As the polarizing issue of gay marriage re-invigorates the “cultural wars” of the last decade, the classic documentary Ballot Measure 9 resonates as strongly as ever. The film shocked movie-goers in 1995 with its inside views of a divisive gay-rights battle and the unprecedented violence the campaign rhetoric provoked across the state of Oregon. Local activists, risking their lives, were given full-time police protection, slept with guns under their beds, and on election night wore bullet-proof vests.  Families were torn apart, neighbor set against neighbor.

Director Heather Lyn MacDonald ducks behind the headlines to lay bare the passions and strategies that drove both sides. Culled from hundreds of hours of material shot over the nine months leading to the election, Ballot Measure 9 tells a story of driving urgency.  As the level of violence escalates, the documentary acquires the tension and suspense of a fiction film. 

The ballot initiative Measure 9 was intended to revoke and prevent civil rights protections for homosexuals and to mandate that schools teach that homosexuality is "abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse.” Statewide, a virulent discourse resulted, and in this climate came the inevitable rise of anti-gay harassment, physical attacks and murder.  The newly formed bias crimes unit tracked a 500% in anti-gay violence in Oregon that year.