Michigan mother Amy Weber addresses Troy, MI’s proudly heterosexist mayor with the kind of loving, measured, dead-on appeal to decency that any of us would want to make, on our best days:

“I always like to think of challenges like this as opportunities to grow,” she said, introducing her children to the assembly. Weber went on to explain that in her family, “We talk every day about different families and different types of people, and teaching respect and kindness. That is the heart that beats in our home. It’s about being kind, about choosing love over everything.” She then showed drawings that the girls had done for Daniels with the words “love” on them. Weber even added, “I would love to see you at the next gay pride parade, leading the march, saying … these are my brothers and sisters just like everybody else.”

Here’s her brief testimony:

Check out Williams’ post for more.

A brilliant two minutes of film from GetUp!, a multi-issue progressive Australian organization (along the lines of Courage Campaign here in CA).

The Advocate posted about it right after Thanksgiving

From the text on its YouTube page:

Please share this with friends and loved ones.  Donate to put on Australian tv: http://tiny.cc/gkuwp Sign petition: http://www.getup.org.au/marriagematters

A Texas gal wants to send 100,000+ signatures on a petition to the senior advisor to the CBS CEO to get this aired at the upcoming Superbowl. Even if popular demand doesn’t ordinarily determine what shows (or doesn’t) at the Superbowl, why not ask?

The author (far left), pleased as punch to be posing with (l-r) KALW San Francisco City Visions producer Lisa Denenmark, NCLR Executive Director Kate Kendell, City Visions host Joseph Pace, and Equality California Marriage Equality & Coalition Strategies Director Andrea Shorter, following the July 11, 2011 show “What’s Next for the Marriage Equality Movement in CA?” (Photo credit: Keiko Lane)

Radio

The photo above is visual punctuation on a really nifty event: I had the amazing opportunity a week ago to talk with KALW’s City Visions host Joseph Pace about the marriage equality movement in California alongside two of the smartest, most consequential women you’re going to find on the issue: NCLR’s Kate Kendell and EQCA’s Andrea Shorter. (I know, right? Pinch me! Wait! Don’t do that: it would just hurt.)

Producer Lisa Denenmark wanted me to speak to the big picture cultural matters that the issue brings up, and provide a first person and parental viewpoint to flesh out the top-notch legal and tactical vantage points provided by Kate Kendell and Andrea Shorter. So lord love me I did.

Just the fact that I got to spend an hour in a room with these sheroes of mine was enough. That I was actually providing color commentary on a radio show with them bamboozles me still. But: life is nothing if not bamboozling.

Go listen to the show, by the way: it was a very interesting conversation. I learned a lot during the course of it, and confirmed my belief that if the whole movement were in Andrea’s and Kate’s hands, I’d sleep pretty well at night.  I’m not saying the battles wouldn’t be hard, and it wouldn’t take generations to get where I want us to be: just saying I’d sleep well knowing steady hands were on the tiller, guided by razor-sharp acumen and hearts as big as they need to be and egos as small as they ought to be (i.e., unencumbering these women’s work, leastwise to my naked eye).

Coalition with (non-queer and queer) communities of color and faith communities will of necessity be part of the ongoing work on this issue in this state, and this issue does not and must not eclipse–at least in the view of those of us at City Visions last wee–other totally critical LGBTQ civil rights battles, such as those over immigration reform, full DADT repeal for trans servicemembers, employment and housing discrimination, to name just a few.

I was very lucky to have the opportunity to repeat my strongly-held belief that a ballot initiative to repeal Prop 8 would be about as wrong-headed as the ballot initiative was to instate it. (See also this post.)  One of the many more pithy quotables that occurred to me after-the-fact was: “I don’t want civil rights because I’m no longer unpopular; I want them because it’s right.” What I wound up saying was kinda like that, only less pithy and involving references to constitutional democracies and the like.

As the show was wrapping, Joseph asked each of us for some parting words. What I wish I said, a bit more succinctly than I managed, was:

The most important work right now for LGBTQ families in this movement? First: ongoing self-love. Next?  Tell our stories and make common cause with everyone else outside the normative understanding of family: blended families, interracial families, adoptive kids, special needs kids, single parents, families with queer parents: together, we’re what the American family really looks like. “Love makes a family” is a very big story with wide-reaching consequences.

Right: so, that’s what I’d wished I said. I kinda got a running start at it and Joseph had to do the “Aaaaaand, wrap” hand gesture on me just as I was warming up. If ever they ask me back on the radio again, I will try to bring more 3 x 5 cards and fewer sentences.

Infrequency

Whether or not I was ready for prime time, the pleased-as-punch smile on my face in the photo above is testament to how proud I was to be a part of that conversation. The fact that it took nearly a week for this picture to get up here, however, is testament to how eventful my life has been. Eventful in the short term: later that night, our boychild awoke suddenly to an out-of-nowhere seal-bark of a cough, and a near closed-off breathing passage, thanks to extremely rapid onset of croup+stridor. It took less than two minutes to find our ordinary croup interventions ineffectual; thereafter a rapid call to 911, then a tear-filled ambulance trip (his tears; I was summoning whatever calm I could) to Children’s Hospital, then a stay there ’til, oh, about dawn. He’s okay now, but I have another 10-20 grey hairs.

Given my history with that building, I know how lucky I was to have him sleeping peacefully, slung over my shoulder, as I walked back to the car.

Eventful in the long term: life now includes a very big J-O-B that I’ve still not taken the time to tell you about.  Not that I’m wanting to be a tease. It’s just that it’s been rather difficult for me to spend sufficient time for something like an actual thought-out, content-y post (which is what that will take) when I am spending most every spare moment dogpaddling like mad to stay afloat at work.  (I should say, “spare” in the parental sense of the word: i.e., not dedicated to childcare or minimal # hours sleep nightly.)  And yes, of course, I often (usually?)work after kids go to bed; yes, of course, I often (usually?) work on the weekends if ever I have a childcare-free patch of time.

The self-evident observation: all this excess workload fits precisely into the time I used to dedicate to ye olde writing life and the care and feeding of this blog.

Yet and still, I persist in my optimism: I will get a handle on the J-O-B; its exigencies will wane as well as wax; I will eventually forgive myself my imperfections (I will! I will!); balance will find its way back into my life, simply because I will be no good at any one of the several elements of it if I am out of balance in the others.

Sign of any and all of the above: a little more trickling in here. One day. Hope springs internal.

So last weekend, just hours after New York state became the sixth in the union to recognize same-sex civil marriage, we attended a straight one which could just as easily have taken place in any of the fifty states. I know, funny, right? LGBT Pride weekend, and we go to a straight marriage. Whaddaya gonna do. Love, apparently, is love.

Fortunately there was a really nice Pagan overtone to the event, a simple and relatively succinct affair which took place in the back yard of a family friend of the bride’s, not far from Point Reyes Station in West Marin County. This is as picturesque a locale as you’re going to find in rural Northern California. God’s country, if you can call it that as a Pagan sympathizer.

Especially appreciated by our boy child was the groom’s gorgeous tunic, which sported bejeweled paisleys and was tied at the waist with a sage green sash.

Much fun was had at the ceremony venue: the usual wonderful post-union stuff.  Old friends reunited and marveling at one another’s lives and spawn, family singing around the piano, folks dancing slowly to the music, kids romping and frolicking, a dog perpetually dropping an increasingly microscopic little slobbery chewed up stick on the lap of anyone, anyone who would pick it up and give it a toss. Yet more fun was had afterward when the party repaired to an old boat house on Tomales Bay, co-owned by some of the bride’s cousins.  LAUNCH FOR HIRE, it reads in bold letters across the side.  I’m not sure in which decade this statement still held true, but last weekend, it was home to the happy launch of a new chapter of dear, blessed relationship.

The only relationship our kiddles really paid attention to was theirs with a GINORMOUS trampoline, on which they bounced for literally hours, with a new friend (daughter of spouse of cousin of bride, said bride being oldest friend of the beloved).  What’s better than a long, lazy afternoon-into-evening adventuring in a ramshackle boat house on a quiet bay with a dozen or so really, really happy, loving, gentle grown ups? All of the above spent with someone you had no idea you’d meet, way back in the morning when your parents were trying to persuade/cajole you out of the house already, we’ve got a long ways to drive, and we’re going to be late for the wedding.

As it turned out, both last weekend and during the brief window we had a shot at it ourselves in California back in ’08, we just made it in time.

[All the love in the loving world to you, Bebhinn and Tuan. And from Buddhist ecologist Joanna Macy's union: "May you ever be strangers to one another." Which to me means: learn, ever; presume, never.]

What my phone looked like in the wee hrs this AM, at the end of my date night. Text came in from a New Yorker chum at 7:53pm Pacific Standard Time (at which point my phone was off & in my pocket).  He sent the same text to my beloved (his old old friend), and probably to everyone in his damn phone (hi, Joseph! I KNOW you’re dancing your ASS off RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE).

And here’s what my inbox looked like:

I’d have images of immediate elation to share, rather than elation media-ated, if our date night was in the Castro. (I know! shocking that we weren’t! That’s what decades of being out and nearly 17 years together will do for ya! Sometimes you just go to a Sondheim show your partner’s music director did in a refurbished movie house that you watched all those Erroll Flynn movies in as a kid, 4.5 whole miles from the Castro in a totally straight part of town! Go figure!)

No analysis or commentary here tonight, though. Just a big wide smile for all the hard work folks done did out there. You deserve all the relief and joy you’re feeling. Happy Pride.

Equality California is polling folks in my fair state about their attitudes regarding a return to the ballot to repair the damage Proposition 8 wreaked upon our civil liberties.  Here’s how they put it:

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that they will not permit same-sex couples to marry while we wait for the California Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals to hear and consider the case. This announcement has sparked conversations about whether or not our state should wait for the courts to restore the freedom to marry for same-sex couples, or if we should overturn Prop. 8 at the ballot box.

Equality California is seeking input from the community and about the wisdom of moving forward with a ballot initiative. This survey is a first step in a process that will include research, conversations with coalition partners, town halls and further chances for input.

I have strong opinions about this matter, as longtime readers of this blog would know. The rest of youse: suffice to say that I wore the print off my fingertips over the battle to preserve marriage equality in CA in 2008, but also am NOT and, since Prop 13 gutted public funding for education when I was a youngster, never have been a fan of California’s proposition system to do anything besides inflame and exploit folks over inflammatory and exploitative issues.

Until faced with the wall of homophobia that all such battles bring with them (and with nauseating predictability), I did not prioritize marriage rights over others in the ongoing LGBT liberation and civil rights battle.  Since having kids, that issue has become muddled for me, because marriage rights for us empower our kids extremely efficiently (to vastly oversimplify, it’s a fast track to enabling us to pass to them our fiscal and legal protections).  Also: I’ve found it consistently unsatisfying (i.e., only fitfully effective) trying to explain “laws” to kids, and to distinguish our family’s differentiated treatment under them.  They totally get the majority/minority stuff, the distinction that “many” families or even “most” look one way, parent-wise, and “some” (like ours) look another. They get it that we’re a left-handed family in a right-handed world. The law part? The unfair treatment part? Blurry. Perhaps because here the power lies way, way outside Mama’s and Baba’s hands, and that’s a bitter pill to swallow.

I continue to harbor my same ol’ feminist critique of the cynical history of the institution, but with each passing parental year, I recognize the vertiginousness of the climb up over and ultimately past this institution as central and defining. My 6-year-old daughter just the other day learned the “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage” chant. She chuckled at it (her version included the baby wearing underpants and doing the “hootchie coochie dance,” and yes, she got it from a book she was reading).  This chant rhymes nicely and appears elsewhere in culture. Before she left preschool she understood, from all the books and fairy tales she’d read, that “marriage” signified the culminating punctuation mark on committed love. Even when she knew nothing about what it was, exactly, she knew what it meant.  Its magnetic capacity to accrue gestalt-y symbolic meaning began for her circa age 3 or 4.

Don’t get me wrong: I got no problem shading that for the kids each time — commitment is commitment, ritualized; this word is about a legal contract that brings with it all sorts of financial and legal protections, etc.  I’m just saying it’s  a large sandhill we’re trying to climb up here.

So when EQ CA asked me, mailing list recipient, what I thought about going back to the ballot in 2012 to rectify the damage of Prop 8, here’s what I said, after checking every HELL NO radio button I could find:

I blogged and organized my guts out over the 2008 campaign (cf: http://www.lesbiandad.net/links/no-on-8/#meseries). Blog readers, allies, and I raised over $16,700 and am fairly sure I raised awareness and helped sway some of the swayable. And I felt totally swindled by the campaign. In retrospect feel I owe an apology to those who donated money toward it. LGBT families were inexcusably invisible, and our kids, who stand to gain the most protections, were totally shredded by the opposition with nearly nonexistent protections/ counterattacks. I was on a statewide con.call over family invisibility and the rationale was utterly unconvincing (focus group-based). Civil rights protections should never be voted upon: I believe that includes those voted IN as well as those voted OUT.  This is a JUDICIAL matter, first and last. Though I would never pick this fight, I would defend myself, my community, and my kids, every time someone else did. However I would NOT fundraise for EQ if it picked it.

So there. I’d have written buttloads more but lucky for them, they put a word count limit on the text box. [Ed note: I did write more in an account of the campaign's San Francisco debrief in March, 2009.]

You who donated through this site to that battle waged by that committee against the Yes on 8 folks: I am sorry it was waged the way it was. Only thing I’m sorrier about was that it was unsuccessful. Or, perhaps, that now Minnesota is facing it.

Want to share your thoughts with Equality California on whether they should mount this horse? Here you go.

This is a victory for the American people; it’s a victory for our justice system.

That’s attorney Ted Olson, commenting on Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling, released yesterday, that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional and violates the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of due process and equal protection. Watch more of his remarks below (h/t, Joe. My. God.):

It is surely among the most personal and profound wins for our community. Judge Walker’s ruling eviscerates the baseless and empty arguments of our opponents. Walker found that there was simply no credible, rational, believable, or persuasive reason to take the right to marry away from same-sex couples. Our opponents had a team of very fine lawyers, and at the end of the trial, the evidence they presented in support of Prop 8 made abundantly clear that other than discomfort or hostility, there is no justifiable basis for excluding us from the same right to marry that’s enjoyed by every other couple in this country.

That’s part of Kate Kendell’s statement follwing the ruling. Read more at her blog here: “A Landmark Victory for Justice and Our Families.”

There’s a blizzard of coverage of this — or so it seems, from the media I watch; seven of the top ten “keywords” tracked on Twitter last night had to do with this verdict. An eloquent New York Times editorial appeared that very afternoon: “Marriage is a Constitutional Right.”

There’s much more to say than I have time for here; still more to be read all over the internet elsewhere. I will say this, though: there are many battles to fight in the larger struggle for LGBT civil rights.  But given the meticulous care with which Judge Walker dismantled the substantiations for legal discrimination against LGBT people, this win will ramify far and wide. I can’t imagine its impact will be felt only in the arena of marriage law. As many have said, regardless of its fate at the Federal District Court of Appeals level (next up), and the Supreme Court, should they decide to hear it (next after that), Walker provided “findings of fact” regarding our social treatment, our lack of social harm, and our consequent need for equal protection that simply become legal precedent. For that, I am extremely extremely grateful.

Take a look at the decision yourself. As Dr. Maddow said on her show last night, it makes great reading, probably better than the novel you’re reading right now. Or (I’m happy to add, today) the blog.

Though I am thinking of them.

An impressive and spirited number of those who haven’t seen the film are cocksure (d’oh!) they know precisely what it’s about and what cultural impact it will have, and are therefore both avoiding it like the plague and denouncing its writer-director. (“No cash for this trash!” one commenter declared; “Lisa Cholodenko is an idiot!” concluded another.)

To which I can only sigh and moan: My people, my people. That, and periodically jump on one of the up-and-down ostriches and try to talk sense into the cantankerous menagerie.

As one who not only saw the film but found it breathtakingly subversive — think New Yorker cover that takes you at least ten seconds to “get,” and then after you do you go, “Wow,” or “Ha!” and appreciate the value of art that much more  (e.g., this recent one)– I am storing up observation after observation and look forward to doing up at least one post later this week reflecting (and inviting dialog) on what in the hell is up with our people and this issue that so many of us would be so, well, reactionary.  (I am also feverishly trying to scratch out the time to finish transcribing and writing up my round-table interview with director Cholodenko and actor Bening).

My least favorite theory about this tempest-in-a-stewpot is that Fox News has polluted all of contemporary American culture, not just its viewers, such that reasoned debate based on valid, primary source evidence (which one has actually reviewed oneself) has become old hat, hopelessly too 20th century.

Another, maybe less dreary theory is that a lot of online debate has the subtlety of a big ole bar fight. Between anonymous people. Who have no prior or enduring relationship to one another. The sober ones, who root their objections in sincere, very valid concerns, are often inaudible above the din, or at risk of being knocked out and silenced by an errant swing.

Is the Jules character in The Kids Are All Right a kind of a white lesbian Bigger Thomas? Maybe, maybe not. But the question, I hope, indicates that one has to think a bit, and with a modicum of subtlety, to answer it. Also, just as one would have had to have read Native Son to pass judgment on the Bigger character and Richard Wright, one pretty much has to see the The Kids Are All Right to determine what one thinks about the Jules/Paul storyline and Lisa Cholodenko’s treatment of it.

Now, to the actual carousel ride of the post title! A sweet, 2 minute 37 second detour into the experience of a three and a half-year old boy! Hope it’s as calming to you as it is to me. [Apologies: it's Baba's first iPhone video, and I'm no videographer.]  Minimal dialog, nice soundtrack. The one audible line uttered by my son I think does a good job of summing up a lot of the problem with the Kids debate amongst what I can only assume, perhaps wrongly, is a predominantly non-parent crowd: “Baba, your whole body is in the way of my face.”

I am proud to say that I was a hard sell for The Kids Are All Right, the family comedy-drama starring Annette Bening and Julianne Moore and opening in limited release on July 9th.  A mainstream film featuring a lesbian-headed family?!  And the leads are among two of the finest actors working right now? With seven Oscar nominations between ‘em? Oh you betcha I’m there.  But I’m there with both expectations and hackles raised.  The attitude I bring to the movie theater approximates what you might bring to the living room in which your daughter’s prom date sits. Hopefully nervously.

Picture your kid, a sweet tender thing you’ve dedicated the last decade and a half to protecting and promoting, who deserves the best, or at least a fair shake, goddamn it.  And then there’s the date, a Usual Suspect with a history of stringing folks along and then breaking their hearts, or worse.  The sweet tender thing in this construction, though, is me and my people: lesbians, even more specifically, lesbian-headed families, and the kids in them. The prom date I’m looking askance at? Commercial Hollywood film.

I have a right to be squinty-eyed.  For most of my movie-going life, commercial Hollywood film has left me and mine either ignored along the walls surrounding the dance floor, quietly convincing ourselves of our worth despite the lack of  attention, or attended to for just a moment, only to be betrayed in the next, accidentally or even maliciously.

I will never forget sitting, or rather eventually slinking down lower and lower in my seat, in a suburban Minneapolis movie theater watching Basic Instinct in the early 1990s.  A mainstream Hollywood movie that had a lesbian in it! Plus a bisexual woman!  I had to go, and took with me my gal sweetie, a friend, and her gal sweetie.  The overwhelmingly heterosexual crowd watched placidly as blood splattered the screen in the opening scene, and then – I’m not making this up – later groaned and called out in disgust when Sharon Stone kisses her female lover.  For Michael Douglass’ benefit.  Which lover, to no one’s surprise, turns out to be a homicidal, suicidal, man-hating basket case.

Things were only a tad better in the mid-1990s romantic comedy Chasing Amy. Again, I was lured to the theater with the hopes that somehow, something resembling “our” truths would win out over “their” fantasies about us. Turned out, not so much. Ben Affleck made his big screen debut playing – surprise! – the handsome, charming guy who turns the heretofore disgruntled lesbian gal happy and straight.  I’m oversimplifying just a tad here, but not much.  I remember spending about 45 minutes after the movie trying to explain to an open-minded-yet-ignorant straight guy chum just what in the Sam Hill was wrong with all that.

Yes, there have been finer moments for us gals in mainstream film – Bound, the noir thriller with Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon springs eagerly to mind – but the disappointments have been heavy ones. Tragedy, pathology, and disposability have figured way, way too large in our film presence thus far. If we’ve been present at all.

I offer up these highlights of my theater-going past in order to help explain the squint in my eye as I entered the theater for a sneak preview of The Kids Are All Right. The good news is that, in the ten to twenty years since I slunk down in that theater seat, interesting things have been happening to me and mine, not least of which has been that we’ve been gayby-booming big time.  That, and we’ve been winning bits and snatches of civil rights, even if we’re shoved one step back for every two steps we take forward.  And some of  us — some super-smart ones at that — have been worming our ways up through film school and the film-making industry, becoming Hollywood’s best kept secret.

This, as you might have suspected, leads us directly to writer-director (and lesbian mum) Lisa Cholodenko and her new film The Kids Are All Right.  You may recall Cholodenko’s work in the creepy but compelling High Art, in which Allie Sheedy’s junkie art photographer seduces Rhada Mitchell’s ambitious magazine editor, Patricia Clarkson dripping around in the background as a tragicomic former Fassbinder actress).  Or perhaps you’ll remember the somewhat less creepy but equally naughty Laurel Canyon, in which Frances McDormand’s Los Angeles music mogul seduces the young lead singer of the band she’s producing, while her uptight son Christian Bale watches his fiancée Kate Beckinsdale slip deeper and deeper into his mother’s debauched scene.  Both are closely observed, deeply atmospheric studies of boundaries transgressed and innocents seduced.

The atmosphere is far sunnier in The Kids Are All Right, but seduction is still afoot.  The interesting question is, Who is being drawn into whose world? Annette Bening plays Nic, a high-strung, wine-swilling, bread-winning doctor; Julianne Moore plays her partner Jules, flaky and aimless, who’s taking a stab at landscape design, her third career foray. Their older daughter Joni, played by Mia Wasikowska (late of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland), hangs in that delicate, thoughtful summertime suspension between high school and college.

It’s Joni’s younger brother Laser, played by teen heartthrob Josh Hutcherson (late of Journey to the Center of the Earth), who bookends the film.  His character provides catalyst for the film’s movement, both in its breezy opening scenes as he cycles through L.A. with a skateboarding chum, and when he asks his sister – who’s of age now – to contact the man whose sperm their mothers used to conceive them.  To Cholodenko and her co-screenwriter Stuart Blumberg’s credit, the plot exposition, even around such potentially puzzling matters as identity release sperm donation, moves swiftly and clearly. (“Identity release” sperm donors are those who choose to be accessible to children conceived with their sperm upon the children’s reaching adulthood. Others are either known all along, officially or personally, or are anonymous.) At the end of the film, it’s Laser’s vision we’re left with.

Mark Ruffalo plays Paul, every lesbian’s dream/nightmare sperm donor: he’s a handsome, affable, organic veggie-growing, funky upscale restaurant-running, motorcycle-riding, magnetic dude. As in, steal away the kids’ affections magnetic.  Hi-jinx and complexity ensue when he responds to the kids’ request to meet him, goes on to meet the moms, and hires Jules to redesign his garden.

Suffice to say that, because this is a story, by definition requiring tension and conflict to exist, stuff happens.  Stuff which, because this is a story, has no obligation to be completely plausible, least of all statistically significant — it just has to be plausible enough, and work within the confines of the characters’ journeys in the film.  This is stuff which the trailer lays bare, and while it might send many folks to the movie with happy expectation (man candy! more images of Mark Ruffalo in the buff!), it will saddle others with a gnawing dread.  No disrespect to Mr. Ruffalo, who was engaging throughout, but I sympathize with that dread (if it could speak, it would be muttering from between clenched teeth, “If our first shot at a lesbian family’s mainstream film portrayal gets splatt-balled by another hetero romance I’ll scream!”).

To those of you feeling that dread gnawing at you, I say, “Scream not. Wait out the movie before you alarm your fellow theater goers. Cholodenko and Blumberg are up to something interesting here.”  As to the rest, I say, “Get ready for plenty of Mark Ruffalo’s fuzzy nekkid body in flagrante delicto!”

I’ll step aside here to note that if you must have more plot synopsis I direct you to the many other reviews of the film – from NPR (“an adorably high-spirited romp” that “puts the fun in dysfunction”) to the Chicago Tribune (“instant classic”) to the Los Angeles Times, (“witty, urbane, and thoroughly entertaining”) to Salon.com, (“ranks with the most compelling portraits of an American marriage, regardless of sexuality, in film history”). [Added later: Also A.O. Scott at the New York Times ("nearly perfect"). Or, still later, my current fave in the MSM: the clears-the-right-intellectual-hurdles Dana Stevens in Slate ("the portrait of this couple's decades-long bond underscores the absurdity of the debate about what to call same-sex unions.") And still later: our inveterate and most astute Dana Rudolph at Mombian ("the perfect lesbian mom date movie") Now how often do you hear THAT?] I find myself  in agreement with most of them, with the sad exception of Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review, whose mis-read toward the end reveals far more about the reviewer’s blinkered vision, I fear, than the film’s heart.

I’ll further note that yet more commentary on the film’s social and political statements will follow in a future post in which I slice up and share the fruits of a media roundtable I participated in with the director and Ms. Bening. Now back to the review.

As in Bound, which took familiar noir plot elements for a lesbian spin, Kids takes familiar elements – a young woman’s coming of age and cutting the apron strings that bind, in this case two pairs of ‘em; an established couple’s relationship, sagging with neglect, rocked by the introduction of a new element; a family’s stretching and reshaping as it undergoes inevitable transformations – and breathes new life in them as they’re re-told by fresh voices.  The acting throughout is superb; even the young castmembers hold their own among towering vets like Bening and Moore.  You want to watch each of these people.  And Cholodenko lets you: she holds the camera on them just long enough so that we see the twinkle of complexity and paradox in moment after moment – and then cuts before it’s a moment too long.

The dialog crackles with wit, ringing true and revealing – most entertainingly in Ruffalo’s Paul, who spouts a cornucopia of groovy dudeisms.  In a heart-to-heart with Laser about his bad-element friend, Paul says “That’s not ‘amped,’ that’s just being a tool.” Or, in lieu of “shut the f**k up”: “shut the front door.” In a rare and well-earned moment of communion with Nic, he reaches for her hand and says, jovially,“My brother from another mother!”

It’s a tribute to the strengths of the performances – Ms. Bening’s being by far the most riveting– that so much of the character development and plot movement happens outside of the dialog, in reaction shots.   Bening is simply a joy to watch, and in one minutes’ long scene in particular, she takes Nic through a series of thoughts and feelings, first casual, then building concern, then finally shocked gravity.  Cholodenko keeps the camera close on her face, the ambient sound at a distance, then brings the sound in all warbly, as if underwater.  It’s the only self-consciously “filmic” moment in the movie, and it’s well-spent.  If a single scene can earn you an Oscar nomination, this one would be it for Bening in this film.

There’s lots more to enjoy about The Kids Are All Right – the infectious, über-groovy soundtrack, the disciplined attention to detail (when we first see him, Paul chomps an apple as he exits his organic garden, a guy Eve; both Nic and Jules sip their morning coffee out of “World’s Best Mom” mugs).  The laugh-out-loud humor.  During an exquisitely awkward scene, Laser asks why his moms had gay male porn (rather than lesbian porn) in their dresser drawer (it’s a long story how he got there).  Moore’s Jules begins to explain the mysteries of externalized desire in an abstract, blurry intellectual fashion, going on to say, “Anyway, with lesbian porn, usually they hire two straight women to do the scenes, and the inauthenticity—“ “That’s enough!” blurts Nic, hastily interrupting.  It’s as if the screenwriters were smiling and winking at every audience member — the lesbo-cogniscenti and the along-for-the-ride visitors alike.

The main thing to enjoy about this film, though, is the love of people in it – all the people, even the cads. I went twice, which helped, since my appreciation, like the wine Nic knocks back throughout the film, became deeper and more nuanced over time.  The first time I saw it was several weeks ago with an old friend, the second time was last night with my old partner – we’ll be together 16 years this month.  She laughed out loud throughout the first hour-plus, and then for the last twenty minutes held my hand in a vice grip as she dabbed at her eyes and sniffled.  We have two kids, after all,  closely resembling those in the film.  Give or take a decade or so.  What we saw up on the screen was something we’re utterly unaccustomed to seeing there: not just something nearer to our relationship and our family than we’ve ever seen, but the reflection back of something deeper.  The simple fact we know to be true: our kids are all right. So are we all.

[cross-posted at BlogHer]

My favorite, probably, among so much news of that day: both Boies and Olson said, in the press conference afterward, that this has been “the most important case of their lives.”  Yes, that Boies and Olson. The they fought over who got to be the 43rd President of the United States Boies and Olson.

Many have said — history has shown — that the brilliance of the reasoning on behalf of justice is not what determines whether and when it is administered. True enough. But damn, it’s nice to hear how hammer-loud and how clarion-clear its bell was rung yesterday.

Dear LD,

Yesterday we heard compelling closing arguments in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the federal challenge to Proposition 8. NCLR was in the courtroom live-tweeting, making sure that you shared this historical moment with us. During the trial we gave you daily analysis of the testimony, and today you can read our analysis of closing arguments on Pam’s House Blend.

I was in the courtroom and had the honor of watching this highly-skilled legal team in action. This trial has been a truly historic moment for our community. It is the first time a federal court has heard, first hand, from real live witnesses, about the harm that the denial of marriage equality causes same-sex couples and their families every day. It is also the first time a federal court has heard the arguments in favor of marriage equality presented live in court by an array of internationally renowned scholars who are truly experts in their respective fields. Check out my vlog on yesterday’s closing arguments, which were as powerful as the testimony heard at the trial.

watch video

Judge Walker will announce his ruling soon, and as we’ve been there for you during the trial, NCLR will be with you at the end to discuss what the ruling means for our community and our fight for equality. I am so excited to announce our newest benefit to NCLR members: a members-only live chat with NCLR attorneys on the day of ruling where you can discuss the results with our legal experts.

If you’re not yet an NCLR member (membership starts at just $40), I hope you’ll join today—not only will you not want to miss this important web chat, but NCLR couldn’t do what we do without the support of donors just like you. We couldn’t have live-tweeted this entire trial without the support of our donors. And you can trust that your support will be put to use right away to fight for equality for all lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and families.

No matter what happens next, this was a landmark moment in history. I hope you will continue to stand with us as the next chapter unfolds.

In Solidarity,

Kate Kendell

Executive Director, NCLR

P.S. If you’re already a member, the day before the ruling, I’ll send you an email with your registration information and all the pertinent instructions so you can get your questions about the trial answered by our attorneys. I am so glad we are able to offer this new benefit to you—this is one small way we can say, “thank you!” for your vital support.