Tampa police officer Mickie Mashburn lost her partner of 14 years, Lois, when Lois, also a cop, was shot and killed attending an armed robbery. After Lois' death, a protracted acrimonious legal battle commences between Mackie and Lois' family, who, given that Mickie and Lois had no legally-recognised connection, claim rights to all of Lois' estate as her next-of-kin. Though once married to a woman, Oklahoma rancher Sam Beaumont shared much of his life with his great love, Earl, who left the farmhouse they shared to Sam in his will. After Earl's death, however, a band of his cousins exploited a technicality in Earl's will, and the Oklahoma court handed Earl's estate to them, evicting Sam who moved to a rundown shack where he survives by selling rabbits.

This horribly-shafted pair of salt-of-the-earthers are the heart of Tying the Knot, a documentary about the debate in the United States over gay marriage which is peopled by a range of academics, activists, commentators and politicians who talk about the many angles of the debate. The heart-breaking stories of Mickie and Sam readily manipulates viewer sympathy for the plight of widowed homosexuals who have to suffer the double blow of losing their partner followed by humiliating defeats in court at the hands of malicious, despicable relatives motivated by money and property which legally they can claim but which morally they have no claim over.

Tying the Knot offers an enormous amount of interesting information about the history of marriage and many of the speakers provide astute obersavtions. But it is all-too-clear that the objective of the documentary is to convince viewers of the moral and ethical necessity of gay marriage being made legal in the United States. I feel that a documentary is stronger when it allows all sides to speak their piece and explores its topic objectively. Tying the Knot's heart-on-its-sleeve makes for several serious missteps.

The most glaring problem for me was the correlation made between the mixed-race marriage debates of the 1960s and the current gay marriage debate. Dr. Martin Luther King's observation that races don't fall in love with each other, individuals do, technically addresses objections that genders don't fall in love with each oother, individuals do, but it wipes out the myriad of differences between the African American experience and the gay and lesbian experience. Though discrimination is discrimination is discrimination, the attitudes and histories that feed into racism and those that fuel so-called "homophobia" are very different, and the regularly-deployed just-add-water comparison between the two is simplistic and convenient, not instructive.

Similarly, showing us that gay marriage is legal in Holland and that this has lead to no problems of any kind in that country is another bit of a conceit. Again, Holland and the United States are very different countries. Even by Northern European standards Holland is known, correctly, as a remarkably socially progressive country that is extraordinaily liberal. The United States, by contrast, makes front page controversies out of the appearance of an entertainer's breast during a performance at a football game. It may be pertinent to show how gay marriage works in other nations, but it takes the documentary no where to simply show us a couple of happily married gay couples living in domestic bliss in Rotterdam and vox-pops of young Dutch people chatting cheerily about how there is no difference between same-sex and opposite sex marriages. It's especially manipulative to flash from Gen-X flaneurs in Amsterdam to the American corn belt, where yokels mumble their embarassed way through answers to questions about homosexuality.

Excerpts from right-wing commentators or Republican politicians are invariably back-dropped with Hunchback of Notre Dame-style pipe organ creep music.

In my opinion, this documnetary would have worked better - and ironically, accomplished it's emotional and political goals - by concentrating on the legal battles of its two worthy protagonists. Their stories are compelling and contain everything the film makers of Tying the Knot seem to be wanting to find, and the film would improve immeasurably if it had cut out the well-meant heavy-handedness and not overstated its case.

Related Reading:
Paragraph 175
Common Threads: Stories From The Quilt

Review by Mark Adnum