Atlanta Screening A Huge Success

I returned yesterday from two days in Atlanta, promoting a community screening of Scout’s Honor. It was, hands down, the best screening I’ve been to: very well organized; good projection in a good hall; and most of all, a large, very enthusiastic audience.

The screening was put together by the president of the ACLU of Georgia, the dynamic Don George, who saw the film at Sundance. The ACLU co-sponsored with (among others) the gay student group at Emory University, who booked a lecture hall with good sound and video projection equipment that seated 250. Well, after Tom and I flogged the film on the local TV morning show and the NBC-affiliate’s news (plus flier distribution, a mention in the Atlanta Journal, and God-knows-what-else), the event drew 300 people: they were standing in the back, seated in the aisles, on top of one another.

The best part was the audience reaction. They got all the jokes, whooped, sniffled, everything at the right moment. There was a really powerful energy in the room, and when it was over Tom’s movie got a standing ovation. The Q&A afterwards went on a little too long — we lost quite a bit of the crowd — but ended on a deeply moving note when a gay dad got up and tearfully asked how or even if he should enroll his son in Scouting.

Another interesting dimension to the weekend was working with two gay college guys, James and Michael, who were interning for the ACLU. They did a large chunk of the logistics and flyer distribution, and then Tom and I had lunch and dinner with them and a few other assorted ACLU types. At first I just kind of thought of them as cute college boys, but as the day wore on I was fascinated and energized by the powerful idealism they brought to their activism.

James was the more poised and charismatic of the two. He told us the absolutely gripping story of his coming out. (He was trapped into going to college with his high school girlfriend, then wound up coming out during a summer spent working at a Scout canoeing camp in Minnesota. It was a quite a powerful tale.) Michael was the more energetic, with all kinds of idealism and great ideas. His mouth could hardly keep up with everything he wanted to say. But Tom, Don and I all expressed concern that his activism is so frenetic that he’ll quickly burn himself out. I hope not.

Regardless, working with Michael and James really put me in touch with why and how I started doing this work, and definitely recharged my batteries.