Dr. Seuss is great for teaching kids to read—but he’s even better, I think, at conveying lessons of inclusion, acceptance, and self-confidence. If more people took those lessons to heart as they learned to read (or taught their kids), the world would be a better place.
Katie Couric did a show yesterday on “Transgender Youth,” which was really rather good, and reminded me I’d never posted about these two children’s books by author, theater artist, and parent S. Bear Bergman. Last year, Bergman launched a Kickstarter project to produce “books and more for gender-independent kids and families.” The first two picture books from the resulting micro-press, Flamingo Rampant, are colorful, fantastical tales.
I wrote the other day about The Purim Superhero, the first LGBT-inclusive Jewish children’s book in English—but two lesbian moms might be lurking in a children’s book about Judaism that was published 28 years ago.
It is a truism in the LGBT community to say that we need LGBT-inclusive children’s books so our kids see images of families like theirs. Yet with few exceptions, LGBT-inclusive picture books have largely shown culturally and religiously neutral families. Diversity of color has started to appear, but even those books don’t explore the families’ various cultural and religious traditions. Kids may therefore see some important aspects of their families in these books, but others are left out. Elisabeth Kushner’s The Purim Superhero, the first clearly LGBT-inclusive Jewish children’s book in English, takes a different approach.
This charming new book, The Very Beary Tooth Fairy, is not obviously gay-inclusive upon first read. But it does contain a hidden gay surprise—and both the author, Arthur Levine, and the illustrator, Sarah Brannen, are known in the LGBT community for their gay-inclusive works. This, their first collaboration, is a sweet tale that any family will likely enjoy.
Jennifer Gennari is the author of the new middle-grade book, My Mixed-Up Berry Blue Summer, about a girl living in Vermont with her mother and her mother’s soon-to-be fiancée, just after Vermont approved civil unions for same-sex couples. I reviewed it a few weeks back, and reached out to her to write a guest post for Mombian, which she kindly agreed to do. Below, she discusses the moment of homophobia against a teen in her community that led her to pen the book, and the personal experiences she wove into it. Thanks to her for sharing this with us.
Family Pride, by Michael Shelton, is a good book with a bit of an identity problem.
In his second inaugural speech, President Obama linked “Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall”—the birthplaces of the women’s, Black, and LGBT equality movements—and reminded us of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words that (as Obama paraphrased) “our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.” A new book about two lesbian moms and their children reminds us that LGBT equality is indeed bound to the need for racial justice.
Jamaica has one of the worst records in the world on LGBT rights. Male same-sex relationships are punishable by up to 10 years in jail, and attitudes, harassment, and hate crimes are endemic across the LGBT spectrum. Filmmaker Micah Fink wants to tell the stories of two Jamaicans affected by homophobia, one of whom is a lesbian mom.
George Kalogridis started as a busboy at Walt Disney World and will now become the theme park’s fifth president, South Florida Gay News reports. Oh, and he’s openly gay. What will this mean for the park and for the prospect of greater representation of LGBT families within the Disney empire?
