Good day to you, sweet Substack subscribers. This is March’s recap post for paid subs. Yes, that’s right: it’s LATE. Sorry y’all. I’ve been excited to do this recap for a while now, as this fine piece of cinema is what you might call a “rich text.” And this is a recap that I had “trouble” “editing,” so it’s “long as hell.”
It probably goes without saying that I am of course speaking of All Aboard: Rosie’s Family Cruise, a 2006 made-for-TV documentary produced by HBO. This film came into our lives when Clover bought a massive haul of used DVDs at Giovanni’s Room, our local gay bookstore. The film follows along on a 2004 cruise, which was the maiden voyage of R Family Vacations, a gay family travel company founded by Rosie and her then-wife Kelli.
Up top, let me just say: we watched this twice and genuinely loved watching it both times. There’s so much going on in this movie that’s touching and fascinating: seeing how much has changed in the past 18 years, hearing about the intense homophobia faced by gay parents and their children in the early aughts, seeing the beautiful love within many of the featured families. There’s also a lot of issues that are simultaneously spotlit but not explicitly addressed by the film: the fact that Rosie is kind of a maniac, the complexities of interracial adoption, the ethical issues with U.S.-based cruise tourism in the Bahamas. If you are tantalized by this description, sorry, there is literally nowhere to watch this online! You either have to come watch it on DVD at our house or haunt your own local gay used bookstore. This also means that my only screengrabs are from a blurry upload of the trailer on YouTube and a video of two homophobic right wing nuts talking about the movie, also on YouTube. Sorry about it!!!
Let’s jump in.
The film opens on shots of Rosie puttering about and greeting guests on board the ship, as string music swells. Kelli O’Donnell, Rosie’s small, blond, and very mild-mannered wife, says of their motivations for creating the cruise, “If we, as one of the most prominent gay families in America, are searching for other gay families, then everyone must be searching.” True! We see a shot of some gay dads cutting into a cake that says “Bon Voyage” as the cruise ship pulls away from the docks in New York City. Lola remarked that the music that accompanies this shot is “Finding Nemo-core.”
Rosie has two qualities that immediately become clear in the first three minutes of the film: she has unresolved body issues, and she is the world’s biggest ham. We see her dressed up in a nautical captain’s costume in some narrow hallway in the ship. She poses behind Kelli and makes a crack about how she’s showing all the plus-sized people out there how to pose behind their thin spouse to hide their double chin. Very cool. We then cut to an opening night show in the ship’s absolutely massive theater. Rosie and the musical theater gays that have been hired as the in-house entertainment for this cruise are doing a big opening number. The theater gays do a kick line and sing a song about welcoming everyone to the cruise, and then they part to reveal Rosie stepping out of a large box, singing the line, “Whether gay, straight, trans or biiiiiii!” Here’s the thing about Rosie: she was ultimately born to be a star! Not even being a plus-sized lesbian in an incredibly fatphobic and homophobic industry could hold her back from her destiny. I would not want to be friends with her, but she has an undeniable charisma. She is a fascinating character!!