I spent the better part of this evening watching All Aboard: Rosie’s Family Cruise, the HBO documentary about the maiden voyage of Rosie’s all-are-welcome cruise venture.
I admit to mixed feelings about the show. First and foremost, I applaud Rosie (and Kelli and Gregg) not only for launching R Family Vacations, but also for attempting to share the experience with the wider world through the documentary. (I’m sure there was a healthy dose of pure, non-altruistic, marketing involved, but I can’t fault her for that.)
The Washington Post’s Tom Shales, however, thinks the show “isn’t engaging, it isn’t much fun, and sometimes it’s punishingly platitudinous.” He bemoans the fact that Rosie “was presenting to the mainstream TV audience a scrubbed-up, politely tidy image of gay men and women — a portrait meticulously devoid of the drag queens, pierced nipples and campy vamping one often sees when a local TV station rushes off to cover a gay-themed event.”
Terrance and Trey have already excoriated him in their respective blogs, so I won’t repeat what they’ve said so well. I will put in my two cents for the distaff side, though, and add that Shales’ description of what he believes a gay-themed event should be like is very much based on his view of gay male culture. Not that there’s anything wrong with gay male culture—but it doesn’t represent the whole community. (Not that there aren’t lesbians with pierced nipples, but I don’t see many of them in any well-policed parade.) If you’re going to insult us, Shales, at least insult all of us, and wish that Rosie would have driven onto the ship on a big-ass Harley.
I admit the show was not the most exciting 90 minutes of television I’ve seen recently. Maybe it’s just that I’ve been on an LGBT-friendly cruise before (through Olivia). I’ve been to P’town and women’s music festivals. I know how great it is to be in a welcoming environment. I know that Rosie’s LGBT-friendly cruise wasn’t the first (I believe the honor goes to Olivia) and isn’t the only. (R Family co-founder Gregg Kaminsky himself is a veteran of LGBT-travel company Atlantis Events.) Rosie does win for the first LGBT-family cruise, though again, there are non-cruise LGBT-family events such as Family Pride’s Family Week, which has been around for over a decade.
Ultimately, I was glad that Rosie was trying to educate people about LGBT families, but felt there wasn’t a whole lot in the show that educated, challenged, or entertained me. I wanted more in-depth discussions with the families about their families, why they had them, and the difficulties they faced. I wanted a master class in LGBT families, while Rosie had produced “LGBT Families 101.”
Does this make it a bad show? Not at all. It just means I’m not the target audience. For the right viewers, watching it was probably an eye-opening experience. I’m guessing Rosie & Co. were trying to reach the borderline-accepting, never-really- thought-about-it people who might be swayed to be more actively supportive. (The ultra-homophobic wouldn’t change their minds if a hundred happy, well-adjusted children of LGBT parents danced circles around them.) She was likely also reaching out to members of the LGBT-and-allied community, trying to give them a glimpse of what her cruises offer. We should commend her for all that. If I was a little bored, that’s because it was an effective portrayal of lives like mine, and I came away thinking “This is my life, in all its mundane detail. Why am I watching a show about it?” If people like Shales were also bored, and surprised at that, then Rosie conveyed an important lesson.
