Educational Media Reviews Online

Mississippi Queen is a documentary that explores the awkward intersection of southern culture, Baptist dogmas, and homosexuality. Writer, director, producer, and lesbian Paige Williams was raised in Mississippi, and when she travels back home for a cousin’s wedding, Williams decides to talk to people about ex-gay ministries, or religious services that strive to convert homosexuals to heterosexuality. She brings along her wife and their young son. In the film, Williams interviews a number of people who are or have been involved with ex-gay ministry. Most notable among the interviewees are Williams’s parents, who are themselves ex-gay ministers.

Not surprisingly, the majority of this film is made up of interviews. Williams interviews two of her former college professors, both devout Christians, one of whom points out that Leviticus (a passage that’s often quoted against homosexuality) is contradictory. Williams also sits down with her parents’ preacher, who also quotes the book of Leviticus as the reason why homosexuality is considered sinful. (A sampling of decrees from the same passage are displayed on the screen—don’t wear clothing of mixed fabrics, owning slaves is OK, and don’t go to bed with a menstruating woman—perhaps to emphasize the fact that the pastor does not run a ministry to relieve people of those sins. He makes a living based on one quote of the Bible, but ignores the quotes surrounding it.) “In today’s America, grace and mercy are elevated above the law,” says the pastor. “It’s a house of cards. If you tell me I need grace and mercy but not why I need it, then grace and mercy are not beautiful.” Two born-again ex-gay ministers, who are ex-gays themselves, say reading the Bible pulled them out of their gay lifestyles. They both share impressively unemotional stories about their journeys away from homosexuality. One of the ministers implies it’s a matter of willpower to change and to not act on “who they are,” admitting that she is not attracted to men and does not have plans to pursue a heterosexual relationship. In great contrast to interviews with ex-gay ministers are interviews with young men who went through reparative therapy and stayed with their homosexual lifestyles, yet are still actively involved in their churches. At some point in the film, it struck me that nearly all of the characters in the film are gay except for Williams’s parents, who admittedly struggled to raise their gay daughter.

While Mississippi Queen truly examines gay values and religion, Williams’ unique situation with her family remains a central theme throughout the film. The documentary opens with rough home video footage of Williams as a high school and college student. The footage mostly shows Williams doing what young women do when a camera is around—preparing for a night out with friends, following her family around the house, dressing up—but the final clips introduce the tension between herself and the couple who raised her. There are many interviews with Williams’s parents interwoven throughout the film. Williams’s mother is especially forthcoming with her regrets, sharing how she feels guilty and thinks her daughter’s homosexuality is due to a breakdown in the mother-daughter relationship, and discussing the issue of pride—feeling like she has failed her husband and God, but that she also recognizes pride as a sin. She is equally ready to share her convictions, however: “Being in a same sex relationship is not who you are. There are times I thought we’d be better off if one of us was deceased,” says the mother. She recalls the time she confronted Williams and her girlfriend at the local Waffle House with an unloaded gun. A few years after that incident, Williams’s mother spoke with a representative with Love in Action, a Memphis-based Christian discipleship ministry. “Nothing would have driven me to the lord as earnestly as finding out you had same-sex attractions,” she says.

Williams interviews the CEO of Love in Action, John Smid (formerly a gay man), along with a couple graduates of his program. “I was my least favorite person in the world,” says one graduate who turned to Love in Action after leaving his gay lifestyle, getting married, cheating on his wife with men, and getting divorced. Criticism of ex-gay ministries—particularly of Love in Action—on the national level goes beyond Williams’s film. The acclaimed public radio show This American Life covered a similar story about a teen program called Refuge that John Smid had started to expand on the adult therapy practiced through Love in Action. The bulk of the story covers nationally-televised protests outside Love in Action’s headquarters in 2005. A gay filmmaker from Memphis named Morgan Jon Fox organized the protests and pestered Smid until he agreed to an interview, which turned into a series of discussions over several years. In March 2008, Smid resigned from Love in Action. He has since admitted that he has never successfully turned a homosexual person straight, and he now believes God embraces homosexuality. He also identifies himself as gay. In May 2011, Fox released a documentary about the protests and his interviews with Smid, titled This is What Love in Action Looks Like. Coupled with Mississippi Queen, the currency of Smid’s about-face could facilitate some fascinating classroom discussion.

Mississippi Queen seems to end with an undeclared reconciliation and acknowledgement that people are not going to change unless they want to. There is modern-day camera footage in Williams’s childhood home, at the dinner table, that reflects the footage at the beginning, along with many moving shots of Williams’s parents showing very real love for their grandchild. Williams and her mother close out the film, with the elder saying “Let God be God, and let me be your mama. Does that make sense to you?” And perhaps for the first time, we hear the southerner come through in Williams’s reply of “Yes, ma’am.”

In sum, Mississippi Queen negotiates a constructive conversation about a topic that most people find hard to leave without an opinion. The video is nicely edited, with interviews of reasonable length and easy transitions between them. The lovely yet angsty guitar and banjo music we hear throughout the film is all original, composed by Montana musician John Floridis. This film is highly recommended for academic library collections, and would directly support curricula in gender and sexuality studies, religious studies, and sociology.