Sex/uality Artifacts

Hello, my name is Sami Parave and for my second artifact I chose the movie The Birdcage. In The Birdcage, Robin Williams plays a character that is the owner of a drag show club and he is in a relationship with the star drag queen. The couple has a son together who comes home from college and tells them he’s getting married, but soon the conflict of the other family’s values comes into play. The woman who the son is marrying has very conservative parents. They are not approving of homosexual relationships and they are not accepting of the type of lifestyle she’ll be marrying in to. In the video clip I picked, the girl’s father has just found out that it is a gay couple that raised her fiancé and he is not pleased with this discovery. He claims that because he is running for reelection and they are going through a scandal that this is the last thing that he needs. He also states that her mother is crying at the time and asks her how many more lives she is going to ruin before she realizes what she’s doing. He believes that the way her fiancé was raised is wrong and that the whole situation is preposterous. He is putting his family above others because of its “traditional” morals within it. In the “Proper Families” article, it is discussed how families see the importance of certain values and the value of early family experiences, but the conflict is that some believe homosexual households don’t provide the same type of positive experience. There is the idea that values should remain the same among all families and shouldn’t differ. Some people worry about “bad genes” being passed on or entering a family because they come from a homosexual background. These ideas are outdated and untrue in the majority of cases because it has been proven in many studies that children of homo and heterosexual relationships develop and grow the same way, which relates to the “Freeman Queer Belongings” article. This article also states that kinship can be skewed based on who is really taking care of the children and who is teaching the children the morals based off what their perception of parenting is. These morals that some families believe makes a traditional family so specific are slowly being phased out because the LGBT community is creating a safer living environment for people around the world.

The link to the video is below!