Twenty-one years ago, I launched Mombian, not imagining where it would lead. Today, the world for LGBTQ parents and our children continues to present new joys and new challenges, and I hope Mombian continues to offer news, resources, inspiration, and connection to help us along the way. Thank you for joining me on the ride.
When I wrote my first post here, my son was two; he’s now out of college and embarked on his career. Mombian has grown, too; today, this site now contains more than 6,400 posts; more than 2,000 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.
I’ve witnessed many advances for LGBTQ families in this time, 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. We are making our mark as part of a longer history.
At the same time, much remains to be done, and much of our progress is at risk. We have the challenge of a virulently anti-LGBTQ federal government and many state governments whose actions endanger our families, erase our identities, ban lifesaving health care, block paths to family formation, 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 that 21 years of this blog and 23 years of parenting have taught me, it’s that we LGBTQ parents and our children are strong, resilient, creative, persistent, resourceful, loving, and many—and that together, we can do great things.
(Longtime readers may notice that my actual blogiversary was yesterday, June 21, but since that fell on Father’s Day this year, I decided to hold off for 24 hours on my own celebration so as not to take away from the dads and others who claim that day as their own.)