A new publishing company by three powerhouse women is launching with a new “bio/anthology” of feminist icon and lesbian mom Audre Lorde by Dr. Gloria Joseph, Lorde’s partner in the latter years of her life.
My annual gift guide for LGBTQ families is usually a roundup of the best LGBTQ-inclusive children’s and parenting books of the year—but I’m delighted that this year’s list includes several inclusive kids’ music albums as well.
It’s National Adoption Day, so I’m celebrating by sharing a baker’s dozen of books about LGBTQ parents and adoption–children’s books, memoirs, and social science studies.
The tension between assimilation and queerness has long hovered over the LGBTQ community. As English writer Jonathan Kemp said a few years ago, “The assimilationists want gay marriage, inclusion in the military, the right to adopt children…. Queers, on the other hand … [regard] the most vibrant and radical aspect of homosexuality as being precisely its opposition to normative sexuality and society.” Two new memoirs, however, show that these concepts do not always have to oppose each other.
Carrie Brownstein is best known as part of the band Sleater-Kinney and for developing and starring in the award-winning comedy series Portlandia. She wrote recently at the New Yorker about her dad’s coming out.
Sometimes, a book comes along at just the right time. My mother was diagnosed with lung, bone, and brain cancer on December 23, just days after I received a copy of Lesléa Newman’s new book of poetry about her own journey through her mother’s illness and death from cancer.
Jerry Mahoney’s “Mommy Man: How I Went from Mild-Mannered Geek to Gay Superdad,” is a wonderful addition to the growing genre of LGBT parenting memoirs, not only because of its sharp writing and smart humor, but because it shows us an aspect of LGBT parenting we haven’t seen in a book-length memoir before—two men pursuing parenthood through gestational surrogacy.
The history of out lesbian and gay parents started decades before the term “gayby boom” was coined in 1990. A new book charts that history—so of course I had to review it.
Two new, very different memoirs continue to expand our sense of what an LGBT family looks like. One is the story of a lesbian mom struggling against her son’s anti-gay Catholic school while grappling with her relationship to the Church and to her own mother. The other is about a butch lesbian and her experience being pregnant—the print version of a graphic novel first serialized online.
I’m always fond of showing just how far back the history of LGBT parents goes. Here’s a fun historical find, then: a comic from 1978 (that’s 36 years ago!) telling the story of a lesbian trying to get pregnant.
