Love in Country explores the intimacy in same sex relationships produced by combat, trauma and romance that has not been shown before.
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Directors
Writers
Cast
David Garber
Vincent Van Hinte
Michael Southworth
Love In Country
It's 1968, and Vietnam War Army Sergeants Ian Alexander and John Reese heroically lead their squad in a desperate attempt to survive and complete a CIA Phoenix mission after their platoon was overrun by NVA forces. Just prior to the Tet Offensive, the squad - Rangers Alexander and Reese, who are also exploring and fighting their own identities and attraction to each other, along with Doc, Thumper, Burd, and their disturbed Captain Henrick prep to kidnap a Viet Cong Leader. They face trauma and betrayal, then mere survival as they endure gut-wrenching combat near the DMZ. Although queer people of many stripes have served in military conflicts from the American Revolution until today, many of these troops fought and gave the ultimate sacrifice for their nation but were prohibited to love legally or openly.
Directors
2023 • Not Rated • 2h 2m
Kurt Braun
Writers
Richard R. Gayton • James Sosontovich
Richard Gayton
Read the book
Fall 2024
Executive Producer & Art Director
As a bisexual or gay man born in a heterosexual world, I was scapegoated with hatred and discrimination. I developed a different type of PTSD that taught me not to trust the people around me. I realized that many people in the world are dedicated to persecuting me and my kind just because of sexual orientation and that they might endanger my life for loving a same sex person.
I explore these themes in the screenplay, a feature film and now in a novel entitled Love in Country as a way of telling my story and as a source of healing for me. I write to honor LGBT people who dared to risk imprisonment to serve and die for their country in combat, but also to change a few minds in the heterosexual community who might think it normal or okay to hate gay people and even want them thrown out of the military.
After writing the screenplay I entered into a many year process of refining the writing and developing a feature film based on the screenplay. No studio would take it saying it cost too much to film but Mario Ortiz, the many Emmy Award winner cinematographer, joined the project as a producer. He believed in the film and encouraged us to go for it. Jerry McGrath took on the project and added expertise, enthusiasm and money. I took out a loan against my house. A wounded retired Army Ranger donated all the uniforms and weapons. We recruited actors and crew in Los Angeles. We settled on Arkansas rice fields and drone shots from Vietnam for locations.
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Men and women falling in love during war has been extensively explored but not love between two men. The prospect of a same sex couple being professional, patriotic soldiers seems somehow alien for those times and yet it was a reality that has been true of all America’s wars since the Revolution.
Richard Gayton and Mario Ortiz on the CIA set for the sizzle reel.
Kurt Braun, a veteran cinematographer, joined the project and finished directing the film when my mobility issues got in the way of continuing to direct. Location scouting and filming took two months in Arkansas traveling all over the state. Some local people would not let us film on their land because of the LGBT theme of two gay soldiers in combat in love, but over a hundred people in Arkansas donated their time and energy to make the film possible as background actors and extras. Some local actors stepped up and took on major roles giving professional performances.
After many difficulties and conflicts the actors and crew finished the film and looked like we had been in a war as we went to the airport to return to our home base in Los Angeles. I rode in a wheel chair from a torn hamstring and one of our lead actors was in a matching chair with a broken ankle. Two years later after post production the two hour movie was released to rave reviews winning Best Picture at nine film festivals and then showing on Amazon, Tubi, Google Play, Dekko and Youtube and even having the DVD’s at Walmart. Arkansas people even sponsored a theater premiere.
After the release I was back reading military fiction but this time about the Navy: the Dan Lenson novels of USA Best Selling author David Poyer. I read all of them and was so moved by his realistic portrayal of a naval officer and the real consequences to his character from war that I decided to write David a fan letter never expecting it to be answered. Instead I got a wonderful enthusiastic letter from him encouraging me to write a novelization of the film. I began writing Love in Country, the novel, immediately. David introduced me to the Ossabaw Writer’s Retreat in Georgia. I attended and met other motivated writers and learned much more about the craft of fiction writing. They gave invaluable feedback on the preliminary work I had completed on Love in Country. As the writing progressed on the novel and through contacts at the retreat, I found Northampton-House Press to publish it. It’s scheduled for release in Fall 2024.
Richard Gayton Writer and Director of Love in Country on practice shoot location in Winchester California.
I wrote Love in Country as a screenplay in 2007 while I lived for three years in Thailand, dealing with my own coming out as a bisexual man and with the residuals of PTSD from the murder of my wife many years before. Though I was never in combat, I knew the craft of infantry fighting from attending Basic Combat Training in 1967 and Officer Basic in 1969.
In the aftermath of my wife’s murder in 1987, I had read many close combat novels and true accounts of fighting from the Vietnam War. The graphic stories of fighting and killing in war desensitized me to the images I had in my mind from the grisly murder of my wife that created such personal agony. War combat stayed emotionally distant for me since it happened to someone else. Murder remained up close and personal.
I suspect it’s that way for soldiers who actually fight close encounters with the enemy and kill people or see their friends killed. Personal violence makes an indelible imprint on the psyche that completely changes one’s view of the world as a safe, predictable place. I learned from the murder to see the world in many ways as a slaughterhouse that violently takes the lives of millions, many of them children.