The chasm he crossed begat his ‘Latter Days’

Seven years ago, a struggling writer-director named C. Jay Cox saw an old photo of himself as a teenage Mormon missionary in the Philippines. It started him ruminating about the chasm between that boy from rural Nevada, who’d been grappling with homosexuality, and the gay ex-Mormon Cox had become.

“I thought, man, if I could put those two people in a room and make ‘em talk to each other.... “

The result is “Latter Days,” Cox’s new, well-received independent film about a promiscuous gay West Hollywood waiter who bets he can seduce a visiting Mormon missionary. After winning awards at a half-dozen gay film festivals last year, the drama, laced with bits of romantic comedy, opens Jan. 30 in Los Angeles and New York.

Cox’s film is already setting off Internet bulletin-board quarrels between gays and lesbians bitter at the Mormon church’s stern view of homosexuals and Mormons who consider the film’s theme blasphemous. Last week an independent theater chain that had agreed to show the film Jan. 30 in Salt Lake City, the heart of the Mormon church, backed out, citing weaknesses in the film’s quality. The distributor of “Latter Days” said the chain, Madstone Theaters, was capitulating to threats of boycotts and picketing by Mormons. Madstone denied there had been threats.

In the world of gay cinema, “Latter Days” has been hailed for its sophistication. Rather than falling back on traditional one-sided themes -- the menace of AIDS, the coldness of conservative churches or the ache of coming out of the closet -- Cox constructed an evenhanded tension: The Idaho-bred missionary (played by Steve Sandvoss) struggles with excommunication from his church, while the playboy (Wes Ramsey) struggles to grow out of his sex-drenched superficiality as the two fall in love.

Steven Gutwillig, executive director of the Los Angeles Outfest, where Cox’s film won the best first-feature award, said he was stunned by the emotional chord the film struck even before it was screened, becoming one of the hottest tickets in the festival’s 22-year history. What Cox touched, Gutwillig said, was the challenge of “accepting yourself in the face of rejection from the only world you know -- church and family.”

Few expect “Latter Days” to cross over to straight audiences, but it has moments that are transcendent. Take one early scene, when the party boy, Christian, tries to kiss the conflicted missionary, Aaron, who pulls away.

“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” Christian says.

“Yes, it does,” says Aaron. “Maybe you can equate sex with a handshake. That’s like a badge? Don’t you believe in anything? Tell me one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt you believe.”

Christian: “I believe Ann-Margret has never been given her due as an actress.”

“My intention was never just to throw darts at the Mormon church,” said Cox, who said he drifted away from the church after his mission. “At the same time I realized that in the gay community we’ve got some pretty big areas that we could take a look at too, especially the idea that so many of us feel so disenfranchised from mainstream religion that we ... just engage in hedonism.... [As] we deify youth and beauty, we tend to engender sort of a shallowness of culture.”

“For a long time, gay movies were sensitive little coming-out parties,” he adds. “I know that’s a really powerful experience. But I think there’s a lot more that goes on with our lives. All of us want to find meaning, have lasting relationships, deeper love.”

Cox, 41, won his first notices as the screenwriter for the Reese Witherspoon hit “Sweet Home Alabama” (2002). In that film and in “Latter Days,” characters are possessed of a breezy wit, and moments of drama or anger sometimes careen toward humor. Ask Cox about his writing influences and he offers James Brooks’ TV classics (“Mary Tyler Moore,” “Taxi”) and screwball comedies such as “Bringing Up Baby” or “What’s Up, Doc?”

Growing up on a ranch between two tiny Nevada towns with only one movie theater in the entire county, Cox says he was shaped by mass culture. “Some of my guiltiest pleasures are movies where things blow up.” (He’s currently rewriting and may direct a project he describes as “a chick race-car flick: A Philadelphia debutante inherits her uncle’s broken-down stock car team.”)

His parents divorced in his early teens. “My mother was a world-champion calf roper,” he said, with a flicker of a smile. “It’s sad when you realize ‘No matter what I do, my mother’s going to be more macho than I will ever hope to be, so I might as well give up right now and make gay movies.’ ”

He made his first film in third grade (a 2 1/2-minute vampire saga) and fantasized about coming to L.A. He studied at Brigham Young University, but interrupted academics at 19 for his Mormon mission. “It’s kind of odd because you take young men at 19 or 20, take them away from their families, you take girls entirely out of the picture

Mormon doctrine once described homosexuality as an abomination, but now merely calls it amoral -- a “serious sin.” It says homosexual feelings can be redirected, and that gays and lesbians are welcomed as long as they abstain from sexual activity. “The general authorities of the church have essentially moved from saying gay is a lifestyle of choice to saying gay is an unfortunate natural phenomenon,” said Jan Shipps, a respected scholar of Mormonism. Other conservative churches have taken similar positions. But some gay ex-Mormons say they endure particularly harsh shunning because the faith has such a strong influence on the family values of its members.

Cox moved to Los Angeles when he was 24. For about 10 years, he worked as an actor and photographer while making short videos and documentaries and continuously writing screenplays. He was working a day job in a windowless downtown basement office for a county government agency when the “Latter Days” notion kicked in. A bit later, one of his screenplays, the story of a gay wedding that shakes up a small town, was optioned.

That set more opportunities in motion, culminating with his “Sweet Home Alabama” screenplay. His work (later polished by a script doctor) received mixed reviews; several critics complained the movie suffered from Hollywood contrivances.

Cox was determined to exert more control over “Latter Days.” He figured he’d make it for cheap. “I wanted to write something so intimate and personal that no one else would want to [direct] it. I started writing it for me and a handful of my friends.”

Around the same time, a gay producer named Kirkland Tibbels was setting up a studio called Funny Boy Films, with the goal of producing 10 gay- and lesbian-themed movies in four years. “Latter Days,” shot for $850,000, became Funny Boy’s first effort. (The budget remained low enough that when professional musicians didn’t deliver their promised songs in time, Cox, a closet singer-songwriter, wrote the lyrics and music for four songs.)

Tibbels, raised in a Southern Baptist home in West Texas, said he was moved by the script’s feel for the pain of “growing up gay in restricted communities. It’s not just a Mormon story.” He was also touched by party boy Christian’s shallowness. “Many of us who have come out and been out have gone through a kind of wild period and requestioned the meaning of life. That’s why I wanted to make this movie. This was the first time I’d seen myself [in a screenplay.]”

In addition to lead actors Sandvoss and Ramsey (both of whom make their film debuts), “Latter Days” features Jacqueline Bisset as the owner of the restaurant where Ramsey’s character works, and Mary Kay Place as the missionary’s mother who freezes out her son emotionally after he is excommunicated from the church by his own father.

Funny Boy wanted the film to open in Salt Lake City because the area has a significant proportion of gay ex-Mormons who were expected to flock to it. “I’m really curious,” said Aaron Cloward, a Salt Lake City man who founded a 3-year-old national organization of young gay ex-Mormons in an interview before Madstone Theaters canceled the screening. “It’s the first film I’ve heard of that has been like a drama, not a documentary, not a sad story. It’s a Hollywood kind of thing that people can identify with.”

Since festival-goers first saw the film last summer, there has been heated reaction. Typical of the conflict the movie figures to create was this exchange on a popular entertainment website’s bulletin board:

Outraged Mormon: “I’m terrified of what this world is coming to when self-proclaimed ‘LDS homosexuals’ are telling stories like this, obviously slanted and biased, showing the LDS [Latter-Day Saints] church members as bigots, idiots ... while glamorizing the homosexual characters .... And, I’m tired of being accused of intolerance, just because I believe in the anatomical, biological, emotional and hormonal reasons men and women were created to be together.”

Fan: “To me, the film seems completely accurate. The scene where the mother slaps her trembling, traumatized gay son across the face and tells him he’s going to go to hell, causing him to burst into convulsive sobs, is very close to a real moment in my life. I almost had to leave the [gay film festival] theater at that moment, it was so close to home .... I hope many young LDS people struggling with homosexuality see this film and learn that there’s an alternative to guilt, repression, hypocrisy and/or suicide.”

Cox brought a DVD to his mother’s house and showed it to her and several other family members Christmas night. “By the end they were in tears. It generated this whole discussion for about an hour and a half, and my family isn’t used to talking about anything for an hour and a half.”

He has savored screenings on the gay film festival circuit -- two standing ovations in Philadelphia, and a tearful thank you in Seattle. “The first guy with a question said he had been a Mormon missionary in Southern California and excommunicated for being gay, and then he started to cry. Eight hundred people, and there was this hush, for a good minute, while the guy pulled himself together. He said he felt like this was the first time somebody understood what he had gone through. That was devastating to me, to think I spoke to someone like that. There’ve been people who’ve come through other religious backgrounds coming up and saying, ‘I want to take my mother to go see this.’

“That’s pretty cool.”