‘I could easily have become bitter’: Dustin Lance Black on love, violence and losing his faith | Mormonism

Dustin Lance Black got an early life lesson in unfairness. His mother, Roseanne, was paralysed from the waist down, after childhood polio that also left her with severe scoliosis. She didn’t use a wheelchair, but walked with leg braces and crutches.

“I was aware from a very young age that many people did not respond well to how different she looked,” says Black. “It angered me as a kid, because I knew who she was. I knew, if anything, she was smarter than most of the people I would meet – more capable, more driven. And I loved my mom deeply. So to see her being treated as somehow less than whole because of her differences infuriated me. I think that is where my sense of justice comes from.”

It has helped him produce his best work. As a screenwriter, he has made a career out of portraying those fighting inequality: the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin (hero of the Oscar-nominated Rustin, which Black co-wrote with Julian Breece), the Aids educator Pedro Zamora (Pedro) and, of course, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California. The 2008 biopic Milk, directed by Gus Van Sant, won Black an Academy Award for best screenplay. “I don’t think we have it right yet,” he says. “And I want to help us get to that place where we understand ourselves a little bit better, and the damage we do, whether on purpose or just out of ignorance.”

That mission continues with Under the Banner of Heaven, Black’s true-crime series about the 1984 murder of Brenda Lafferty and her baby by her fundamentalist Mormon brothers-in-law. Premiered on Hulu in the US in 2022 and Disney+ in the UK, it’s now coming to ITVX. It’s a deeply personal project, which chimes with Black’s experiences of growing up in an abusive, patriarchal Mormon household.

“I’m keenly aware of some of the good that faith can do,” says Black, 49, on a video call from the home in Los Angeles that he shares with his husband, the Olympian Tom Daley, and their two sons. “But I’m also keenly aware of some of the ways in which it can be used to rationalise selfishness and violence.”

Based on a 2003 book by Jon Krakauer, Banner follows the Mormon detective Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield) as he investigates the murder of Lafferty (Daisy Edgar-Jones). Like the book, it uses a dual narrative, tying the bloody 19th-century history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the misogyny and patriarchal violence that led to her death.

Critics were largely positive about the series on its release, but it was also accused of demonising Mormonism. “It doesn’t take much digging to see that there is violence throughout many religious histories,” Black says today. “And certainly in this much shorter timeframe of Mormonism, there is an incredible amount of violence.” But, he adds: “The show never says that Mormonism only breeds violent men,” and that there are plenty of Mormon characters with strong moral compasses. “So what you’re upset about is that I’ve depicted some active Mormons who are fundamentalist and who have gone down the road of violence. And, sorry to say, it is more common than it ought to be. I know: I’ve lived it, I’ve seen it.”

Born in 1974, in Sacramento, California, Black grew up in San Antonio, Texas, in a Mormon household, the middle child of three brothers. He had a very close relationship with his mother, who died in 2018, and wrote about their relationship in his 2019 memoir, Mama’s Boy. When Black was six, his father left them, without saying goodbye, to marry his first cousin. Black never heard from him again.

At the time, Roseanne didn’t have a job, but they got by on discreet cash-stuffed envelopes provided by the church. This kept the family together, as it meant they didn’t need to go to the government for assistance and alert them to the fact an unemployed single mother with a disability was raising three boys.

Roseanne eventually landed a job at a local army hospital and remarried, to a member of their church’s congregation – a divorced staff sergeant named Merrill. Within weeks of moving in, he became physically abusive. In one incident Black recounts in his memoir, he was punched in the face for not cleaning his room. In another, Merrill chased Roseanne with a knife and was only stopped when Black’s older brother, Marcus (then 13), beat him with a baseball bat. When they notified the church – about this incident and many more – the bishop pressed them not to involve the authorities. He considered it a domestic matter that should remain in the church’s hands. The onus was on Roseanne not to trigger Merrill’s rage.

“I look back on the decisions being made by men about men in the Mormon faith, and it makes me sick,” says Black. “I guess my mom just has to try harder so that she doesn’t get stabbed to death. I guess I’m just supposed to try harder at eight years old so I don’t get the living hell beaten out of me.”

Black was six when he first learned about homosexuality, sitting with his congregation to watch a church broadcast that compared it with the “sin of murder”. When he used the word, confused, around some of his mother’s friends, they explained that lying down with other boys was so wrong that it would bar him from heaven.

Black soon developed a crush on a local boy and realised he was a member of this evil homosexual tribe. “I knew it was a problem because the Mormon church had told me so explicitly. So there was a very short lifespan for my first butterflies, my first crush. They died pretty quickly.”

From then on his childhood has all the familiar beats you’d expect for a closeted boy in a repressive environment: suspicion, slurs, secret crushes, performance and excruciating missteps, like the time he asked a boy to dance at his junior high school. “What kind of faggot are you?” was the response he received. In his darkest moments, he considered suicide.

Merrill was redeployed to South Korea just a few years into his marriage to Roseanne. While he was away, she started seeing another soldier and agreed to move with him to his new posting in Salinas, California. She divorced Merrill; the deal was she wouldn’t tell the courts about his physical abuse if he stayed away from them.

Black arrived in California, aged 13, and didn’t have many friends. He was extremely shy and would avoid wearing bright clothes in case he stood out. (That has changed, he says: “Whenever I go out and about with Tom, because you know, he’s colourful, I don’t want to just be sort of a drab easel to his amazing painting. I take it as a challenge to put on colour.”) He struggled to be away from the Mormon church at first. But as he met more non-Mormons, he began to question his faith. “It was really wrenching. I mean, there were nights of tears and terror and nightmares.” After a year of soul-searching, “I just let it go. I just went: ‘That’s not true.’”

Now, he says, he has a “fully formed spirituality” but this isn’t attached to any religion.

After high school, Black moved to LA to attend UCLA’s film school, a liberating experience that allowed him to finally accept his gay identity. Early jobs included staff writer on HBO’s Big Love, a drama about a polygamous Mormon family. He spent three years researching the life of Harvey Milk (whom he had heard about during a trip to San Francisco in the 90s), before finishing the screenplay. Around the time of Milk’s release, California had voted in favour of Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage after a brief period of legalisation. Black used his Oscar acceptance to deliver an impassioned call for equality for gay people, stating: “I promise you, you will have equal rights, federally, across this great nation of ours.”

His profile took off overnight – but, as he puts it, “the speech was a promise that needed to be fulfilled … Am I gonna go do the hard political work to fulfil the promise I made on the stage? Or am I gonna cash in and make a lot of movies and never have to worry about money again? And, at my Mormon mother’s behest, I went in the direction to fulfil that promise to win federal equality for gay people in the United States.”

Shortly after winning the Oscar, Black helped to launch the American Foundation for Equal Rights, a non-profit organisation that helped to overturn Proposition 8. Later that year he gave another speech, this time at the National Equality March in front of the US Capitol to an estimated crowd of 200,000. He remained involved in the fight for marriage equality until 2015, when the supreme court legalised same-sex marriage in all 50 states. “That’s one of my proudest things sitting right here: the supreme court decision for marriage equality,” he says, pointing to a series of hefty legal tomes.

Black turns 50 this June, a milestone he’s approaching with enthusiasm after losing so many loved ones at an earlier age.

His brother Marcus died of cancer in 2012, still in his 40s. “I had my crisis of age right around the time I became older than he ever was. Then I felt like I was entering into the abyss, the unknown. And it was scary,” he says. “But I came to a place where I felt very lucky that I was getting to experience things my brother never did.” He has just finished making a documentary about the punk and metal scene (one of his brother’s passions) and the role of LGBTQ+ people in it.

The same goes for many of those he knew at the height of the HIV/Aids epidemic. “I watched my friends and mentors die and I’m getting to live all of these years they never got to live. And so I’m just so grateful.” His voice cracks and he wipes away a tear. “It’s OK!” he reassures me. “And for whatever reason I’ve kept my feathers” – he ruffles his hair – “I don’t know how! I feel like I’ve preserved rather well for my age.”

Black says the past year has been the hardest of his life, after he was wrongly accused of assaulting the presenter Teddy Edwardes at a London nightclub. The case was thrown out last November before the defence had begun, after the judge decided there was insufficient evidence of an assault and inconsistencies in the prosecution’s case. Video footage released by the Crown Prosecution Service shows the two arguing in the club in August 2022, with a tangle of arms before Black walks away; Edwardes follows him out of the club and punches him in the head. Edwardes later accepted a caution for assault.

“I hope I never experience injustice that deep and damaging again in my life,” Black says. He holds no grudge against Edwardes but is furious at the CPS. He says he can’t understand how the case ever made it to court. “Listen, I never even had to testify. The prosecution’s evidence exonerated me. That is a malicious prosecution.”

The experience is why Black and his family recently relocated to LA. “This is no longer, you know, do I like or dislike a place?” he says. “I think that the crown, the government owes me an apology. And I have not received it. I think they also owe me a lot of money.”

This summer Black will head to Paris to watch Daley compete in the Olympics. At the mention of his husband, a grin spreads across his face (“Look what you did to me just saying his name!”) as he describes, with giddy pride, the experience of watching him qualify.

The couple married in 2017, after meeting at a friend’s dinner. They had their first son in 2018 and their second in March last year. As one of the most high-profile gay couples, do they ever feel pressure to behave as role models?

“No, if anything, I think I’m self-conscious of how, like, heteronormative we are,” Black begins, before explaining that heteronormative is not a word he likes using as it feels judgmental. “But we are a little bit. We really love having kids and doing all the family things that, you know, Norman Rockwell would have approved of. But Tom and I know how to have fun outside of parenthood as well. We work hard, we should play hard. But I do not pay attention to other people’s opinions of me or my family any more.”

Anyway, he’s pretty happy about the job he’s doing. “I am proud of how my mom helped me survive: I could have easily become bitter and angry and checked out,” he says. “Instead, I reacted to having horrible examples of fatherhood in my life by becoming, I think, a really good dad. It’s the project that I’m most proud of.”

Just before we talk, Black and the rest of his family attended a ceremony at his elder son’s school where they watched him ring a bell for being named “the kindest child in his grade”.

“I’m very, very proud of him,” says Black.

Under the Banner of Heaven is available to stream on ITVX.