Travel Journal

Another Newsweek Article. This article is of interest to me because I did really like the movie End of the Spear. But I did find it also very interesting that they chose a politically active homosexual to play the lead. Later as I read the director’s comment on why he chose Chad Allen, I came to understand more about it and started to believe the decision was possibly good. Maybe the movie (or PR of the movie) would have been more effective with non-politically active homosexual lead, but also maybe there is a greater good here. And now after reading this article, perhaps there is.

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Film: Gays, God and the Movies
Bruised in one encounter with evangelicals, gay actor Chad Allen gets a different reaction the second time around.

WEB EXCLUSIVE

By Samantha Henig

Feb. 6, 2007 – Normally a child actors biggest professional hurdle is finding roles once his voice breaks and acne hits. But Chad Allen, whose career took off at age 9 as Tommy on St. Elsewhere, had another obstacle to overcome: his sexuality.

When the openly gay Allen was cast as a Christian missionary in End of the Spear, a 2005 movie produced by an evangelical film company, members of the religious right fumed about the choice. But he has received a warmer response from evangelical Christians to his new film, Save Me, in which he plays Mark, a drug-addicted, promiscuous gay man who is sent by his disapproving brother to Genesis House, a live-in therapy program that aims to cure gay men of their brokenness, through Christianity. Mark does find God at Genesis House, but he also finds love. The film, which was recently shown at the Sundance Film Festival but does not yet have a distributor, tackles the controversial practice of ex-gay ministries. It chronicles Marks struggle to reconcile his newfound belief that living in the Lords image means being heterosexual, with his romantic feelings for Scott, a fellow Genesis House resident, played by Robert Gant of Queer as Folk.

[More:]

Allen spoke with NEWSWEEKs Samantha Henig about what he learned from the uproar over End of the Spear, the reaction to his latest film, and his own quest to reconcile his religious faith with his sexual orientation.

NEWSWEEK: When End of the Spear came out, you got a lot of heat from evangelical Christians for being a gay actor playing a Christian missionary. Was your decision to do Save Me at all a reaction to that?

Chad Allen: No, we were already working on Save Me then. But honestly, without the reactions to End of the Spear and how that changed the way I look at this entire issue and who I am, I couldnt have participated in Save Me the way that I did. When I went to make End of the Spear, I expected to meet a group of hateful, bigoted, at-best ignorant individuals, and I didnt. I met a group of smart, God-loving, God-following individuals, who were doing what they thought was the most loving thing to do, when they suggested to me that God wanted me to be different. That really affected me. I went back to work on Save Me, and I remember sitting around with the rest of the producers and saying definitively, We have to make a movie that shows evangelical Christians as smart and loving. We just need to have a conversation about love.

NEWSWEEK: It didnt offend you to be told that God wants you to be someone youre not?

Chad Allen: It didnt offend me. But I knew that it was incorrect, in so far as I knew that wasnt what God was revealing in my own heart. I firmly believe in the importance of having this conversation about God and gay. I think that End of the Spear opened up that conversation, and Save Me is the perfect follow-up to it.

NEWSWEEK: How did End of the Spear open the conversation?

Chad Allen: There was a firestorm about my being involved, and what we got a lot of at first was the hateful, judging, scared reaction. But what followed for me was more truthful: I got hundreds, if not thousands, of e-mails and letters and messages from Christians who were saying things like, This has opened my eyes. In fact, the filmmakers said to me, We didnt know what was going on, we just didnt know what was happening to people like you in the name of Jesus Christ, and were so sorry.

NEWSWEEK: How would you describe the reaction so far from the evangelical Christian community to Save Me, which recently premiered at Sundance?

Chad Allen: While Im sure that reactions were mixed, a vast majority of those that I spoke to came up to me not only loving the film but so excited about how they can use this film to further this conversation within their own communities.

NEWSWEEK: Are you surprised that they seem to have embraced you this time around?

Chad Allen: Im shocked. I wish I had a little more faithpart of me is still slightly hesitant since the movie hasnt gone out to a very wide audience, but I have been blown away by the reaction. I expected to have to work much harder to get people, especially conservative Christians, to see this film and understand what it is that I wanted to say with it and what all of the producers wanted to say.

NEWSWEEK: Can you tell me about your own religious upbringing?

Chad Allen: I was raised a pretty strict Catholic. I always remember having a really personal and beautiful relationship with this guy Jesus when I was young, but pretty quickly I figured out that I didnt feel a part of Catholicism, and that there was a part of the church that didnt consider me a member because I had these longings that were different. Ive always been a kind of spiritual seeker. Ive studied Buddhist philosophy, Hindu philosophy, Native American spirituality, and found a lot of God in all of it. The beautiful part was that End of the Spear and my connection there was able to bring me back to Christian theology and Christian teaching and see it from this new perspective, and its been really amazing. I was able to bring that to Save Me.

NEWSWEEK: Your character in Save Me struggles to reconcile his Christian beliefs with his homosexual desires. Which parts of that struggle ring true to you?

Chad Allen: Pretty much all of it. It wasnt like I set out to tell my story, but where the script ended up is a struggle that I relate to almost in its entirety. My character starts out finding himself loveless and godless. I went through that. There was a time in life when I was absolutely desperate and addicted and void of love. My characters entire process of finding God and finding love, while truncated, is truthful for me. Thats what it looked like, except mine was over the course of six and a half years, not two hours.

NEWSWEEK: Did you ever enter a gay reparative-therapy program, as your character does?

Chad Allen: No, thankfully. I say thankfully because I think for me it would have been a very damaging experience, as I think it often is for people. We presented a very loving, very middle-of-the-road ex-gay ministry. But there are many that weve looked at that are much more extreme, and potentially much more damaging to the psyche.

NEWSWEEK: What do you say to believers, like those portrayed in the movie, who use the Bible to condemn homosexuality?

Chad Allen: My understanding of those seven Biblical passages that supposedly speak about homosexuality is that none of them speak about homosexuality as we understand it today, in a loving, committed relationship. They speak about pedophilia, they speak about rape, they speak about violence, but they dont speak about this.