The story unfolds across three hourlong chapters in more or less chronological order. The first episode charts the courtship between the filmmakers’ parents, Robin Young and Sandy Russo, and follows the couple’s excitement as they build the family they’ve always wanted. Initially, Tom Steel, the gay man whose sperm had helped conceived Russo-Young, is welcomed into their orbit. As his bond with Russo-Young grows warmer, however, his relationship with her parents deteriorates.
Russo-Young’s storytelling approach has the warm, sometimes devastating intimacy of a personal collage. She cuts and pastes snippets from old home movies, archival footage and present-day interviews with friends and family to piece together her narrative.
The family’s story necessarily dovetails with the recent history of LGBTQ rights in America, serving up snapshots of a community in the midst of rapid change. It’s not even until a friend passes Russo and Young a pamphlet in the late 1970s that it even occurs to them they might be able to have children of their own; by the time Steel takes them to court in the 1990s, judges still tend to favor biological parental relationships and rule against same-sex couples.
The climax of the series arrives late in the third episode, as Russo-Young confronts her moms about her own evolving impressions of the ordeal they endured together, and the decisions they made in their need to protect her. The tears flow freely, and the hurt is apparent on the faces of Russo-Young and her mothers. Yet in their way, her parents are pleased. “We saved every piece of material from the lawsuit,” says Russo.
“We had to, over and over again, in many different ways, explain why our family was a family,” Cade says in an interview from 1999. She’s talking about the lengths her family had to go to in order to prove to the court that they were, in fact, a real family, superseding even Steel’s biological claim to her sister. Watchingin 2021, though, the proof is in the pudding: Only a family would fight this hard to remain one.
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