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Big tree - photo by Dana Rudolph

For the Holidays: Finding Family, Creating Connections

The end-of-year holiday season is hard for me now that my parents have passed. Thanksgiving had always been my Jewish family of origin’s time to gather. My brother and I have continued to celebrate Thanksgiving with our immediate families and his wife’s parents, but the absence of our parents makes the occasion bittersweet. I miss them, too, at Hanukkah, when we always lit a menorah and exchanged gifts. I’m finding comfort this year, however, in a new project to uncover and preserve our family history.

Rainbow Dollars - Original photo: Sharon McCutcheon

Addressing the Unequal Costs of Queer Parenting

It’s not news that starting a family can be expensive for queer parents. Many of us have lived that. But a new report from Family Equality lays out the costs for different options; looks at how income variation among LGBTQ people impacts their choice of option; and offers suggestions for addressing the imbalances.

The North Family. Photo credit: Dana Pugh Photography Okotoks Studio Photography

Watch: “Just Another Beautiful Family” Tells Story of Trans Dad, Queer Mom, and Their Five Kids

For those of us of a certain age, any large, blended family brings to mind television classic The Brady Bunch–but Nick and Katherine North are a very real family, whose award-winning, 20-minute documentary tells how they fell in love, became a blended family with five kids, and navigated Nick’s gender transition from female to male. Watch it free, in full, right here. It just might be the sweetest thing you’ll see on the Internet today.

Heart in s

Divorce, Reproductive Losses, and Other Queer “Failures”

When the first same-sex couple to marry legally in the United States, Hillary and Julie Goodridge, was feeling stressed from public attention, they didn’t want to seek couples’ counseling. Julie told NPR this past May, “It felt like too much of a risk.” They divorced a few years later. Their daughter Annie, who was 10 at the time, said in retrospect, “I felt like our family let everyone down.” Their situation highlights a long-time problem for the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups: the pressure to be perfect. Two new books, however, each look at topics often associated with failure—relationship break-ups and reproductive losses—in order to help LGBTQ people and our children better navigate them.

LGBTQ Back-to-School Books

New LGBTQ Picture Books for Back-to-School

For back-to-school time, here are some new and soon-to-be-published picture books with LGBTQ and gender creative characters, all involving schools and classmates.

Rainbow Flag

Over the Corporate Rainbow

This past Pride Month saw an explosion of rainbows on products from sneakers to snack foods, reenergizing the debate over whether and how corporate America should be involved in Pride. For me, two things come to bear here: My belief that companies should support LGBTQ equality if they are going to market to us—and the fact that my family would not exist as it does now if it was not for the benefits my spouse and I received from the companies where we worked.

Egg and sperm

J.P. Morgan and Others Boost Fertility Benefits for LGBTQ Employees

Financial giant J.P. Morgan has announced it will soon offer expanded fertility benefits aimed at helping LGBTQ employees start or grow their families. Let’s take the opportunity, then, to look at what they and other companies are doing—or should be.

The F Word

Watch: A Queer Couple’s Continuing Journey as Foster Parents

Nicole Opper and Kristan Cassady’s The F Word docuseries in 2017 showed us the beginning of their journey to parenthood through the foster-to-adoption process. Now, they’re back with Season Two, which continues their story and adds in the stories of others.

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