“Family Voices” in Spanish

For the past two months, I’ve posted Family Voices, a series of interviews with LGBT families from around the country. The families volunteered because of their involvement in the Family Pride Coalition’s OUTSpoken Families program, and their commitment to speaking with their local communities and media about their lives and the need for LGBT equality. Turns out their impact is international.

A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail from a blogger in Argentina, asking for permission to translate the series into Spanish. Below is her message (shared with permission), which offers a glimpse of LGBT lives in another part of the world:

My name’s Julieta and I live in Santa Fe, Argentina. I visit Mombian everyday and the reason I’m e-mailing you is that I´d like to know if it’s ok with you if I translate “Family Voices” to Spanish to post it in my blog. My partner and I are considering to become parents and whenever we talk about it with others we get two different ideas from people. Straight people in general are very supportive, at least the ones that are close to us… On the other hand a lot of gay people we know look at us as if we were crazy. Our friends got used to us talking about it and we found out that most of them really want to become parents as well but they think it’s impossible or too hard so they don’t ever mention it.

The legal situation is a bit complicated here… it’s like we don’t exist, there’s not even civil union (except in Buenos Aires). Most of my friends don’t understand English so I thought it’d be great if I could translate “Family Voices” for them so they can see that there are lesbian moms living elsewhere and that they are happy and proud about it.

She’s now posted translations of the first and second Family Voices profiles, and written again to say “This is helping me to find people where I live. I already found 3 lesbian couples that that live in Argentina and are proud parents so I’m really happy about all this.”

Thanks for helping to build visibility and community for all of us, Julieta!

(If anyone else is interested in translating Family Voices or other Mombian posts into additional languages, please drop me a note to discuss.)