Outrage: Trapped in the Closet

As his 2006 documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated made
clear, filmmaker Kirby Dick is nothing if not tenacious. Chronicling
the formation and “secret history” of the Motion Picture Association of
America, This Film… found him doing every legal thing in his
power—hiring a full-time private eye, digging through curbside
garbage—to expose the truth about the MPAA, from its endlessly
iffy ratings system to the identities of the secret ratings board.
Dick’s ultimate goal: to expose the biases, lies, and hypocrisy
polluting the group responsible for policing America’s movie
screens.

Three years later comes Outrage, which finds Dick devoting
a similar procedural tenacity to a far more explosive subject:
America’s closeted gay politicians, whose conflicting histories of
“secret” homosexual activity and public anti-gay legislation have long
taunted those who know of both. Historically, the subject of closeted
politicians has proven so distasteful that general media outlets
wouldn’t touch it, but Dick (who’s straight, by the way) wisely seizes
this moment of unprecedented support for gay equality to dissolve the
glass closet and name names. Among the subjects: former Idaho senator
Larry Craig and Florida governor Charlie Crist (both professed
heterosexuals with public histories of homosexuality and ugly anti-gay
voting records), as well as former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey
and former Arizona congressman Jim Kolbe, both of whom preempted public
outings by outing themselves and who supply the film with valuable
insights on post-closet life. (McGreevey’s major contribution: proving
that an unctuous ex–closet case can be just as creepy as an
unctuous closet case.)

But the majority of the film is devoted to the Craigs and the
Crists, whose brazen, bullheaded mendacity increasingly inspires
nothing so much as pity. In the perverse closed-circuit world of the
closet, gay politicians create laws to sustain the anti-gay world they
use as a reason to remain in the closet. Will the revolutionary
plainspokenness of Outrage put an end to the farce? Time will
tell, literally: Outrage star Charlie Crist has just announced
his bid for the Senate.