On Sunday Jan. 31, HBO Original Programming broadcast Rose O’Donnell’s event, “A Family Is a Family Is a Family”, effectively a one hour documentary.
Much of the documentary (38 minutes) consists of kids talking about their various families with a degree of enthusiasm. Of course, there was enumeration of different kinds of families that develop besides the traditional one (there is one sequence where children explain the biology of procreation in marriage, however, as long as a description of surrogacy). One girl from China says she was adopted because of the one child policy. In China, a boy is expected to take care of his parents when they get older, but a girl is not.
Rosie O’Donnell appears half-way through the film, and says “A family gives us people to take care of us and people to take care of. Family means love all the way. Your family will always be there for you.” Rosie says she and her partner head a family even though they are not in the same home now.
In the gay male world that I came of age in during the 1970s and 1980s, there was a lot of emphasis on selectivity of significant others. A person had to prove that he was “worthy” or your attention. That seems the opposite of the family, where the committed love among members is supposed to be a done deal. But because the political climate a few decades ago drove gays away from “the family”, gay men especially developed the idea of extreme selectivity.
In the viewpoint of the film, Family has the right to demand loyalty, to perceive oneself as a member of a social unit (created by parents) as well as an individual, and the willingness to put the needs of other family members above one’s own chosen ends. In conservative thinking, parents have the right and duty to implement this emotional obligation on their children. Psychologists call it “socialization”. Rosie would extend socialization to families formed out of choice, not just blood relations. Unsocialized people tend to perceive the demands of other family members as requiring “sacrifice” until they have their own families. Individuals who resist this emotional socialization are sometimes characterized by clinical psychologists as having “schizoid personalities”, but I think that the whole area has a moral undertone: some people need emotional solidarity from other family members more than others; there is nothing wrong with living productively as a “loner.”
The teenage boy who sings the “family commercial” shown these days at AMC Theaters sings in the film, a song called “So Many Combinations”.
I thought I would hear the Sister Sledge “We Are Family” song, but it didn’t turn up.
The film offers a lot of animation, much of it in pastels, rather simple in technique.
Rosie O’Donnell had appeared on Oprah Winfrey on January 21, presenting the show and also telling her story in adopting children, which had been illegal for gays in Florida. But see the CNN story Nov. 25 2008 by Taylor Gendossy on Florida’s gay adoption ban being overturned, link here.
The main HBO link for the program is here.