Interview with Daniel Karslake

So while I have huge respect for Gavin Newsom — and Chad Allen is a friend and an amazing spokesperson of our community — every time one of those guys would make a very strong point they would go back to Larry King in the studio with the two Baptists would say, "Well, that's all well and good but the bottom line is the Bible condemns it," and Larry would say, "And now a commercial." And I would just go insane, because there are so many theologians that just completely disagree with that.

And until we start to really confront that and directly address it, the myths will continue. When people invoke that at a dinner party or in an argument, other people tend to just shut down and assume, well, this person knows what they're talking about because it's the scripture and it's the Bible and it's intimidating, and it's almost always not the case.

So one of the things I hoped with my film was that people would emerge from the film feeling a little more comfortable, going, "Huh ... okay, let's talk about Leviticus — actually, the word 'abomination' meant then kind of like today if we drove through a red light ... because it's 'against our rituals'. That's it! It's not offensive to God."

AE: The film works on several levels: it's deeply personal in the stories of the five families with gay children, it's academic in its discussion of scripture and interpretation, and it's got a journalistic angle in the way that it goes after evangelicals and charts our progress. How did you come to decide to use a multi-pronged approach to the subject in one film?
DK: The final film is very close to what I had first envisioned. And I think mostly because I had worked for a show on PBS for years called In the Life. And I had produced for In the Life many, many segments about religion and homosexuality. So I had this sort of testing ground where I saw what would resonate with people. I saw what didn't. I saw the arguments from the right against what I was reporting and how they sort of said, "Well that's all well and good but all the clergymen you used are gay!"

Well, guess what? The clergy in For the Bible Tells Me So? Almost all of them are straight. I kept learning new things like, "Okay, this is how they answer that argument, this is what Christians need to hear about that."

So really In the Life was this great testing ground for me and so I learned, really, how to have this intellectual conversation and not put people to sleep — I hope! — but also learn about storytelling and how if you find compelling human stories and you tell them well, people are moved beyond belief, way more than on the intellectual side.

I wanted to definitely address the scripture stuff because if I made a film just about feelings, then it would be an easy target for the right to say, "Well, that's all well and good but you've got to open the Bible." We made sure that we opened the Bible and looked right at it.

AE: As a practicing Christian yourself, did you ever consider including your own family story in the film?
DK: You know, no. Because I wanted to make a film that had no voiceover, which is a lot harder. I didn't want to make it feel like a film where the filmmaker was telling you what to think. I wanted people to hear these stories out of the mouths of the people, hear these theologians out of their own mouths, not feel like at all they were being told what to think rather than being informed by the people themselves.

And I also felt like if I was a character in the film, that would just muddy it for me. The film is not about me. Although one of the stories in the film is very close to my story and is probably why it resonated so much for me, and that's the Reitan family story in Minnesota.

AE: The film's starting with the Anita Bryant pie-in-the-face footage immediately brings a lot of emotions to the surface.
DK: When I first saw that a few years ago I was kind of in the middle of shooting the movie and starting to look at archival footage to get a sense of what I had to work with, and I just came upon it in a whole reel of Anita Bryant stuff. And the thing I just love about that sequence is that for me initially, I went through all these different emotions in the space of about 45 seconds.

I saw her and as a gay man there was a revulsion because she was sort of the beginning of the anti-gay movement in this country. And then out of the blue there's this pie and it made me sort of jump and I thought, "Ugh, that's horrible ... but then, it's her, so maybe it's not too horrible" and I sort of wanted to laugh a little. But I also was sort of taken aback. And then the camera pulls back and the guy's there and she says that sort of snide comment, "Well, at least it's a fruit pie!" and I thought, well, that's incredibly mean and here come her true colors.