Mama’s Boy: The Power of Sharing Our Stories

“I raised you to know that a promise is a sacred thing.” These words are at the heart and soul of Mama’s Boy, a feature-length documentary film based on the best-selling memoir, Mama’s Boy: A Story From Our Americas, written by screenwriter, director, producer, and LGBTQ+ rights activist Dustin Lance Black. 

Directed by Lauren Bouzereau and produced by LD Entertainment, Amblin Television, Playtone, and Nedland Media, HBO’s Mama’s Boy narrates the life of Roseanna, a southern girl from Providence, Louisiana, who contracted polio at the age of two and spent the rest of her life overcoming all kinds of difficulties. Her story – tragic, raw, and that of a survivor – is told by her family, but mainly her second son, Lance.

Roseanna or Anne, as she liked to be called, was a force to be reckoned with. From a very young age, she was told that due to her disability (a side effect of polio), she wouldn’t be able to do many things. Dreams of having an education, a husband, and a family were not in the cards for her. The best advice doctors and nurses could give her was to stay in a wheelchair and cash her disability checks for the rest of her life.

But Anne was nothing if not tenacious, so after offering them a very polite “thank you very much,” she made it her life’s mission to prove them wrong.

Anne’s Ultimate Dream

Anne never settled for the life she was supposed to live. Instead of using a wheelchair to get around as would be expected of someone in her condition, she mastered braces and crutches to be able to move around independently. She excelled in school and managed to get a scholarship to the Louisiana Polytechnic Institute to study medicine. But being able to get married and have children was always her most impossible dream – until it was not.

When Anne joined the Mormon Church, her life changed completely. This new religion offered her what she had been told she couldn’t have, and she embraced it without hesitation. At her church, she met another missionary who wanted to marry and start a family with her. There were a lot of red flags, but she wanted love, she wanted children, and she wanted the promise of Mormonism, so she said yes.

Her family disapproved of this union, they didn’t trust the man and accused him of marrying a disabled woman to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War. But she was in love, so despite her family’s opposition, she dropped out of college and married him. Three boys were born from their union, Marcus, Lance, and Todd. 

However, Black’s biological father wasn’t happy and he eventually abandoned his family and ran off with his first cousin with whom he was having an affair. Because Anne was abandoned by a member of the Mormon Church, the institution quickly fixed her up with a second husband. But this man – who would end up giving Anne’s three children his last name – was abusive and had homicidal tendencies, so his departure from Anne’s life, while harsh at the time, was a blessing in disguise.

Anne was a warrior, a woman of extraordinary strength and character, a couple of failed marriages weren’t going to bring her down after everything she’d already gone through. So she did what she could. She provided for her children, married a third time (to the man who would remain her husband until the day she passed), and became a medical technologist for the Department of Defense.

Like mother, like son

If there’s one thing Mama’s Boy makes sure audiences know throughout the nearly two-hour documentary, it’s that Anne was an inspiration to so many. Despite her upbringing, despite her conservative beliefs (which at one point led her to reject Black for being gay), she was a woman who achieved the impossible. She didn’t settle, she fought, she resisted, and in the end, had the life she always dreamed of.

Anne’s story is Black’s story, and it’s that simple truth that ultimately ends up shaping Black’s success both as a filmmaker and an LGBTQ+ rights activist. In 2009, when Black won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Milk – the biopic based on the life of gay rights activist and politician Harvey Milk – he made a promise on stage. He promised that soon LGBTQ+ people in the US would have equal rights at a federal level. It was a big promise to make on a stage of that magnitude and Anne made her son keep it.

So after his big win at the Academy Awards, Black used his platform and his commanding presence as a spokesman to fight for the community. He fought for LGBTQ+ marriage equality and became a co-founder of the American Foundation for Equal Rights – the organization behind the challengers of Proposition 8 and its eventual overturning in the Supreme Court. Black, like his mother, did not settle on this issue. He battled, and he resisted, and for this reason, he is now able to (and does) live the life he always dreamed of. 

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. 

Building Bridges

But it wasn’t an easy feat. Black’s life was shaped by everything his mother was: resilient, conservative… a woman of faith. He was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He knew from an early age that he was different, but he grew up learning about a god who said loud and clear that his heart had no value, that his feelings had no value. Black’s struggle to reconcile this upbringing with his identity as a gay man is harrowing.

As learned in Mama’s Boy, he had an incredibly traumatic childhood and after coming out while studying filmmaking in LA, he became estranged from many members of his family, including his mother. Anne lived in ‘her America’ described by Black as faithful, southern, red. And Black in his: blue, progressive, queer. Bringing these two completely different worlds together seemed like an impossible task (it still is for many), but that’s when the power of sharing stories came into play for them. And everything changed. 

Anne changed. She was open enough to share a space with people who had completely different views than hers and that helped reshape her ideologies. She listened and learned. She accepted that which was different. She built bridges. 

Perhaps it’s a bit idealistic of Black to think that just because he and his mom were able to set foot on the bridges between their opposing worlds, then perhaps other people can too. But isn’t the world made for those who dare to dream and achieve the impossible? Without these idealistic notions, change will never come. 

Mama’s Boy serves to remind us of the importance of sharing our stories, of voicing our differences. While it seems unlikely that humanity will ever reach a point where we can find true universal common ground (because of the global factors that influence our differences), the power of a shared story does have the ability to change the minds of others. Even one changed mind is progress. 

And this is the underlying message of this film. In a world where segregation continues to drive humanity to pieces, Mama’s Boy is Black’s rallying cry for more tolerance, love, and understanding. And honestly? We all could use more of that.

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Featured Image: Image Courtesy of HBO. Photograph by Travers Jacobs