Sitting in the living room today, my roommate and I were watching the 1967 film,  “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” I’d never seen this classic film though I’ve heard many great things about it! I mean, with Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy, you can’t really go wrong, right? There are so many great things about this film and I can’t believe that I haven’t seen it until now! Its a perfect glimpse into the past and the sad present as well. While I’m sure that things have changed drastically since the 1960s, it also quite interesting to note how much hasn’t. The following quote from the end of the film [I apologize for the spoiler, but you’d have guessed it anyway] is simply brilliant. It sums up so much of what Loman and I have struggled with over the past couple of years and is a pretty accurate representation of what lies before us. However, I can’t express how glad I am that Love truly does conquer all. Together we have and will continue to take on the world. We will hold hands when and where we please. We will choose to ignore the looks of hatred we receive in small town America. We will continue to love one another despite the religious, moral, and ethical reasons people seemed to have formed in their minds. We know that we cannot change the world and we don’t intend to. The challenges that we have faced have almost broken us at times, but looking back, we have been made strong in our weakness. In the end, no one sums it up better than Mr. Drayton:

“Where John made his mistake I think was in attaching so much importance to what her mother and I might think… because in the final analysis it doesn’t matter a damn what we think. The only thing that matters is what they feel, and how much they feel, for each other. And if it’s half of what we felt- that’s everything. As for you two and the problems you’re going to have, they seem almost unimaginable, but you’ll have no problem with me, and I think when Christina and I and your mother have some time to work on him you’ll have no problem with your father, John. But you do know, I’m sure you know, what you’re up against. There’ll be 100 million people right here in this country who will be shocked and offended and appalled and the two of you will just have to ride that out, maybe every day for the rest of your lives. You could try to ignore those people, or you could feel sorry for them and for their prejudice and their bigotry and their blind hatred and stupid fears, but where necessary you’ll just have to cling tight to each other and say “screw all those people”! Anybody could make a case, a hell of a good case, against your getting married. The arguments are so obvious that nobody has to make them. But you’re two wonderful people who happened to fall in love and happened to have a pigmentation problem, and I think that now, no matter what kind of a case some bastard could make against your getting married, there would be only one thing worse, and that would be if – knowing what you two are and knowing what you two have and knowing what you two feel- you didn’t get married. Well, Tillie, when the hell are we gonna get some dinner?”