Out of the Past

In 1995, Kelli Peterson started a gay and straight club at her Salt Lake City high school. This story of her ensuing battle with school authorities is interspersed with a look back at the diary of a 17th-century Puritan cleric, Michael Wigglesworth; the 30-year love affair of Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Adams Fields; Henry Gerber's attempt after World War I to establish a gay-rights organization; Bayard Rustin's role in the civil rights movement, and Barbara Gittings' take on the position the American Psychiatric Association held that homosexuality is an illness. Fittingly, Kelli sums up the film's material when she comments, "To create a place for ourselves in the present, we have to find ourselves in the past."