Go be inspired by photographer Gabriela Herman’s wonderful photo essay of grown children with same-sex parents in today’s New York Times.
The project, which Herman calls, “The Kids,” was published in part as “What Could Gay Marriage Mean for the Kids?” in the NYT Sunday Review. It intersperses photos and quotes from its subjects to shed light on their lives and the relationships between them and their parents.
Herman, whose own mom came out when she (Herman) was 20, started the project because she had never met anyone else with gay parents. She’s now “documented the stories of dozens” and met many more. “Some aspect of each story resonated with my experience and helped chip away at my own sense of solitude,” she writes.
I love her emphasis on the power of stories, and the importance of telling the stories of those with same-sex parents as part of the fight for marriage equality—but I have to disagree with her implication that studies of them is sparse. A brief look at Columbia Law School’s What We Know project gives us 75, 71 of which conclude that the children of same-sex parents fare no worse than any others.
I also wish the NYT had read the quotes in the essay more carefully and not used the term “gay marriage” in its headline. As Zach Wahls, one of the subjects, says, “It’s really no more accurate to say that my moms are gay married than to say they are Packers-fan married, or work-in-health care married.”
Despite those caveats, I’m thrilled that such terrific images and quotes have gained such a platform as the NYT. The full project will be released June 29, according to Herman’s website.