Two new lesbian moms will soon be coming to your TV screens, in the form of Teri Polo (The West Wing) and Sherri Saum (Rescue Me). The pair will play the titular couple in The Fosters, a one-hour pilot being produced by Jennifer Lopez.
NBC’s The New Normal, a sitcom about two gay dads and their surrogate, premieres in a week. ABC’s sitcom Modern Family, which includes two gay dads, has won an Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series. I therefore thought I’d post a list of some of the funniest true memoirs by lesbian and gay parents. Humor can be a coping, teaching, and entertainment mechanism, and the authors below use it in all three ways.
Parents of transgender children “are the best parents ever. They unconditionally love their children, even when they don’t completely understand what their child is going through,” writes mom Tracie Stratton (herself such a parent) in Transitions of the Heart: Stories of Love, Struggle, and Acceptance by Mothers of Transgender and Gender Variant Children, edited by Rachel Pepper. That lesson of acceptance and love, conveyed through the 32 essays in the collection, make Transitions of the Heart a valuable read for any parent, regardless of the gender identity of their children.
NBC affiliate KSL in Salt Lake City, Utah, won’t air The New Normal, a new sitcom about two gay dads and their surrogate, reports the Salt Lake Tribune. Bonneville CEO Jeff Simpson, CEO of the station’s parent company, Bonneville International, told the Tribune that “For our brand, this program feels inappropriate on several dimensions, especially during family viewing time.”
LGBT parenting memoirs are few and far between. You’d think any publisher’s marketing and design team would take the time to investigate what’s already been done. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to take drastic measures here and declare a moratorium on LGBT parenting memoir covers with blue gradient backgrounds, all-lowercase white titles, and Ken dolls.
To label Dan Bucatinsky’s Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?: Confessions of a Gay Dad a “gay parenting” book is to do it a disservice. Not that there is anything wrong with gay parenting books (far from it)—but Bucatinsky’s work is about parenting, period. To limit the scope of this hysterically funny, often bawdy, and unexpectedly touching book to gay parenting alone is to miss that essential point—even if the book also contains some supremely sharp observations about being both gay and a parent.
Jennifer Lopez is developing a TV series for ABC Family about two lesbian moms, Deadline reports. Will the hour-long drama give us an authentic (albeit fictionalized) portrayal of a lesbian-headed family? Will it stay away from tired clichés, like “the wacky search for sperm”? Will J.Lo sing and dance about baby strollers?
Books matter. “Children feel unimportant and invisible when they do not see representations of their lives and families in books,” asserts librarian Jamie Campbell Naidoo. He knows this firsthand. Growing up in the Bible Belt in the early 1980s, he says, there were no books that “mirrored my life and the lives of other queer children.” If there had been, he says, he “I would not have felt so alienated and ashamed of being different.” His classmates, too, might have understood his queerness was not strange. Such books, however, were not to be found.
Fast forward to today and Dr. Naidoo, now an assistant professor of library and information studies at the University of Alabama, has written a book of his own to help guide librarians, parents, teachers, and others seeking LGBT-inclusive titles.
Author Todd Parr has responded with the video below (after the jump) to the banning of his The Family Book by an Illinois school board. They banned the book after some parents complained about a page that says, “Some families have two moms or two dads.” Todd Parr is awesome.
President Obama has said that same-sex parents and their children influenced his decision to support marriage equality. And in the Washington Post recently, Janice D’Arcy asked, “Has gay parenting ‘normalized’ the perception of gay relationships?” The interaction between LGBT parenting rights and relationship rights is indeed a fascinating and important question—and one charted in part by law professor Carlos Ball, whose new book also gives us a compelling history of the expansion of LGBT parenting rights. Here’s my review of his work, originally published as my Mombian newspaper column.
