Coming Home — And Out — In The South

Southword is a collaborative series between NPR and Oxford American magazine, spotlighting the people, places and trends that shape the modern American South. Dave Anderson, filmmaker for Oxford American, teams up with NPR journalists to produce stories about a region that continues to evolve in unexpected ways.

Many years ago, a young Chad Griffin left his hometown of Arkadelphia, Ark., to pursue a career in politics. Today, he's the newest head of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) — a powerful gay rights group based in Washington, D.C.

Together with Oxford American magazine, NPR brings this latest installment of Southword, a series about life in the South. To learn a little bit more about what it's like to be gay below the Mason-Dixon line, we caught up with Griffin — both at his office in Washington and in his hometown of Arkadelphia, Ark., where he spent his first day on the job.

"I never knew that I knew another gay person when I was growing up," Griffin recalls, describing life in Arkadelphia. "I frequently heard things like 'faggot' and 'queer bait.' "

It wasn't until many years later that Griffin would realize he was gay, let alone come out to his mother, which he did in his 20s. By that time, he had already volunteered for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign, and joined that administration in the White House as one of the youngest-ever staffers, at age 19.

Upholding Tradition

"I was raised missionary Baptist. Very conservative," says Griffin's mother, Betty Hightower. "And at first it really was hard for me to say my son was gay." Still, Griffin emphasizes repeatedly, he has always had his mother's support.

Even Jerry Cox, head of the conservative Arkansas Family Council, says homosexuality, per se, is not the issue:

"Most people in Arkansas have a very live-and-let-live attitude," he says. "So if you said, 'What do people say about gays in Arkansas?' They'd be like, 'Eh, whatever.' "

Yet Cox takes issue when certain folks try to change the rules. In 2008, he led an Arkansas ballot initiative banning gay couples from adopting (which was later struck down by the state Supreme Court). And he represents long-standing beliefs about upholding the traditional family unit.

"Where the issue comes in," he says, "is when people come in and say 'I'm gay and I want to redefine what marriage is.' And people say 'Woah, wait a minute, marriage has been this way for thousands of years. We like it the way it is and don't want it to be redefined.' "

The HRC provides support to those opposing positions espoused by Cox. Griffin and his sympathizers might not win all battles, but they have won some: Arkansas is actually one of a few states that has an anti-bullying law with specific protections for sexual orientation.

Life At Home

Of course, what goes on in the legislature doesn't always reflect attitudes at home, which can prove formidable.

Take 19-year-old Alyss Parrish (that's not her real name; it's what she goes by in college in Little Rock). When she's home with her parents, she goes by her birth name. Because when she was 15, her parents found her MySpace page — and saw that she was questioning her sexuality.

"Mom started crying," Alyss recalls at a function for Griffin in Little Rock. "Dad pulled out a bible. Chanting verses, angry, extremely red-faced. I don't think I've ever seen my parents that upset before."

Her dad is a Pentecostal preacher. He said she could continue to live with them under one condition: That she say she's straight. And so she did. If she told them she was actually gay, she fears they would disown her.

Griffin says he goes home so he can hear stories like hers.

"Someone who is that young," he says, "Having to go in and out of the closet so she can hide her identity from her own parents — that's the young person that motivates me day in and day out."

Maybe this is where Griffin's southern roots come in. If he can pivot from pressuring the president one day, and the next, to handing a microphone to closeted kids like Alyss in Arkadelphia — well, she can tell you what that means:

"Having someone from this state president of the HRC? That's big! That's big for Arkansas," she says.

Griffin left the south to pursue big dreams. Alyss, on the other hand, doesn't think she has to leave home to change the world. She wants to be a Supreme Court justice. And change, she says, is already afoot in Arkansas.

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Bob Mondello's Best Movies Of 2012

Cousin Ben (Jason Schwartzman), Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward) show that nothing can stand in the way of young love in Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom.

Niko Tavernise/Focus Features

A lot of movie box-office records fell in 2012. The comic-book blockbuster The Avengers had the biggest opening weekend in Hollywood history. Skyfall will be the first James Bond film to top $1 billion worldwide. And the box-office year as a whole is easily the movie industry's biggest ever. But what about quality? Perhaps surprisingly, the news is good there, too.

Hollywood is often accused of serving up simple-minded pleasures — either explosions or uplift, frequently both — but a lot of this year's best films were nuanced and complex, and for once, their nuanced complexity was exactly what made them popular. Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, for instance, is no wide-eyed presidential snow job, but a tale of political intrigue where the great good of eradicating slavery requires great compromise on lesser evils. The film has other virtues — terrific performances, gorgeous cinematography — but what's captivating audiences is that it's not the dipped-in-amber civics lesson they expected.

John Chambers (John Goodman) and Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) help craft a fake movie production in Argo.

Claire Folger/Warner Bros. John Chambers (John Goodman) and Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) help craft a fake movie production in Argo.

Claire Folger/Warner Bros.

That's also true of the war-on-terrorism chronicle Zero Dark Thirty, a gritty look at the hunt for Osama bin Laden that raises all sorts of moral and ethical questions, and is about as far from a rah-rah, get-the-bad-guy flick as director Kathryn Bigelow could make it.

That's a good thing, because Ben Affleck made a rah-rah, get-away-from-the-bad-guys flick that would be pretty hard to top: the rousing thriller Argo, about how the CIA got six Americans out of Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis by pretending to make a movie.

That's a trio of fact-based stories. Beasts of the Southern Wild, in contrast, is a fable that blends real-world tempests and mythical creatures in telling the tale of a 6-year-old girl named Hushpuppy who lives in a bayou community, hit by a hurricane. Filled with danger, but also warmth, Hushpuppy's world is at once real and magical — as is the movie.

The next three of the year's most compelling pictures hail from overseas. France gives us Michael Haneke's devastating masterwork Amour, about an elderly married couple, played by the great French stars Jean Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, who find themselves facing the end of life. It's not a pretty end to a love that's lasted decades, but they find joy while they can in things like a brand new motorized wheelchair.

Another French picture, Rust and Bone, is about a love just beginning — between a fighter and a woman who suffers a life-altering accident — one that required some of the year's most arresting special effects.

2012's most compelling documentary, meanwhile, hails from Israel: The Gatekeepers, in which six former heads of Israel's internal security service, Shin Bet, talk about everything from targeted assassinations to being hung out to dry by the politicians who gave them their marching orders. Augmented by news footage, the film offers an alternately fascinating and deeply upsetting perspective on conflict in the Middle East.

Also eye-opening is a far lighter documentary about a 1970s folk singer from Detroit who gave up music after cutting an album that got no traction in the U.S. Unbeknownst to him, it sold like hot cakes in South Africa, where all his fans thought he'd died, until someone went Searching for Sugar Man.

That's eight of my top 10. The last two are by directors named Anderson. Moonrise Kingdom is Wes Anderson's whimsical look at a small New England community's reaction when a 12-year-old orphan who excels at scouting runs off camping with a girlfriend.

That contrasts with the high seriousness Paul Thomas Anderson brings to his midcentury epic, The Master, about a movement called The Cause, its charismatic leader (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and an alcoholic acolyte (Joaquin Phoenix). The film is as intense psychologically as it is ravishing visually.

OK, that's a Top 10, so theoretically, we're done, but the number 10 feels especially arbitrary in a terrific year like this one, so let's keep going. Commercial filmmakers came up with some seriously cool fantasies this year, including two co-starring Joseph Gordon Levitt — the time-travel thrill ride Looper, in which Gordon-Levitt is an assassin who must kill his future self (played by Bruce Willis), and the final episode in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, in which he's intent on saving children and orphans.

That's a theme that has a particular resonance as 2012 draws to a close, and that was also present in two foreign films earlier in the year — Monsieur Lazhar, about a sensitive substitute teacher from the Middle East, who helps traumatized students deal with their former teacher's suicide at a Canadian primary school; and the Dardenne brothers' The Kid With a Bike, about an abandoned Belgian child and the woman who tames his violent impulses.

Impulse control also figures in two compelling love stories: Keep the Lights On, Ira Sachs' film a clef about a gay love affair undone by drug use; and Silver Linings Playbook, David O. Russell's far happier tale about two damaged, bipolar souls who are heavily medicated.

Another romance steeped in jazz was the year's loveliest animated film — Chico and Rita, a conventionally drawn, unconventionally adult tale of Cuban musicians who come to the U.S. in the 1940s and '50s. And Tim Burton's black and white, stop-motion spoof Frankenweenie was also pretty splendid — the story of a boy who reanimates his dog, Sparky, after an auto accident.

That title's obviously a riff on Frankenstein, which is not the only classic novel to triumph in an unorthodox reworking this year. Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was vividly reimagined as if taking place literally in a theater, with spoiled Russian aristocrats walking from interiors that are clearly stage sets into the wings, where snow is falling and the real world beckons.

And just as Anna's leapt from page to stage, leaping from the stage to the screen is the musical of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, with the actors singing on-camera, which proves effective enough that you wonder why they don't do it all the time. Les Miz is not for all tastes, perhaps, but it's catnip for a theater nut like me.

That's a second 10, and if pressed, I could probably even come up with a third. It's been that kind of year: rewarding enough to send film lovers into cineplexes in 2013 feeling downright optimistic.

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