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Longtime Coming....
Oct. 6th, 2014 09:00 pmOne of the movies that came through our Netflix queue last week was Longtime Companion, which we finally got to watch tonight. Released in 1989, and IMDBilled as "the first film to put a human face on the AIDS epidemic," it follows several couples through their troubled lives and several painful deaths. It's not comic (although it has some funny moments including a deadpan YMCA version that virtually defines the end of the era), and it avoids the overt politics of condemning the establishment's response to the disease in its early years (Reagan is barely mentioned, once in a joke, and he never gets the villification he is totally due for his neglect of the victims during his presidency). No, it's a story of love- of companions caring for their friends and lovers in sickness and in health, of facing their own fears and phobias as the world they knew collapsed around them, and of confronting prejudice and indifference in the legal, business and entertainment worlds. "Longtime companion" was a somewhat reviled euphemism, but here, again and again, it proved accurate, as these men stayed for each other for the duration, through better and a lot of worse, to prove that love and commitment know no bounds of gender.
And, thus, how fitting that we saved this screening for the day that the U.S. Supreme Court denied review to a docket full of circuit court cases, covering 60 percent of the nation, respecting the right of any two consenting adults to marry regardless of those bounds. The usual trolls of OMNOMNOM are sick about it, of course-
"It's really despicable. You've got state constitutional amendments being struck down by lower federal courts … and the Supreme Court just lets it stand?" said John Eastman, chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, which has opposed gay marriage
- but in the end, it was a tactical decision by the wingnut-friendly foursome on the court who could've voted the cases for review (only four votes are needed to grant certiorari), because they knew that the current nine justices would likely set an even more despicable-to-them precedent.
I smiled at the thought of Nino Scalia stamping his feet and holding his breath and praying to his favorite saints to smite the other wing of the court in hopes of a more favorable outcome in the future. Maybe I should mail him my Netflix of this movie, in hopes that seeing loving, caring people in monogamous adult relationships will cast the scales from his eyes and get all this talk of sodomistic arglebargle out of his mouth.
Nahhhhhhh. Best stick to silver bullets and crucifixes with him.
And, thus, how fitting that we saved this screening for the day that the U.S. Supreme Court denied review to a docket full of circuit court cases, covering 60 percent of the nation, respecting the right of any two consenting adults to marry regardless of those bounds. The usual trolls of OMNOMNOM are sick about it, of course-
"It's really despicable. You've got state constitutional amendments being struck down by lower federal courts … and the Supreme Court just lets it stand?" said John Eastman, chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, which has opposed gay marriage
- but in the end, it was a tactical decision by the wingnut-friendly foursome on the court who could've voted the cases for review (only four votes are needed to grant certiorari), because they knew that the current nine justices would likely set an even more despicable-to-them precedent.
I smiled at the thought of Nino Scalia stamping his feet and holding his breath and praying to his favorite saints to smite the other wing of the court in hopes of a more favorable outcome in the future. Maybe I should mail him my Netflix of this movie, in hopes that seeing loving, caring people in monogamous adult relationships will cast the scales from his eyes and get all this talk of sodomistic arglebargle out of his mouth.
Nahhhhhhh. Best stick to silver bullets and crucifixes with him.