A very happy 40th birthday to PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays)—the nation’s largest grassroots-based non-profit for families, friends, and straight allies of LGBT people. Not everyone is pleased to hit middle age, but I have to imagine the folks at PFLAG are pretty excited.
I was amused and touched by the summer travel wisdom over at Are You the Babysitter?, making her “Family Discoveries” my Post of the Week.
Two senior Defense Department officials spoke at the Department’s first-ever Pride month event. One noted the positive impact of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal on the children of gay servicemembers—but the other observed that there are still obstacles to full equality for them.
I’m passing along this information about the Gender Spectrum Family Conference, a yearly gathering for gender nonconforming children, teens, and their families. I’m not involved in the organization myself, but I’ve heard many good things about it.
Books matter. “Children feel unimportant and invisible when they do not see representations of their lives and families in books,” asserts librarian Jamie Campbell Naidoo. He knows this firsthand. Growing up in the Bible Belt in the early 1980s, he says, there were no books that “mirrored my life and the lives of other queer children.” If there had been, he says, he “I would not have felt so alienated and ashamed of being different.” His classmates, too, might have understood his queerness was not strange. Such books, however, were not to be found.
Fast forward to today and Dr. Naidoo, now an assistant professor of library and information studies at the University of Alabama, has written a book of his own to help guide librarians, parents, teachers, and others seeking LGBT-inclusive titles.
This lovely post from Coming Out At Midlife was submitted as part of Blogging for LGBT Families Day. It reminds me that LGBT families are more than just parent(s) and kid(s); they are grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins; grandchildren, nieces, and nephews.
Seven years ago today, roughly two years after the birth of my son, I published my first post here at Mombian. In it, I said the blog was “dedicated to providing relevant, useful, and just plain fun reading for lesbian moms.” I hope I’ve succeeded.
New results from the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS), the longest-running and largest study of American lesbian families, have shown that the lack of male role models “did not adversely affect the psychological adjustment of 17-year-old teens raised in lesbian-headed households.” The findings directly address one of the key criticisms leveled at same-sex parents: that the lack of role models of both genders will somehow hurt children’s well-being and development.
Several children’s health care facilities, including one of the top children’s hospitals in the country, were named “Leaders in LGBT Healthcare Equality” in HRC’s 2012 Healthcare Equality Index (HEI).
