Interview with Jennifer Chrisler of the Family Pride Coalition

Mombian’s interview series continues, this time with Jennifer Chrisler, Executive Director of the Family Pride Coalition. Jennifer is also the mother of twin four-year-old boys. (She either sleeps very well or not at all.) Prior to her role at Family Pride, she was a fundraising consultant for political campaigns and LGBT organizations and served as Finance Director for a special election in the Massachusetts 9th Congressional District. She’s written at length below on Family Pride, celebrity lesbian families, marriage equality, and the role of technology in the LGBT-rights movement. She’s also offered suggestions on what we can do as LGBT parents to advance the cause, and given some advice for those embarking on parenthood.

For the benefit of those who aren’t familiar with Family Pride, would you summarize its mission? What are your big strategic goals?

Family Pride is the oldest and only organization whose focus is on securing equality for LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer) parents and their children. We believe that all loving families should be recognized, respected, protected and celebrated. We believe that families are not truly defined by blood relationship, but instead by love and commitment. We envision a country that celebrates a diversity of family constellations and that respects and commends individuals for stepping up, supporting one another and creating families.

Family Pride is committed to achieving family equality in our lifetime. Family Pride works with other progressive national and state-based organizations, local parents groups, families, friends and allies to make change, share information and build community. Maintaining the focus of LGBTQ parents and their families, in 2005, Family Pride expanded our mission and embraced the fight for full family equality for all loving families. We recognize and believe that the laws, provisions and ordinances that hurt LGBTQ-headed families also hurt so many others—single parents, blended families, low income families. To that end, Family Pride is standing strong to defeat anti-family legislation and promote pro-family legislation.

Through strategic initiatives, groundbreaking programs and legislative battles, Family Pride is dedicated to securing equality for all loving families. In support and pursuit of love, justice, family, and equality, we are committed to making change, sharing information, and building community.

Now that 2006 has ended, would you tell me a little about what Family Pride has accomplished in the past year?

2006 has been an important year of unprecedented growth and success for Family Pride. First, we were proud to deliver on all the major commitments we made to our members and to the movement in 2006. We hosted a first of its kind Academic Symposium in May of 2006. Produced in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania, this two day summit brought together over 160 scholars, advocates and direct service providers to review the over 30 years of academic research about same-sex headed households. Together we also took that opportunity to look at some of the new groundbreaking research that is being conducted about our families. We launched OUTSpoken Families — the national speakers bureau for family equality — and have over 700 people in 43 states who have made the commitment to be part of this powerful ensemble. These families are informed, prepared and are proactively speaking in their communities about treating our families fairly. In fact, this December, one of our OUTSpoken Families from San Antonio, TX was chosen to appear on the Oprah show to talk about being a two-dad family. In October, we hosted a weekend conference for parents and youth to be trained on how to be advocates in their local communities and how to build community power to make family equality a top priority.

In addition to these core programmatic commitments, Family Pride was instrumental in bringing national visibility to our families. By participating in this year’s White House Easter Egg Roll we were able to, once again, introduce our families to the American public and show that we, like all parents, want our children to participate in every aspect of our American community — including traditions like the White House Egg Roll.

What are the specific projects and issues you’ll be tackling in 2007? What events can we look forward to?

2007 will be another important year for the organization. We have five important initiatives for 2007 all designed to build community power, to support the parenting community and to ensure national visibility for our families:

  1. Building Blocks: Tools for Equality
  2. Making the Grade: Creating Safe Schools for our Children
  3. Policy for Equality: Legislative Initiatives to Secure Family Equality
  4. OUTSpoken Families
  5. Visibility for Victory

These initiatives address core areas of building community power, sharing information, creating safe schools for our children, ensuring the defeat of anti-LGBT family legislation, and making sure our families are visible at the local, state and national level.

In addition to this important programmatic work, you will see us participating again at the White House Egg Roll as well as other family events throughout the year. And as always, Family Week will be happening in Provincetown and our Palm Springs weekend will happen in the Fall. We’ll also be participating in the R Family Vacation Cruises by providing the educational programming for cruise participants.

You recently launched an upgrade to your Web site. You also bought the Google keywords “mary cheney pregnant” last week so people searching for those terms would see a link to Family Pride. How important is the Internet to your strategies going forward? Any peeks at what we can expect in 2007?

Technology continues to be a very important part of our work and the LGBT movement’s work in general. So many people get their information from bloggers, websites and electronic communications that Family Pride wants to be sure we are responding to that trend. In early 2007, folks can expect to see, in addition to our newly retooled site, an entire section for local parent communities and groups. This portion of the site will include lots of downloadable files that will help parents build and sustain local parents groups. Additionally, you will see us using more tools like podcasts to communicate with our members and more interactive, multi-media presentations of information that will convey the compelling and emotional stories of our families.

What is the role of celebrity lesbian families? Do they help create positive awareness of LGBT families, or are they, by virtue of being celebrities, too out of the mainstream to be representative?

Like it or not, we are a celebrity-fascinated society and so I think the role of celebrity lesbian families is very important. For many Americans who don’t know a gay- or lesbian-headed family, this is their only connection to what our families can look like. And while they may seem too out of the mainstream for many, having people like Rosie O’Donnell on television everyday talking about what her children did at school or how she and Kelli disciplined one of their children can only help to make our families more accessible. As talking about our families becomes more prevalent, I think we can expect to see more and more images of LGBT-headed families in television shows, on talk shows and in movies. However, the role of celebrity LGBT parents can never take the place of the one-to-one conversations each of us need to have with our friends, families, school communities and neighbors about what it means to be gay parents. Only by sharing those struggles and joys with those who know us, can we expect to overcome the very real prejudices and stereotypes that people are carrying about LGBT parents.

Have we as a community become too focused on marriage equality? Are there other rights and issues that should be getting more attention?

First, I think it is really important that we understand as a community that the issue of marriage equality wasn’t driven by the LGBT community or its leaders. It was thrust upon us by the fundamentalist right who knew it would be a winning political issue. Long before marriage was “our” issue, the right was pushing the issue forward and even if we had never uttered the word marriage you can be sure that they would have been talking about it. Since we have been consistently been forced to deal with the issue — I don’t think our movement is too focused on marriage equality. It is one of the important ways that our families can gain access to the many protections and responsibilities that would make it easier for us to protect and raise our children. Through our work on marriage we can take the opportunity to educate millions of Americans about our lives, our loves, our struggles and our joys. This can only help lower the resistance to the work we are doing in other areas of our community — the passage of Employment Non-Discrimination, the passage of local non-discrimination ordinances, the passage of hate crimes statutes, creating safe schools free from bullying, the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, more HIV/AIDS funding and education, eradicating racism, addressing the needs of our senior population and the many other important issues that our community is facing.

How does Family Pride coordinate with other national LGBT organizations and the multitude of state and local groups on their LGBT-family initiatives? What is it that you bring to the table?

Family Pride is very fortunate to enjoy terrific working relationships with many of the national, state and local organizations whose work touches on LGBT family initiatives. First, we are the conveners of the Family Policy Working Group which is a coalition of all the national, state and local organizations that work on family issues. We coordinate resources, ensure sharing of information, get state and local groups connected to the other nationals, and help with message and strategy development on LGBT family issues through this group.

Family Pride brings several unique things to the overall work of the movement. First, we have a long history of working with and understanding the LGBT parenting community. Long before it was fashionable, Family Pride was pushing and advocating for the needs of LGBT parents.

Second, we are uniquely positioned to convene those leaders working at the local level to share best practices and successful techniques so that other local leaders can replicate the work. For example, we are currently funding and working with CalFUN (the California Family Unity Network) to launch a model program for community and coalition building in the state of California around family issues. This work will tie into the proactive marriage education work that is happening, the safe schools and family diversity work that has been gaining great momentum and will generally build a strong and more politically united LGBT family network. As part of this program, we are documenting the work and its successes so that we can take this to other states and give them a blueprint of how to do similar work in their area.

Third, we ensure that the legislative agendas of statewide LGBT political groups takes our issues into account and that parents are a part of those groups and playing leadership roles.

Finally, we are an authoritative resource on issues related to LGBT parenting that the press, public and elected officials can turn to when necessary. In so doing, we ensure that accurate, fair and reliable information is used in those settings when talking about LBGT parents or setting policy that affects us and our children.

Monetary donations are obviously critical to making Family Pride work. What else can the LGBT community and our allies do to advance the cause of LGBT families, even after we’ve made our fiscal contributions? In particular, what can parents, whose spare time is limited, do?

We at Family Pride really understand how hard it is to be both a parent and an activist. But there are a myriad of ways that as parents we can help educate and move people towards justice and equality every single day. One of the uniquely powerful things about being an LGBT parent is that we have access through our families, neighbors, playground, faith communities and school communities to a host of people who would be with us if only we explained how our families are being unfairly treated and what they can do to help.

First, talk about our families and the specific ways that we struggle being LGBT parents — whether it’s the adoption process or the extra education of our children’s teachers — we need to help people understand how our lives are made more difficult because of discrimination.

Second, share our lives. Simply by living our lives as openly and honestly as possible — we create new allies in our fight for full family equality.

Finally, download the 52 Ways to be Outspoken (PDF link) tool from our website. This is an amazing list of once-a-week actions you can take (that fit nicely into our lives as parents) to help advocate for family equality.

What advice would you give to an LGBT couple embarking on parenthood right now?

First and foremost I would tell them to get lots of rest, go to the movies, enjoy your adult alone time, focus on your relationship, because when you bring your children into your life that all stops (at least for a while). At the end of the day, LGBT people are parents first and so all the same advice for perspective parents applies to us. But we also have some additional burdens that we need to take on. Get your wills done, consult a good probate attorney who understands how to create protections for same-sex couples. Have conversations with your friends and family. Make sure you can explain your decision in language that you feel comfortable with. As an LGBT parent you will have to explain your family an infinite number of times. Understand your state laws and what you can and can’t do. Find a community of other LGBT parents so you will have access to support and information. Visit the Family Pride website and find out what local resources are available and what national resources are there.

Once you have done the hard work of getting ready for bringing children into your lives — get ready for the most amazing, life-altering experience that you can imagine. There are countless ways that children will bring joy to your life and that as yet-to-be-parents it is hard to imagine. I have twin four year olds, Tim and Tom, and they amaze me every day. Whether it’s a quirky grin or the first time you hear your child tell you that they love you — the size of your heart gets exponentially bigger with your children in your life.