When Oil City native Joe Wilson and Dean Hamer announced their wedding in The Derrick newspaper in summer 2004, a battle erupted on the editorial page between supporters and letter writers who were so outraged they suggested it would be better if the men had never been born.

Wilson was disappointed by the controversy over his same-sex marriage but wasn’t surprised.

He grew up gay and closeted and knew some people, particularly in rural western Pennsylvania, view homosexuality as a violation of Biblical law or a choice.

But after Kathy Springer, the mother of a gay son who was being tormented at Franklin High School, sent Wilson a letter about her heartache over her son’s troubles, Wilson and Hamer, filmmakers who live in Washington, D.C., grabbed their cameras and headed to Wilson’s hometown.

Footage from the couple’s interaction with gays, lesbians, allies and vocal opponents there became “Out in the Silence,” a documentary screened recently at Penn State Shenango in downtown Sharon.

About 100 people turned out to watch the film and talk with the men behind it and activists like Hickory High School senior Matthew Chess and Stephen A. Glassman, chairman of the Pennsylvania Human Rights Commission.

“I believe that this is a struggle about basic human rights,” Wilson told the crowd.

Professor Dr. Missa Murry Eaton said she hoped the movie would stimulate discussion on campus and in a town not unlike Oil City. She said there’s also a possibility of reviving Penn State Shenango’s now-defunct Rainbow Lions club for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered and their allies.

The movie’s subtitle — “love, hate and a quest for change in small town America” — sums up the filmmakers’ motivation.

“If I didn’t shine a light on and try to understand and illuminate the basis for the controversy, it would simply pass away into history’s ether … and silence would settle once again over my hometown in the faded hills of northwestern Pennsylvania, affirming and perpetuating the fear and isolation that I knew too well as a young gay boy in a stiflingly anti-gay world,” Wilson said in a news release.

The movie opens with photos from Wilson’s childhood and captures their drive north, where the audience meets 16-year-old C.J. Bills, an athlete, animal lover and budding mechanic just trying to get the beater he’s bought road ready.

After the hostile reaction at school to C.J.’s coming out, he began cyber school to avoid what he called “eight hours of pure hell” every day.

The filmmakers gave C.J. a camera and he documented his feelings, along with the shenanigans kids in a rural town get into.