Rhode Island International Film Festival 2009

In 1982, an athletic group tries to hold a "Gay Olympics," instigating what will ultimately become a battle at the U.S. Supreme Court and a challenge over the place of gays and lesbians in American society.The Supreme Court is widely viewed as the country's chief defender of civil rights. Yet its long-hidden struggle with demands for gay equality points to a more complicated reality. The inner workings of the Court are exposed, revealing an institution and individual justices — real people with human emotions and deeply felt assumptions — divided and in conflict. The Court takes a surprising journey as it confronts the call for gay equality.The story begins in San Francisco in the early 1980s, when former Olympian Dr. Tom Waddell founds an international sporting event he calls the Gay Olympic Games. Open to men and women of all ages, abilities and sexual orientations, the Gay Olympics is Waddell's way to nurture a healthy self-image for gays and lesbians while publicly affirming positive examples of homosexuality. The U.S. Olympic Committee, however, doesn't want the words "gay" and "Olympics" combined. Despite a long history of disparate groups adopting the Olympic moniker — from Special Olympics and Police Olympics to the Xerox Olympics, Crab Cooking Olympics and even the Rat Olympics — the USOC chooses for the first time to take an amateur, nonprofit event to court. The gay group, led by attorney Mary Dunlap, fight through losses at every level of the judiciary until turning to the high court is the last option. By the time the Gay Olympics case arrives, the Court is in deep turmoil over its direction on gay rights issues. Through rarely seen internal documents and insider access to the Court, the film goes behind the scenes and explores how individual justices — real people with human emotions and deeply felt assumptions — are divided and in conflict.The remarkable journey of Justice Harry Blackmun stands out. Despite strong religious and personal feelings otherwise, he finds himself in the unlikely role of gay rights defender. Linda Greenhouse, Blackmun biographer and 30-year Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times, describes the justice's unexpected evolution from conservative Nixon appointee to champion of progressive stances on such controversial issues as abortion and the death penalty. Chai Feldblum, privileged to be in the justice's closed circle of law clerks during the Gay Olympics case, offers a behind-the-scenes account of the Court and its personalities during this period. She recounts her struggle over whether to come out as a lesbian to a justice whose personal beliefs don't always match his liberal legal rulings.Reagan judicial appointee Alex Kozinski, today Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, explains why he forcefully sided with the Gay Olympics organizers, causing an uproar in the news media and signaling the Supreme Court to take up the case. Constitutional law scholar and Georgetown professor Nan Hunter and Washington, D.C., journalist Lisa Keen place the case within the larger arc of the modern gay rights struggle.Gay Olympics organizers and participants provide vivid eyewitness accounts of the birth of the games, the shock of being dragged into court by the USOC and, despite the real possibility of a loss with steep consequences, the determination to fight and claim the title of Olympics. Gay Games II Executive Director Shawn Kelly, Olympic swimmer Susan McGreivy and attorney Maureen Mason bring to life this overlooked but and important moment in history.The fight over Gay Olympics turns out to be the opening salvo in the next decade's major gay rights battles at the Supreme Court — and a preview of a conflict that continues to split society to this day.