Helen and I share viewer comments on favorite Disney films, tackle neighbors’ assumptions about lesbians and men, and discuss two picture books we’ve enjoyed recently. One is Patricia Polacco’s In Our Mothers’ House, a new book for older elementary students that features an interracial lesbian family. The other, Tacky the Penguin, is an older book […]
Yesterday, I posted a recent column in which I reviewed several new books and films for and about LGBT families. It turns out the conservative Massachusetts Family Institute, which took the lead fighting against marriage equality here in the Bay State, didn’t like it so much—or maybe they did. In their latest e-newsletter, they included
(Originally published in Bay Windows, July 29, 2009. Stay tuned for another post on what an ultra-conservative group had to say about this article.) The number of resources for LGBT families is, like my own son, small but growing. Here are some recent highlights for a variety of children’s ages: Mommy, Mama, and Me and
[I published a version of this two years ago when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows first came out. I thought it was worth revisiting now that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is in theaters. (No, I haven’t seen it yet. Hope to soon.) Warning: Serious geekiness ahead.] The below list of charms and
“Writing has always been my political activism,” said Lesléa Newman, author of Heather Has Two Mommies, the classic 1989 children’s book that was one of the first to feature a child with two moms. Her two new books, however, are sweet, simple tales of family life, without any overt politics or agenda. Mommy, Mama, and
Helen and I discuss two new children’s books (one about moms and one about dads) by Lesléa Newman, author of Heather Has Two Mommies. We then reveal yet another hidden lesbian on children’s television, Lily Tomlin (bonus points if you can guess which show without looking it up), and ask whether we’ll see any actual
My son is starting to read more on his own now, so I was delighted to find the lighthearted early reader There Is a Bird On Your Head! by Mo Willems, of Knuffle Bunny and Pigeon fame. The simple plot is that elephant Gerald has a bird on his head, and must rely on his
“Guess what?” “Chicken Butt!” The classic schoolyard gag has found new life in Chicken Butt!, a picture book by critically acclaimed children’s author Erica Perl. There is nothing LGBT-specific about the story, but Perl’s illustrator is Henry Cole, the prolific artist who also did the drawings for Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson’s And Tango Makes
For the third year in a row, Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell’s And Tango Makes Three, about two male penguins who care for an orphaned egg and raise a chick, tops the American Library Association’s (ALA) Top Ten list of the Most Frequently Challenged Books. This despite the fact that the book is based on
This week, Helen and I are celebrating 16 years together! We also discuss the joys of classic Disney films (with or without a young Angela Lansbury), and how children’s movies have changed over the years, not necessarily for the better. For bonus points, we demonstrate the fun fold-out action of the Panorama book I blogged
