I was thrilled to see that the same book won the American Library Association’s top honors Monday for both the LGBT- and Latino-related children’s book awards, proving that one book can address multiple aspects of identity (and countering the prevalent media impression that the LGBT community is predominantly White). It just so happens, too, that the intersecting of identities is a major theme in LGBT politics this week.
LGBT-inclusive children’s and young adult books are hard to find. Good ones are even harder. I’m delighted, therefore, that the American Library Association has just honored a number of new ones in two ways, through their Stonewall Book Awards and their Rainbow List.
The year 2012 saw several notable books about LGBT parents and our children, including one for the often-ignored middle-grade readers, a young adult novel about two African American teens with a transgender dad, two memoirs (one by a gay dad, and another by the son of lesbian moms), and a fascinating history of LGBT family rights. They make better gifts than yet another “I Love My Mommies” t-shirt.
It’s official. Not just “calling her then-partner ‘my beautiful Cydney’ in public” official. Not just “the kids have both their names” official. It’s “now she’s said it to the world” official: Jodie Foster came out. She did so in a heartfelt speech at the Golden Globe Awards last night, after receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award.
Here’s some great news to end the year: The Disney Channel’s social outreach campaign, “Make Your Mark,” currently includes a video about a 14-year-old boy who happens to have two moms. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) calls the video “the first of its kind for the Disney Channel, which has not included an openly gay character on its programming.”
Congratulations to Roe, who won last week’s giveaway of Jennifer Gennari’s LGBT-inclusive middle-grade book My Mixed-Up Berry Blue Summer. (For details about the book, see my earlier post.) Even if you didn’t win, though, here’s one thing you can do to help authors of LGBT-inclusive kids’ books (and thus, indirectly, our kids).
Any Day Now, the new feature film starring Alan Cumming and Garret Dillahunt as a gay couple in the 1970s who foster a teenager with Down Syndrome, is a refreshing reminder that LGBT families have a long history of coming together in unexpected ways, against the odds. Other recent fictional portrayals of LGBT parenting have focused on upper-middle class families, deliberately becoming parents and secure in their parental rights. Not so here.
Congratulations to Lydia, who won Tuesday’s giveaway of Jennifer Gennari’s LGBT-inclusive middle-grade book My Mixed-Up Berry Blue Summer. If you didn’t win (or didn’t enter), however, don’t despair. Here’s another chance to do so.
Australian filmmaker Maya Newell gave one of the best responses I’ve ever seen to the mistaken assertion that all kids need a mother and a father.
I’m so excited—a new, LGBT-inclusive book for middle-grade readers, and a delightful one, at that! Jennifer Gennari’s My Mixed-Up Berry Blue Summer is about coming-of-age, coming out about one’s family, and baking pies. I’m happy to be doing a giveaway of two copies of the book, courtesy of publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: one today, and one later this week. Read on for details.
