OUTRAGE: A Review

NYT: Secret Lives in the Age of Gay Rights
by A. O. Scott.

With horror-movie music and stark white-on-gray titles, “Outrage” promises to illuminate a “brilliant conspiracy” that protects the secret lives of some powerful politicians while ensuring that the rights and interests of ordinary gay and lesbian Americans remain marginal. The choice of the word conspiracy may be deliberately provocative, but this indignant and methodical new documentary, directed by Kirby Dick, offers a lot of insight into the ideology and psychology of present-day political homophobia.

I say present-day, but “Outrage,” a battlefield report from the culture wars clearly intended to rally the morale of one side while attacking the exposed flanks of the other, is also a snapshot of a rapidly changing landscape. Its accusations of hypocrisy and betrayal are pointed and in many cases persuasive, but they would have sounded different — more urgent, and perhaps more incendiary — a few years or even six months ago. With each passing day that brilliant conspiracy looks increasingly tattered and beleaguered, and the men at the center of it seem less fearsome than pathetic.

Mr. Dick, whose previous documentaries have examined sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church, the inner workings of the movie ratings system and the life and work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, is a cerebral muckraker.

While his techniques are not as nakedly tendentious as Michael Moore’s (and his movies, as a consequence, are not as much fun), he hardly pretends to be a detached or unbiased observer. “Outrage” is less an analysis of the practice of outing closeted public officials than a defense of it, an argument that the dignity and full citizenship of gay men and lesbians are undermined by an unspoken pact of secrecy.

This idea has been a foundation of gay politics for a long time: a clip at the end of “Outrage” shows Harvey Milk, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors more than 30 years ago, insisting that coming out was central to the project of gay civil rights. And Mr. Dick’s film often works less as an exposé of current injustice than as a historical essay, looking back in particular on the 1980s, when AIDS made candor and visibility matters of survival for many gay men and when resistance to gay rights began to emerge as an organizing principle for conservatives in the Republican Party.

More HERE.

And in case you missed the trailer in my earlier post go here.

The film will probably never play here, but there is always the DVD. I wonder what the news will make of this tomorrow - if they will cover it at all, or just choose to ignore it at all cost.

More later.
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