Outrage

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

To each generation of gay rights activists there is a galvanizing moment where the status quo becomes intolerable. In the 80s it was the Reagan administration's denial of AIDS while half a million Americans died; in the 90s it was the passage of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," banning gays from serving in the military. In the Aughts it was the totality of the 2004 Republican strategy to win the presidency and house seats by funding anti-gay measures across the states' to encourage religious fundamentalists to vote.

The documentar Outrage presents BlogActive creator Michael Rogers as the leader of a new opposition movement. Rogers employs the values of old-fashioned yellow journalism with the tenacity and immediacy of blogging to collect data and out political figures who by night have same sex partners but spend their daylight hours chipping away at the civil liberties and safety of out homosexuals. Outrage also demonstrates the baffling inability of mainstream media to cover these issues at all -- even when it involves inappropriate expenditures of funds to take a same sex staffers on exotic locations or when it is a clear-cut case of hypocrisy. (Though the film leaves aside any issue of how one defines lesser hypocrisies when the nature of federal legislation is so convoluted, a single vote impacts a myriad of different issues.)

Director Kirby Dick (This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Sick) wades into the complications that arises around privacy rights when discussing people who are not only public personas but law-makers and how expectations of honesty can conflict with the realities of political campaigning. The cognitive dissonance experienced by men like Idaho Senator Larry Craig and Florida Governor (and 2012 presidential hopeful) Charlie Crist is played as equally tragic, to see people so at odds with their own reality and as a series craven political choices that have destroyed the lives of millions of people.

It feels a bit "Let them eat cake"-ish to gush too much about the glorious political theater on display in the film. But it's worth mentioning Outrage could serve as a primer course on legislative fundamentals as Dick gains access to virtually every out gay politician on the national level, and also some of the top level staffers, think tankers, political pundits, fundraisers, lobbyists and legal advisors.

Former Arizona Congressman Jim Kolbe and former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey provide particularly heartwrenching insight into being outed while in office, one having had enough time to feel liberated the other still dealing with the immediate fallout if tearing a family apart and seeing one's career end publicly.

DVD extras include Commentary with Kirby Dick and producer Amy Ziering, deleted scenes, Director Q&A, and panel discussion from the Tribecca Film Festival.

Trailer: