David Bianculli

And as portraits go, it's by no means a hasty sketch.

With its many interviews and film clips, and its exciting use of split-screen comparisons and music by the Rolling Stones, Mr. Scorsese is closer to a patiently painted masterpiece.

This is Fresh Air.

I'm David Bianculli.

The newly released movie Fairyland, produced by Sofia Coppola and directed by Andrew Durham, stars Scoot McNary as a gay single father raising his daughter in San Francisco in the 1970s.

It's based on a memoir of the same name by Alicia Abbott, who wrote about growing up in the early years of the gay rights movement in the capital of gay America, San Francisco.

It's not uncommon now to see children with gay parents, but it was uncommon when she was raised by her gay father in the 1970s and 80s.

Her father, Steve Abbott, was a poet, essayist, and editor.

In 1969, when he married the woman who became Alicia's mother, he described himself as bisexual.

Both of them were graduate students at Emory University in Atlanta.

Alicia writes that while her parents shared a bed and a life, her father helped organize Atlanta's Gay Liberation Front and was the gay lib editor at Atlanta's Alternative Weekly, The Great Speckled Bird.

Two years after Alicia was born, her mother was killed in a car accident.

Soon after, her father decided they would move to San Francisco, and the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood became their home.

Steve Abbott died of AIDS-related complications in 1992.

Terry Gross spoke with Alicia Abbott in 2013.

Her memoir is based, in part, on her father's journals.

Alicia Abbott speaking to Terry Gross in 2013.

After a break, we'll continue their conversation.

And critic-at-large John Powers reviews the new movie Blue Moon, starring Ethan Hawke.

I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air.