Julie Andrews & Ann-Margret play mothers of gay sons in this forgotten made-for-TV weepy
Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, in anticipation of Mother’s Day, we’re looking back at 1991’s Our Sons about moms who bond over their children’s relationship.Norman Bates said it best.
A boy’s best friend is his mother. It’s a cliché, of course, that every gay man is a mama’s boy—a cliché that’s often repeated and propagated through media.
There is some truth in how a young boy whose inclinations fight against traditional “boy” things is able to bond more easily with his mother than his father.
But every family, every gay child, and every mother is completely different, even if media portrayals don’t often showcase that.Subscribe to our newsletter for your front-row seat to all things entertainment with a sprinkle of everything else queer.This week, to celebrate Mother’s Day, we’ll take a look at a little seen and often-forgotten movie (which is kind of shocking given the talent involved and the themes at the center) that depicts the relationship between mothers and her gay sons in a much thornier and complicated way: the 1991 television movie Our Sons.Our Sons tells the story of a young gay couple at the peak of the AIDs crisis in the early 1990s, James (Hugh Grant in one of his earlier American roles, using a truly confounding American accent) and Donald (Zeljko Ivanek).
