When right-wing protesters began disrupting school boards and holding anti-LGBTQ+ protests throughout Southern California, documentary filmmaker Rocky Romano thought some of those involved looked familiar.
Moms Club, a new documentary from Romano and co-director Miranda Winters, tells the story of a group of mothers who came together to find out who kept showing up to protest and disrupt Southern California school boards in 2022 and 2023.
By his recollection, Romano covered almost 300 protests in and around Los Angeles after the June 2020 murder of George Floyd.
The right-wing backlash to the Black Lives Matter protest movement that followed — against BLM, then masks, then vaccines — by 2022 had coalesced around protesting inclusive LGBTQ+ policies in schools.
"Slowly but surely, we started putting together these different factions and how they would keep showing up," Romano told KPBS in an interview. "And they were working together, (but) we really didn't have a connection."
Independent photojournalist Kelly Stuart said she also noticed the common cast of characters at protests and school board meetings all over the region — Hollywood, Chino, Temecula and Santee.
Some of them were known members of the Proud Boys, a violent hate group frequently involved in street brawls during protests around the country. Several of its members were charged over their involvement in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capital.
Other demonstrators wore masks or used aliases — it was a mystery who they were.
One thing they weren't, Stuart said, was parents of kids in the school districts in which they were protesting.
She was frustrated that the mainstream press hadn't caught on.
"It was like I was a crazy person, you know?" she said in an interview with KPBS. "For a long time (I was) being told, like, 'you guys are red string conspiracy theorists.'"
Daisy Gardner is the mother of an LGBTQ+ teenager. In the documentary she said she was shocked in the summer of 2023 by the people that came to protest a Pride event at her Los Angeles elementary school.
"A bunch of dudes — dudes over 50 with long, weird beards," Gardner said. "We're hearing slurs. People are calling me a 'groomer.' People are calling me a 'pedophile.'"
Fights between protester groups broke out at that June 2, 2023 protest at Saticoy Elementary School and police had to intervene, the LA Times reported.
During an interview in the documentary, Gardner said she was frustrated when a reporter called the anti-LGBTQ+ protesters "concerned parents."
"No one in the news was investigating this," she said.
She started trying to find out who was behind the protest, something that would connect her with the other moms featured in Moms Club.
Stuart started an encrypted group chat with mothers she met at the protests along the way — mothers of LGBTQ+ students who were frustrated with watching their kids become ammunition in a culture war.
The moms got to work, Glendale mom Angie Givant said in the film.
"Nobody should mess with moms who grew up on social media, because we have the ability to find anything," Givant said.
Romano said he didn't set out to center the documentary around the school board fights. What he and co-director Winters were doing, he said, was investigating dark money political groups.
"It was probably, you know, six years of filming and recording protests and trying to figure out the right vehicle in order to tell the story," Romano said. "We had many different iterations, but we knew Kelly (Stuart) from filming on the ground for ... many years."
Stuart knew about Romano's documentary project but not where its focus would be.
"We didn't know that it was going to go in this direction — about the attacks on trans kids — until the moms got involved," Stuart said.
Unraveling the dark money networks Romano said were helping fund the groups organized for the anti-LGBTQ+ movement was going to be a challenge for the documentary.
"It is so complex and almost unbelievable, so we really felt the moms were the perfect vehicle to tell the story," Romano said.
That's because one of the moms runs an Instagram account called "TheChartyB." She also maintains a website that charts connections between several right-wing groups and figures prominent in the Southern California anti-LGBTQ+ school board movement.
She appears in the documentary anonymously — wearing a mask and with her voice distorted.
She spoke with KPBS in 2024 about threats she received because of her work connecting right-wing activists on-the-ground to the political organizations she said support them.
The moms noticed one person at the front of a lot of the anti-LGBTQ+ protests. He often used a bullhorn. In one of Stuart's photos, he holds it in the face of an LGBTQ+ rights protester.
Photos Stuart provided to KPBS in 2023 showed the man at no fewer than 12 rallies, most of them in opposition to LGBTQ+ rights.
He was frequently in the company of members of the Proud Boys and other hate groups, Stuart's photos and videos showed.
In the film she recounts how they identified the man.
"There was one member of the Moms Club," Stuart said. "She went back through all the school board meetings. She found the very first meeting he ever spoke at where he used his name."
In 2023 KPBS first reported the man, Bryce Henson, was an active duty Navy SEAL.
In a series of reports, KPBS documented the Navy's investigation and gained access to a Telegram chat involving him and members of the Proud Boys.
Romano said this story isn't over — right wing activists continue to challenge school policies that support LGBTQ+ students. Some have been elected to school boards, others are contending for statewide offices — such as Chino Valley Unified School District board President Sonja Shaw.
Documentaries can take time to get in front of audiences and, because he said the issue is urgent, Romano's team isn't taking the traditional route to do that.
They've launched a GoFundMe to raise money to pay the final costs of the film. Romano said they are also hosting digital screenings for donors.
For more information on the film visit Momsclubfilm.com.
