Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in a scene from Lisa Choldenko’s The Kids Are All Right. Photo credit: Suzanne Tenner.

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.

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Philip Spooner’s testimony on behalf of LGBT marriage equality before the Maine legislature has become a YouTube phenomenon. I ran it in the sidebar here some time ago, but (like Pam Spaulding), I’m inspired to run it again today. (More Spoonerism yesterday at the LA Times.)

A full transcription of what he said is over at this post at Box Turtle Bulletin. Here’s some of it:

I am 86 years old, a lifetime Republican, and an active VFW Chaplan. I still serve three hospitals and two nursing homes, and I also serve Meals on Wheels for nine years. My wife of 54 years, Jenny, died in 1997. Together we had four children including one gay son. All four of our boys were in service.

I was born on a potato farm north of Caribou and Perham, where I was raised to believe that all men are created equal, and I never forgot that. I served in the U.S. Army in 1942 to 1945, in the First Army as a medic and as an ambulance driver. I worked with every outfit over there including Patton’s Third Army. I saw action in all five major battles in Europe including the Battle of the Bulge. My unit was awarded a Presidential Citation for transporting more patients with fewer actions than any other ambulance unit in Europe. And I was in the liberation of Paris. After the war, I carried POWs back from Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia, and also hauled hundreds of injured Germans back to Germany.

I’m here today because of a conversation I had last June when I was voting. A woman at my polling place asked me, “Do you believe in equality of gay and lesbian people?”

I was pretty surprised to be asked a question like that. It made no sense to me. Finally I asked her, “What do you think our boys fought for on Omaha Beach?”

For the first time in U.S. electoral history, Maine could turn the tide today and defend LGBT rights (wrongly, as yet incessantly) up for popular vote. I am ready for that tide to turn. Ãœber number-cruncher Nate Silver seems to think it will.

Me, I’ll be holding my breath all day.  And saying the obvious: if any of you know anyone (who might know anyone who might know anyone) who lives in Maine, please call to help get out the vote.

Our eyes are on you and our hearts are with you in Maine, in Kalamazoo, MI, and in Washington State. (Louise, Pam’s House Blend is a fierce Maine ally, has been all over this the whole time. Here’s her post on the last day of the campaign there. [Update: and a few more here, "Maine News Updates, Tidbits, and Rumors," and here, "Final Newspaper Clippings/Maine Blog Stories."] Don Davis at Bilerico has a comprehensive day-of analysis of Washington’s Ref. 71 polling here.)

[Image at right: the Langbehn-Pond family, from Janice Langbehn's Twitter page. Lisa at left, Janice at right.]

I had a Banned Books Week / LGBT families in children’s lit post all queued up and ready for its final powdering, but have to set it aside after reading on Tuesday evening that the Langbehn v. Jackson Memorial Hospital case was dismissed yesterday by its Florida judge.

Janice Langbehn, for those who can’t place where you heard her name (if not from here, in February and August of last year), is the woman whose partner of 18 years, Lisa Pond, suffered an aneurism just as they were about to embark on an R Family vacation cruise with their three children. They were in Miami. The hospital barred all of Lisa’s family from seeing her, because, in the words of the hospital social worker, they were in “an anti-gay state.” (Family? What family?)  Janice tells the whole story here, on the blog she started for their family.

The more you read about their life together — the 25 children they fostered over the years, the four they adopted, Lisa’s Girl Scout troop — and the more you read about the lengths Janice went to to try to gain access to Lisa for herself and their children — the more vivid and the more unthinkable their inhumane treatment becomes.  Lambda Legal argued her case against the hospital; their page on the case is here.  Janice posted the judge’s motion to dismiss the case here. I — and any other LD readers as ignorant in the minutia of the law as I — welcome anyone’s armchair analysis / translation of its import.  Lambda and the family have until October 16 to take the next step, whatever that may be.

Two more things:

(1) Look at Lambda Legal’s Tools for Protecting Your Health Care Wishes, but with this caveat: Janice and Lisa had medical power of attorney for one another, and Janice had them faxed to the hospital in one of her many attempts to do everything possible to have their family status recognized by the hospital staff.  It was the bigotry and inhumanity of the hospital staff that kept them apart, when other family members, including small children, were welcomed to visit other patients in same critical care area there. (Nolo Press explains more about Powers of Attorney for Health Care here.) And,

(2) the Langbehn-Pond family lives in Washington state. Right now people in Washington are fighting tooth and nail to preserve their strong domestic partnership law. Referendum 71 needs to pass for it to stay on the books, and for all Washington families to be treated fairly, especially in times of crisis, and  for all families to be provided the same protections under the law. So if you haven’t done what you can to support their battle there, please do. For the Langbehn-Pond family, if for no one else.

A visual to leave you with: NGLTF keeps and regularly updates a map of all the states with laws on the books that, in one way or another, throw barriers between us and safe, proper, ethical, full legal recognition.  And sometimes throw barriers between us and our very own families. A sobering note: only the clear white states have no prohibitions on same-sex partnerships.

Click on the image to see it at its full-page resolution: