by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The last episode of When We Rise begins in 2006 and continues through 2013, when
the first of the two same-sex marriage cases reached the U.S. Supreme Court and
the Defense of Marriage Act (DoMA) was finally ruled unconstitutional — half of
it, anyway, the part that defined marriage as the union of one man and one
woman for the purposes of all federal government benefits. The other half of
DoMA — the part that said states could refuse to recognize marriages between
same-sex couples legally performed in other states — remained in effect until
the Supreme Court, in a case from two years later, finally ruled that all
restrictions on the ability of same-sex couples to marry violated the equal
protection clause of the 14th Amendment. This was the only episode
I’d been able to watch in the company of my husband Charles — we got married
during the 4 ½-month “window” between the California Supreme Court’s ruling
that the state constitution gave same-sex
couples the right to marry and the passage of Proposition 8 by the state’s
voters, which amended the California Constitution to define marriage as the
union of one man and one woman. (That provision remains in the state
constitution, though the Supreme Court threw out Proposition 8 on a
technicality in a separate case in 2013 and therefore legal same-sex marriages
resumed in California two years before they became legal throughout the
country.) While there’s a strong possibility that that decision will be
reversed by the new Supreme Court justices President Donald Trump will be able
to appoint (Anthony Kennedy, generally a hard-line conservative and the author
of the loathsome Citizens United decision that effectively legalizes political corruption by big-money
donors, but who’s also the author of virtually every major landmark decision
expanding Queer rights, is 80 years old and Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 82, and if
both of them either die or retire during the Trump Presidency he’ll have a
chance to replace them with justices who are likely to overrule the same-sex
marriage decisions, the decision banning state sodomy laws, the Roe v. Wade decision protecting women’s reproductive choice and — a particular
priority of Trump’s — the 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan decision making it virtually impossible to win a libel suit if you’re a
so-called “public figure”), at least for now same-sex marriage is legal
nationwide. Charles, who’d been at work when most of the previous episodes
aired, liked this one better than the bits and pieces of the previous shows
he’d been able to see, at least partly (I suspect) because this is history we
lived together and which directly applied to us.
It was focused mostly on the
marriage cases and the famous odd-couple pairing of attorneys Ted Olson and
David Boies (both of whom are depicted on the program but the actors playing
them are not identified on imdb.com), who had been on opposite sides of the Bush v. Gore lawsuit that decided the 2000 Presidential election, who got together
to do a legal challenge to Proposition 8 in federal court. The script by Dustin
Lance Black (who also was executive producer of the entire series and directed
this final program himself) shows Chad Griffin (T. R. Knight) reaching out to
old-line Queer community leaders for assistance in the suit and support for the
American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the organization he founded to
coordinate it, and landing one of the series’ lead characters, Cleve Jones (Guy
Pearce) — in fact Griffin avoided reaching out to the mainstream Queer leaders because he thought they
had screwed up the previous marriage campaigns (until 2012 marriage equality
had lost in every state in which it was on
the ballot — even in bright-blue bastions like California) and he didn’t want
their “advice.” The show also depicted Ken Jones’ (Michael Kenneth Williams)
struggle with the storefront church which saved him from drug addiction but
also turned out to be homophobic, and the Black church he joins after that
which is Queer-friendly and one of whose ministers is a Transwoman who gets hit
by a car and killed — and her relatives show up for the funeral and insist on
referring to her as “him.” There’s also a Queer-bashing — indeed Black made
sure to insert a Queer-bashing scene in all four parts of the program (Cleve Jones was the
victim in the first two, an Asian Transwoman in the third and Ken Jones in the
fourth), and it wraps up the plot strand of Roma Guy (Mary-Louise Parker) and
her partner Diane (pronounced “Deanne,” for some reason) Jones (Rachel
Griffiths) by having their daughter marry her long-time boyfriend (so there!
Just because she was raised by a Lesbian couple didn’t turn her into a Lesbian
herself!) and the love and emotion surrounding this even finally breaks Roma’s
resistance to marriage (on the familiar 1970’s argument that marriage was an
institution created by the patriarchy specifically to subjugate women) and
leads her to accept Diane’s proposal and get married as soon as the Supreme
Court lifts the ban on same-sex marriage in California in 2013.
When We Rise, episode four, had some of the same flaws as the
previous three — the uneasy perching between “official history” and a richer,
deeper, more emotional presentation of the characters as individuals, warts and all — and it missed some opportunities
I thought surely a writer as experienced and generally savvy as Dustin Lance
Black would have seized on (like the fact that Cleve Jones and Ted Olson had
one big thing in common — both had lost people they loved to tragedies: Cleve Jones’
partner had killed himself in the throes of late-stage AIDS and Olson’s wife
Barbara had been on one of the planes hijacked on 9/11) — but for the most part
it was a profound and deeply moving ending to a sometimes creaky but generally
good set of shows on a movement that had laboriously pulled itself out of the
shadows and won at least some of its demands. As a written afterword points
out, Gay rights are still under attack throughout the U.S.; there is no federal
anti-discrimination law protecting people based on sexual orientation or gender
identity (the struggle Cleve Jones regarded as more important and immediate
than marriage equality) and the Trump administration and the Republican
majority in Congress (as well as Trump’s vice-president, former Indiana
Governor Mike Pence, who pushed through the first so-called “religious
conscience” law in his state, which allows individual government officials to
refuse service to Queer people if giving them marriage licenses or otherwise
serving them would violate their “sincerely held religious beliefs” — the Right
seized on Pence’s brainstorm as a way of nullifying the same-sex marriage
decisions by making sure few Queer couples in red-state America could find
county officials willing to marry them even if they theoretically have the
right to do so) has, as I noted in my comments on the previous episodes, not
only turned the arc of history away from justice (paraphrasing a famous line from Martin Luther King, Jr.
actually quoted in the series) and crashing into reverse, upholding bigotry,
injustice and religious fanaticism. As Jim Morrison (who himself was pretty
homophobic even though Queer poet Arthur Rimbaud was one of his culture heroes
and role models!) sang, “The future’s uncertain and the end is always near … ”
