Indivisible

The lights had just gone down in the theater when we arrived in the foyer of the "Damn These Heels" Film Festival in Salt Lake City. We rushed up the stairs to the balcony in the back and tripped through the darkness to our seats just as the film started to play...only to have the film halt right as we found seats for our group.

The lights came up and the manager rushed out to explain the glitch in the aspect ratio while the dvd menu looped on the big screen. We looked at each other and shrugged stopping to take advantage of the light to acclimate ourselves to the room. We were at showing of "Outrage", a documentary by Kirby Dick exploring the closeted homosexuals in the U.S. government. We came to the theater to contrast our visit to the Mormon Temple Square, wanting to explore a wide range of culture in Salt Lake, instead of just focusing on the Mormons, so we included a stop in the gay community, one that Mormonism largely (and vocally) excludes.

To be honest, I think we were all shocked by how full the theater was. In a state known for a conservative religion, there were a lot of gay people around. We settled in and struck up conversations with the people around us, going through the usual spiel of who we are, where we're from, what we're doing, etc.

One woman and her guy friend started talking with Jenni and I, asking questions about the trip. She seemed interested in the project, and as the lights dimmed again, she slipped me her card and whispered, "Let's talk after the show." I glanced down at the card in the light of my cell phone: It was Jackie Biskupski, Democrat in the Utah House of Representatives.

We talked after the show, and she wished the group the best of luck. Her friend said the same, saying, "It's good to hear that the next generation is doing something better than us. Hopefully you'll do better than we have. Or at least pick up the baton."

We came to Salt Lake City searching for American culture and found two subcultures so starkly opposed to one another that it was difficult to find unity there. I thought about it on the drive back to the bus, struggling to find a link between them. Between all the hurt feelings and misunderstanding.

Maybe what links them is their feelings of being misunderstood. Maybe what America is is just a group of people feeling misunderstood, semi-categorized into groups of similar misunderstanding, forming one huge, tangled and patriotic Venn diagram.

Or maybe hope is the unifying factor. Hope in the future generations. The Mormon tour guides were all young women serving as missionaries for their church, helping Mormonism become one of the fastest growing religions in the world. The gay community was staking hope in the younger generations to find a better level of understanding and mutual compassion between multiple sexual orientations and groups.

It's probably more than that, but as a member of the future generation, if unity is the important factor in American culture, we need to start picking up the baton. Unity needs to be more than just between "the enemy of my enemy". America needs to be more than just the umbrella term for a series of groups who can't understand each other. If we truly are one nation, we have some work to do.