When lawyer, policy advocate, and community organizer Alli Harper and her wife had their first child, they did what many LGBTQ parents do: looked for children’s books that showed two-mom and other diverse families. The difficulty of finding more than a handful, however, led Harper to launch a nationwide service that is connecting readers with these books while also pushing the publishing industry to create more.
One of the first picture books about a gender creative boy, published in the 1970s but long out of print, is now available in a new edition produced by its illustrator, Marian Buchanan. She recently shared with me some details about the lengthy journey to its reprinting and why it still holds lessons for today.
A new multi-artist, multi-genre music album coming out this month will offer transgender and nonbinary children and youth songs that reflect and support who they are. It’s the brainchild of Julie Lipson, one half of children’s music duo Ants on a Log, who spoke with me recently about the project and shared this sneak peek of the cover art.
Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, the 2008 picture book about a girl worried that her favorite uncle will no longer have time for her after he marries his boyfriend, is coming out today in a bright new edition. The anthropomorphic guinea pigs are gone, replaced by human characters—and author Sarah Brannen was kind enough to answer some questions for Mombian readers about the changes.
Kim Bergman wrote her new children’s picture book about assisted reproduction based on “what I’ve been telling parents for 30 years to tell their kids. It’s what I told my own kids.”
Orca Book Publishers of British Columbia, Canada, is an independent publisher that has produced two of my recent favorite LGBTQ-inclusive children’s books: Pride Colors, by Robin Stevenson, a bright board book for the youngest tots, and A Plan for Pops, by Heather Smith and Brooke Kerrigan, a poignant story about a two-grandfather couple and their gender-ambiguous grandchild. Publisher and owner Andrew Wooldridge was kind enough to speak with me recently about the 35-year-old company and its goal of offering “reading material that represents the diversity of human experience to readers of all ages.”
The Bravest Knight, a children’s television series that centers on a family with same-sex parents, is premiering on Hulu June 21—the first such series on a mainstream network. I spoke with creator Daniel Errico about the show, his motivations, and working with the all-star voice cast.
Thirty-two years ago, Nanette Gartrell, M.D., launched a project to follow the first wave of lesbian families created through donor insemination. Now, her National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS) is the longest-running study on LGBTQ-parent families, and Gartrell and her team have just released a paper about the now-grown children at 25 years old. Gartrell, a psychiatrist and Visiting Distinguished Scholar at the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, spoke with me about the latest results and more.
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.”
