Film on gay teen highlight of journalists convention

Sometimes, no matter how much you try to put something behind you, it keeps coming out.

Take it from Kelli Peterson, the Salt Lake City teen who sparked nationwide controversy two years ago when she tried to form a club for gay students at her high school.

Today, Kelli would like to put that time in the spotlight behind her. But somehow, it keeps coming out of the past.

That, coincidentally, is also the title of a new documentary telling of Peterson's crusade. It will be part of the agenda as several films are screened and workshops are held this weekend at the seventh annual convention for the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, assembled in Las Vegas for the first time.

Though Peterson is now in college and has left most of her activist days in the past, she and director Jeff Dupre have agreed to be on hand at the convention Thursday night after the screening of "Out of The Past" to discuss the film and its message.

For those not attending the convention, the film will also air on PBS stations nationwide later this month. (Locally, it will air at midnight on Oct. 17 and 11 p.m. Oct. 24 on KLVX Channel 10.) The film will also be available at major video stores starting this week, Dupre says.

Dupre was approached to direct the film by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, a 90-chapter New York organization which works to end homophobia in schools.

"I think art is a more effective way to create change than politics," says the filmmaker, whose project evolved from a $15,000 budget video of a slide show into a $500,000 award-winning production on 16-mm film that wowed the audiences at the Sundance Film Festival this past winter. "I think change will come of it," he says.

Dupre, a former production assistant for filmmaker Ken Burns, started with a purely historical documentary tracing 400 years of the history of gays in America, but decided he needed a modern-day story to illustrate it.

"To reach out to young people, we thought it would help if we could find a story that was present day and paralleled history," he says.

On the other hand, for Peterson, seeing others like her throughout history helped give her a better persepctive on her own life and sexuality.

"I was taught gay people were horrible people and I wouldn't want to be one of them," she notes in the film. "If I'd known history was full of people like me, things could have been different."

Peterson's story begins about two years ago, when the East High School student tried to form the Gay-Straight Alliance, an after-school club to provide a forum for gay teens to find support.

"I started the group to end the misery and isolation of behing gay in high school," she says. "The Gay-Straight Alliance is to show you're not alone, you're not horrible, we understand what you're going through."

However, the idea of a gay club for teens became so contentious in the conservative Mormon town that the Salt Lake City School Board finally voted to ban all their non-curricular after-school clubs, rather than let them assemble for that purpose.

Students marched on the state capitol after legislators debated ways to uphold the prohibition, and ended up letting the board ban clubs that "involve human sexuality."

Dupre heard of the story about a year after the height of the controversy, and decided Peterson would make the perfect centerpiece for his film.

"We read about (Peterson's) story to gain the right to meet, I talked to her on the phone,and the rest is history," he recalls. "We went out in March '97 to interview her, and by the end of the day, I was in tears. I knew we had a winner. The (film's) success was riding on her shoulders, it depended on her screen presence and if she could tell her story in a compelling way."

Peterson must have done the trick: The film took the Audience Award for Best Documentary at Sundance and has been making the festival rounds since then in about 50 cities, including last month's Las Vegas International Film Festival at the Orleans hotel-casino.

The film, which features voice-over work by Gwyneth Paltrow and Edward Norton, was also released in theaters in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Salt Lake City.

"(Peterson) became this eloquent spokesperson for what gay youth endure in high school," Dupre says.

Things have quieted down for Peterson since then. Now a student at the local community college and studying to be a teacher, she told a Salt Lake City newspaper this year that she hopes to "get on" with her life.

So the club -- and the quest -- has continued without her.

The Gay-Straight Alliance found a way to circumvent the legalese, meeting after hours and paying like any other community group to rent space from the school.

And last spring, two current East High students, represented by the Utah affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, challenged the school board's continued position as a violation of their civil rights under the Equal Access Act, chapter director Carol Gnade says.

Despite attempts to find a resolution between the two sides, the school board maintained its policy in a meeting held two weeks ago, so it looks like the case is headed for trial next year.

"Basically, the struggle continues," Dupre says. "The club is meeting, but they make it hard on them. And when you think about it, they're not really asking for much."

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