Comfort With Labels
If you are a lesbian who has a family, you might be interested in going on a vacation where you, and your family feel comfortable. An additional way to make your family feel comfortable is to incorporate the idea that homosexual families are normal into their train of thought. There are new videos that can help families with this. If you want to take a family vacation, there are many opportunities for keywest with gay-friendly hotels. There is a lesbian paradise at any keywest and there are Caribbean vacations that have many a hotel for women. In your plight for comfort, you can ask yourself what happens to a country that takes yet another step down that twilight path, and attempts to exclude the Almighty from the family? That may be an experiment from which we will never recover. My family is special because we love each other," a little girl on screen tells the viewer." Another says of her family, "They're always here for me when I need them, they're always caring for me."
Those tender words are from a couple of the sweet kids who appear in the new documentary That's A Family!, the slickly-produced, 35-minute documentary from Helen Cohen and Debra Chasnoff. If those names sound familiar to pro-family groups, it's because the pair also produced another controversial children's film, the 1996 video It's Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School.
That's A Family! was the first of a three-part video series entitled Respect for All. The next two videos will focus on the subjects of dispelling "gay" and lesbian stereotypes--in other words, anything that argues against the normalcy of homosexuality--and offering strategies to deal with name-calling against homosexuals. The untitled videos are also intended to be shown directly to children.
That target audience makes the strategy of That's A Family! all the more potent: children do virtually all the talking, turning this film into something of a one-on-one experience for the schoolchildren who are watching in class. These bright, adorable kids on screen are speaking to the viewer like a friend might do sitting across the lunch table or on the playground at recess. The impact on the hearts and minds of innocent viewers must be palpable--a fact that could hardly have been lost on Cohen and Chasnoff when they set out to develop the series.
So just what will these onscreen kids be saying to the schoolchildren of America? In the first few minutes of That's A Family!, young faces tell the viewer things like, "To have a good family everyone needs to take care of each other.and to feel comfortable with each other.you can feel trust and friendliness."
The film takes special care to honor this diversity of family framework. Emily, a third-grader, has parents with different ethnic backgrounds--the father is Chinese, while the mother is German. "There are a lot of kids like me in the world who have mixed families, and they don't all have to be the same," she says. "There are a lot of different ones."
And how. Interspersed throughout what most people would consider the normal variations of family structures that appear in That's A Family! are same-sex couples. They are families, too, say the children in such homes. "If you knew my dads," insists 10-year-old Breanna, "you would know how cool they are. They're the best dads ever."
| 
