User Reviews

If there is a weakness in this series it is in the regular relationships sometimes being exaggerated as far as the public showing of emotions which really were not as obvious as are illustrated at times. The mysteries of the starting of HIV/AIDS is spot on. A lot of victims started dying and more and more rumors of what the causes were wilder and wilder.

While the crisis was more evident in San Francisco as this series shows, the entire country did get swept up in the homo-phobia that resulted from the disease as it spread. Acceptance of Gay Lifestyles took a long time to get accepted and often was downplayed as it happened in the national media. To it's credit, an early episode of the TV series MASH actually dealt with this intelligently, the main stream media as is usual with issues today, did not deal with being Gay until Barack Obama got in office, and yet still kind of avoids dealing with it whenever possible.

That is why this series, while fictionalized in parts, is ground breaking. Being Gay is a normal human condition which exists. It has never really been anything but normal though cultures have often tried to make it so negative that it was minimized. Strange while a normal human event was viewed so negatively by some cultures while so many of them accepted slavery as a normal condition and even used religion to defend it.

Imagine being a teenage girl with 2 mothers, just meeting your father, and having to explain to your peers what is going on in your home and being bullied by others around you about it. This episode nails this one very well. Too often kids in school find out too much about their classmates and are not mature enough to understand the information. Then they mess up everything in their lives because of their ignorance.

It shows what happened in schools before the attention to bullying of the past few years happen. A teenage girl accuses one of her girlfriends of trying to hit on her because she lives with 2 mothers, even though her perception of being hit on is questionable at best. What is interesting is that being too sensitive is presented here as a problem which can very well apply to many male- female problems.

For example, leering at someone is considered taboo. Hugging someone can be totally harmless but sometimes folks over react thinking there is something more to a hug than what it is. Now that we have a more elderly population, there are times that an elderly Grandfather might grope a younger person and the younger person makes it into more than it really is. I mean that it is possible this might happen and the Grandfather might be at the onset of Alzheimers or Dementia and not even remember doing it. Often the younger person goes crazy and lets this obsess them for years.

The younger person should go for counseling and let go of any one time this happens. If it happens more than once, and becomes more advanced, then the younger person knows the problem is beyond the onset of Alzheimers or Dementia as repeat attacks prove the person knows what they are doing and is a pattern. Once is not enough information.

The best thing about this series is addressing the Gay issue, ignorance is rampant. This teenager with 2 moms issue is addressed well as it shows the damages of ignorance and how things can be handled.