"Fairyland"
A True Queer Family Story of the 70s
and 80s Comes to the Big Screen
"Fairyland," Alysia Abbott's 2014 memoir about growing up with a single gay dad in San Francisco during the bohemian 1970s and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, is coming to theaters as a feature film with a stellar cast.
Fairyland premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023 and will have its theatrical release on October 10, 2025, after being picked up for distribution by Lionsgate and WILLA. Based on Abbott's father's journals and her own recollections, the story gives us the gift of insight into a little-documented time in queer family history and a little-seen perspective on the AIDS crisis. It's also a wonderful, nuanced look at the relationship between a father and daughter.
When she was three, Alysia's mother died in a car accident. Alysia could have gone to live with her aunt, but her father Steve insisted he wanted to raise her. A year later, in 1974, he moved with her from Atlanta to San Francisco, hoping for a fresh start. This was the San Francisco of the burgeoning gay rights movement (as it was then known), Harvey Milk, food co-ops, and a nascent gay literary scene, which Steve Abbott helped grow as a poet, editor, and organizer.
He struggled, however, to support his daughter both financially and emotionally. Some of his struggles were personal, but as Alysia notes in the book, "It wasn't easy being a single gay father in the 1970s.... There were no models. For better and for worse, my father was making up the rules as he went along."
When Alysia went to college in New York, she relished the chance to, as the book says, "discover and create" herself, away from the tensions of living with a gay writer in recovery. But her father's AIDS diagnosis both challenged their relationship anew and brought them closer, as she worried about losing him, the one constant presence in her life.
The film brings the Abbotts' story back to life through actors Emilia Jones as Alysia, Scoot McNairy as Steve, Cody Fern as Steve's boyfriend Eddie Body, Maria Bakalova as roommate Paulette, Nessa Dougherty as young Alysia, Adam Lambert as Steve's boyfriend Charlie, and Geena Davis as Alysia's grandmother Munca. Andrew Durham wrote the screenplay and directed, while Sofia Coppola produced.
Alysia, who is straight, nevertheless writes, "This queer history is my queer history. This queer history is our queer history." Queers, and our children, should be thankful she has shared it with us—and that such a spectacular team is bringing it to our screens.
Dana Rudolph is the founder and publisher of Mombian (mombian.com), a two-time GLAAD Media Award-winning blog for LGBTQ+ parents plus a searchable database of 1,800+ LGBTQ+ family books.