Entertainment
It’s a bonus entertainment week:
- Autostraddle has compiled a collection of celebrities with two moms.
- Brent Hartinger at After Elton discusses the increasing number of gay dads on television, and the increasingly varied ways they are forming their fictional families.
- Law & Order recently ran an episode featuring a lesbian heiress who adopted her partner in order to gain some measure of legal protections for their relationship. It’s loosely based on the real-life case of Olive Watson, the heir to the IBM fortune, who adopted her partner Patricia Spado. An interesting twist in the Law & Order episode is that one of the women was pregnant with the embryo of the other—the same thing Helen and I did (though neither of us adopted the other). The Culture & Media Institute has more.
- Actor Cynthia Nixon is this month’s Advocate cover story. She talks about her partner Christine Marinoni and their two children, among other things.
- The New York Times reports on the making of The Kid, a musical based on the parenting story of gay dad and syndicated columnist Dan Savage.
Everything Else
- A Texas appeals court ruled that a non-bio mom lacks standing under Texas law to petition for custody or visitation of the children she and her former partner were raising, because, at all the times she was parenting the children, their bio mom, Smith, was also caring for them. Nancy Polikoff observes that a different Texas appeals court ruled the other way in a different case, so the matter is likely heading to the Texas Supreme Court.
- A two-mom family has filed a lawsuit against the Rio Rancho School District in New Mexico, claiming that their daughter’s fifth-grade teacher, because of bias against their family, did not let the girl go to the school nurse after a playground injury.
- Another New Jersey school board bans another LGBT children’s book. (Sense a pattern?)
- The York Daily Record profiles Kay Rainwater and Gail Lee, a couple who have adopted nine children.