Harry Potter Lego Sets to Include Suspiciously Short-Haired Quidditch Coach

With Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe making the cover story of Out magazine, I’d be thinking about Harry even if I wasn’t in the middle of reading the series with my son and playing the new Lego Harry Potter Wii game. (And I’m not the only queer parent to be doing so, as Paige Schilt’s post at Bilerico proves.)

The best Harry news I’ve heard recently, however, is that the Lego Harry Potter sets coming out in October will include a minifig of Madam Hooch, the broomstick-flying instructor and Quidditch referee. (Image here; right-hand side of third row.) She’s an athletic coach with spiky short hair, played to perfection by Zoë Wanamaker in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. Granted, Madam Hooch’s sexual orientation is unknown, unlike that of Albus Dumbledore (whom author J.K. Rowling outed in 2007). And having short hair and being athletic is no guarantee of being a lesbian, of course, as Elena Kagan has taught us. But if Wanamaker’s portrayal doesn’t remind you of the gym teacher you had a crush on in eighth grade, then you weren’t paying attention to either the movie or eighth-grade gym class.

Now I just have to convince Helen to buy me the Lego Quidditch stadium for the holidays. (And I’m sure Santa will get our son a Lego HP set, too.)

Who else is looking forward to the release of Deathly Hallows in November? Anyone else have kids reading the books (with or without you)? Am I the only one ridiculously excited about the Lego/HP combination?

UPDATE: Prop 8 Stay Is DENIED; Same-Sex Couples Can Marry in California

Updated: Judge Vaughn Walker has just denied a stay in his marriage equality ruling of August 4, but kept a temporary stay in place until 5 p.m. August 18.

More to come, I’m sure. . . .

Victory for Lesbian Mom in Ohio: Marriage Ban Does Not Block Child Custody

Add another court victory to the recent Prop 8 and DOMA wins. The Eighth District Court of Appeals in Ohio last week rejected an attempt to use the state’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage to prevent a lesbian mother from sharing custody of her children with her former partner.

Lambda Legal, which represents Rita Goodman in the case against her former partner Siobhan LaPiana, reports that the two women were in a committed relationship for 10 years, during which they planned and had two boys. LaPiana gave birth to them, but both women parented equally, and even signed an agreement committing to do so. The boys, Lambda says, “love and rely on both of them as their mothers.” Read the rest of this post »

Prop 8 Ruling: A Ally Dad’s View

At the risk of overloading you on Prop 8 references, go read “Gay Marriage Revealed the Worth of My Own,” by Jeremy Adam Smith, founder of the blog Daddy Dialectic (itself a great read for anyone interested in gender and parenting). The piece appeared last Friday in the San Francisco Chronicle, and begins with the assertion, “Judge Vaughn Walker has overturned Proposition 8—just in time to save marriage from the mess heterosexuals have made of it.”

Smith writes of how same-sex couples are “an integral part” of his community in San Francisco and how “An attack on [my friends'] lesbian marriage—for that’s how we perceived Prop. 8, regardless of its intent—felt like an attack on all of us, straight and queer alike.”

He explains how he became a father with his female partner before they felt the need to get married, and how it was in part the struggle of same-sex couples for the right to marry that led them to tie the knot. “With Judge Walker’s decision,” he says, “I hope we will soon be seeing more and more gay and lesbian couples join us in pulling marriage back from the brink of irrelevance.”

Destroying marriage? No. We might just be saving it. And knowing we have allies like Smith gives me great hope.

New Books and Media for LGBT Families

(Originally published in Bay Windows, July 23, 2010. Regular readers will recognize many of the items in this mid-year roundup from previous reviews I’ve done—but there’s one new item in there, so read on.)

It’s been a good year so far for books and media about LGBT parenting—but not so much for items aimed at our children. Let’s take a look.

She Looks Just Like You: A Memoir of (Nonbiological Lesbian) Motherhood, by Amie Klempnauer Miller, is a touching and heartfelt chronicle of becoming a mother and navigating the first year of parenthood. as she and her partner ” discover who we are, together, as parents.” Miller has managed to find a thoughtful balance between illuminating the things that set nonbiological lesbian parents apart with the things that bring all parents together.

And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents, and Our Unexpected Families, ed. Susan Goldberg and Chloe Brushwood Rose, is an essay collection that came out in Canada in 2009 and is now available in the U.S. The more than 20 authors include those who have used a known donor, those who have themselves donated sperm or eggs or been a surrogate, and the children created by these acts. They explore what it means to be a family, the importance (or not) of biological connections, and the challenges of negotiating roles and responsibilities outside the traditional two-parent dyad.

Mom’s Apple Pie: The Heart of the Lesbian Mothers’ Custody Movement, a documentary by Jody Laine, Shan Ottey, and Shad Reinstein, shows us how lesbian parents have been a vital part of the LGBT rights movement since shortly after the Stonewall Riots in 1969. It gives us a look at several early custody cases involving lesbian moms—and how the activism they spawned has had a direct impact on LGBT people and organizations today. The film was released in 2006 but is now out on home video, and available at frameline.org. Read the rest of this post »

How Well Do You Know Your Sperm Donor Movies? And Why They Matter

Okay, dear readers: Here’s a little Monday-morning puzzler for you. Which movie involving a sperm donor is referenced in the following quote?

The point of the movie is what is it that defines family? It isn’t necessarily the traditional mother, father, two children and a dog named Spot. Love is love and family is what is around you and who is in your immediate sphere. That is what I love about this movie. It is saying it is not the traditional sort of stereotype of what we have been taught as a society of what family is.

No, it’s not The Kids Are All Right. Answer after the jump. Read the rest of this post »

Mombian Weekly Reader

I’m not going to do my usual political roundup this week because the Prop 8 ruling and Elena Kagan’s confirmation have made it a week full o’ politics. I will, however, point out a few items, political and otherwise, that are worth a read.

• “What teens think about Prop. 8 being struck down” from the teen authors at LA Youth newspaper. Important voices. (Thanks to Lee Wind.)
• “Judge Walker’s Ruling is About Much More Than the Law” by Kai Wright at Colorlines. The money quote: “Walker’s ruling moves the debate away from deliberately distracting questions about how gay relationships impact everyone else—and toward questions about how bigotry impacts gay relationships.” (Thanks to LesbianDad.)
• “The Kids Are All Right, Aren’t They?” by Belinda Baldwin at Change.org looks not so much at the movie (about which we’ve had much discussion here), but at what the debate about the movie within the lesbian community means. “It has become a kind of cultural litmus test for how we feel about ourselves,” she says. A good and thought-provoking read.

Prop 8 Reading List for the Day After

It’s been all Prop 8, all the time in the LGBT blogosphere for the last day or so, with a sprinkling of Elena Kagan softball jokes thrown in.

Here are a couple of pieces I wrote about the Prop 8 ruling over at Change.org—they’re not parenting-specific, but may be of interest to some of you:

• Jehovah’s Witnesses Aided Prop 8 Reversal Ruling: Just how did members of a religion that is against same-sex marriage help Judge Walker’s Prop 8 ruling?
• Prop 8 Ruling Highlights Crumbling of Gender Roles: One of the more interesting passages in the Prop 8 ruling states that “the time has passed” for distinct gender roles in marriage.

Also worth a read or listen:

• Lisa Keen’s piece at Keen News Service (for whom I also write) is a good place to start. Lisa’s been covering LGBT news for over 30 years, and won an award from the American Bar Association for her coverage of the historic Romer v. Evans case in 1996, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an anti-gay law in Colorado and ruled that animus against a group could not be used to justify discrimination.
• Chris Geidner at Metro Weekly gets into the legal nitty gritty.
• The New York Times offers a sympathetic editorial on the ruling.
• Plaintiffs’ attorneys Ted Olson and David Boies spoke on The Rachel Maddow Show.
• Kevin Drum at Mother Jones adds a dose of reality with a look at potential weaknesses in Walker’s ruling as the case moves to appeal.
• Bob Egelko of the San Francisco Chronicle explains what that appeal process is likely to be.