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Someone in the film makes the point that all the experimentation with drugs back then opened people up to the supernatural, and thus to God. And some people might ask whether Lonnie was really moved by the Spirit, or whether he was just on another trip.

Di Sabatino: You have to remember the context of back then. LSD wasn't illegal . . . and I think it was the lubricant for a lot of spiritual experiences. And if you were really searching, that search ended up with some sort of faith. So when these missionaries came up to the Haight-Ashbury district, they didn't have to offer up an apologetic for God—that was a really open time, and drugs were just part of the story. Lonnie was searching. He went through a lot of stuff before he got to God, and a lot of people will look at that and say it was false, and they will say God can't bring people through a lot of that mess, but he did with Lonnie.

Frisbee baptizing a new convert

What about the miracles? Do you think they were genuine?

Di Sabatino: Yeah, sure, why not? Stories are what they are. Not that I'm trying to prove anything to anybody, but there are people there that didn't really like Lonnie, and 20 years later, their 15-minute encounter with him is the formative shaping moment of their life.

I didn't want this to sound like . . . I was propping him up as some sort of faith healer. But I'm telling you, the people I spoke to saw things that didn't make sense to them. Chuck Smith Jr. is something of a Thomas, but he was there and he says Lonnie was real and genuine and almost impossible to explain because it was too weird. None of them could explain Lonnie. This guy is so far outside of the matrix of anything we understand rationally. But I'm open to people saying, "Yeah, right. I don't believe a word of it." There are other things about his life that are interesting. This story is multifaceted.

Considering the role that his homosexuality plays in his story, it is striking that we don't see any firsthand interviews about that.

Di Sabatino: This was a tough thing. I brought to light some things that not a lot of people knew. I've been in rooms with his family where I've had to tell them that he defined himself as gay, way back. Nobody knew that. There's been some tense moments behind the scenes.

Now I love these people, and one of the things I wanted was for them to give the thumbs up to this story, but there were times when we battled. I would go over to his friends' house and play this thing and they would reel, because I had things from Mel [White, an evangelical author turned gay activist] or Troy [Perry, a bishop with the pro-gay Metropolitan Community Church], and they would say, "How could you do this?" But by the time we screened it at Set Free Church, earlier this year in February, I think things had calmed down.

The hardest thing has been with some of the women who had a really close relationship with him, not in a physical sense but in a brother/sister sense. Lonnie admitted a lot of things to them, but I think he stopped short of telling them a lot of his sexual dysfunction because he didn't want to hurt them, or because he didn't want to be hurt. His early testimony at Calvary Chapel was that he had come out of the homosexual lifestyle, but he felt like a leper because a lot of people turned away from him after that, so he took it out of his testimony—and I think that's an indictment of the church.

Would you consider sending this film to gay and lesbian film festivals?

Di Sabatino: Absolutely. And I've already applied for some of them. That's where I want this played. I have made no bones about this. My primary goal was not to make a documentary for Christians. I would like them to see this, but that's not my primary goal. I want to go to the people that Lonnie went to, and that would be the disenfranchised.

I have made this documentary in the spirit of Lonnie—edgy, on the cusp, on the periphery, truthful, and with an eye toward those who were on the margin of society. And the premise of the movie is, "If God can use this guy, then you're all invited." And the ironic thing is that the face of God on earth, the Church, is turning people away because they're not up to snuff. And I think we need to revisit that.

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