Florida Lt. Governor Jennifer Carroll responded to accusations that she had an affair with a female aide by stating, “Usually black women that look like me don’t engage in relationships like that.” Responses from the LGBT community have been both strong and clever.
Here’s a few of the LGBT parenting stories I haven’t covered elsewhere. Lots of good stuff this week!
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.
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.
A new report details the inequalities children of LGBT parents face under state laws—laws that govern much related to family life, including parentage orders, fostering, adoption, donor insemination, surrogacy, custody, and inheritance.
Felix Bermea, his partner Roy, and their four children have been harassed in their hometown of Gilbert, Arizona for almost three months. It started with epithets scrawled on their house and car, led to someone setting their bushes on fire, and has escalated to a home break in and vandalization of the children’s furniture. The children are afraid, and the parents are afraid for them. Now, the Family Equality Council wants to do the family a kindness and send them, free of charge, to the organization’s annual Family Week in Provincetown. But they need our help.
“Mya and Her Moms” is a 10-week video series from CafeMom Studios featuring Florida lesbian moms Lisa and Laura and their eight-year-old daughter Mya. The videos give us a charming look at a lovely family—and the positive depiction of an LGBT family on a mainstream parenting site always has tremendous value. The way the site is positioning the videos, however, is a bit problematic.
A big congratulations to Jennifer Chrisler, executive director of the Family Equality Council, her spouse Cheryl Jacques, and their sons Tim and Tom as they welcome little brother Matthew Wade into their family!
A lesbian Super PAC? Sounds like a flannel-wrapped emergency kit consisting of hummus, dental dams, and a cheat sheet of Indigo Girls’ lyrics.
My son is turning nine soon, and it frightens me. Nine is perilously close to ten, first of the double digits, rubbing shoulders with that phantasm of every parent’s nightmares, puberty. Nine seems like the last hurrah of young childhood before it gradually starts to give way to the moods, interests, and concerns of an older phase of life.
