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 […]
Jonathan Kemmerer-Scovner has a spot-on essay at Critical Masses Media about same-sex parents in children’s books. “Children’s literature,” he observes, “acts as a testing ground for the social mores of a society. You may think we’re all progressing along at a fine rate, but if you really want to see where we’re at, stick it in a children’s book and see what that gets you.”
(Originally published in Bay Windows, December 10, 2009. I’ve covered a few of the books below in separate columns, but several of them are new—and good. Enjoy!) There are still relatively few books for and about LGBTQ families, but 2009 gave us as good and diverse a crop as I’ve seen in a long time.
Heather Has Two Mommies, the classic picture book about a girl with lesbian moms, is now out in a new 20th anniversary edition. Author Lesléa Newman has a piece in this week’s Publisher’s Weekly, in which she discusses the origins of the book and reactions both positive and negative. I have to admit, though, that
“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
Helen and I discuss two new children’s books (one about moms and one about dads) by Lesléa Newman, author of Heather Has Two Mommies. We then reveal yet another hidden lesbian on children’s television, Lily Tomlin (bonus points if you can guess which show without looking it up), and ask whether we’ll see any actual
Because the financial bailout isn’t the only thing happening this week: Ten-year-old Kira Findling of Sebastopol, California, wrote “Please Let My Moms Be Married,” a moving plea to vote no on Prop. 8, for the Press Democrat newspaper. A new report by the nonpartisan Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York concludes that gay
