LGBT rights struggle moving

I always feel it must be a strange and intimidating experience for an actor to portray a real person who is still alive. Being open to public criticism of one's heartfelt performance must be stressful enough, but imagine if the actual person you were playing might think you had done a bad job. The approval-seeker in me cringes just thinking about it.

I don't know what the LGBT rights activists portrayed in the miniseries When We Rise (currently available to stream on TVNZ OnDemand), thought of their depictions, but the actors give moving performances as people displaying admirable strength in the face of injustice. So they come out looking good.

Presented by OnDemand as eight 40-minute episodes, the series was made to be shown in four two-hour slots on the ABC network, which accounts for the way the shorter episodes seem divided into pairs by their timeline. Beginning with the birth of the gay rights movement in the 1970s, the story follows its central characters through the devastation of the Aids epidemic in the 1980s and '90s, and to the ultimate defeat of Proposition 8 in 2013, making same-sex marriage legal in California.

The central characters are activists Cleve Jones (played by Austin P. McKenzie and Guy Pearce), Roma Guy (Emily Skeggs, Mary-Louise Parker) and Ken Jones (Jonathan Majors, Michael K. Williams), all of whom, as I only discovered when I looked up the series online, are real people who are or were key figures in the San Francisco LGBT rights movement. The story is partly based on the real Cleve Jones' memoir, When We Rise: My Life in the Movement, and most of the screenplay was written by Dustin Lance Black, who wrote 2008 Oscar-winning film Milk.

The series portrays some of what was and is fun and fabulous about San Francisco's gay community (magnificent drag queens, sassy repartee, roller disco!), but also examines many of the rights movement's internal struggles. It documents the prejudice not just in wider society but within marginalised groups - white gays against black gays, straight women against gay women, gay men and women against each other. It's partly a heartbreaking testament to the many ways and reasons human beings find to treat each other badly, but it's also the story of the progress made in overcoming those prejudices.

When We Rise is perhaps, at times, a little heavy-handed in its earnest poignancy, but in dealing with such fundamental human qualities as love, kindness and tolerance, the subject matter is undeniably moving. And just because I think a show's trying to make me cry doesn't mean it's not going to work.

The series is available on OnDemand until the end of this week.

Catch it while you can.