New Memoir Highlights Nonbiological Motherhood

(Originally published as my Mombian newspaper column.)

Amie Klempnauer Miller and her partner Jane, “fully endowed with the lesbian love of process,” spent 10 of their first 18 years together talking about whether to become parents. Once they did, they spent another two years trying to get Miller pregnant before they decided that Jane might have better luck.

She did, setting Miller on her own quest to discover what it means to be a nonbiological lesbian mother. Miller chronicles that journey in She Looks Just Like You: A Memoir of (Nonbiological Lesbian) Motherhood (Beacon, 2010), a warm, insightful, and gently humorous addition to the small number of memoirs about LGBT families.

The book is an expansion of several essays, including one in Confessions of the Other Mother: Non-Biological Lesbian Moms Tell All, ed. Harlyn Aizley (Beacon, 2006), the only other book devoted to nonbiological lesbian parents. The longer solo format, however, gives Miller space to explore further not only what it means to be a nonbiological lesbian mom, but what it means to be a parent, period. Read the rest of this post »

Weekly Political Roundup

• Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) says he will keep transgender rights in the Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA) even though some say that will kill the bill.
• House lawmakers are considering passing a repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell this year that wouldn’t go into effect until later. Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is continuing to push for the legislation.
• Former First Lady Laura Bush told CNN’s Larry King that she supports marriage equality and abortion rights.
• President Obama nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. The LGBT community reaction? Meh. Read the rest of this post »

From Harassment to Hope

I’m fuming. Let’s review:

• A twelve-year-old Kentucky middle-school student with two moms was suspended from school for three days after she asked her bus driver to stop some other students from making fun of gay and lesbian people. When the bus driver laughed along and called the girl a “contradiction,” the girl called the bus driver a “jerk”—and was suspended. The Kentucky Equality Federation is calling for the termination or route change of the driver and an official apology from the school’s assistant principal. (Thanks, Pam.) Change.org has a petition up demanding apologies from the school principal and assistant principal.
• 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.
• A Roman Catholic school in Massachusetts withdrew its acceptance of an 8-year-old boy because he has lesbian moms. The Boston archdiocese does not have a policy that would prohibit the children of same-sex couples from attending its schools, said a spokesperson. In March, a Catholic preschool in Boulder, Colorado similarly told a lesbian couple their child could not return to the school next year—but in that case, the Denver Archdiocese supported the school’s decision. (For contrast, however, I recommend this essay in Commonweal magazine, in which a lesbian mom discusses her Catholic faith, her and her partner’s decision to send their children to Catholic school, and the welcome they received there.)
• Catholic churches aren’t the only ones at fault here. Cate and Elizabeth Wirth were told last December by a Vermont district director of the Boy Scouts that they could no longer volunteer for their son’s Cub Scout troop after it became known that they are a couple.

What’s keeping me from despair? Let’s review: Read the rest of this post »

“She Got Me Pregnant”: Episode 106

Helen’s back with me this week! We display our Mothers’ Day crowns and talk about how we celebrated with our son, as well as how his school dealt with the occasion. Plus: Does family bonding through technology really work?

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

Brought to you in partnership with After Ellen.

LGBT Parenting Roundup

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. Read the rest of this post »

Tango Authors Discuss Their New Children’s Book

Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, authors of the famed LGBT children’s book And Tango Makes Three (and gay dads themselves), were kind enough to answer some questions about their latest book, Christian, the Hugging Lion, about which I posted more yesterday.

What attracted you to Christian’s story?

Justin: First there was that extremely moving video. And second there was the fact that the story begins with the creation of a very special family led by two “dads.” But if those were the elements that caught our attention, it was the arc of the story that made us want to adapt it for young children. The tale begins with a delightfully rambunctious lion cub with whom young children can identify. We watch him grow up under the care of two loving parents and, eventually, leave them to make his way in the outside world. He begins his own family, but his connection to his parents endures. We thought we could tell this story in a way that would speak at a deep level to children’s eagerness to grow up and to their concerns about separation.

In real life, John and Ace [the men who adopted Christian] are not partners (at least as far as I know), but you leave that rather ambiguous in the story. Was that intentional?

Peter: We don’t know what Ace and John’s relationship was at the time the story takes place. [John Rendall refers to a girlfriend in this article.—DR] But it was clear to us from all of the accounts they gave that they functioned together as Christian’s main caregivers and main attachment figures. And so it seemed right to present the three of them as family. Not knowing more than that, we couldn’t specify their relationship further, but we were also were happy to leave it open to interpretation. Unlike Tango, in this story the fact that the parent figures are the same sex is not central to the tale. It’s there by the way. Maybe that captures a bit of our own experience as parents to our daughter. Yes, her fathers are gay. But for now at least, as a little person whose chief interests are love and food and play, for her that fact is very much by the way.

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Tango and Heather Authors Bring Us Two New Books

(Originally published as my Mombian newspaper column. Stay tuned for tomorrow when I’ll share Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell’s answers to a few questions about their new book.

Click image to enlarge.)

The authors of two of the most famous LGBT children’s books have two new books out this month. Neither work has an overt LGBT theme this time, but both center on issues of love and family that should give them wide appeal both within and outside the LGBT community.

Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, authors of And Tango Makes Three, about two male penguins who raise a chick, now bring us Christian, the Hugging Lion. The tale, like Tango, is based on a true story. In 1969, John Rendall and Ace Bourke bought Christian as a cub from the exotic pets department of Harrod’s department store in London, wishing to rescue him from his cramped cage. He lived with them, played in a local churchyard, and became known for his hugs until he got too big and Ace and John decided he belonged in the wild. Read the rest of this post »

LGBT Parenting Roundup: Mother’s (s’) Day Edition

Happy Mother’s Day or Mothers’ Day to all of you who proudly bear the title!

Here’s some of what’s been happening in the world of LGBT parenting:

Media Coverage

• The headline sounds promising: “More lesbian couples becoming moms.” C.W. Nevius’ article in SF Gate, however, begins and ends with sperm. Not that finding sperm is an insignificant part of many of our paths to parenthood, but a) not all of us do it that way (some adopt; some have children from previous opposite-sex relationships); and b) There’s really so much more to being a lesbian parent than that. Focusing on the one biological bit that we haven’t got is a very limited view of the whole endeavor.
• The Washington Post’s Petula Dvorak takes a broader view, and looks at gay and lesbian families and issues of inclusion in schools.
• The old marketing truism about same-sex couples with disposable income isn’t so true any more, says the U.K.’s Guardian (who can refer to the alliterative “pink pound”). The reason? More of us are settling down and having kids, and that’s changing how we think about money. (I’m inclined to believe that the “pink pound” (or “gay greenback”) was never really as widespread as some believed. Urban gay men, the epitome of the trend, were always only one part of our whole community.
• Same-sex couples in Denmark can now adopt jointly, instead of just as individuals. Same-sex adoption? Home of the Lego company? I foresee a rise in immigration.

Presidential Notice

• For the first time in history, the president mentioned two-mom families in his Mother’s Day proclamation. I have more on the proclamation and its historical context over at Keen News Service. Read the rest of this post »