I have a special guest this week while Helen is away on a business trip— our six-year-old son. He offers his thoughts on one of his favorite books of the moment, Redwoods, by Jason Chin. It’s not LGBT-related at all, but it’s delightful, and our son likes it, which is reason enough for me to […]
Happy birthday to Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, who was born on this date in 1904. As those of you with children in elementary school likely know, today is also Read Across America Day, an an annual reading motivation and awareness program run by the National Education Association (NEA). I feel obliged to point
(Originally published as my Mombian newspaper column.) The American Library Association’s Rainbow Project has just published its third annual Rainbow Bibliography, a list of recommended, LGBT-inclusive books for readers under age 18. Nel Ward, head of the Rainbow Project, says one of the biggest problems librarians have with including LGBT-inclusive books in their collections is
I’ve been posting this quote from Coretta Scott King, wife of Martin Luther King, Jr., every year at this time, but I think it bears repeating. Mrs. King was speaking at Lambda Legal’s 25th Anniversary Luncheon in 1998: As Martin once said, ‘We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny… an inescapable
Here is the tenth in my series of quotes from Who’s Your Daddy? And Other Writings on Queer Parenting. I’ll be running them for a couple of weeks courtesy of the book’s editor, Rachel Epstein. I’m choosing the quotes I feel are most intriguing and thought provoking; I don’t always agree with the sentiments, but
(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
“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
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
The 21st Lambda Literary Award finalists were announced this week. The six finalists for the LGBT Children’s/Young Adult category are fine books all, although I’m a little disappointed none of them show LGBT parents—as important as it also is to show LGBT kids. Actually, Hit the Road, Manny, is about a gay male nanny, so
