Twenty years ago today, I published the first post at Mombian. My son was 2 then; last month he graduated from college. I’ve been honored to write about LGBTQ families and to see our community thrive and grow over the past two decades. We face renewed challenges today, but I’ve seen our strength and resilience before.
In my first post, I wrote, “Mombian is a blog dedicated to providing relevant, useful, and just plain fun reading for lesbian moms.” While I still can only write from my perspective as a lesbian mom, I have become deliberately broader in my language and coverage to include more about LGBTQ parents of all identities, while my focus on relevant, useful, and sometimes fun material remains.
Today, this site now contains more than 6,200 posts; more than 1,800 listings in the Mombian Database of LGBTQ Family Books that I launched in 2021, and more than 400 entries in the Mombian LGBTQ Parental Names Project that I launched in 2011.
Since I began this work, we’ve seen many advances, including the spread of marriage equality, the growth of expanded legal recognition for LGBTQ parents; increased representation of LGBTQ families in children’s books, television, and other media; a larger, more nuanced vocabulary to talk about LGBTQ identities (including parenting names); more inclusive definitions of “infertility”; and our growing visibility in many aspects of society and culture.
It would be foolish, however, to ignore the many challenges that remain, including the need for updated parentage laws that reflect and protect the many ways families are created today; for accurate and inclusive information on starting and raising our families; for our representation in books and media, without censorship; for inclusive schools that respect, include, and affirm all students’ intersectional identities; and for protected and expanded access to reproductive healthcare.
Most immediately and ominously right now, we LGBTQ parents have the challenge of a virulently anti-LGBTQ federal government and many state governments that want to erase our identities, ban lifesaving health care, stigmatize our representation, prevent us from serving our country, deny our parentage rights, and remove funding from Medicaid and other critical programs that benefit families of many types, among other things. I have no easy solutions for any of this, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my work over the past 20 years, it’s that we LGBTQ parents are strong, resilient, creative, persistent, and loving, and that that combination can result in amazing things.
I offer my deepest thanks to all of you who have read, shared, and commented on my work, inspired me with your ideas and family stories, and taught me much about parenting, queerness, and community. You’ve made me a better writer and a better person. Along the way, I’ve had the honor of winning two GLAAD Media Awards (2012 and 2023), plus the Hostetter-Habib Family Award from Family Equality (2018). To me, that means that other people in the LGBTQ community value what I have done here, and for that, I am truly grateful. What keeps me going, however, are not the awards, but the LGBTQ families I encounter every day, in person or online. We are many and varied and we have a long history.
I hope that by continuing to offer news, information, resources, and occasional diversions, this blog can continue to play some part in strengthening and connecting our community of LGBTQ families. While I cannot predict what the next 20 years—or even the next 24 hours—will bring, I know that we are stronger facing it together. Thank you for being with me on the journey.