Continuing an extremely sporadic series, I invited Glenn to write a guest entry for the journal about the movie he’s making. I met Glenn last summer through a mutual friend (hi, Chris!) who knew Glenn was looking for someone to create a website for his movie. Initially I begged off, because I had too much work at the time, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the movie. I got back in touch with him and offered to do it after all. The site was fun to make — it’s all in Flash, and despite having to do it twice (I’ve learned that particular backup lesson), I’m really glad I changed my mind. Glenn says his mom thinks the site is classy, and, you know, that’s good enough for me. But enough from me — I’m going to let Glenn tell you about the movie.

What’s yours?

G L E N N   K I S E R

9 May 2003—Every gay person has a coming-out story. Just ask them. Some are sad; a few are funny; a surprising number (especially for those under 40) offer little drama. But any gay man or lesbian can tell you the story of how they first came to acknowledge their sexuality, and how they went about breaking the news. Several years ago I became interested in hearing people’s stories and collecting them into a documentary, which I call Openly. My interest grew out of two specific events.

No. 1: I’m not really great at parties, especially ones where I don’t know many people, and this particular party was especially agonizing. I don’t remember any women, just a bunch of gay men, like me, in their 20s, most of whom had come to Hollywood seeking fame and fortune in the movie business. We were in a house high in the Hollywood Hills, full of glass and newly purchased Ikea furniture, and I remember standing around nervously, with a plate of food in one hand and a drink in the other. But at some point in the evening, an odd and remarkable thing happened. One of the guys began telling his coming-out-of-the-closet story. I don’t remember any of the particulars now, but it was blood-curdling enough that the entire party started to listen, and a living room full of people stood and sat enthralled. Then other guys told their stories, and I don’t think I’ve ever been to another party where, like this one, there was only one conversation going on, between the guy telling his story at the moment and all the rest of us. Most gay people have a curiosity to hear others’ coming out stories, I’ve found. As I listened to the stories go around that night, there was a lot of laughter, sadness, acceptance, anger. It felt cathartic, and I thought, I wish I had a video camera here to record all of this.

No. 2: In 1996 I returned to Boston for my 5-year college reunion, which fell on a June weekend that coincided with the gay-pride parade there. A number of us decided to head downtown to check things out. My own coming-out process started late during my time at Harvard, and I only knew a handful of out gay men when I was in school. The vast majority of us were closeted and, more or less, underground. I was surprised then, on that warm June morning, to see a Harvard student contingent, about 50 strong, marching in the parade. What a difference 5 years had made! And then I watched as wave after wave of high school groups marched by. High school! And it made me start to think seriously about my own process of slow acceptance of my sexuality, how different would the lives of these kids be, who knew and understood at 15 what I didn’t get until years later? How different might my life have been if I’d gotten what they knew? What if Will & Grace had been on TV every week when I was 13, something with fairly normal gay people that I could point to and say, “I’m like that”? And by the same notion, what if I’d been older — would societal pressure and the lack of gay role models have kept me closeted, pushed me into a straight marriage, produced children, and then triggered a midlife homosexual crisis and coming-out, as I’d heard so many times?

Selfishly, I also wanted to see if others had my same experience, of a life bifurcated with a secret sexuality kept at arm’s length from their “normal” lives. For me, this reached the ludicrous extreme junior year in college where I was actually dating women, and keeping a locked trunk under my bed filled with gay porn. I marvel now, but for years I was able to shuttle back and forth between the secret world of the porn images I was increasingly drawn to and my other life with women, without acknowledging that it was even slightly screwy. To the extent my mind could hold the two concepts simultaneously, I thought myself “progressive” or “non-traditional” or “hyper-sexual.” I wondered if others could speak eloquently of that dual life, and the hiding and the self-deception. And most importantly, of the moments when the firewall started to break.

So for years I sat with this desire to see a collection of coming-out stories, focusing on how the experience of coming out had changed through the years, and how different were the experiences of older and younger gay men & lesbians. Eventually my friends said, “You’ve been talking about this project for years, why don’t you just go make it yourself?”

I am not a documentary filmmaker by profession. I moved out to Los Angeles after college with an interest in producing and directing feature films. But a need to actually pay rent and eat led me into an assortment of jobs that eventually morphed into a successful career in the post-production business. In 1999, I moved to San Francisco and took a job working with Lucasfilm.

At the same time, changes in camera and editing technology made it possible for one person working alone to actually shoot a presentable documentary. So a little over a year ago, armed with my Canon XL-1 (the same camera Steven Soderbergh used to shoot Full Frontal) and my trusty Macintosh loaded with Final Cut Pro, I started shooting interviews for my documentary.

Probably my most heart-breaking interview has been with Jim, a man in his late 70s living in an assisted-living community here in Marin County. A staunch Catholic, he took a time-honored route into the priesthood in a desire to avoid dealing with being gay, but he was thrown out of seminary because he couldn’t stop masturbating and couldn’t stop talking about it. Drafted, he was then caught having sex with another sailor and lured into naming names of other gay men, and still ended up with a dishonorable discharge. He was rejected for a Fulbright grant and turned down from teaching jobs because of the circumstances of his discharge from the military. It got worse: in Wisconsin in 1954, he was even arrested and spent six weeks in jail for having sex with another man in his car.

Jim eventually made his way to San Francisco and even sang with the Gay Men’s Chorus. Then several years ago, because of health issues, he sold his house and moved into the retirement home where he went back into the closet. Anxious about being rejected by the other residents, we had to lie about why I was following him around with a camera.

Most of my interviews have come to me through friends — I would mention what I was up to and a friend would say, “You should talk to ______,” then they would make an introduction and an interview would follow. But recently I exhausted the friends-of-friends routine, and felt I needed to cast a wider net, so I put together a website I could use as a tool to recruit more people who would be interested in telling their stories. In the month since the site launched, I’ve talked to more than 50 people who have come forward, interested in telling their stories. I’m planning on taking time off this summer, throwing my gear in the back of my car, and driving around the country to collect interviews. If you’re interested, send me an email (glenn@openlythemovie.com) and we’ll talk.

I have no idea when I’ll be finished. I do know that I’m going to shoot many more interviews than can possibly go into the documentary. When I’m done, I’ll donate all that collected material to a gay & lesbian archive. I think in 100 years, when coming-out is a total non-issue, people will be fascinated at the experiences gays & lesbians have gone through–the years of self-deception, the damaged relationships, the overt persecution and rejection many have endured.