Lez-tracurriculars 18: The Kids Are All Right with Rebecca Noyes

Can you believe there is just one more week until our Season 8 premiere? To tide you all over until next week, we have something very special for today - one of our full-length Patreon bonus episodes! Our Lez-tracurriculars series is a recurring series of full-length bonus episodes created exclusively for our beautiful patrons where Ellie and Leigh get to talk about topics and movies that don't quite fit into the regular feed. If you enjoy this episode, there are a lot more where this came from! Join us on Patreon for as little as $5/month to support our little queer independent pod and gain instant access to all 22 existing bonus episodes as well as ad-free weekly episodes, mp3 downloads of all our original songs, special merch discounts, a private Discord channel and more. If you're already a patron, thank you so much for your support! We could not continue to make this show without you.

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Today, Ellie and Leigh hang out with friend of the pod Rebecca Noyes (who you probably know as a host of LHO Trivia) to talk about the incredibly controversial 2010 film, The Kids Are All Right. This movie tends to incite very strong, visceral emotional reactions in queer viewers, however, it did amazingly with critics and was nominated for 4 Oscars including a Best Picture nomination. Since Ellie and Leigh were strongly in the “this movie is a hate crime” camp, Rebecca is here to share the other side, easily placing this film in her top 5 (maybe even top 3) lesbian movies of all time.

If you have not seen The Kids Are All Right, let us explain why it is so controversial. While at first glance the film seems like a great step for representation, it quickly reveals a much more nuanced plot. The story revolves around the 20-year marriage of Nic and Jules, a lesbian couple with two donor-conceived children, Joni and Laser. In 2010 there were basically no other movies that showed a married lesbian couple with a family, so you can just imagine how much of a splash this movie made. Unfortunately for lesbian representation, Nic and Jules’ relationship 20 years in is not looking so good. This in itself is not all that problematic, after all, who is still in the honeymoon phase after that many years? Where things go off the rails is when the movie introduces the kids’ biological father Paul. At first the kids have idealistic views of him as he worms his way into the family unit. But it’s not only the children who are taken with Paul. Jules, who openly describes herself as a gay woman, proceeds to fall for Paul, charmed by his similarities to her children. She ends up sleeping with him, beginning an affair that truly could not be more painful to watch. For a movie that is supposed to be about a lesbian family, there is so much focus on men and somehow more male sex and naked male butts than we would ever want to see, especially because Nic and Jules watch gay male porn to spice things up in the bedroom. The one good thing about this movie is it somehow has a happy ending (which we all know is a rarity in lesbian films), with Nic and Jules remaining together despite glaring relationship problems. We personally really hope they got some family therapy after the credits rolled.

We want to hear your thoughts! Do you hate this movie with a burning passion like Leigh, are you starting to feel more accepting of its existence like Ellie, or is it in your top favorite lesbian movies like Rebecca? Let us know your experience with The Kids Are All Right in the comments.

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