Educational Media Reviews Online

With warmth and exuberance, this fluently crafted documentary celebrates a diverse array of gay, lesbian and transgender relationships that are redefining and broadening what constitutes a family in the United States. Nine of its ten chapters are separately devoted to distinct variations, scattered throughout the country, of traditional conceptions of the family and new forms of community taking up functions associated with those conceptions. Beginning with a lively profile of the spirited cross-dressing coordinator of a San Jose chapter of the Pink Pistols, a national organization promoting firearms in the GLBT community, the film extends its survey to include moving profiles of gay and lesbian military service personnel, a septuagenarian gay couple, the San Francisco chapter of the Dykes on Bikes Women’s Motorcycle Contingent, a lesbian couple raising children in a Pennsylvania suburb, several cross-dressing dance members of the Harlem Voguers, a pair of gay Native Americans from the Two Spirit community in Denver, and gay rodeo riders at a competition in the Rocky Mountains. Director Jean-Baptiste Erreca elicits moving testimonies from this rich survey of nontraditional lifestyles, families, and social organizations, with a triumphantly recurrent emphasis on how manifold adversities are faced and overcome in the striving for community, equality, and acceptance. Recommended for public libraries, and for academic library collections serving interests in gay and lesbian studies, gender studies, parenting, and women’s studies.