Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!

Happy birthday to Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, who was born on this date in 1904. As those of you with children in elementary school likely know, today is also Read Across America Day, an an annual reading motivation and awareness program run by the National Education Association (NEA).

I feel obliged to point out, however, that while the NEA has a fascinating and packed Diversity Calendar, worth a read, there is one major heritage month missing from it. In June. Can you guess? Harumph.

Still, the good doctor himself remains a favorite of mine even now. In honor of the event, I invite you to leave a comment with any or all of the below:

• The name of your favorite Seuss book.
• A rewritten Seuss title, giving it an LGBT theme. (Of course, One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads has already been done for real.) My entry, in honor of the high-protein, low-carb diet I had to be on while taking one particular fertility drug: “In Vitro Fertilized Eggs and Ham.”
• A Seuss-style stanza about your family.

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Read LGBT Books, Win Prizes

I was delighted to discover the new(-ish) blog GLBT Reading, home of the GLBT Challenge 2010. The goal of the site is to encourage people to read books about GLBT topics and/or by GLBT authors.

To participate in the Challenge, simply read relevant books (or short stories, poems, or essays), post reviews on your blog, and enter the Challenge as directed. Participants will also be entered into drawings for a variety of prizes.

There are also mini-challenges each month, in which people are encouraged to read and post about books on particular topics. The mini-challenge for February is People of Color, and for March it is Graphic Novels. Young Adult works are coming up in April, and Picture Books in September, among other categories.

I know many of you are voracious readers. Go show GLBT Reading some love!

Johnny Weir, His Mom, and Gay Guinea Pigs

What does Olympic figure skater Johnny Weir have to do with gay guinea pigs? The talented Sarah Brannen, author and illustrator of Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, the much-challenged children’s book about two male guinea pigs who marry, made a name for herself with photographs and watercolors of ice skaters long before she turned to furry rodents.

She’s captured the images of Olympic skaters like Weir, Rachael Flatt, Sasha Cohen, and many others. Check them out in the Figure Skating section of her Web site. (Please keep in mind that they are subject to copyright.)

Brannen is a regular contributor to Skating Magazine, and along with 2006 Junior World Champion pair skater Drew Meekins, writes and contributes photographs to a regular column on Ice Network. One of Brannen’s drawings is in the collection of the World Figure Skating Museum in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

If any of you have children who skate, you might want to read Sarah and Drew’s column from a couple of years back, in which they ask Johnny Weir’s mom Patti for her thoughts on being Johnny’s mom and her advice for other skating parents.

I took my own son skating for the first time yesterday, and he had a blast. I have no idea if his interest will last, but I think Patti Weir’s tips could be applied to many other sports and endeavors. It sounds like she has a healthy perspective on what really matters: “Be the positive reinforcement to your child.”

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.

2010 Rainbow Bibliography Highlights LGBT Books for Kids

(Originally published as my Mombian newspaper column.)

The American Library Association’s Rainbow Project has just published its third annual Rainbow Bibliography, a list of recommended, LGBT-inclusive books for readers under age 18.

Nel Ward, head of the Rainbow Project, says one of the biggest problems librarians have with including LGBT-inclusive books in their collections is that they don’t know what to buy. The Bibliography is designed to help them select a range of appropriate, quality publications.

LGBT book-award programs, such as the Lambda Literary Awards or the ALA’s own Stonewall Book Awards, “highlight just the very, very best,” Ward noted in an interview. In contrast, the Rainbow Bibliography takes a broader view. “There’s just a lot of good reading out there, some with literary merit, some genre stuff, that doesn’t see the light of day or is in hiding,” she explained. “Once you’ve bought the top two, three, four on a list, where do you go from there?” Read the rest of this post »

Kansas School Board Stands Up for Tango

The North Kansas City Schools Board of Education recently voted 3 to 2 to keep And Tango Makes Three on the shelves at Bell Prairie Elementary School, despite a parent’s request that the book be removed, reports School Library Journal.

I’m annoyed every time a children’s book with LGBT content is challenged, but I’m especially upset by challenges to Tango. It’s a true story, for heaven’s sake—and not the only real-life example of a same-sex penguin pair. Somehow, though, it has managed to be the most-challenged book in the U.S. for three years in a row, according to the American Library Association (ALA). It seems like it’s off to another good start, so to speak.

Expect many of the new books on the ALA’s just-out 2010 Rainbow List to be challenged in the coming year.

SLJ also notes that the ruling also motivated the school to expand a system whereby parents can view library card catalogs from home and restrict their own children’s reading material. Parents of middle school and high school students had access to the system; now parents of elementary students do as well. I think that’s a wonderful solution that allows parents to take responsibility for their own children without imposing their views on others. Schools elsewhere should take heed.

Bravo to the school board that voted to retain the book, especially in a state known for conservative views of education.

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.

2010 Rainbow List Is Out

The 2010 Rainbow Project Bibliography is out!

The Bibliography is a list of recommended titles for youth from birth to age 18 that contain “significant and authentic” GLBTQ content. The titles are chosen by the GLBT Round Table and the Social Responsibilities Round Table of the American Library Association. This is not a list of every children’s book published with GLBTQ content, but rather a set of books chosen by librarians for both quality and content. The books for this year’s list were published between July 2008 and October 2009.

The Rainbow Project Web site has the full list. Below are the books on the list that I’ve written about here at Mombian, with links to my original posts.

• Lo, Malinda. Ash. Gr. 8+.
• Newman, Lesléa. Il. Carol Thompson. Daddy, Papa, and Me and Mommy, Mama, and Me. Pre-K.
• (The above entries were noted for exceptional merit, along with Luis Alberto Urrea’s Into the Beautiful North, and Ed. Michael Cart’s How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity, which I have not read.)
• Polacco, Patricia. In Our Mother’s House. Gr. K-3.
• Walliams, David. Il. Quentin Blake. The Boy in the Dress. Gr. 3+.
• Ed. Mitchell Gold with Mindy Drucker. Crisis: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social, and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing Up Gay in America. Gr. 7+.
• Hart, Melissa. Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood. Gr. 8+.

Congratulations to all the selected authors and illustrators!

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

I’ve been posting this quote from Coretta Scott King, wife of Martin Luther King, Jr., every year at this time, but I think it bears repeating. Mrs. King was speaking at Lambda Legal’s 25th Anniversary Luncheon in 1998:

As Martin once said, ‘We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny… an inescapable network of mutuality… I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be.’

Therefore, I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream to make room at the table of brother and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.

After the jump, a number of books for young children about Dr. King. What struck me most about these books was the quality of the illustrations, consistently a notch above the average in children’s literature, and a fitting tribute to their subject. Read the rest of this post »

Heather Has a Good Laugh

Somewhere, a pair of penguins is snickering. (Thanks, Queerty.)

As always, more videos with positive images of LGBT families at the Mombian YouTube channel.

D.C. Passes Marriage Equality; D.C. Parent Claims Child’s Innocence Destroyed by Gay Guinea Pigs

It’s a joyous day in our nation’s capitol as the D.C. City Council voted for the second and final time in favor of legal marriage for same-sex couples in the District of Columbia. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has promised to sign it soon, after which it will go to Capitol Hill for Congressional review before becoming law.

Yesterday, however, came news that Margaret C. Hemenway, the mother of a first-grader at Horace Mann Elementary, a public school in D.C., had filed a complaint with the D.C. school chancellor because her son’s teacher had—horrors—mentioned to the class that she was going to get married—to a woman. The teacher had also read Sarah Brannen’s Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, about two male guinea pigs who marry, to the class.

Hemenway, a member of “Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays (PFOX),” said she asked the chancellor, “What department in the DC Government we can appeal to for restoration of our child’s sense of innocence?” Her post about this on the PFOX site (http://pfox-exgays.blogspot.com/2009/12/real-purpose-of-gay-marriage.html) is full of the vilest assumptions that talking about a same-sex couple getting married means talking about sex. (You can read coverage of it at the Washington City Paper if you’d rather not visit the PFOX site.)

[Update: Reader A points out in a comment below that Hemenway has used this same schtick before. I'd even covered it, but was clearly thrown off because she had tried to use it against Obama and William Ayers last time around. I guess the whole "gay people are indoctrinating our children" gag still has some miles left in it.]

News flash: My son is in first grade, too. He’s had same-sex parents since he was born. His parents got (legally) married when he was three, and he attended the ceremony. He still doesn’t know a thing about sex. Read the rest of this post »

More Gay Penguin Dads!

Gay penguin dads Guido and Molly of the East London Aquarium in South Africa have been caring for their unnamed chick since it was born five months ago, reports The Sun. The pair began to incubate the egg after an opposite-sex couple rejected it. (Molly was originally thought to be female, hence her name, but is in fact male.)

The pair join the famed Silo and Roy (Tango’s parents) and Z and Vielpunkt of Bemerhaven Zoo in Germany as adoptive gay penguin pairs.

The Sun quotes Curator Siani Tinley, who reports, “He’s strong and healthy and showing no signs of confusion from having non-heterosexual parents. He’s happy and loves swimming around – I think the parents are very proud.”

Also proud, I imagine, are actual gay dads Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, authors of And Tango Makes Three. Here’s what they had to say about their book topping the American Library Association’s list of the most challenged books in the country for three years in a row. That, despite the fact that their story is true—and clearly not an isolated case. How many more gay penguin parents will it take before the right stops it with their “gay parents are unnatural” argument?

Coming soon: a new advocacy and support group called COLAGPE: Chicks of Lesbian and Gay Penguins Everywhere. (With a respectful nod to my friends at COLAGE.)

(Photo: Not one of the actual penguins in question.)