The most difficult part of Blogging for LGBT Families Day is reading through all the amazing posts (130 this year!) and trying to figure out how best to share them further. I’ve tried in some past years to categorize: posts on trying to start a family, on being the child of an LGBT parent, on faith and LGBT families, on being a single parent, etc. Many of the posts cross these boundaries, though. I also think there’s value in sometimes stumbling on a great post not in a category one would normally read. My solution this year is therefore a little different.
Over the next week or so (perhaps interspersed with posts on other things), I’m going to showcase several intriguing quotes at a time from people’s Blogging for LGBT Families Day posts. I’m not going to group them into categories—think of this as a delicious buffet with a variety of flavors. Here are the first six. Enjoy your reading—and thanks again to all of you who participated!
- Two and a Half Women: “As a kid I was constantly bragging about my lesbian moms, effectively outing them wherever I went. . . . Explaining to first-grader Zach Tell that I wasn’t born in two separate sections with each half of my body coming out of a different mother: I felt good that I was able to clarify that. But that was over twenty years ago. And now I find my excitement is mixed with a bit of confusion.”
- BiNet USA (Fliponymous): “We don’t have to all be the same to be unified. It’s the differences that make it interesting. But the nature of family is such that in spite of the things that look like differences, we’re all in it together, and no one can attack any one of us without the entire family coming to our defense.The LGBT community is a family, too. And one of the primary purposes of a family is to provide for its members the ability to live a life of integrity in a community of mutual support.”
- First Time Second Time: “The mom I was when I wrote here back then . . . that really was me, as is the dad I am as I write now.”
- Keshet: “We didn’t ask for this. Our children were born this way, b’tzelem Elokim, in the image of God. For reasons we may never know, God, in His infinite wisdom, created our children with a sexual orientation or gender identity that is not what we expected.”
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Outrunning the Storm: “There are times hanging out with my other suburban mom friends when they let slip such things as wow, sometimes I really forget that you are gay, I guess I just don’t think of you that way. Those are the moments when my ordinary life feels stripped of my culture.”
- Amal Nahurriyeh: “This is one of the things that makes talking about parenting for LGBT folks difficult—most of what we go through is identical to other families’ issues, so it seems like there’s nothing special or different about us. . . . But families with LGBT people parenting in them aren’t just like everybody else, because we go through all of these ‘normal’ things in a context where our families are considered different by society and government(s).”
