I’ve taken a look, and while there is much to praise, there are also a few obvious gaps, particularly around gender identity and transgender issues. 

The section on gay and lesbian parents is short—just over three pages—but reassuring and positive. It is about half aimed at lesbian and gay parents, and about half aimed at straight ones. For gay and lesbian parents, it offers basic advice like needing to consult with a lawyer, but mostly refers people to further resources in the Guide at the end of the book. For straight parents, it addresses the fear that it will be “confusing” to their children to learn about same-sex parents. “I think the answer is simply no,” the book (now revised by Dr. Robert Needlman) tells us. “Children are remarkably able to accept plain facts when they are presented plainly.”

Bravo—and even more so for the following paragraph, which explains that children may be confused if they are taught homosexuality is wrong, but then meet parents who are nice and have great kids—and are gay or lesbian. It also notes that the existence of gay and lesbian families gives parents the opportunity to teach about different types of families, tolerance, and acceptance. The book also offers a short section to help parents support their teen if they suspect the teen might be gay or lesbian.

Where it fails, however, is in discussing gender identity, and not only because there is no mention of transgender parents or how parents might approach that topic with children. It dances around the issue of children who may be transgender.

It rightly says children should be allowed to play with toys aimed at any gender, and notes that does not determine gender identity. It also notes that some children may consistently express that they want to be the other gender, and that a psychiatrist or psychologist might diagnose “gender identity disorder (GID).” But it then simply notes that “Many children with GID do grow up to be homosexual; many do not.” True; but some people who have been diagnosed with GID also grow up to be transgender, and the book makes no note of that. (And the fact is, GID is itself a problematic term. The American Psychiatric Association may soon replace it with “Gender Dysphoria.”)

With organizations such as Gender Spectrum offering numerous resources for parents with gender variant and transgender children, there’s no excuse not to include at least a reference to them. It’s great to see the book explicitly include gay and lesbian parents, but let’s hope the 10th edition is even more inclusive.

I am a member of the Amazon Associates program, and get a small referral fee from all purchases made at Amazon.com via links on this site. You are under no obligation to purchase through them.

The father in the show, Marty Kahn (Don Cheadle), is “confused,” Anderson-Minshall says, but nevertheless “goes to bat for the kid. . . . Like Kurt Hummel’s father on Glee, he’s trying to understand the kid. So is Roscoe [Donis Leonard Jr.] gay? Transgender? Or just playing around the way kids should be allowed to do? We know as much as Marty does but, based on episode one, it’ll be a fascinating journey watching Roscoe find out.”

My friend Cathy Renna, whose firm Renna Communications does publicity for Gender Spectrum, also liked the portrayal of the child in the first episode, as did After Ellen’s The Linster.

Based on the trailer, parenting may be the only area where Marty acts with integrity, but I’m all right with that—having a good character accept his child would have been expected, and perhaps yawned at. Having a sleazy one actually try to do the right thing in this area makes it even more compelling. And Marty is just one in a long line of morally ambiguous Showtime parents, who include Weeds’ drug-dealing Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) and Dexter’s serial killer Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall).

Positive media images aren’t the only thing that will grow acceptance and understanding of gender variant children, but they help. Good for Showtime.

Showtime’s new comedy series, House of Lies, which starts this Sunday, stars Don Cheadle as a “charming, fast talking” business consultant. Cheadle and his team of MBAs “are playing America’s 1 percent for everything they’ve got. They put the con in consulting as they charm smug, unsuspecting corporate fat cats into closing huge deals, and spending a fortune for their services.”

Sounds funny—more so because my brother is a business consultant—but a read through the character descriptions on Showtime’s site reveals that Cheadle’s character’s young son is gender variant. From the character description:

Marty and Monica’s young son Roscoe is as bold and brash as his father, except instead of consulting, his thing is cross dressing. Roscoe is very sure of who he is, and he knows how to work a blinged out tee and designer handbag better than anybody, classmates and teachers be damned. The idea that he is not the right gender to play Sandy in Grease does not stop him from auditioning, or even enter his mind.

I haven’t seen a screener, so I don’t know if they’ve handled the character and the issues with insight and sensitivity along with humor, or if they’re just going to use the tired “let’s poke fun at a male in a dress” approach regrettably used by other shows. The “very sure of who he is” part sounds promising, but time will tell.

(For an example of a great approach to handling issues of gender in the classroom, read Wisconsin teacher Melissa Bollow Tempel’s recent piece. You might also want to take a look at my interview with Stephanie Brill, executive director and founder of  Gender Spectrum, which supports families that have gender variant, gender non-conforming, and transgender children. Let’s hope House of Lies’ writers and producers have taken a look at similar resources.)

The fact is, children’s books about real LGBT people and LGBT civil rights events are even scarcer than children’s LGBT-inclusive fiction books. The Harvey Milk Story, by Kari Krakow (Two Lives, 2002), is the only picture-book biography of an LGBT person in which the person is openly LGBT.

I’ve also found two middle-grade biographies of Ellen Degeneres, by Sherry Beck Paprocki (Chelsea House, 2009) and Katie Sharp (Lucent Books, 2010), which describe her coming out and how it impacted her life.

But that’s about it until we reach high school-level material.

Even historical fiction is rare, excepting the brand-new picture book Operation Marriage (Reach and Teach), by Cynthia Chin-Lee (Reach and Teach, 2011), about a lesbian-headed family in California before and after the Proposition 8 vote that banned marriage for same-sex couples. The book shows the impact of such debates on local communities, and that children are indeed sensitive to the special status of marriage—even though it at times seems to conflate people’s objections to unmarried parents and their objections to same-sex parents.

We need more elementary and middle school-appropriate biographies and histories that show LGBT people as LGBT—books about the key figures in the struggle for LGBT equality, and about LGBT people whose contributions lie in other areas.

Why? Because children deserve to know about all of the major civil rights movements of our time. They deserve to learn, when relevant, if and how people’s significant relationships and struggles against inequality impacted their lives, no matter what the reason for their fame. And for young people who are LGBT or questioning, or who have LGBT parents, it is important to see LGBT people achieving in many areas of life.

In schools, LGBT-inclusive materials not only expand students’ knowledge, but also help create a safe and welcoming environment. According to the 2009 National School Climate Survey from the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), LGBT students in schools with inclusive curricula were less likely to report hearing homophobic remarks or negative comments about gender expression, and less likely to feel unsafe or experience victimization because of their sexual orientation and gender expression.

Histories, biographies, and historical fiction about LGBT people will make it easier for schools to build this kind of inclusive curriculum. In California, a new law even requires schools to incorporate the contributions of openly LGBT people into history lessons.

But schools are “scrambling” to figure out how to do this, according to an article in the San Diego LGBT Weekly (October 21). The piece quotes Paul Boneberg, executive director at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, who said, “I’m not sure how we plug it into the curriculum at the grade school level, if it all.”

Part of the problem, the article says, is the vagueness of the legislation; part is that there are no funds for new instructional material or textbooks. But I have to think another part is that there are almost no existing resources. And if they’re having problems in California, where LGBT inclusion is required, how much more difficult will it be in other states? Even if schools or teachers want to offer inclusive materials, there are none to be found.

The hurdles are high, though. LGBT-inclusive fiction books are among those most banned and challenged in schools and public libraries. Non-fiction would likely fare no better. Still, that is no excuse not to try. Not every challenge is successful.

Another hurdle is that it is hard to write accurate, well-researched history that is also engaging and accessible, especially in a length suitable for younger children. But I find it hard to believe we don’t have the talent among the LGBT community and our allies.

The question is whether publishers will step up—not only small, independent presses, but also publishing behemoths like Scholastic, which have the clout and distribution needed to get the books into schools and libraries. (Scholastic has published LGBT-inclusive fiction books before, like Arthur Levine’s picture book Monday is One Day.)

There are small efforts underway. The Anti-Defamation League, GLSEN, and StoryCorps have recently created “Unheard Voices,” an oral history and curriculum project for middle school and high school students. The project contains online audio interviews (and transcripts) of nine people who “helped shape LGBT history,” along with discussion questions and historical background. It is a good start.

“History is written by the victors,” goes an old saying. We may not have won full LGBT equality yet, but we have had many wins along the way. It is time that we start to write LGBT history—for all ages—and pass on the tales of those victories to the next generation.

I was therefore delighted last year when the Maccabeats, Yeshiva University’s a cappella group, gained YouTube fame last year with “Candlelight,” to the tune of the pop hit “Dynamite.” Finally, a Hanukkah tune catchy enough to compete with all the pop versions of Christmas carols my son’s been hearing!

The Maccabeats are back this year, now with “Miracle,” another tune that has my son’s toes tapping. While it may seem out of character to include the video of an all-male (and not necessarily gay) singing group here, I will point out the brief scene (at about 1:38) showing what appears to be a single mom celebrating Hanukkah with her children. Clearly, Hanukkah celebrations occur in all types of families. Not only that, but the mom is wearing a men’s tie and yarmulke (traditionally worn only by men), which gives the scene a certain gender-bendy appeal, or at least a feminist twist. (Bonus fun fact: Actor Mayim Bialik, who plays the mom in the video, also has a Ph.D in neuroscience.)

The Maccabeats are using the video to encourage donations to the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation at makesomemiracles.com.

Happy Hanukkah to everyone celebrating today. May your lives be full of miracles, big and small.

Children’s Books

Donovan’s Big Day, by Lesléa Newman, is a delightful story about a boy preparing for the wedding of his two moms. Newman wrote Heather Has Two Mommies, the first picture book for and about children with lesbian parents, over 20 years ago. Unlike in Heather, however, which shows the girl grappling to understand why her family is “different,” Newman left “issues” out of Donovan entirely. The young boy has only the problems any child might face while attending a wedding of any sort. He has to dress up, keep clean, and not fidget. Most of all, he has to make sure to hand his moms their rings at the proper moment.

There is just enough light tension to keep young readers engaged as Donovan goes through each step of his preparations. Illustrator Mike Dutton’s dynamic gouache drawings capture Donovan’s earnest spirit with gentle humor.

Monday is One Day, by Arthur A. Levine (Scholastic Press), is a gay-inclusive (but not exclusive) poem from a working parent to a child. Each page shows a different family and a different activity as they count down to and through the weekend. The families are white and black, with moms and dads, gay dads, single parents, and one older couple who could be the child’s grandparents. They live in cities, suburbs, and on a farm, and all delight in each other. Julian Hector’s bold, colorful illustrations complement the bouncy rhymes. The book reminds us how much of the parenting experience is universal.

Levine, a gay dad himself, is also a publisher of his own imprint at Scholastic, Arthur A. Levine Books, whose titles include the U.S. editions of the Harry Potter series.

Adult Novel

Sing you Home, by New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult, brings the lives and concerns of lesbian prospective moms to a mainstream audience in an engaging and sympathetic way. Picoult’s novel also tries to educate its readers about some of the real-life legal and social barriers same-sex couples face. A spunky fictional attorney from the real-life Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) plays a prominent role. If the book sometimes feels jammed with too many Big Social Issues—marriage equality, alcoholism, abortion, suicidal teens—Picoult is a good enough writer to weave them into a coherent and compelling tale.

Memoir

Times Two: Two Women in Love and the Happy Family They Made, Sarah Kate Ellis and Kristen Henderson’s memoir of simultaneous pregnancies, is a welcome addition to the small genre of LGBT parenting chronicles. Ellis is a marketing executive in New York City. Henderson is a founding member of the all-female rock band Antigone Rising. In alternating chapters, they tell their intertwining tale of coming out, falling in love, and starting a family.

Although some might consider the tale of double the hormones, mood swings, and post-partum exhaustion to be more of a cautionary tale, Ellis and Henderson manage to emphasize the positive. Along the way to parenthood, they discover their resiliency as a couple as they bond over the side effects of pregnancy—heartburn, hemorrhoids, and swollen ankles—and agree to disagree over issues such as whether to know the genders of their children and whether to try natural childbirth. They tell their story with a warmth and honesty that shows on every page.

Research Studies

Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood among Black Women, by UCLA sociologist Mignon Moore, is arguably the most groundbreaking work on LGBT parenting published in recent years. Her work is a valuable corrective to the predominant portrayal in media and research of LGBT parents (and LGBT people generally) as almost entirely white. It will complement the emerging demographic data that shows a high percentage of lesbian and gay parents are people of color.

Mignon takes a close look at the community of gay black women in New York City, drawing on personal observations, interviews, and surveys to perceptively trace the connections among sexual orientation, gender expression, race, and class. While she doesn’t focus exclusively on mothers, many of the women in her study are mothers, and must negotiate the assumptions and expectations of motherhood within black communities while also challenging those assumptions by virtue of being gay.

Mignon deftly explores the overlapping influences on these women’s identities in a work that is both valuable in itself and will serve as a model for future research into LGBT families of all types.

Adoption by Lesbians and Gay Men: A New Dimension in Family Diversity, edited by David Brodzinsky and Adam Pertman of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, brings together experts across several disciplines—social welfare, psychology, sociology, and law—to provide a picture of this “rapidly growing new family form.” It summarizes our knowledge of lesbian and gay adoptive families, contributes to it, and points out directions for future research, education, and policy changes. It is an academic book, not a light read, but should become an invaluable reference for adoption professionals, researchers, policy makers, advocates, and lawyers.

I am a member of the Amazon Associates program, and get a small referral fee from all purchases made at Amazon.com via links on this site. You are under no obligation to purchase through them.

What? You’re not? Well, you should be. Go check out A.K. Summers’ new comic/graphic tale, “Pregnant Butch” over at comic collective site Act-i-vate. It’s a funny, insightful, semi-autobiographical look at “a butch dyke enduring that most deeply feminizing of processes—pregnancy.” She’ll be serializing the 100-page comic at the rate of several pages per week, and hopes someday to find a print publisher. (Note: This is a comic of the grown-up variety.)

I had the pleasure of interviewing A.K. for my upcoming Mombian newspaper column, which should be appearing in papers this week. (Here it is in Bay Windows.) I’ll repost it here after the papers have it out. (If your local LGBT (or other) paper isn’t carrying my column, and you’d like them to, drop the editor a note and ask her or him to contact me. Much appreciated!)

In the meantime, go enjoy Pregnant Butch and marvel yet again at all of the many journeys we take to parenthood. (You can also find out more about A.K. at her personal site.)

(I broke this story a few weeks ago in my Mombian newspaper column, reprinted below. It’s about a lesbian teen making a difference—and underscores for me how much things have changed since I was a teen. Despite the horror stories we still hear about bullying, suicide, and other ills, there are more gay-straight alliance clubs, more LGBT-inclusive books, and more out students than when I was growing up. The world isn’t perfect yet, but I do believe it’s headed in the right direction. Teens like Amelia are helping it get there.)

For LGBT youth, age-appropriate books about LGBT people and issues can be a lifeline. Not every school has the resources or desire to include such books in their collections, though. But 14-year-old Amelia Roskin-Frazee, an out lesbian ninth grader from California, founded The Make It Safe Project to solve that problem. The project gives free packages of LGBT books to schools that need them, and works to ensure the books will be readily available to students.

“When I figured out that a lot of schools didn’t have any resources about what it means to be LGBT or how to come out,” explained Amelia, “I decided that I wanted to help send those books to schools.”

“My goal is to provide awareness for people and also to provide the reading material that will make them safe,” she added.

She launched the project a month ago, and has already sent free packages to schools in Arizona, Pennsylvania, California, New Jersey, and North Dakota. 

To pay for the books, she collects monetary donations through a PayPal link on the project’s Web site. All donations go towards the cost of the books—each package of 10 books costs roughly $100. Amelia welcomes smaller donations, though—even $10 or $25. She sends the books directly from Amazon, which provides free shipping on orders of that size.

The package includes six fiction and four nonfiction books: Ash by Malinda Lo, Annie On My Mind, by Nancy Garden, Empress of the World, by Sara Ryan, Luna, by Julie Anne Peters, Boy Meets Boy, by David Levithan, Rubyfruit Jungle, by Rita Mae Brown, It Gets Better, ed. by Dan Savage and Terry Miller, GLBTQ: The Survival Guide for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Teens, by Kelly Huegel, Queer: The Ultimate LGBT Guide for Teens, by Kathy Belge, and Like Me, by Chely Wright.

Amelia chose the books from among 30 bestselling books for LGBT teens. The final selection includes books that both she and her gay friends “responded well to and that covered a wide range of topics,” she explained. The topics include coming out, preventing suicide, and staying healthy, “because most books on adolescent health don’t cover LGBT issues and bullying.” For one school that includes grades K-8, she swapped in a couple of LGBT-inclusive picture books.

Already, the packages are providing resources to students who would not otherwise have them. She sent a package to one private middle school in California, for example, where parents had resisted using school money or parent donations towards books with LGBT content.

Another request came from an eighth-grader in Arizona, whose middle school had told her she could not start a gay-straight alliance (GSA) club. The girl then started a GSA at her church. Students from far-flung communities began to attend, since few schools in the state have GSAs. GSA members can now borrow the books that Make It Safe has sent, share them with friends back at their schools, and then return them to the GSA.

In general, Amelia said, the books “are sent directly to the GSA president or faculty adviser to put on a classroom bookshelf, where a teacher will ensure that the books will be available for all students.” The books may also be put in the school library “if the GSA is sure that the library will keep them safe and available for all students.” One school has also put some of the books in the school counseling office for students to borrow.

“My basic job is to ensure that regardless of where they go in the school, they are available to all students at any time,” she explained.

One additional part of the project lets students post anonymous stories on the Make It Safe Web site about their experience with GSAs. That way, other students who are considering joining or starting one can learn from peers at schools similar to theirs.

Even at 14, Amelia is no newcomer to activism. She came out during middle school, where she founded the school’s Gay Straight Alliance and was one of the school’s student representatives on the Diversity Committee. Now in high school, she is a Student Ambassador for the national Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN).

“Both my parents were extremely supportive from the beginning,” she said. They helped her start the middle school’s GSA when some other parents resisted the idea. “I feel so happy that I have the parents that I have,” she said. “I just wish that other LGBT kids who maybe aren’t so fortunate could have a similar experience.”

Her mom is now helping her with the Make It Safe Project, including assisting with the paperwork needed to turn it into a registered non-profit. They hope this will happen next year.

Amelia is spreading the news about her project through word of mouth, including her middle school friends who are now at different high schools, and through social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

“So much of this right now is just letting the schools find us, because it’s hard for people to have the courage to go look for these books,” she said.

Her sights are high, however. She hopes to send a package to every state by the end of 2012. Beyond that, she would like to send books to schools around the world. She asserted, “I really want to get them to any school that needs them, because there are so many that do.”

Visit the Make It Safe Project at makeitsafeproject.org.

But they’ve kicked up the gay quotient a notch with the revelation in the October 26 episode that Detective Carlton Lassiter (Timothy Omundson) has a lesbian mom, who came out after being married to his father. It’s a throwaway line, a small in-passing bit of backstory for the character. If your attention wandered during the show, you might have missed it. 

Still, there are so few adult (or even teen) characters with LGBT parents on television, that it’s always exciting to see a mention, even if we hope for more. Fans of Glee have been agitating for a while now for the show to feature the gay dads of character Rachel Berry (Lea Michele), to no avail. Of course, having gay dads isn’t the defining part of her character, and I’m glad they haven’t presented it that way. But heck, it sure would be nice to see them at some point.

Same goes for Lassiter. There doesn’t have to be a Big Gay Storyline, but his mom and her partner could still provide a nice focal point for an episode. Maybe they’re victims of or witnesses to a crime that Lassiter has to solve, even if it doesn’t revolve around being gay.

At the same time, Lassiter is a straight-laced Republican, which suggests either his mom is that rare breed, a lesbian Republican, or there’s tension between her and her son because of their differing politics. Either way, there’s opportunity for non-homophobic but gay-related humor there (Psych is a comedy, after all)—and maybe even a subtle lesson about LGBT equality. Maybe Lassiter tries to cement his relationship with his mom by reminding her of the prominent Republicans who support LGBT rights, such as former vice president Dick Cheney and lawyer Ted Olson, who is trying to strike down California’s Prop 8.

Perhaps we should start a campaign to have his mom and her partner appear in a future episode. Certainly we should put the show’s creators and USA Network on notice that we’re watching, and would love to see a funny, positive episode with these characters. Better yet, give them recurring roles.

GLAAD gave the network a “adequate”  grade last year for its LGBT inclusivity, up from a “failing’ grade the year before—but clearly there’s still room for improvement. Here’s a chance for them to work on that.

Who would you pick for the actors?

Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood among Black Women, by UCLA sociologist Mignon Moore, is arguably the most groundbreaking work on LGBT parenting published in recent years. Moore gives us one of the few in-depth looks at lesbians of color, showing how race and class influence their self-perceptions, relationships, and family creation.

Her work corrects the predominant impression from media and research that LGBT people are almost all white. It complements the recent demographic work by UCLA’s Williams Institute and others that shows a high percentage of lesbian and gay people, including parents, are in fact people of color.

Moore draws on three years of personal observations, interviews, and surveys with over 100 gay black women in New York City to explore their “intersecting identities as Black, as women, and as gay people.” She first identifies the paths by which they have come to accept a lesbian sexuality, and explores how race, class, and the black lesbian social environment have affected when and how they do so.

She then looks at gender presentation and how this, too, is influenced by race and class. For example, while 1970s white lesbian-feminism caused many white middle-class lesbians to reject gendered (butch-femme) presentations, it did not have the same impact on black lesbians, who have now adopted their own interpretations of that legacy. The middle-class black lesbians in her study, for example, often avoid a more masculine presentation, because they feel it may interfere with their efforts towards “assimilation into larger society.” On the other hand, she has found that working-class black lesbians may adopt a nonfeminine presentation, “to express feelings of difference from larger society based on the multiple marginalized statuses they occupy.”

Moore next digs more deeply into how race, class, and sexuality interact to form a person’s identity. She perceptively delineates the difference between a person’s individual identity, or self-conception, and her collective identity, where she has “the strongest feelings of group belonging.” While most of the women in her study participated in primarily black social environments, the extent to which gender and sexuality formed part of their individual identities was also influenced by both class and gender presentation.

Moore then turns to motherhood, noting that most previous studies of lesbian mothers have focused on women who became parents after coming out. Because a large percentage of black lesbians had children before coming out, however, such studies have excluded them—as they have excluded lesbian stepparents who come into these women’s lives. And because having children as a lesbian often involves costly insemination procedures, previous studies have also skewed towards middle- and upper-class families.

She addresses this imbalance with case studies of black lesbians of various classes who have become mothers in a variety of ways. For each of these families, she looks at how race, class, and their different paths to motherhood affect their sense of identity, approaches to child raising, and relationships to larger communities.

Moore also explores how families of different classes and structures negotiate their roles with respect to household chores, money management, and child rearing. She finds that many black lesbian households do not necessarily follow the egalitarian principles associated with white feminism in dividing household tasks—but that management of household activities is often a source of power in lesbian relationships. This also sets these relationships apart from heterosexual ones, where higher income, rather than household management, has been seen as the primary source of power.

Finally, she looks at the relationships among black lesbians, their extended families, and their racial and religious communities. Maintaining connections with the larger black community is important for them, she says, even when it does not fully accept them for being openly gay. One way many of the women deal with this, she has found, is to convey a certain middle-class “respectability”—an ideal that originally developed as a response to negative post-Reconstruction stereotypes about black women.

Displaying this “respectability” may mean downplaying their identities as gay people while in social situations, especially in church, which remains an important focus of black culture. At the same time, Moore says, these women “remain clear in their refusal to give up or deny their gay sexuality,” and are findings ways to negotiate between these two influences.

As important as Moore’s findings, however, are her methods. Traditional ways of gathering subjects for LGBT research studies—such as notices in LGBT community centers, nightclubs, and newspapers—have had little success in reaching gay populations of color, who tend to have their own social venues.

Moore, however, recruited her subjects by going to numerous social events that had primarily black lesbian crowds—everything from cocktail hours to book clubs to religious meetings. When she did go to lesbian nightclubs, she handed out flyers directly to people and spoke with them about her project. For eighteen months, she also organized her own weekly social event for lesbians of color. This was “critical” to her fieldwork, she said, because it gave her “regular, sustained contact with the community.”

That kind of thought and effort in finding and recruiting subjects is needed if we are to continue exploring LGBT life across other racial groups, socioeconomic classes, geographic areas, and parts of the LGBT spectrum.

Moore deftly explores the overlapping influences on black lesbians’ identities and families in a work that is both valuable in itself and should serve as a model for future studies that reflect the full diversity of LGBT families.

I am a member of the Amazon Associates program, and get a small referral fee from all purchases made at Amazon.com via links on this site. You are under no obligation to purchase through them.