“This morning, the Supreme Court recognized that the Constitution guarantees marriage equality. Folks who were willing to endure bullying and taunts, and stayed strong, and came to believe in themselves and who they were, and slowly made an entire country realize that love is love.”

This is a part of the speech president Obama announced after the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the constitutionality of same-sex marriage in 2015. <Political Animals> starts with this speech. And then continues by saying “People think the historical advances which are natural now have been achieved in a heartbeat. But they were never just given.”

The documentary unfolds the history of struggles that made those progresses become reality. In the middle of this history are four lesbian politicians. They put their efforts in enacting the anti-discrimination law to prevent students from being outcasted or abused in school according to their sexual orientation and gender identity in the 1990s. Thanks to them, the anti-discrimination legislation enacted at last in 1999. Following this feat, they took the lead in enacting laws which allow homosexual partners to have the same legal rights as a family with heterosexual partners. These accomplishments of struggles accumulated to make history advance, little by little.

Change never comes all at once. When the buried voices are heard at last, when those voices become a group and earn political strength, and when that empowerment achieves institutional progress, change is at last, visualized in the overlapping of time. <Political Animals> is a record of that heart-throbing history. [Jay Sohn]​