review for Dear Jesse on AllMovie

Gay director Tim Kirkman's film about Senator Jesse Helms might have been a screed against a notoriously homophobic politician, but it's amazingly light on its feet, beginning with Kirkman's offhand admission that both he and Helms are obsessed with gay men. Ignoring fellow North Carolinian Thomas Wolfe's dictum, Kirkman does go home again and finds that in his several years away from the state, things have changed for its gay citizens, mostly for the better. Some of this is a matter of perception; Kirkman looks up many old friends and makes new acquaintances, all of whom are largely sympathetic to gay rights. (Among the most eloquent of the latter group is writer Alan Garganus.) And his own ability to feel more comfortable about his sexual orientation helps, too; it's this personal dimension that often swerves the film away from rote Jesse bashing. Kirkman is perceptive about Helms' appeal to fundamentalists, admitting that the first time he voted, at age 18, he cast a ballot for Jesse "because he believed in God." The film ends on a chilling note; on Kirkman's first day of filming, he had shot interview footage of two young men at a rally in North Carolina, and one of them was Matthew Sheppard, who would make national news in the fall of 1998, when he was murdered outside of Laramie, WY, in a brutal hate crime.