(June 22, 2010)--They're parents "like anybody else," says a sympathetic soul, but not really. Not quite. If they were like anybody else, these parents wouldn't both be wearing "Proud Dad" caps at the baby shower.

As the title more than implies, "Gary and Tony Have a Baby," a poignant and captivating CNN documentary that debuts Thursday evening, is the story of a family that's both unusual and a sign of the times. It does not, as the cliche goes, "explore all sides of an issue," but instead offers an intimate and affecting portrait of what happens when partners in a same-sex marriage set out to secure for themselves a blessed event, the limits of biology notwithstanding.

Sensitively but not mawkishly reported by Soledad O'Brien, the hour-long documentary is definitely high-road television -- meaning it's been made as a gesture toward enlightenment and not to grab big ratings, which it probably won't. Not to disparage the Fox News Channel or its right to thrive, but it's hard to imagine Fox doing a documentary as big-hearted and open-minded as this one. Fox docs are virtually always hard-edged, hard-news affairs, including the most recent, "Fox News Reporting: The American Terrorist," an explosive hour about Anwar al-Awlaki, born in the United States but relocated to Yemen for his graduate studies in being rotten. (Other "Fox Reporting" titles that aired this year include "Inside Campaign 2010," and, to commemorate the 40th anniversary, "Summer of Evil: The Manson Murders.")

"Gary and Tony" may be "soft" by comparison, but it's also hard-hitting emotionally. The two men -- Gary Spino and Tony Brown -- face many a bump along the rough road to parenthood. Two New Yorkers in their late 40s who've been living together for 20 years, Spino and Brown must be truly in love or else how could they survive in one of those punishingly puny New York apartments? They're a likable pair if not precisely eloquent. "So cool," one of them says while looking at sonograms of the fetus. "So cool," says the other when they hear the baby is a boy.

So cool? Not "awesome"??

Asked early in the hour why they want to be parents, they come up with the same sort of glib answers, making it sound as if they're trying to be fashionable rather than paternal. But this is a picture medium; shots of Gary and Tony holding newborn Nicholas, and close-ups of their shining eyes as they behold the baby for the first time, are inescapably expressive -- and conclusive.

O'Brien has the men recall the history of their relationship from the beginning, when, like it says in "Some Enchanted Evening," they saw each other "across a crowded room." They had a wedding outside of New York state because the legislature refused to pass a bill acknowledging same-sex marriages. Demonstrators outside the courtroom repeat the canard about gay marriage being a "threat" to the institution, but Gary and Tom justifiably want to know how they are a threat to anybody.

The "threat" argument seems to presuppose that everyone would be homosexual and take up with husbands or wives of their own gender if not for the social strictures placed upon such behavior. And that goes back to the never-ending argument about whether homosexuality is learned or inherited, a "lifestyle" or a genetic predisposition. O'Brien is wise not to rehash all that; it's not a subject that brings out the best in those who never seem to tire of debating it...read more.

Source: Washington Post