As a mom, Erin Uritus, the new CEO of Out & Equal Workplace Advocates, knows first-hand how important it is for companies to support their queer parent employees in starting families and finding work-life balance.
Both as a daughter and a parent, the new executive director of PFLAG, Dr. Jaime Grant, understands the organization’s mission of uniting families, allies, and people who are LGBTQ. “I’m a queer mom of a queer kid and my Irish family exiled me,” she said in an interview. This treatment by her family led to an accelerating drug addiction. Grant, who was named head of PFLAG last September, is now 28 years sober and solo parenting her son, 19, who identifies as bisexual, and co-parenting her daughter, 10. “I can see the difference in a person’s life between family acceptance and family rejection,” she said. “I just know what it means.”
Everyone’s first week on the job should be like Stan Sloan’s. The new executive director of Family Equality Council, the national organization for LGBTQ families, began the role on the first day of Family Week in Provincetown, the organization’s signature event and the world’s largest gathering of LGBTQ families.
A 25th anniversary edition of Lesléa Newman’s children’s book “Heather Has Two Mommies,” with brand-new illustrations and updated text, has given the classic new life for families today. And Newman is amazed that some of the children who read Heather when it first came out could now be reading it to their own children, she told me in an interview.
Janson Wu, executive director of GLAD (Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders), is leading one of the several LGBT legal organizations bringing marriage equality before the U.S. Supreme Court this spring. I asked him recently about the interplay among marriage equality, parental rights, and other issues that impact LGBT parents and our children, and about the past, present, and future of our movement.
October marks LGBT History Month, and a new project by two daughters of gay dads aims to reveal a part of history that has rarely been told before: the stories of people like themselves who lost parents to AIDS.
It’s the season of the High Holidays for Jews around the world—and that means that Julie Silver, one of the most popular singers and songwriters of Jewish contemporary music — and a lesbian mom — is very busy. She took time, however, to speak with me about being a mom, balancing family and work, coming out, living as an interfaith family, and doing good in the world.
Yesterday, a federal district court ruled that a key section of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)—the part that denies federal recognition to same-sex couples—is unconstitutional. The plaintiff in the case, Karen Golinski, is an attorney and lesbian mom. I interviewed her last December about her accidental path to the DOMA challenge and the case’s impact on her family.
Since the blogosphere has been abuzz with news about breast cancer organization Susan G. Komen for the Cure pulling funds from Planned Parenthood, I thought I’d post the slightly revised version of an interview I did several years ago with Dr. Susan Love.
(Originally published as my Mombian newspaper column.) For same-sex couples wanting to have children, knowing where to begin can make a big difference. For couples starting their families through biological means, one new resource is the Family Building Options Web site, part of the Fertility Lifelines educational program created by pharmaceutical company EMD Serono. Despite
