I’ve been writing a lot about kids’ books—so for a change, here are some of the best recent parenting guides, memoirs, and social science studies for and about us LGBTQ parents.
The below books are all from 2020 through today. Click through for longer reviews and more details—and as always, check out my database, filtered with the “Grown-up books” tag, to see even more books, including ones from previous years!
Parenting Guides
The Gender Identity Guide for Parents: Compassionate Advice to Help Your Child Be Their Most Authentic Self, by Tavi Hawn, a licensed clinical social worker and a transgender, nonbinary, Two Spirit Native person, is intended to help all parents understand gender identity, have healthy conversations with their children about gender, and create an affirming environment, whether their children are transgender, cisgender, nonbinary, gender expansive, or questioning.
Why Did No One Tell Me This?: The Doulas’ (Honest) Guide for Expectant Parents, by Ash Spivak and Natalia Hailes, illustrated by Louise Reimer, is a helpful, supportive guide to pregnancy, birth, and the first days of parenthood, inclusive of birthing people of all genders and sexual identities, and intended for anyone, whether they use a doula or not.
Also see How We Do Family under Memoirs below, which has much generally useful parenting guidance.
Memoirs, Anthologies, and Photo Essays
If These Ovaries Could Talk: The Things We’ve Learned About Making an LGBTQ Family, by Jaimie Kelton and Robin Hopkins. The hosts of a popular podcast capture the lively spirit of their show and the insights of their many guests as they explore LGBTQ family making.
What’s in a Name? Perspectives from Non-Biological and Non-Gestational Queer Mothers, edited by Emily Regan Wills, Raechel Johns, and Sherri Martin-Baron, is a must-read anthology about queer women and nonbinary people who are nonbiological and nongestational parents looks at their paths to parenthood, their experiences as parents, and the evolving meanings of what it is to be a mother.
The Other Mothers: Two Women’s Journey to Find the Family That Was Always Theirs, by Jennifer Berney, is the thoughtfully written story of how the author and her spouse Kellie became parents despite fertility challenges and a healthcare system not designed for queer families.
Second Parent: A Memoir, by Lora Liegel, explores what starting a family felt like to Liegel as a nonbiological mother, not always included in the social and legal processes of motherhood. Liegel also reflects on how growing up with a mother who was living with mental illness impacted her own feelings about parenthood. The overview of the legal situation for nonbiological parents has a few gaps, but the book successfully conveys Liegel’s personal journey.
Broken Horses: A Memoir, by Brandi Carlile, is the engaging, poignant, and sometimes funny story of the six-time Grammy winner’s life from her childhood growing up in poverty, to coming out as a lesbian in her teens, starting her music career, and continuing to tour while raising two children with her wife.
I’m Still Here: A Memoir, by Martina Reaves, interweaves the strands of the author’s life from San Francisco in the 1960s through teaching, law school, coming out, starting a family, and surviving two types of cancer.
Dads, by Bart Heynen, is a gorgeous photo essay offering portraits of 40 gay dads (coupled and single) and their children from around the U.S. . We see families of various racial and ethnic identities, formed in different ways; children from infant to grown; and even a sense of queer community beyond individual families.
Gay Like Me: A Father Writes to His Son, by Richie Jackson, is told as a letter from a gay dad—an award-winning Broadway, television, and film producer—to his gay son. It is one of few books that explore the experiences of people in families with both queer parents and child(ren). Thoughtful and moving, it is part memoir, part social commentary, and all fierce love.
Determined To Be Dad: A Journey of Faith, Resilience, and Love, by Steve Disselhorst, who grew up Catholic in the Midwest and always assumed he would marry a woman and have children. After coming out as gay, however, he thought he would have to give up that dream. After years of self-discovery and gradual self-acceptance, he ultimately starts a family through adoption with his husband while also balancing a career in corporate America. The book offers thoughtful and informative insights both into Disselhorst’s personal growth and the adoption process.
Affliction: Growing Up with a Closeted Gay Dad, by Laura Hall. In 1975, when she was 24, Hall’s father came out to her, after he and her mother had been married for over 30 years. Her mother had known for 18 years, yet they remained married until her death, a total of 64 years. Hall shows how they built a life together and raised four children, despite her father’s relationships with men, and what the impact of this double life was on all members of her family.
Ashes to Ink: A Memoir, by Lisa Lucca. In 1974, when author Lucca was 13, her mom and dad divorced and she learned that her dad was gay. At the time, there were no examples or support for children with queer parents. Moving back and forth between the time after her dad came out and the time just after his death, Lucca shows us how her conflicted feelings about family and relationships, learned through the lens of her parents, impacted her own life and fraught romances.
How We Do Family: From Adoption to Trans Pregnancy, What We Learned about Love and LGBTQ Parenthood, by Trystan Reese, is part memoir and part parenting guide, which manages to tell a story that is specific to the author’s experience as a gay, trans dad while also offering universal advice on parenting, relationships, and more.
I Have Always Been Me: A Memoir, by Precious Brady-Davis, is a story of resilience and triumph by transgender advocate, communications professional, and public speaker Precious Brady-Davis, who grew up as a biracial, gender-nonconforming child, shuttled between abusive foster homes. She details her personal and professional life through high school and beyond as she comes into her identity and eventually marries Myles Brady-Davis, a trans man, with whom she starts a family.
Social Science
Queer Stepfamilies: The Path to Social and Legal Recognition, by Katie L. Acosta, fills a gap in research by looking at queer families formed when one or both parents had children from a previous relationship of any kind or had started their family as a single parent before partnering. Acosta, an associate professor of sociology at Georgia State University, and part of a queer stepfamily herself, looks at the “messiness”—but also the resilience and strength—of families engaged in “plural parenting” and navigating “legal and social systems that are ill-equipped to accommodate their needs.”
We Are Family: The Modern Transformation of Parents and Children, by Susan Golombok. One of the leading academic researchers of LGBTQ families gives us a history of the changing forms of modern families, including ones headed by LGBTQ parents, single parents, and those formed via assisted reproduction.
LGBTQ-Parent Families: Innovations in Research and Implications for Practice, 2nd Edition, edited by Abbie E Goldberg and Katherine R. Allen, covers topics including family formation; lesbian-, gay-, bisexual-, and transgender-parent families; polyamorous parents; race and ethnicity; LGBTQ youth with LGBTQ parents; LGBTQ parents and the workplace; schools; law; clinical work with LGBTQ families; and more.
Queering Family Trees: Race, Reproductive Justice, and Lesbian Motherhood, by Sandra Patton-Imani, draws on over 100 interviews with African American, Latina, Native American, White, and Asian American lesbian mothers of various socioeconomic circumstances to show how they have navigated family making. She argues that federal marriage equality reinforces existing structures of inequality grounded in race, gender, sexuality, and class.
