When Macky Alston decided to document the life of Gene Robinson, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, neither filmmaker nor subject could have possibly known what was ahead of them. Alston, a veteran documentary filmmaker and himself an openly gay person of faith, couldn't have anticipated that his camera would be arbitrarily banned from certain spaces at will. Bishop Robinson, who at this point in his very public career was accustomed to frequent death threats, couldn't have known that he would be confronted while delivering a sermon on acceptance. Alston's filmmaking team couldn't possibly have expected to capture the coming out of a prominent figure in the Episcopal community. But isn't that precisely what makes docmaking so exciting?

For Alston, however, documenting real-time events isn't just about the excitement; the fulfillment comes from the social change he knows he's affecting with his projects. A man raised in a family committed to social justice doesn't really have to question his purpose in the world; he just has to do that which is already so ingrained within him.

We spoke with the director of Love Free or Die, which won a Special Jury Prize at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, about his career, the themes he finds himself exploring, and how he wants to help start the conversations many of us have been dying to have.

 

 

Documentary: You've been making movies for about 15 years now. What got you started as a documentary filmmaker?

Macky Alston: When documentary found me, it was a revelation. Not every documentary is committed to issues of social justice, but there's such a proud tradition of documentary films that have been catalysts for social change or critical stories that draw out the humanity of injustice in ways that open hearts and minds, and lead to people acting, voting, living in different ways. So I was bartending 20 years ago in New York City, having studied art history at Columbia and having been an AIDS activist. My father, my grandfather and my great-grandfather were all liberal pastors in the South fighting for progressive justice causes. When I was doing all this AIDS work and the church was on the wrong side of all the issues, I thought, "Well, I'll go to seminary and fight from the inside." I dropped out of seminary, saying, "This is not for me," even though there was a lot of power there, and started making art.

I got a job as a paid PA. That film was called Something within Me. That won three awards at Sundance, and I was a PA for a year on it. The director, Emma Joan Morris, took me under her wing and said, "I think you'll be great at this. You can learn to storytell a documentary film either through camera work or editing. Which would you like to do?" I said, "I guess editing." So I was an assistant editor on that film, and then became an editor, then a director.

 

D: So when you say that documentary film "found you," what do you mean by that?

MA: I liked documentary film, but I never thought I'd be a filmmaker. It seemed like such a colossal undertaking in terms of budget, in terms of just the technological project of it, that I took the job for the paycheck. Of course, in documentary, the paycheck doesn't go a long way. What I found was a vocation. And the answer to the question that I was seeking in my early 20s--"What am I going to make of this life, and how am I going to be both an artist and make a difference?"-- that's what documentary can be all about. 

 

D: Alongside Love Free or Die, you also produced the film Questioning Faith and founded Auburn Media to help equip religious leaders with the tools they need to better communicate with the public. What is it that draws you to this intersection of faith and the media? Or is it more a draw to the intersection of faith and LGBT rights and issues?

MA: I've made five feature documentaries and produced more. In two of them, religion plays a central role; in the majority, religion does not. I would say there are themes that are in all of my films. It's surprising to me, what the common denominators and common threads are, what issues I've been chewing on for these 15 or 20 years, because I wouldn't have necessarily known it. It's a bit of a revelation.

That said, religion is my family business. Being a gay person in the 21st century in the US, I'm conscious of the fact that organized religion has provided the ideology for my oppression for the last couple thousand years. But [it] also is an agent for my liberation, certainly in this generation. That's interesting to me. It means that there's important storytelling to do there. I have an easy time relating to religious people, given that so many in my family are clergy. 

 

D: Are there any other themes that you have seen emerge in all of your films?

MA: I would say the themes that are consistent in all my films are telling the truth and the cost of telling the truth, but also the cost of keeping secrets. Another one is, How do we deal with evil or the bad things that happen in life? How do we make sense of unthinkably bad stuff that takes place whether it's consciously motivated or not? Love Free or Die is clearly about coming out and secrets. [It also asks], How do lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people deal with the evil done to us by the church, synagogue or mosque? Particularly for queer people of faith, does that make us reject religion and also hate our oppressors, or is there a next chapter and a new role for religion in our liberation?

 

D: This film really wouldn't have happened without Bishop Robinson's willingness to participate. How did you first connect with Gene Robinson? Was he immediately open to working with you on this project?

MA: I run a program called Auburn Media at Auburn Seminary, which helps progressive faith leaders and experts on religion speak out through the media for justice. This means I do a lot of media training. I had media-trained the bishop and all the spokespeople for the major advocacy organizations for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality. I media-trained all of [the Human Rights Campaign's] religious voices. I continued to work with Bishop Robinson after I initially met him for the media appearances that he was regularly having to take.

One day, I was sitting around during a training, and he told me what was coming down the pike: Barack Obama, who was running for president the first time, was calling him and saying, "What's it like to be a ‘first'?" Civil unions were about to go up for the vote in New Hampshire. This once-every-ten-year gathering of global bishops was [also] about to happen, and for the first time in the history of these historic meetings, a legitimate bishop had not been invited. That was Gene, and he was going to go anyway. I felt like I was talking to somebody who was clearly going down in history as the first openly gay bishop in Christendom on the eve of the tipping point in history both in church and state. So I said, "Might we go along with you?" Because of the trust that we had established and the fact that he knows that he's going down in history, and that there's a responsibility that goes along with that, he invited me in.

 

D: There's the horrifying moment in the film when that man starts yelling at the bishop mid-sermon, telling him to repent. The congregation does a great job of drowning out this man's ranting, but it still takes him a moment to be evicted from the premises. From behind the camera, how did that moment make you feel? Did you want to intervene?

MA: The scene at that church in London may have been the most excruciating scene for me. It's not that it was the most frightening, but it was the first frightening moment for me on the job. I knew the volume of death threats that Gene was getting. I knew that the bodyguard was in the house. But that was just a part of the mystique that went with Bishop Robinson--that he wore a bulletproof vest to his consecration when he became a bishop. It just came with the territory. [It's the] same thing with Barack Obama and all these public figures: You know that they can die but when you're with them, it's not real until suddenly you feel the threat.

I was up in the balcony with my camera, enjoying the service and framing the scene in my brain and tuning in to the sermon, editing it in my mind. Suddenly, the heckler stood up and started screaming. He was holding a motorcycle helmet and his fist was up in the motorcycle helmet. I had no idea whether or not he had a gun, but I could imagine it with great ease. My eye was on Gene's partner, Gene's bodyguard and Gene's face, which was crumbling. At that moment, this beautiful thing happened: In a kind of open-source, utterly unplanned way, the church began to clap to drown out the anti-gay heckler, and then sing a hymn--one of the most traditional hymns, about courage.

I just wept. I didn't know why I was crying, but what I came to recognize was that in the time I have come to know Gene, I'm proud of him. And though I could document his assassination, there was no way, if it was going to happen, that I was going to be able to run from where I was to body-block. Even if I could do it in that instant, I couldn't prevent Gene from getting killed by the scores and scores, if not hundreds and thousands, of people who would like to see him dead. The price that he had committed to paying for my liberation became concrete and real in that moment. Some people in history or in their lives choose to pay that price for other people's welfare. That's pretty impressive.

 

 

D: One never knows how the public is going to handle themselves when confronted with something they might have mixed feelings about. We can't expect everyone to be respectful. So as you've screened Love Free or Die, how have audiences in different parts of the nation reacted to the film?

MA: There has been a range. We haven't experienced much rage. I feel like between the arthouse theaters, festival audiences and congregations, there's an etiquette as well as a certain amount of self-selection as to who shows up there and how people behave. I certainly have been conscious that in most public screenings, there are people who have a range of opinions on the issue.

What I'm proud about in the film is that everybody is represented with compassion. Not only are were representing the full humanity of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people to people who judge us, but I also had a goal as a person whose dad is a minister to try to represent compassionately religious people who are for and against LGBT equality. From people who are in the film who are opposed to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality, they've been happy with the way they've been portrayed, even though the film is pretty clear on what I believe to be true--that [members of the LGBT community] are fully human and deserving of full equality. I think that that's to some degree dictated, a certain quality of response—that people will come to the conversation expressing a range of views, but not as the heckler does.

There's a lot of tears. There's always, at the end of every screening, a few who linger. That's been the case for most of the films I've made. If a movie is documenting anything that has any emotional content, there's a certain population out there who meet the film at a fortuitous time and the film penetrates their heart and sometimes breaks it, sometimes opens it up. I remember a screening at Sundance where a couple came up to me at the end, crying, saying, "We don't know what we think about this issue, but our son came out to us right before the screening, knowing we were coming to watch it." The father, who had a cowboy hat on, said, "What do I do? I don't want to lose my son." And he just started bursting into tears.

I knew I had a little window. I said "You love your son. It doesn't matter what you think about this issue. You love your son. You hold on to him. You tell him that you love him. That's all you need to say right now. The rest you will work out in time." To be able to have those interchanges and to know that the film as it operates in the world can be an agent for opening up around this issue whatever happens, helping people talk about it is certainly a goal and a privilege. Never before with a film have I done as much outreach work as I'm doing. Because I do work at Auburn Seminary at this program, I've done a lot of work within lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality organizing over the years. I've been working with Human Rights Campaign, the Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Center for American Progress, and about five other organizations from the beginning of this work.

 

D: You mentioned earlier that certain people who come to see the film happen to see it during a time when they needed to see it. LGBT issues have been gathering so much momentum recently, and this is an election year. Do you feel like those two factors are working in your favor with getting organizations on board to help you with promotion and with funding?

MA: Yes! And not to mention that my day job is embedded within the communities that I'm trying to mobilize and move. So I have been working deeply in the last five years to try and help religious communities that support lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality to do it in a way that actually moves the needle. So when we created the film, we created something called the Love Free or Die Friends and Family Plan . There are three pieces to the plan: One is making screenings available wherever they might happen in community contexts. We've done 250 community-based screenings so far, and hope to do another 100 before the election. Our national partners have been helpful in that regard. The reason that we've gotten that level of play is because we have a story that helps communities have conversations they are dying to have, particularly faith communities.

The second thing we did was create the Each One Move One Pledge. We are calling on everybody who sees the film--or doesn't--who supports LGBT equality to think of one person in your life who you love who votes against LGBT equality because of their faith convictions, and to lean into conversations with that person this critical election year. The way change is happening in America, as Bishop Robinson says, is that gay people are going from some sort of nameless, scary "other" to the people down the street who are bringing a covered dish when you're sick, or people you work with or go to school with or know who you respect. That is the way history is tipping. Still, affection and sentiment aren't strong enough determinants as people go to the ballot booth; still, their religious convictions trump their relationships in the ballot booth. So Christians need to find a way to neither have to leave their LGBT loved one or their faith at the door. How do we help them find within their religious tradition a way to remain that person of faith while also being supportive of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people?

 

 

D: After the film's Special Jury Prize at Sundance, its inclusion in DocuWeeks, and now its premiere on Independent Lens, Love Free or Die is really having quite a year! What's next for you?

MA: On this film like on no film before, I committed to deep outreach through the election. I literally haven't allowed myself to flirt with the next film. My guess is that around the turn of the year, I will let my guard down and begin to go out on dates with the films that I'm interested in.

Except for this: I am a gay dad. My husband and I have two little girls. Which is a miracle, by the way—that we are legally married and we legally adopted our children at birth in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Just goes to show how far we've come. My daughters, as they've see me on the road so much with this film, they've made me promise that they're going to star in the next film. They've named the next film The Team. It's going to be like Spy Kids 3. There's a piece of me that wouldn't be surprised as we wrestle with the themes of being a multiracial family with same-sex parents and two children who are adopted that somewhere in there there's material for a film on the horizon.

 

Love Free or Die premieres October 29 on PBS' Independent Lens.

 

Katharine Relth is the Web & Social Media Producer at the International Documentary Association.