Our House: A Very Real Documentary About Kids of Gay and Lesbian Parents

Growing up with two mothers or two fathers instead of a mother and a father, or to have a parent leave a heterosexual marriage for a same sex union.

Film Signature Image
Series
PBS Plus Presentation
Premiere Date
June 1, 2000
Length
60 minutes
Funding Initiative
Open Call
  • Award laurels-r Created with Sketch.
    2000 Phoenix Gay and Lesbian Film Festival-Best Short
  • Award laurels-r Created with Sketch.
    2000 New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival-Jury Prize for Best Documentary
  • Award laurels-r Created with Sketch.
    2000 OutFest: Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival-Grand Jury Award for Outstanding Documentary Feature
  • Producer

    Meema Spadola

    Meema Spadola is a producer, director, and writer in television and radio living in Brooklyn, a short subway ride from Red Hook. She has produced documentaries for PBS, HBO, Cinemax, Sundance Channel, and Public Radio. Her past work includes the Independent Lens documentary Guns and Mothers, about two mothers on opposite sides of the gun control debate, Show more co-produced with director Thom Powers. Spadola’s ITVS documentary Our House premiered on PBS in 2000 and featured the sons and daughters in five diverse gay and lesbian American families. It received jury awards for best documentary at both the New York and Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals, and has been broadcast worldwide. Spadola and Powers’s documentaries Breasts and Private Dicks, about women’s and men’s attitudes about their bodies, have been broadcast on HBO to critical acclaim and high ratings, and interviews produced by Spadola were featured in HBO’s 2001 adaptation of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. Spadola produced the four-part series Shorts From the Underground for the Sundance Channel, and her radio documentaries have appeared on Public Radio’s This American Life. She is the author of Breasts: Our Most Public Private Part (Wildcat Canyon Press), based on her documentary of the same name, and was a contributor to Out of the Ordinary (St. Martin’s Press) a collection of essays by sons and daughters with LGBT parents. Her knitting patterns have appeared in Stitch N’ Bitch (Workman Press) and the magazine Interweave Knits. Spadola grew up in Searsmont, Maine and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. Show less

    Other ITVS Films
    Guns & Mothers
    Red Hook Justice

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    The Film

    Our House: A Very Real Documentary About Kids of Gay and Lesbian Parents is a frank examination of the diverse experiences of children of gay and lesbian parents. The documentary profiles 16 sons and daughters — between the ages of 4 and 23 — in five families who are facing the usual highs and lows of growing up while encountering varied reactions from extended family, classmates, teachers, neighbors, and public officials. Our House was produced and directed by Meema Spadola, the daughter of a lesbian mother.

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