Archives › 2008 › July

BuddyG DVD Giveaway

As promised earlier, here is the contest to win a copy of BuddyG: My Two Moms and Me, the first fully animated show featuring a child of LGBT parents! Margaux Towne-Colley and Donna Colley, the women behind BuddyG, have offered a free copy to a Mombian reader, and they’re throwing in some temporary tattoos as [...]

Trans Parents, Trans Kids: Two New Guides

(Originally published in Bay Windows, July 10, 2008.) Two new works offer much-needed guidance for families with transgender members, but each approaches the subject from a different perspective. One addresses parents of transgender children, while the other targets children of transgender parents. The Transgender Child, by Stephanie Brill and Rachel Pepper (Cleis, 2008), is subtitled, [...]

Mombian-Bilerico Birthday Contest Winners

Thanks to the participants and winners in last week’s Mombian-Bilerico Birthday Blowout. Reader CMB won the two books and CD. Bil at Bilerico says he now has an extra copy of children’s book Choose to Love, however, and will offer it to my second-place winner Erin. Thanks, Bil! I’ll also be running a new contest [...]

Weekly Political Roundup

Four retired officers, each from a different branch of the U.S. military, recommended that the military repeal the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and let gay men and lesbians serve openly. In the “Report of the General/Flag Officers’ Study Group” released by the Michael D. Palm Center of the University of California at Santa Barbara, [...]

Mombian/Bilerico Birthday Contest Extravaganza

Bil Browning, founder of The Bilerico Project, was kind enough to suggest we celebrate our respective blogs’ birthdays with a little cross-promotion. Bil and his partner Jerame have built their site into one of the most active and diverse LGBT communities online in only a year, all while raising a teenager and two dogs (as [...]

Goodnight Bush

Few among us, I’d wager, haven’t read Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd’s classic bedtime story Goodnight Moon. It was our son’s constant goodnight story for the first year or so of his life, and is now burned into my brain along with the Thomas the Tank Engine theme song, the movie Cars, and large [...]

“She Got Me Pregnant”: Episode 34

Helen and I talk about Family Outing, the funny, raunchy new memoir by a man whose mother was outed to him by her ex-girlfriend when he was 10 years old. (Not the recommended way of doing things, might I add.) We also share more highlights of our recent vacation to California, including San Francisco Pride’s [...]

FroYo the Way to Go for IVF, Study Claims

Helen and I used in vitro fertilization (IVF) to conceive our son. We did not, alas, have enough extra embryos after implantation to freeze any for later use. (We did, however, use a tried and true frozen sperm “pop-sicle.”) I was still interested, however, in a new study from Copenhagen University Hospital, which reports the [...]

San Francisco Pride, Family Style

Continuing my coast-to-coast exploration of the family side of Pride, here are a few shots from the Family Garden at San Francisco Pride 2008. Yes, it’s official: Pride is now as much about crayons as it is about feather boas and motorcycles. In addition to watching our son climb all over the playground with his [...]

LGBT Parenting Roundup

A few links of interest during this slow vacation season: Long Island lesbian moms Syndi Diaz and Sandy Colon shared the story of their domestic life and supportive local community with the New York Daily News. For the second time, a same-sex couple has sued online adoption service Adoption LLC and Adoption Media LLC, after [...]

See, It Does Lead to Polygamy

Headline from 365gay.com: “LA Mayor Weds Gay Couple” (Or am I the only one who parsed it this way? Compare, for example, “Gay Bishop Weds Longtime Partner,” or, on a straight note, “‘SNL’ alum Chris Kattan weds model Sunshine Tutt,” not to mention, from the amusing annals of straight, marriage-themed reality shows, “Ex-Bachelor Firestone Weds [...]

Birthdays All Around

Our friends at the Bilerico Project are celebrating their first birthday on Wednesday. Click over and join the fun. They’ll have contests and festivities all week long. As it happens, Mombian passed its third birthday on June 21. Since that was only a day before my two-week trip to California, with unknown Internet access, I [...]

Olympic Mom: Hero or Cheater?

I’m feeling inadequate. Dara Torres is my age, 41, the mother of a two-year old, and just qualified for the U.S. Olympic swim team with a win in the 100-meter freestyle and a U.S.-record time in the 50-meter freestyle. This will be her fifth Olympics. In 2007, she won the 50-meter freestyle at the U.S. [...]

Thomas Beatie Gives Birth

Thomas Beatie and his wife Nancy welcomed a baby girl into the world last Sunday. Beatie, a transgender man, made headlines in March when he announced he was pregnant. Best wishes to the new family. May they have the privacy and peace their young one needs while they also continue to help shift attitudes. Kudos [...]

Will You Support McDonald’s Now that the Ultra-Right Hates Them?

The American Family Association is calling for a boycott of McDonald’s restaurants, claiming that the company is giving “the full weight of their corporation to promoting the homosexual agenda, including homosexual marriage,” according to Box Turtle Bulletin. Normally I’d be more than happy to urge people to support a company that supports the LGBT community, [...]

Same-Sex Parents in the Czech Republic

I’m finishing up vacation here in California and will be in transit and/or up to my eyeballs in dirty laundry for the next couple of days. I suspect many of you (at least in the U.S.) are traveling this week, too. If you are still online, however, why not take a few moments over this [...]

What Would You Do With $30 Million?

Thirty million dollars. That’s what consultants are estimating both sides could spend on Proposition 8, the November ballot initiative that would amend California’s constitution to ban marriage of same-sex couples. Rather than wasting money trying to stop loving couples from marrying (or having to fight for their right to do the same), here’s a rough [...]