LGBT-inclusive children’s and young adult books are hard to find. Good ones are even harder. I’m delighted, therefore, that the American Library Association has just honored a number of new ones in two ways, through their Stonewall Book Awards and their Rainbow List.
The year 2012 saw several notable books about LGBT parents and our children, including one for the often-ignored middle-grade readers, a young adult novel about two African American teens with a transgender dad, two memoirs (one by a gay dad, and another by the son of lesbian moms), and a fascinating history of LGBT family rights. They make better gifts than yet another “I Love My Mommies” t-shirt.
Books matter. “Children feel unimportant and invisible when they do not see representations of their lives and families in books,” asserts librarian Jamie Campbell Naidoo. He knows this firsthand. Growing up in the Bible Belt in the early 1980s, he says, there were no books that “mirrored my life and the lives of other queer children.” If there had been, he says, he “I would not have felt so alienated and ashamed of being different.” His classmates, too, might have understood his queerness was not strange. Such books, however, were not to be found.
Fast forward to today and Dr. Naidoo, now an assistant professor of library and information studies at the University of Alabama, has written a book of his own to help guide librarians, parents, teachers, and others seeking LGBT-inclusive titles.
Acclaimed children’s author Maurice Sendak died yesterday at the age of 83. I love his books, both the words and the pictures, and their exploration of “the darker side of childhood,” as NPR puts it. Darker, yes, but never bleak or hopeless.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that children’s books dealing with issues of gender identity are still few and far between. A colleague of mine, however, recently recommended Andrea U’ren’s Pugdog, a picture book about a gender nonconforming dog.
A new American Library Association (ALA) list of recommended LGBTQ-inclusive books for children and young adults shows that characters who are transgender, bisexual, and of ambiguous identity are taking their place solidly beside more traditional gay and lesbian ones.
Wisconsin high school librarian Lynn Evarts, who chairs the ALA committee that chooses the annual “Rainbow Bibliography,” said she is “very happy” that the fifth annual version of the list, announced January 22, is so diverse.
My third-grade son has been enjoying biographies, learning things even I didn’t know about Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin. So when I read that Frank Kameny, one of the founding fathers of the gay equality movement, was honored November 15 by a memorial service at the Cannon House Office Building near the U.S. Capitol, I
This year brought us several new books, fiction and non-fiction, featuring lesbian- and gay-headed familes. While we might hope for greater quantity (and greater diversity across the LGBT spectrum), the quality was at least very good. Here are some of the best.
Just a few articles this week, but they’re juicy, so enjoy! Denise Balkissoon writes in Toronto’s Globe and Mail about “The seven habits of highly effective lesbian families.” “A series of studies in Canada and elsewhere over the past decade has found that the children of lesbians aren’t just well-adjusted—they excel.”It’s a good article for explaining some of the
More than 20 years after she wrote Heather Has Two Mommies, the first picture book for and about children with two happily coupled lesbian parents, Lesléa Newman is still turning out must-reads for lesbian families. Her latest work, Donovan’s Big Day, is a delightful story about a boy preparing for the wedding of his two
