admits he had not known before appear as his girlfriends, and, more recently, his second wife, and usually disappear as soon as the election is over. One tells Dick that she can't say anything now, but "call me in 10 years, and I'll have a story for you."
How does Dick know these things? He's careful with his documentation as is the D.C. blogger, Mike Rogers, who follows gay officials who regularly oppose gay rights and funding for HIV/AIDS. When Rep. Ed Schrock (R-Va.) is accused of using recorded phone lines to solicit sex with men, Rogers tracks down the actual tapes. (Schrock dropped out of his re-election bid in 2004 after Rogers revealed his double life.) Dick, too, tracks down the friends and lovers of these figures, and, in the case of McGreevey, his ex-wife. In Crist's case, he also has a videotaped sworn deposition from a lawsuit.
Faced with being outed after he voted in favor of the "Defense of Marriage Act", Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) came out on his own in 1996 and was re-elected to five more terms. The 66-year-old Kolbe's face practically shines as he tells Dick how relieved he was when he ended his charade. Mitt Romney-backing Rep. Jim McCrery (R-La.) chose not to seek re-election last year, despite his high rank in the House, after young men from his college fraternity started coming forward and describing how McCrery used his old frat house as a personal "gay bar."
Dick also talks with Republican operatives who are gay, including one who was outed by Rogers and is still smarting. Rogers shrugs it off. The GOP official had overseen an anti-gay scare mailing to voters, Rogers tells us, and "now he's on the board of North Carolina's state gay equality group.''
As the country grows more open about gay people and less tolerant of gay-bashing, some of this sort of thing will just fade away. In the meantime, discriminatory laws are still passed and in force (a Crist favorite is making sure Florida is one of only two states to ban gays from adopting children), and gays are still targets of the political right.
Why do people live these sorts of lives? Cynics will say it's because they can. Others might point to the twisted psychology that comes from living a lie. The last word probably goes to entertainer Bill Maher, who says, in a clip from CNN's Larry King Live that Dick includes in the film: "What can I tell you, Larry? Hating yourself is truly the greatest love of all."
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