Latter Days

The official movie tie-in to the winner of the Outstanding First Narrative Feature Award at the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, and the Best Gay Male Feature Film Award at the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. A shallow LA party boy falls in love with a hunky, repressed Mormon missionary in this gay romantic drama from the writer of Sweet Home Alabama starring Reese Witherspoon. The theatrical release date of Latter Days is January 2004, starring Jacqueline Besset, Mary Jay Place, Wes Ramsey, Steve Sandvoss and Amber Benson.

"You listen to me, my girl" Ruth Douglass tells her daughter. "You've got three choices in this world, and only three. A woman can be a virgin, a wife, or a widow, and that's all there is." Ruth Douglass should know. The central character in Laura Kalpakian's novel of three generations of Mormons, Ruth soon finds herself neither wife, widow, nor virgin. Born into genteel Salt Lake society, she marries Samuel Douglass and is flung into a hardscrabble life in frontier Idaho. Keeping her doubts about men, marriage and God to herself-this is 1890, after all-she sustains her family in a makeshift home. But when Samuel goes mad with religion, Ruth packs up the children and moves west to California. Intent on raising her six children impeccably, Ruth is nonetheless haunted by the lie that she told and the lie that she lives. Eventually, with the determination of a woman with few choices, she finds the courage to excavate her secret hopes and make a new life for herself. She presides over a loving and contentious cast: Dr. Lucius Tipton, the convivial cigar-smoking atheist who falls in love with Ruth; her rich, small-minded brother, Albert, who refuses to help her; Kitty, the daughter-in-law who defies the church, the community and the family bond. And the children-some of whom never lose faith, some of whom never find it-especially Eden, the bright star. These Latter Days is about reconciling what is expected of us with what we do. The Douglasses discover that within the bounds imposed by their world and their church, it is hard to do right; sometimes they must do what their hearts tell them. "It's that simple. And that hard," Ruth declares. Told candidly and compellingly, this story shows the ways in which families constrict us, root us, ground us, and at the same time give us the courage for rebellion.

An arresting, lyrical memoir about the path the author took—sometimes unwittingly—out of her Mormon upbringing and through a thicket of profound difficulties to become a writer. At twenty-two, Judith Freeman was working in the Mormon church–owned department store in the Utah town where she’d grown up. In the process of divorcing the man she had married at seventeen, she was living in her parents’ house with her four-year-old son, who had already endured two heart surgeries. She had abandoned Mormonism, the faith into which she had been born, and she was having an affair with her son’s surgeon, a married man with three children of his own. It was at this fraught moment that she decided to become a writer. In this moving memoir, Freeman explores the circumstances and choices that informed her course, and those that allowed her to find a way forward. Writing with remarkable candor and insight, she gives us an illuminating, singular portrait of resilience and forgiveness, of memory and hindsight, and of the ways in which we come to identify our truest selves. (With black-and-white photographs throughout.)