Mother’s Day and Father’s Day can be fraught times for LGBTQ parents and our children, seemingly designed to underscore that our families are different. I try to see them, however, as opportunities to remind the world that queer families exist. By raising our voices on these days—or sometimes, simply being visible—we resist the attempts of those trying to ignore or eliminate us, and we welcome all who take on the mantle of parenthood.
StoryCorps, the national oral history project, is launching a new initiative to capture the stories of LGBTQ elders born before the Stonewall Riots. Even if you don’t fit this category yourself, you can interview an LGBTQ elder and help preserve their stories for the future. The project is personal to StoryCorps founder Dave Isay, who has said his own dad’s coming out and relating the story of Stonewall helped inspire StoryCorps itself.
Here’s what’s happening that I haven’t covered elsewhere, including progress—and protests—in LGBTQ-inclusive education, mixed results in Tennessee, and more same-sex penguin moms!
Today marks the 8th annual International Family Equality Day, and organizations and individuals in over 100 cities and 50 countries across the globe will be taking part!
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has finalized a new rule that will allow health care workers to refuse to provide or assist in providing medical services if doing so violates their religious or moral beliefs. In other words, it will allow them to discriminate widely—putting LGBTQ people and our families, among others, at risk.
Sometimes a picture book knocks everything out of the park. Evocative prose, whimsical illustrations, a sweet storyline that deals with sensitive topics by applying a big dose of family love—plus a gender ambiguous protagonist with two grandfathers who are a couple. I almost missed this book because the grandfathers’ relationship is so seamlessly woven into the story that the cataloging information has no indication there are LGBTQ characters. This is one picture book that shouldn’t be skipped, however.
It’s Lesbian Visibility Day, so here are a few tidbits of early visible lesbian mom history to honor those who went before us. (Plus a bonus photo of my own family being visible.)
Sarah and Yessie Williams, spouses from Brooklyn, New York, are featured in a new documentary airing today about four different couples and their journeys to create families through in vitro fertilization (IVF). Watch it here!
A Maryland middle school musical was cancelled just two weeks from its first performance. School officials say it is because of profanity in the script, but others say it is because one of the characters has gay dads.
An ongoing project in Canada has been conducting video interviews of families with LGBTQ parents and/or LGBTQ children about their children’s experiences in school. Have a look at some of the many clips from nearly 40 families.
