The first trailer for ?Freeheld,? a new movie about New Jersey State Police Lt. Laurel Hester and Stacie Leigh Andree and their fight for Stace to receive Laurel?s pension benefits as Laurel was dying of cancer, came out yesterday. And watching it, my breath caught in my throat:
It?s not just that Julianne Moore, who plays Hester, and Ellen Page, who plays Andree, see like they?re going to be very strong in the roles, though the evidence is promising. And it?s not just their story is agonizing, though it is: Hester literally won the fight for her home partnership with Andree to be recognized from her hospital bed.
It?s how recent this all is. It was in 2005 that the freeholders of her New Jersey county voted against Hester?s request before reversing themselves in 2006. In 2003, I helped organize support for a proposed home partnership ordinance in New Haven, Conn. In a tight vote, the Board of Aldermen rejected the measure. The disjuncture between outcomes like those and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court?s 2003 decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, which granted same-sex couples the correct to marry, was vertiginous. The hole between the states and communities that were moving fastest toward marriage equality and those ? sometimes just a few states away ? where home partnership was still a reach was enormous.
Hester and Andree were the subject of a 2007 Academy Award-winning documentary about their fight for equal benefits. But when Hollywood makes fictionalized movies about civil rights struggles, the industry often has a tendency to situate inequality safely in the past. Movies such as ?Milk,? about San Francisco city supervisor and pioneering gay rights activist Harvey Milk (Sean Penn); ?Brokeback Mountain?; and the forthcoming ?Stonewall,? from director Roland Emmerich, depict events that take place, respectively, in the 1970s, between 1963 and 1983, and 1969. More activist movies such as ?Philadelphia,? which was released in 1993, take place in somewhat closer proximity to the events and attitudes they?re chronicling. But something like ?Fruitvale Station,? which chronicled the last day in Oscar Grant?s (Michael B. Jordan) life before he was shot to death on a BART platform, and which preceded massive, national protests against police violence against people of color, is somewhat rare.
None of this is to say that anti-gay animus has been suddenly expunged in the past decade, or that there isn?t still job to be done to effectuate this year?s Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges that extended marriage equality nationwide. But ?Freeheld? and the events it depict lie on contrary escarpments of a gaping canyon. Watching it, I suspect, will be a stark illustration of how closely the past stalks behind the happiness of the present.
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