"Oil City is a small town with small town values," says filmmaker Joe Wilson. "That's why I moved away 25 years ago."
In 2004, Wilson married his longtime partner, Dean Hamer, and placed the wedding announcement in his hometown paper. The maelstrom that followed included a slew of personal attacks against Wilson, but the plaintive plea of a local mother with a gay teenage son who had been severely bullied at school lead Wilson and Hamer to think about what they could do to help.
And thus a documentary was born.
The final result, Out in the Silence, expands the debate around same sex unions via a chain of events involving the intertwined lives of several Oil City residents, including a gay teen, a lesbian couple, a right-wing activist and an evangelical preacher who starts out condemning Wilson and Hamer's union but ultimately befriends the couple. Though recently selected as a New York Times "Pick of the Week" following its debut in the 2010-2011 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Wilson and Hammer prefer to show the film in small towns and rural communities. "Similar to the seemingly innocuous act of publishing a wedding announcement in a small-town newspaper," state Wilson and Hamer, "small acts of LGBT visibility in places where they are rare and unexpected help to raise awareness and open up dialogue in profound new ways, creating ripple effects and opportunities for change that go far and wide."
