Rosie’s R Family Cruises Show Real Family Values

The New York Times has a fantastic article about Rosie O’Donnell’s most recent gay-family themed cruise from New York City to Halifax, Nova Scotia. This particular outing featured entertainment provided by over 100 entertainers, many from Broadway, including Christine Ebersole, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Andrea McArdle.

“R Family Vacations is led by Rosie O’Donnell, the entertainer and talk-show host; Kelli O’Donnell, the pixieish entertainment executive who recently became her wife; and their business partner, Gregg Kaminsky, and caters to gay and lesbian families. But anyone who might have signed up looking for something sexy or even illicit — for a Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name Boat — well, that ship had left the harbor. Whatever their sexual orientation, this was an extremely straight bunch.

Wearing T-shirts and Crocs, straining at their waistbands and beginning to contemplate middle age, they might have passed for the guests on any other cruise. If, that is, they were not quite so wholesome, so relentlessly focused on being good parents and raising happy kids. At the dock, the ship seemed to serve as a kind of reverse quarantine, a metal container moored off 12th Avenue to prevent the passengers’ expansive child-friendly values from wiping out New York’s social ecology.”

Read the full story at The New York Times.