Sharon "Rocky" Roggio is my special guest - the producer and director of the award-winning documentary "1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted Culture." This film explores the profound impact of a mistaken biblical translation of the word "homosexual" and its consequences on culture, religion, and the LGBTQ community. Rocky shares her personal journey as a Christian lesbian, discussing her efforts to seek acceptance and understanding from her father, a church pastor. Through these conversations, listeners gain insight into Rocky's experiences and the broader implications of this pivotal mistranslation.
1946’s director, Sharon “Rocky” Roggio is no stranger to the implications of a life completely affected by the predominant modern interpretations of the Bible. Growing up lesbian in a Christian household, with a pastor for a father, has prepared her for this expansive undertaking. Rocky’s experience, of anti-gay biblical teachings, has been incredibly traumatic. She is a strong voice, among the growing chorus of LGBTQIA+ Christians who want to cure the world of this damaging narrative. Once Roggio learned of Kathy and Ed’s work, she was compelled to tell this story. This film is part of her attempts to reconcile a relationship with her family and begin to heal.
Sharon “Rocky” Roggio is an multi award-winning film producer and director living in Los Angeles, CA. She has been a member of three IATSE unions nationwide and has a Bachelor’s degree in Communications with a focus in Radio, Television and Film Her background includes large budget physical production on award winning shows and films such as House of Cards, Parks and Recreation, With Bob and David, Whip It and Red Dawn. In 2016, Roggio associate produced and production designed GOOK, a feature film that premiered at Sundance in 2017 and Won the Audience Award in the Next Category. In 2018 when she heard about the 1946 mistranslation in the Bible, Roggio immediately quit all her other endeavors and has focused all her time, money, and resources on producing and creating this documentary. 1946 is Roggio’s directorial debut.
1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture is a feature documentary that follows the story of tireless researchers who trace the origins of the anti-gay movement among Christians to a grave mistranslation of the Bible in 1946. It chronicles the discovery of never-before-seen archives at Yale University which unveil astonishing new revelations, and casts significant doubt on any biblical basis for LGBTQIA+ prejudice. Featuring commentary from prominent scholars as well as opposing pastors, including the personal stories of the film’s creators, 1946 is at once challenging, enlightening, and inspiring.
Watch the full feature film today.
1946 Roadtrip Across America - We are THRILLED to announce our plan to utilize the award-winning documentary, 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture, as a tool for civic engagement and to drive voter registration for the 2024 election. Our mission is to organize 14 free public conferences in US cities impacted by extremist ideologies. The primary objective of these assemblies is to activate the audience to vote as we advocate for the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community, standing up for democracy and promoting equality for everyone. We will discuss the power of civic engagement to stop evangelical and legislative domination and provide people with a sustainable narrative of compassion founded on research, history, and facts. AND - We will SHOW THE FILM - followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and director Sharon Roggio!
[00:00:00] Rocky: Once the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuals as being mentally ill and society deemed us well, that's when we see the church do a switch and a turn and make this a moral issue.
[00:00:20] Carole: Welcome to Wisdom Shared, where parents, children, and people on the front lines are the experts and where connection inspires change. I am your host Carole Blueweiss and today I have as my special guest, Sharon "Rocky" Roggio, the producer and director of the award-winning feature documentary 1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted Culture.
This film investigates the grave consequences of an erroneous biblical translation of the word homosexual, chronicling the effect on culture, religion, and the LGBTQ community over the last century. That might sound confusing, but it'll become more clear as this interview moves on.
And you know how I love to explain how I met my guests. Well, Rocky gave a webinar for Women Make Movies, an organization that supports filmmakers. And Rocky was talking about how and why she made her film. I was listening closely, as I too am directing a documentary and I have a lot to learn. As luck would have it, 1946, the partial name for this film, was playing near me. So I went to see it.
I knew then that I wanted Rocky to be a guest on my show to share with you all her story, a fresh and honest firsthand perspective about her identity as a Christian lesbian, and her attempts to find acceptance and understanding from her father, a church pastor. Let's listen.
What is this film about?
[00:01:47] Rocky: 1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted Culture is about the first time the word homosexual appeared in the Bible. We have the evidence that it was a mistranslation. We go from there, from the archives at Yale University, where we discovered these historical documents that lead us to this mistranslation and try to pull back the layers from there and lay out the history of how we got to where we are today, where we see the church pushing back and weaponizing the scriptures, not only toward the LGBTQ community, but towards other people in our society. So it's a biblical, historical, journalistic documentary film on how did we get here and why.
[00:02:30] Carole: That sounds intriguing. And if I heard that, I wouldn't totally understand it. I'm not a churchgoer and I wouldn't catch all the nuance and all the importance of what you're actually saying. So I wonder if you could tell me as someone who's curious and naive and a little ignorant about the history of homosexuality in our country. What I learned from the film, am I right that there was never ever that actual word mentioned in the Bible until 1946?
[00:03:06] Rocky: Correct. The first time the word ever appeared in any Bible, in any translation, was 1946. Prior to that, it was 1st Corinthians 6: 9 through 10. There were many different translations over thousands of years, which we look at too.
[00:03:24] Carole: Before 1946, the words homosexual and gay were used, but there was never a mention of it in the Bible. Is that accurate?
[00:03:33] Rocky: The word homosexual had been around for, I don't know, 70 years at that point, something like that. It was coined in the late 1800s by the Germans. And in the 1930s, people didn't really know what homosexuals were. They were deviants, they were abusers, they were, you know, all of these negative connotations. They were mentally ill, which the American Psychiatric Association supported that idea in their medical journals.
[00:04:01] Carole: It wasn't just Christians then. You're saying it was society in general.
[00:04:05] Rocky: Correct. A hundred percent. What we see when we look at how did the church handle this issue prior to 1946, and what we see is that up until even the 70s, pastors and churches and spiritual leaders were, and this is from the pastoral council magazine, which was a US-distributed magazine, we see clergy being and pastors being suggested to take these issues to a psychiatrist, to a mental medical doctor. This is a medical issue. They're sick. They need to be fixed. After the 1970s and when we see the word homosexual spread into multiple English translations now in many verses, more than just the one, we start to see the church.
And once the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuals as being mentally ill and society deemed us well, that's when we see the church do a switch and a turn and make this a moral issue. It was around the mid to late 70s when the switch really happened. And then in the 80s, the moral majority latched onto this as a political talking point.
And so all of these things are in alignment. When you start giving one group certain rights, the church pushes back on taking those rights away. First, it's people of color. Then it's women. Now the gay people are speaking up and wanting their equality. We need to get a handle of this.
And now that they're pushing back, obviously they won the Roe thing. That's been a thing they've been working on for 50 years in basements. Don't get me started on all of that. But now it's pushed back on gay marriage, but the targeting of the trans community is just awful. And this is an issue in the church, this is a sickness in the church that is new.
Christians never behaved this way. I mean, okay, when I say never, Christians have behaved poorly throughout history. So make sure we get that clear. But, you know, the church and, you know, my parents' church didn't have the kind of hate that we see coming from the church today.
It's really just progressed. And the bullying, the name-calling, and it's allowed because of our current political culture. So it's just a big mess right now, which is why we wanted to make a movie that doesn't vilify the other side, because this is an institutional problem. And I do believe that good people were played by a political system and by a power structure that's designed to uplift.
And uplift them into power and use good people and use religion as a stepping stone. And so we wanted to make sure that people who are religious, Christian, Jewish, that they don't feel that we're pulling out the rug from underneath you. That we're just, you know, throwing out the Bible, and we need to just kind of talk about this. I always say that this isn't an attack on God or the Bible or religious people. This is an intervention.
[00:07:07] Carole: That's what's so fascinating about this film and what you've done. And I just want to kind of focus on this a little bit more. It sounds like what you're saying is this particular instance is very specific, but it's really about a powerful organization choosing a group to persecute, and it could be any group.
So this is really, in that sense, a universal theme. It's not just about homosexuals and not just about the Christian church. What's so fascinating that I learned in the film, it was, it's like all this is kind of, you learn it, you don't, we're all confused, like in the public, with so many things, including history and politics and what's going on now in the world, because it's, you don't know what's true, what's not true, and you're hearing all these things.
What I learned in the film was the evolution of the, I might be not using the word correctly, but evangelicals, the detailed evolution that you described that story of when it comes to scripture and when it comes to interpretation and how those different versions of the St. James Bible changed. Can you talk that through? Because that was so clear in the film and that was so elucidating. About how something like religion can become political.
[00:08:26] Rocky: When you're looking at translations, and one of the things really that separates our film from other films that do a great job or dealing with homophobia in the church is looking at how we got our English Bibles that we have today. We never think about this translation and where does it come from and who's doing this. And we all know the telephone game, right?
You know you say one thing and by the time you get to the end of the line, It's changed. And a good example is like the word butterfly, you know, it's not butter and a fly. We know that a butterfly is different than the actual, a butter and a fly. And so just thinking through little things like that. So those are just some of the simple mistakes that could happen just through trying to get the text to align with the reader.
Another example, I remember when I was growing up, I remember hearing that missionaries would take the Bible and change things when they were going to tribal lands. And instead of having Jesus come into your heart, you know, their centerpiece of the body was the stomach. So they would change it from heart to stomach.
And so that's a translation change. So we only have certain amount of copies of the scripture to know what kind of those changes may or may not have happened. But to that end, those are things we can deal with. Those are things we can live with, right? Those are, that's doesn't really impact how it's become politicized or how it's become weaponized.
Where the problem comes in what we want to look at are the committees behind these translations and what's really going on there. And as we can see the Bibles that are more conservative will 100 percent subjugate women. Another good example, the New Testament in '46 and the Old Testament, Full Bible in '52, that Bible was more academically correct than any other, but they got pushed back as a liberal Bible and a communist Bible.
And the conservatives wanted to bury that Bible because they did things like they took the virginity of Mary away. They made Mary a young woman instead of a virgin. But that's what the Greek is. That's the original Greek, young woman. And so they were just trying to be accurate to the original Greek.
[00:10:34] Carole: I also don't know a lot about Bibles because you go to a hotel, you see a Bible.
[00:10:40] Rocky: It's the King James version of the Bible that you're referring to. And that was published in 1611. And that was the widest Bible that the majority of the people used until the mid-century 1900s. And so that's when the revised standard version was the first major translation to come out to modernize the text, to get rid of that old English.
And so then from there, once the RSV was deemed a communist Bible, because not only did they take the virginity of Mary away, they took the deity of Christ away because they called him on the cross. Surely this must be a son of a God, not the son of the God. And so in the stats, when we see the other translation committees come together to make their version of the English Bible, to make sure that we let people know Mary was a virgin and Christ is the only God.
And just because one person's perspective says, surely this must be a son of a God, a person in the crowd that would have seen Christ that way. So why can't we be honest with the text? Why do we have to change it? It's about power and structure.
[00:11:51] Carole: What's the name, then, of that Bible that you just said was translated that way?
[00:11:55] Rocky: The Revised Standard Version Bible, the one that we're talking about that did the word homosexual, they're the ones who took the deity of Christ away, according to the conservatives, and the virginity of Mary, because they made her a young woman, which was more original to the Greek. So each one will have some sort of title. One of them is the NIV, which is the new international version.
Then there's the ESV, the English standard version. Then there's a Standard Bible, the Living Bible, you know, there's tons of them. And so you have to look at who's on those committees and what are their objectives and goals. The ESV Bible was put together by the most conservative that you can think of. And so you're going to find a lot of these conservative things.
And what I always encourage anyone who's Christian, who's struggling with this, I always encourage them to go talk to a Jewish person because our Jewish brothers and sisters, they understand this. It's in the writing. It's the writing adapts as it goes.
And you're able to breathe with the writing and work within it into your modern life. You know? And so as they read the Bible and go through these lessons again, through the months, each year, you're going to, they're finding new things. And that's wonderful and beautiful.
[00:13:10] Carole: You just take things for granted like the Bible says, and then.
[00:13:13] Rocky: 100%. Look, it says it right here in my Bible. Does it? Is that? No, that's how the Bible reads. Let's see what it really says, you know? And we really need to look beyond. And in other social sciences, in culture, in history, which is why Kathy Baldock's work is so amazing. If anybody doesn't know, definitely look her up, she's the lead researcher in the film, who was the first to ask the question, who made this decision and why, to put the word homosexual in the Bible.
Her next book will be coming out this summer, and it's called, How the Bible Became Anti-Gay: Forging a Sacred Weapon. And she calls it a sacred weapon because that's what we see in the letters that we discovered at Yale University. The person who challenged the translation committee said this is wrong and here's why.
[00:13:59] Carole: So, Kathy Baldock. She wrote a book and you were aware of the book and in that book she did extensive research on these topics and there was another gentleman that was helping her with the research. Their research became your journey in this film. So can you just start at the beginning where you realized that, wow, I think I'll make a documentary?
[00:14:24] Rocky: Sure. It was the summer of 2018 when I had been pushing back on the church and asking questions. And I reread the Bible and learning all of these things about homosexuality in the Bible that I told my friends I was going to do a documentary on this subject to find affirming theology that could help affirm my identity with my non-affirming parents.
Meaning they don't affirm me as a fully, you know, inclusive person of society being gay. They don't permit it, you know, that kind of stuff. And the only way to really communicate with them is through the Bible. And so it was about two months later, I took a class on homosexuality in the Bible at a church in Toluca Lake, California.
That's where I learned about Malakoi and Arsinokoitai, which are the two Greek words that were combined to mean the word homosexual.
[00:15:12] Carole: Can you say those words slower?
[00:15:14] Rocky: Yeah. Malakoi and Arsinokoitai. And we'll get into the meanings of those in a minute. And so I'm like, what are these two Greek words? And they were combined to mean homosexual. So I had learned about that. I didn't know about the 1946.
Oh, that's interesting. And then it was that night that somebody in the class said, Oh, you need to look up Kathy Baldock. And so I looked up Kathy Baldock. I went home. I binged watched Kathy Baldock. Now, she had only had previous stuff out from her other work.
So that's the only work that I really knew. I didn't know that she was involved in the Malakoi and Arsinokoitai discovery of homosexual mistranslation. I just knew her other work from going to that class. And so then I found out that in October of 2018, she was coming to Los Angeles to do a seminar and it was the same weekend my parents were coming into town.
And, you know, my parents would have me go to Love One Out, and if anybody knows what that is, in the 90s, that's a Dr. James Dobson conference, where they would go to towns and teach people how to not be gay through the Bible, and to work with parents on how to deal with, you know, either mourning a loss of their gay child, because they're now no longer in society, you know what I mean?
Like, how do you deal with your child that's gay? It's like, we're mourning. I'm like, oh my gosh. Anyway, so the conferences they asked me to go to, and I'm like, I said, yes. And I went, so I was like, okay, mom and dad, I want you to come to this conference with me. So they said yes, and I asked permission to film it.
This woman's great. So I got a crew together, and I filmed us all going to that event. It was a six hour event. That's where I met Ed Oxford, who's the other researcher you mentioned. And so he started working with Kathy a couple years prior, when he found out the same way that I found out about this homosexual mistranslation.
So, he started buying old books, Bibles, lexicons to get to the bottom of Whoa, he's like the word homosexual wasn't in the Bible till 1946? I find that hard to believe. So he started doing the research on his own and because of his book collection, he woos Kathy, they become friends, they start working together.
So it was Ed who discovered that the RSV translation committee who made this mistranslation had left all of their archives at Yale university. So they're telling us all of this information in this day conference at this church in Los Angeles, and I'm just like, what? I had no idea about the mistranslation.
And then they tell us about the man who wrote this letter in 1959, challenging the translation committee. David was his name. He was a young seminary student, 21 years old, who wrote a beautiful letter with an appendix saying, this is a wrong translation and why. This is going to be yielded against the community as a sacred weapon if you don't fix this.
And so I'm sitting in this conference next to my dad, and I'm just like, this is the documentary. This is the story because this isn't my interpretation. This isn't a stretch on exegesis, which means taking or hermeneutics where you, you know, you want to support your ideas and interpretations through scripture.
And so it's not a theory. This was a tangible mistake, a mistranslation. We have the historical documents to start a conversation from there and then we can build the film. But to that end, the advocacy work continues. So we're working on our impact and educational campaign this year with 1946 and really immersing it into the community and including a workbook discussion guide that we're about to get connected with a big publishing company to put that out with us, which was just amazing.
[00:18:42] Carole: As a child, were you somebody who felt like you wanted to advocate for others?
[00:18:48] Rocky: So my nickname is Rocky and that's kind of for a reason. You know, I'm the kid that would always stick up for the underdog on the playground and call out any kind of injustice.
I do remember at one point there were these straight white dudes in high school that went to school in dresses as a joke. And this is the 90s and they were suspended, expelled. And I went straight to the administration. I was president of student council. And I was like, you can't suspend these students.
Here's the student handbook. They didn't break any law. And we took it to student court and the next year, they updated the handbook: guys can't wear dresses in school. So it wasn't really a win. So I was always able to stand up for the underdog and then kind of add some levity to it, which is a pretty good balance.
We are having trouble finding a distributor, sales agent. Networks are not interested in this. They love the film, but they're either trepidatious or they're, you know, there's so much competition, they want to go with, you know, the documentaries that are moving have celebrity appeal, have true crime, have global type things like global warming, where I was under the impression that something like the Bible, which impacts everyone in the world, whether you're Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or not, but there were 300 documentaries that premiered at DOC NYC in 2022 and that's just a small piece of all the films that are created each year.
[00:20:22] Carole: Do they include ones made by in-house companies like Netflix and HBO?
[00:20:27] Rocky: Yes, absolutely. And more of the film festivals are taking more so it really doesn't feel Independent anymore. And then the independent producers and films keep getting pushed out and we have to rely on alternative ways. It's just us adapting each day pretty much with the ever changing industry.
[00:20:50] Carole: My impression is that that you get a little bit of a boost on that because that's something that our society has decided is LGBTQIA not usually talked about. So therefore we want more people to talk about it, but that doesn't sound like what's happened.
[00:21:11] Rocky: We are an LGBTQ film, but we aren't. This is a film about history, politics, religion, people, society, culture. And I really wanted those themes to stand out. Now this is the group of people that have been impacted by this mistranslation that came through religion and came through scripture and came through society that impacted culture.
But the LGBTQ community is just one in line of a list of tons of others that this has happened to in our society. So when we were on the film festival circuit in 2023, we played, I mean, at least 80 screenings last year, which were phenomenal. And a majority of them were queer or LGBTQ film festivals. But every single time we got into a non-LGBTQ film festival, I was more excited or I was equally excited, just more grateful for the opportunity to be able to play to an audience that really needs to hear this too.
Of course we want our LGBTQ brothers and sisters to hear this message, but we need other people to move so our culture can move so that we can stop weaponizing the Bible and using it against these people.
[00:22:28] Carole: We all as filmmakers have to decide that and I'm curious what did you come to, who is your audience?
[00:22:34] Rocky: You know every filmmaker says this film is for everyone. But if we had to narrow it down, we would say LGBTQ, allies, people who care about LGBTQ rights, social justice issues, equality, Christians, non-Christians, practicing Jewish people, people who like history and politics. This is, as I say in the film, a global message that whether you're Christian or not, I've said it before, you know, you can relate to this film because the characters are relatable.
The stories are relatable. The institutional issue of power and structure over other people is relatable. Whether it's this issue or not. And the movie is fun to watch. Our editor, Jill Woodward, who is a New York local, is phenomenal if anybody's looking for a storyteller editor. And she was able to, with our writer and producer as well, Jena Serbu, and the three of us really structured the film.
And then Jill was able to give us those juicy notes as an editor that of course we weren't able to do as much. And she was in the footage doing wonderful things with the pacing and the breaths and the laying of the scenes, stacking them on top of one another with the information. It's a heady project and there's a lot of information and we wanted to make it entertaining, relatable, fun, journalistic, but also like a, we call it the documentary Da Vinci Code. Cause we're in literal archives reading historical documents in real time, discovering something, you know, so it's got that journalistic discovery kind of feel. It just started from me being curious, me asking questions, me being a filmmaker, me wanting to affirm my own life and help me and my family.
And once I learned that mistranslation, I'm like, It would be irresponsible of me not to make this movie. Now, my dad will probably never change his mind, but I've got nieces and nephews, you know, and a lot of people might not change their mind, but there's enough people out there. This issue has been weighing on their heart.
And now we've provided a tool for people to be able to do their own research, continue their own conversations and hopefully change our culture more toward love and inclusion and equality. So it's fascinating. And then of the characters, Kathy and Ed, they're amazing characters. They're funny, they're witty. They're humble. Just. Really great characters on film and in person, you know, real life people. I'm a still a filmmaker, so we call them characters. And then David, David Fearon, a retired minister from the United Church of Canada, who was a homosexual. His letter was phenomenal, ahead of his time.
[00:25:11] Carole: Can you explain in your words more specifically? I remember this letter was a super powerful and awe inspiring. Can you say exactly what did he say?
[00:25:22] Rocky: So, yeah, David Fearon was a pastor at the United Church of Canada, but at the time that he challenged the translation committee, he was going through seminary school.
He had only taken a year and a half of Greek, but really the most impressive thing was him going through all of the different translations over time. Citing them all and being able to trace how, again, this is an act as opposed to a person. They've now, the new revised standard updated edition that came out in 2022 says illicit sex with men or something.
And it's like, okay, well, what's this illicit and you know, to whom and all these different questions. It just forces the reader to think as opposed to putting a blanket statement like a pervert or a homosexual, or even pedophilia. Now that's a mistranslation too. A lot of the European Bibles did use the word boy molester there.
And that's because of what was going on in the ancient world of this pederasty, which was sex with young boys that was accepted up until they hit puberty. And they wanted to have sex with the boys for many different reasons, but mainly they didn't want to spoil the women because they needed to be virgins.
And it wasn't really more about like sexual release or pleasure. It was about power. So that could have been what St. Paul was condemning, but we just don't know. It could have been slang. You know, he made up a word to describe these people that he didn't like. And so, you know, if he wanted to talk about men who loved each other, he could have used a dozen other Greek words.
So this isn't about consensual loving relationships. So those are just clues that again, we hope the general public will start to understand. So we can start to together push back against religious oppression because we're all going to be in trouble if certain people get elected and certain people want to dominate this land and the world with their religious views.
And we can't allow that. This country was built on freedom of religion and separation of church and state. Some people forget that.
[00:27:31] Carole: Is lesbian an okay word to use? Is that like a politically correct word these days?
[00:27:36] Rocky: Sure, yeah. I mean, you know, some people don't like the word queer. They don't like the word homosexual. And then, you know, but that these are just, this is just semantics, but then some people identify as queer. Some people identify as lesbian or gay, you know.
[00:27:52] Carole: So where does that come into this story, into the Bible?
[00:27:55] Rocky: It doesn't really. These are modern ideas as we know more and grow and language changes and we have words to start describing different things. A lot of it too is, you know, when we look at history, all of the research has been done on men. And even in the Bible, you know, the Bible doesn't condemn lesbianism. It condemns men doing sexual acts because the Bible was written by men for men and women were considered property.
And then even then that seeps into society. It's like, well, who cares what women are doing with their bodies? Who cares what women are doing or who cares about women's health? You know, Kathy in one of her conferences talks about, we didn't learn that women had orgasms until the 50s. You know, and Kathy jokes in her conference, she's like, they could have just asked, you know, it's like, but nobody's doing this research.
Even when we look at conversion therapy, which was an awful time in church history, all of the research was done on men. And, you know, they would have the theories would be you have an overbearing mother, smothering mother, and, you know, you don't spend enough time with the boys and your dad and just different, you know, it's like, no.
People are born gay. Like some people like to be a ballerina and some people like to, you know, swing hammers and whatever, like let it go. And this is the social issue.
[00:29:16] Carole: Can you tell me a little bit more about your relationship with your dad? In the film, it's clear that it is very painful and it was quite remarkable to see your expressions and to see him speaking without being aware of the hurtful words he was saying. Can you talk more about that. Are you comfortable with doing that?
[00:29:33] Rocky: Yeah, sure. So, we knew right away that we wanted to make the film more than just the researchers and the documents. We wanted to be able to have a tangible example of how it plays out in real life. And we interviewed a lot of different people who unfortunately have dealt with these kinds of issues.
But we didn't really know my dad was going to be in the film until he really showed up. All of this kind of just happened again, when that first day we filmed in October of 2018, I didn't know my parents were going to be coming to LA. So I just threw everybody in the room, like I say in the movie, and I just started filming.
I mean, it's just like, that's really how it happened. And then I learned of the mistranslation and I'm like, oh my gosh, like this is going to change the world. I believed, you know, and then my dad, maybe he thinks this is going to change the world too. And now he's like, uh oh, he's got to make sure his voice is heard, right?
And so for me and my family, we've been dealing with this agree and disagree for many years. And that has taken on many forms in our relationship from years where we don't talk to one another to, you know, times where I'm back and I'm coming over for Christmas.
[00:30:44] Carole: Can you start with how he found out, like, just even when he first found out, you know, that you were gay, like that was the beginning of this?
[00:30:51] Rocky: Well, sure. So when I was younger, I mean, there were signs. And my dad read my diary and he, you know, I've forgiven him for that now, but he did that because he was legitimately concerned for my eternal soul because he believed what he read in the Bible, that homosexuals will not inherit the kingdom of God.
Now, he's now moved and come to that understanding like Dr. Weigel did in that letter where, oh, it might be homosexual practices and not just being gay. And so now he has changed a little, but he's still, you can't act on it, you know? So that was when I was right out of high school. And so I was able to leave home and I left home and I never looked back basically.
And so it's been 20 plus years of this challenge and complication in our relationship and really just the loneliness, sadness, all the things that go with separation. On both sides. And as I was talking earlier about how parents go through mourning, my parents went through a mourning process. That's what they were talking about with their Christian counselor.
You've lost a child. Like, I'm not dead guys, you know, and so that was all really interesting, but it wasn't until I was living in Los Angeles in 2017, when I went back to church as an adult and started to really recognize the issues that are in our society are coming from our church building and seeping out into our society and what you call sin, I don't call sin.
This isn't right. And I've always felt that the way that the queer community and other communities have been treated by the church just did not seem like a gospel message, like a Jesus message that I was presented with. And that's why I always challenged. And a lot of it has to do with women's issues as well, you know?
And so it was just kind of natural for me to fall into that role. But the way that we got my dad to be in the film, you know, he really does care. And as we say in the film too, the only way that we can really be an influence with one another is to be in relationship. So we were in a pretty good place in relationship.
I was learning this stuff and I'm, like I said, we went to that conference. We're there filming together. So now he's already in the movie, you know, but now I needed to convince him to sign the release form and get in the interview chair. So about a year later, we got our first round of funding. And then we went to The Reformation Project in Seattle and I invited my dad to come.
And he said, he wasn't going to be filmed, but then we didn't give him the microphone. He couldn't ask a question. You know, it was like, dad, you have access to all these people. We told you before you came here. Then he was like, I'm ready to talk. And which was great because honestly, like it did afford him the opportunity to tell his authentic perspective and his conviction behind it.
And then it afforded our audience the opportunity to see the struggle, but then also, you know, let the evangelical audience see themselves and walk through this together. So I'm so grateful that he did say yes, and it was painful on both ends to relive the trauma and the past experiences. But we knew going in, and I say we, Jena Serbu, our producer, writer, we've known each other for 20 some years.
So she knows me, my family, Sal, the whole nine, like we knew he was going to give us everything, everything, because we know what he's going to say, you know, and it was just a beautiful representation of the reality. So we'll see. The story's still going. I mean, the movie is complete, but the story still goes.
[00:34:25] Carole: Thank you very much for explaining how you made the movie, why you made the movie. I think that it'll make other people also think twice about many, many, many things. So thank you for making the film.
[00:34:37] Rocky: You're welcome. I'm so grateful you had an opportunity to see it and it's impacted you. I'm so grateful for this opportunity too, to share it with your audience.
And I'm so grateful to everyone from our donors, to our volunteers, to our paid technicians for helping me create this wonderful documentary.
[00:34:59] Carole: Well, I think that we're all very lucky that this documentary is out there and I hope that it gets picked up and screened in theaters all over the country so people can learn about how her story came to be. And really it's a story on many levels for many groups out there who are stigmatized. Thank you, Rocky, for making such a film available to so many.
I have many takeaways from this film that I just want to share with you. I learned that the word homosexuality became a rallying cry for evangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell in the 1980s. By 1997, after one copy of the Living Bible, which is an abridged version of the Bible, got into the hands of Billy Graham, 40 million copies were sold.
And in that version, the word homosexuality was used six times, but it wasn't even mentioned in the Bible before 1946. I learned how politics and religion became a mixed deal. And then how gay people became central figures in the cultural wars that are still with us today. Now I understand better how politics, religion, and sexual orientation have become so closely entwined.
You can see 1946 online. Check out the show notes for details on how to watch this important film. Thank you so much for listening to Wisdom Shared. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to check out all the other episodes. Go to caroleblueweiss.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you like what you're hearing on Wisdom Shared, please spread the word and share this podcast with your friends. Leave a review and subscribe so you can receive wisdom every month. Thanks for listening.