‘When We Rise’: Dramatizing the Gay Rights Movement With Passion

A four-night miniseries about the gay rights movement — as well as the women’s movement, and the civil rights movement — When We Rise carves out a huge chunk of history to dramatize. The four-night, eight-hour miniseries starts Monday on ABC. It was created by Dustin Lance Black, who won an Oscar in 2008 for his screenplay for Milk, the biopic about the assassination of gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk (played by Sean Penn). The new miniseries is constructed around a diverse group of real LGBT activists, primarily Cleve Jones (Guy Pearce), Ken Jones (Michael Kenneth Williams), and Roma Guy (Mary-Louise Parker). The production frequently contrasts actors with footage of real news coverage of the rights struggle. It will probably surprise a chunk of the When We Rise viewership to see how commonly antigay sentiments were aired as a viable position in the mainstream media.

Any historical saga that is set to the beat of Sylvester’s “(You Make Me Feel) Mighty Real” and Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” is A-OK with me, and a lot of When We Rise, which begins in the early 1970s, is exhilarating stuff. Black gets down to the nitty-gritty, as we used to say in the ’70s, with lots of well-detailed scenes of how a loose coalition of angry, exploited, frightened, shrewd, political, and apolitical people formed patchwork groups that held small meetings, fought with other groups over philosophy and methods, and eventually united to create a movement that changed the social fabric of America. Along the way, Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie O’Donnell, David Hyde Pierce, and other familiar faces pop up as history-based characters who agitate for or against that movement, depending on their point of view.

The script moves from big, macro issues — how various groups organized, protested, drafted legislation — to personal stories of individuals discovering their true sexuality, coming out to their parents, facing down discrimination and worse.

When We Rise also regularly succumbs to some of the pitfalls of agitprop, most notably dialogue that sounds less like conversational speech and more like stiff sloganeering. “It’s time to fight back!” “All of you combined are stronger than you know!” “We’ll fight for your right to be a mother!” “If straight America doesn’t find out they know at least one of us, then they might vote against us!” Black has not avoided comparisons of When We Rise to Roots, the 1977 miniseries about the history of American slavery, and his project is no less ambitious. But Roots, as powerful as it was in its visual depictions of the slave trade, was also marred by a melodramatic style that makes some parts of it now seem quaint and obvious.

Rise shares some of these flaws. It would have helped, perhaps, if the production wasn’t so drawn out, but rather condensed to a tightly assembled, one-night TV movie. But at its best, When We Rise achieves the inspirational status it desires, and goes beyond that to portray the romanticism of rebellion as an exhilarating, desirable goal. Arriving at a time when so much of the country is primed for its own organized protests, When We Rise offers valuable models for resistance in the present day.

When We Rise airs Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday at 9 p.m. on ABC.

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