At a time when our community is already grieving too many of its young people, here is another story to break your heart. Frankie Valencia, Jr. was randomly shot by a gang member in Chicago last fall. As if that wasn’t tragic enough, his non-biological mother, Siu Moy, was fired from her job after his death made her too upset to go to work. Her employer apparently didn’t understand that she had lost a son. Press coverage of the murder trial has focused on his biological mother, Joy McCormack, and his biological father, Francisco Valencia, Sr., to the exclusion of Moy. Even many relatives don’t understand her role in the family. McCormack and Valencia, Sr. divorced when the boy was young; she and Moy had raised him with help from the father.
Kate Sosin at Windy City Times has the full story; yet another example of how many things in our society need to change.
[Update: I see that Tina Fakhrid-Deen, Chicago-based author of the new book Let’s Get This Straight, has also written about the family’s situation. She notes, “It is wonderful to see that all of the parents raised him and that they didn’t succumb to the kind of post- heterosexual divorce drama that sometimes disconnects and fragments the children in LGBT homes.” She also points out how important it is for coverage of family tragedies like theirs to include the whole family, “Oftentimes, the media glosses over who our families are and it is situations like this that can add insult to injury.”]