MTV’s True Life is a one-hour documentary series that profiles issues important to young people. From True Life: I’m Coming Home From Iraq to True Life: I’m On Steroids, this weekly show typically covers a diverse, lively selection of topics. But with much anticipation about the conflict they might portray in their latest episode, True Life: I Have Gay Parents, some audiences may consider it something of a disappointment.
Originally produced by MTV Networks for Logo, a GLBT entertainment channel, the episode follows three young people with gay parents: Aidan, a liberal-minded marching band member with two moms; Hope, an adopted African American girl with two white fathers; and Cooper, a 19-year old waiting to meet his biological father (with the support of his two moms).
For a show that typically deals with such volatile, controversial topics, the gay families profiled are boringly normal. From parents doting on stain removal methods to an after-school dinner at Cheeburger Cheeburger, True Life personifies its title.
The most intriguing teen in the show is Aidan, a member of her school’s Gay-Straight Alliance and a self-professed pansexual. Although she calls herself the “token lesbian” of the school and wears rainbow garb during Diversity Week, she also has a boyfriend, and has decided to wear a dress-rather than a tuxedo-to her junior prom.
This recent decision to wear more traditional attire bothers Jane, Aidan’s feminist, butch mom. With her short hair, men’s dress shirt, and sweater vest blazing, Jane is noticeably uncomfortable when they go shopping for the big event because she believes prom dresses are patriarchal, with classically uncomfortable ties and restraints. “We bonded when we would go and try on tuxes. These dresses are creepy,” she quips at one point during their shopping adventure. But the whole scene is good-natured, and both parents are suitably proud when Aidan comes downstairs on prom night wearing a beautiful dress that blends perfectly with her male date’s traditional tux. It is a proud family moment straight out of suburbia.
The teens in the documentary are all thoughtful, insightful, and-dare we say-well adjusted, and these portrayals support the positive statistics about kids with gay families. For example, a recent Tufts University study found that children who are raised in same-sex families have no difference in gender identity, sexual orientation, or emotional issues than their peers from heterosexual households.
Interestingly, the Tufts study also found that children from gay families might be better off developmentally, exhibiting higher self-esteem, better behavior, and fewer incidences of mental illness and emotional disturbances. Experts suggest that this trend is due to the open-mindedness and stoic attitudes that many gay people must adopt in order to survive in a discriminatory world. “I think that my parents being gay has given me a lot of freedom to be who I am and to explore further who I’m going to become,” says Hope. “They know what it’s like for people to reject them for who they are.”
The gay families in True Life echo these sentiments of open-mindedness, compassion, and acceptance. While being confronted by her teachers at a marching band tryout, Aidan comments that she wouldn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable with her politics or family life. It seems that she?the outsider, the “queer” student?is the only one mature and intelligent enough to look past who her parents are.
Although the show tends to focus on the teens’ development independent from their families, the idea that gay parents propagate homosexuality in their children is eventually brought up. Shifty-eyed Cooper?who was conceived through artificial insemination?says that he deals with this issue a lot. “A lot of people [think] when you come from a gay family, doesn’t that make you turn gay? But… I’m not.”
All of the teens profiled in True Life seem to have an answer for this commonly held belief. “I think that is the most B.S. thing that anyone has ever come up with in a million years,” comments Aidan. “Because honestly, where do gay people come from? Straight families!
The logic doesn’t hold.”
Suggestions of subtle biases and vague allusions to stereotypes are about as far as this documentary is willing to go, as True Life deals with the topic of gay families by addressing the parents as being incidentally gay, rather than catalysts for protest and hate.
From a visibility perspective, this insipid approach actually has a positive impact. There are no militant lectures on gay marriage or generations of man-hating lesbians, only real families with real household issues.
While it doesn’t make for the most intriguing hour of television, this portrayal of gay families also makes it more difficult for Conservatives to make the “protect the families” argument; the gay moms and dads in the show aren’t raising dysfunctional gay children, or subjecting them to whatever oddities and extremes the religious right might envision. They are simply doing laundry, making dinner, and driving their kids to school like everyone else.
If television can be refreshingly vapid, this is it.
But for lesbian viewers who knew all along that gay families are as real as any other, these trivialities may prove to be a disappointment. There is nary a discussion of politics or discrimination, and the teaser to the show showed more hateful comments than the actual documentary. In fact, the show lacks almost any opinion from the religious right, although surely they exist in “true life.”
Aidan’s classmates quote the Bible and stumble over the word “ho-homo-homosexuality”, but that is about as far as it goes. The theme of the show clearly lies in the mundane activities, with the tiniest undercurrent of “why not them?”
Although it may be to the detriment of lesbian entertainment value, real cases like these make it harder for anyone to justify denying the existence of these families. In that regard, True Life: I Have Gay Parents succeeds with?and may even win over?the audience whose support is most needed.
