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.

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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.)

A 2009 Review of LGBTQ Family Books

(Originally published in Bay Windows, December 10, 2009. I’ve covered a few of the books below in separate columns, but several of them are new—and good. Enjoy!)

There are still relatively few books for and about LGBTQ families, but 2009 gave us as good and diverse a crop as I’ve seen in a long time. Here are some highlights: Read the rest of this post »

Gay and Lesbian History for Teens

(Originally published as my Mombian newspaper column, October 2009.)

October is, among other things, LGBT History Month, which makes it the perfect time to write about Gay America: Struggle for Equality (Amulet: 2008), by Linas Alsenas. The book is a history of gay men and lesbians in the U.S. from the mid-nineteenth century through 2005. It fills a much needed gap, not because of the subject (there are a small but a growing number of LGBT-specific histories), but because of its audience: teens.

LGBT histories for that age group have been sorely lacking, consisting mostly of Becoming Visible: A Reader in Gay and Lesbian History for High School and College Students (Alyson: 1994), by Kevin Jennings. (Yes, the same Jennings who is now heading up the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools). Jennings’ volume is useful, but is more a source book than a narrative like Gay America. Both are needed. Read the rest of this post »

NYT’s LGBT Family Blowout

The New York Times is chock full o’ LGBT family goodness this weekend:

Lisa Belkin’s “What’s Good for the Kids” looks at recent research showing that children of lesbian and gay parents tend to be more tolerant and less bound by gender stereotypes and assumptions. She relies heavily on a new book by Abbie Goldberg, Lesbian and Gay Parents and Their Children. (I have a column of my own coming out soon on Goldberg’s book, so I won’t go into details here, but I will point you to my interview of Goldberg from a couple of years ago.)

Belkin makes some good points, and her main one, that non-traditional families can actually be good for kids, is laudable. I have to take issue with one thing she says, however:

It is striking, then, how comparatively rarely children are mentioned as an argument in favor of gay marriage. The issue is framed as a debate over equality and justice, of personal freedom and the relation of church and state, not about what is good for kids.

First, I’ve seen a lot about how letting same-sex couples marry is good for our children, and about how not letting us do so hurts our kids.

Second, the ultra-right is always framing the debate about what is good for kids. (Several, if not all, of the sources I mention in the Maine section of my Weekly Political Roundup note this was a large reason we lost there. Ditto for Prop 8. )

If LGBT advocates have framed the issue instead as one of simple fairness and equality, that may be a matter of tactics, and isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As I’ve said before, I think Protect Maine Equality should be praised for focusing on fairness and equality, and not getting caught up in the back and forth of whether “gay marriage will be taught in schools,” one of the big issues that sank us in California.

Still, Belkin is correct in noting that the research on lesbian and gay parents, deftly compiled by Goldberg and others, shows not only that we are no worse than others, but may in fact be better preparing our children, gay or not, to live in a world where gender stereotypes are fading, straight husbands spend more time with kids, and wives take out the trash.

Will that convince people to support marriage equality, however, as Belkin suggests? My take? It won’t persuade the ultra-right, for whom the idea of blurred gender roles is as scary as that of same-sex couples getting married (and may in fact be the root cause of the latter). On the other side, those who see blurred gender roles as a good thing already tend to support marriage equality. For the undecided middle? Perhaps, although I am continually surprised at how entrenched gender roles are among the families in my neighborhood, even here in relatively liberal Massachusetts.

Still, the ultra-right has long owned the argument of “what is best for children.” If there is anything we can do to reclaim that argument from them in a compelling way for Middle America, then maybe Maine will be the last defeat of its kind.

Also of note in the NYT this weekend:

• “Can a Boy Wear a Skirt to School?” a good exploration of gender expression and identity. (The article even mentions Labels Are for Jars, whom I—and many of you—have long known around the queer-mom blogosphere.)
• “Field Guides to Fairies” is not in fact about identifying gay men, but rather a review of several new young adult books involving fairies, including Malinda Lo’s Ash, a lesbian retelling of Cinderella. (Here’s my interview with her about the book.) Many congratulations to her for making the NYT, which calls Ash “somber and lovely.”

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.

“She Got Me Pregnant”: Episode 89

Helen and I bring you up to date on Scholastic’s refusal to carry a book with lesbian moms at its book fairs. The company has now made a step in the right direction, but is it enough? We also discuss Preacher’s Sons, a great new documentary showing five years in the lives of two gay dads and the five sons they adopt from California’s foster care system. Plus: If you think lesbian parenting is funny, you don’t know enough about wombats.

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

Brought to you in partnership with After Ellen.