Two New Books Reveal LGBT Lives
Stories can be told in many ways. Two new works—one poetic, one academic—take strikingly different approaches to telling the stories of LGBT people and families.
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Books for Parents
Banned Books Week Reminds Us of the Need for LGBT-Inclusive Children’s Books
This week marks the 30th anniversary of Banned Books Week, bringing issues of LGBT content in children’s books once again to the fore.
Gay Dads Read from their Children’s Book for Banned Books Week
It’s Banned Books Week, the annual celebration of the freedom to read! In honor of the event, here’s a video of gay dads Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, authors of And Tango Makes Three, reading from their book, which for several years topped the American Library Association’s list of most challenged books.
Lesbian and Gay Parenting: Funnier than Fiction
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 Share Their Stories
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.
So Few LGBT Parenting Memoirs, So Few Cover Designs?
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.
New Parenting Memoir Shows Humor and Heart
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.
LGBT Parenting: 40 Years of a “Quieter Revolution”
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.
Zach Wahls’ “My Two Moms” Tells of His Family’s Values
Zach Wahls, the former University of Iowa student whose speech about marriage equality to the state House went viral—twice—on YouTube, has a new book out today about his family: My Two Moms: Lessons of Love, Strength, and What Makes a Family.
Is Blogging a Luxury?
April is National Poetry Month, which always brings to my mind this passage from Audre Lorde, self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”:
