Clay Aiken a Gay Dad

Quick: How many famous gay dads can you name? For me, the answer is “Not many.” While most of us can reel off at least a few names of famous lesbian moms, starting with Melissa and Rosie (if not the whole list of Most Powerful Lesbian Moms in America), I think we’d be hard pressed to name any well-known gay men who are fathers.

Singer Clay Aiken, however, now gives us at least one name to put on the list: his own. The American Idol runner-up announced the birth of his son, Parker Foster Aiken, on August 8. He came out in this month’s People magazine, saying, “It was the first decision I made as a father. I cannot raise a child to lie or to hide things. I wasn’t raised that way, and I’m not going to raise a child to do that.”

Bravo!

Aiken is also a born-again Christian. Seems to me he has a better understanding of what Christianity means than many others who profess an equally strong faith.

Aiken had the child with his best friend and music producer, Jaymes Foster. I wish the new family much happiness. I know the child will have a life full of music.

(Photo credit: Judy Butler, via Wikipedia. This file is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License (cc-by-sa-2.0). )

Non-LGBT Book Recommendations for LGBT Families, II

Here’s my next recommendation for a book about non-traditional (or non-specific), but not necessarily LGBT families. (See my philosophy behind this as well as my first recommendation here.)

Mommy, Do You Love Me?, by Jeanne Willis and illustrated by Jan Fearnley (Candlewick Press, 2008), tackles the same broad theme as the publisher’s classic Guess How Much I Love You, by Sam McBratney: a young child learning about the extent of a parent’s love. In some ways, Mommy Do You Love Me? is the distaff version of McBratney’s book, which features a young hare and his father. Willis’ Little Chick is more probing and curious than McBratney’s Little Nutbrown Hare, however. He makes faces and jumps in mud puddles to test whether his mother will still love him. He wonders whether losing a race or accidentally ruining a present will affect her feelings for him. Unlike McBratney’s story, which focuses on the immeasurable size of a parent’s love, Willis’ tale takes a somewhat deeper look at how children think about the concept.

Willis resolves the story with a light touch and just enough humor to keep it from bogging down in saccharinity. Fearnley’s soft watercolors convey the characters’ emotions but are also full of a liveliness that again keeps the book from cloying.

If you like Guess How Much I Love You, but are looking for a story featuring a mom and not a dad, Mommy Do You Love Me? fits the bill perfectly, and stands on its own as a worthwhile tale for bedtime and other quiet moments.

Family Voices XVIII: LGBT Grandparents

Here’s the next post in my Family Voices series. This phase of the series is in partnership with Stonewall Communities, an organization dedicated to creating residential, educational, social and supportive opportunities among older LGBT people.

After you read their interview, go read the lengthy Web exclusive by Newsweek on LGBT seniors. It is an excellent piece (with a video bonus), and a worthy acknowledgment of the 30th anniversary of SAGE (Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders), the nation’s oldest senior network. “Gay seniors confront unique challenges,” the article reports. “They’re twice as likely as straights to live alone, and 10 times less likely to have a caretaker should they fall ill.” At the same time, there are signs of progress: When SAGE holds its national conference next month, it will be sponsored for the first time by the powerful, 40-million member AARP (American Association of Retired Persons). Read the rest of this post »

New No On 8 Ad Features Parents of Lesbian Daughter

The indefatigable folks of the No On 8 coalition have released a new ad featuring the parents of a lesbian daughter. They don’t treat her any differently than they do their straight children, they say. Why should the state? Spread it around:

Give if you can (and if you’re not in Arizona or Florida, fighting marriage bans in your own state), or find other ways to take action, regardless of where you live. Make sure you’re registered to vote. 43 days until the election, folks. What are you doing to help the causes you believe in?

[Update: Karen Ocamb at Bilerico has more on this first ad from No On 8, including where it is scheduled to air, how much it will cost to run, and the response from Yes on 8.]

Online Art for Kids (and Others)

Here are a couple of great little online apps, ways to satisfy a kid’s desire to be online but without the ads and noises of many kids’ sites:

• Mr. Picassohead is a simple painting app that lets users create faces in the style of the famous Spaniard.
• Jacksonpollock.org is even simpler. Just drag your mouse to create paint splotches; click to change color.

Nothing beats getting out the real paints and crayons, of course, but these apps offer a way to get in a little art (and maybe even a discussion of artists’ styles) when time doesn’t allow for the messy stuff.

(Via Download Squad.)

When Every Day Is Talk Like a Pirate Day

Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I feel obliged to mark the occasion, even though those of us with young children (particularly, though not exclusively, boys) can find any day suddenly turned into Talk Like a Pirate Day, with foam swords swinging and old sheets pressed into service as sails hanging from the banisters. Hide a few shiny pennies in a shoebox and you have yourself a full-scale treasure hunt! Arrr!

Do your kids play pirates, or did they when they were younger? What is/was their favorite dress-up game?

Weekly Political Roundup

There’s lots of news below about Prop. 8, the measure to ban marriage of same-sex couples in California. Let’s not forget there are similar measures in Arizona and Florida—but California is the big one, as it would represent the greatest reversal for supporters of LGBT equality. This weekend is No on 8 Action Weekend, and you can find lots of ways to support equality throughout the state. If you don’t live in California, or can’t attend an event, you can still contribute money to the No on 8 campaign or give through any number of other LGBT organizations.

• The Gay History Project’s Mark Segal interviewed presidential candidate Barack Obama. Rival John McCain declined participation. In the interview, Obama talks about his support of LGBT rights, but also why he feels we must approach legal changes with the right process.
• Lynne Cheney, wife of Dick and mother of Mary, kinda sorta maybe endorsed marriage for same-sex couples. She quoted her husband, saying, “that freedom in this country ought to mean freedom for everyone.”
• Arkansas Families First, which opposes a ballot measure to bar same-sex and unmarried opposite-sex couples from adopting or fostering children, said it is dropping plans to challenge the ban in court. Instead, it will concentrate its efforts on “educating voters about the broad implications of the measure.” Read the rest of this post »

The Lipstick Schtick

Ellen Degeneres revealed she is the new face of Cover Girl barely a week after the first smear in the lipstick wars between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama.

“She Got Me Pregnant”: Episode 43

It’s lesbian home improvement this week! Helen and I show you how we reorganized our garage with a few simple pieces of hardware to make things more convenient for ourselves and safe for our son. We also update viewers on our son’s transition to kindergarten and recommend two classic books with positive messages for kids from all types of backgrounds.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

(If the Veoh video above doesn’t work for you, try it at Dailymotion.)

Brought to you in partnership with After Ellen.

Kentucky Forbids Same-Sex Stepparents

The Kentucky Court of Appeals ruled this week that adoptions by stepparents are allowed only when the stepparent is married to the child’s biological parent. In a catch-22, same-sex stepparents cannot therefore adopt because Kentucky has a constitutional amendment banning marriage of same-sex couples. The ruling holds regardless of whether the person was involved in every aspect of the child’s creation or came along afterwards. The Court avoided the term “second-parent adoption,” used in other jurisdictions when a non-biological parent adopts a same-sex partner’s biological child, because “there is no statutory authority for ’second-parent adoption’ in Kentucky.”

The ruling was based on the case of a lesbian couple who had a child together and then split. The non-biological parent then adopted the child with her former partner’s approval. The partner then tried to have the adoption revoked, but a lower court refused because she had waited more than a year to do so. State law says adoptions cannot be reversed for any reason after that time. It looks like things have turned out as well as can be expected for this family, then, but the precedent the case sets is chilling.

For more on the case from an actual lawyer with vast experience regarding same-sex families, see Nancy Polikoff’s blog. Polikoff also notes that she herself allowed her former partner to adopt the child Polikoff had adopted as a single parent. She has a few choice words for biological parents who treat non-biological parents as anything less than equal.

The only heartening thing in this otherwise depressing news is that the Louisville Courier-Journal published an editorial opposing the ruling, indicating that opinions in the Bluegrass State, even among the general population, are far from uniformly anti-LGBT. The editorial notes that the ruling, while “technically correct,” was far from fair: Read the rest of this post »