When Freeheld won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short, it was more than just a win for the filmmakers, Cynthia Wade and Vanessa Roth. It was a victory for same sex couples everywhere who face discrimination and are told they cannot take care of the people they love. And it was a victory made possible by someone who wasn’t around t celebrate it: the woman whose life, love and struggle for justice is the subject of the documentary. When Laurel Hester, a 50 year police Lieutenant who had been on the force for 25 years, was diagnosed with cancer she knew she would have to fight for her life. What she didn’t know was that she would have to fight for her partner’s security, for her pension and for basic fairness and decency.

When a dying Laurel asked that her pension and benefits be given to her partner of 6 years, Stacie Andree, the city refused her the option which is offered to heterosexual couples. Ironically, Laurel was a private person, who, in a fairer world “would not have to be here to announce my sexuality because, frankly, it’s nobody’s business.” But the decision– which said a dedicated police woman could not turn over hard earned pension to the woman she loved– turned Laurel into an activist who would spend the last six months of her life fighting against cancer and discrimination, and for justice and equality. Following the simultaneous stories of Laurel and Stacey’s personal struggle with loss, sickness and death, and their political struggle for fairness, Freeheld demonstrates that marriage equality, often dismissed as a luxury or privilege, as symbolic and not substantive, really is a basic human right and an issue of life or death.

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