A very happy day to all who define yourselves as fathers, have or had fathers, or use Father’s Day to celebrate any parent, donor, or other important person in your family. Here are a few recent pieces that explore some of the many ways of being a dad.
- Heather Ostermann at TIME shares her story in “I’m a Cis Woman. My Husband’s a Trans Man. This Is How We Made 2 Babies.“
- lphonso and Melvin Reyes of Brooklyn, New York, speak with NBC’s new NBC Out channel about their long journey to become parents through fostering and adoption, and the extra hurdles they faced as a same-sex couple.
- NBC Out profiles Brian Rosenberg and Ferd van Gameren of New York, founders of Gays with Kids, who adopted, and Dustin Brown, an Indiana gay dad who started his family within a different-sex marriage, and is now co-parenting with his ex-wife.
- At Gays with Kids, Anthony Romeo writes a touching, heartfelt letter about his spouse and how they fell in love, in “Dear Gabe, Let Me Tell You About Your Papa.”
- Lindsey Straus’ piece in the Boston Globe, “The story of a transgender father: ‘I had to risk losing my family,’” is complemented by one that her son Taylor De Lench (an Emmy-winning video journalist for the Globe) wrote: “The story of a son with a transgender father: ‘My dad never changed inside.’”
- The Handsome Father speaks with Adam Toguchi and Bruce Weatherford of Austin, Texas, about becoming parents through fostering and adoption.
- The inimitable Melissa Harris-Perry at ELLE writes, “Hallmark Doesn’t Make the Father’s Day Card I Need.” She tells us of the various types of dads in her life, including the husband of her children’s gestational surrogate, and observes, “As a nation we have a discernible lack of imagination about the multiple manifestations of paternal affection.” (Harris-Perry is not LGBTQ, but she is an ally, and several aspects of her story overlap with the stories of many LGBTQ parents.)
- The Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion has launched a charming and funny series of ads “to show the adorable reality of how one child celebrates having two fathers.” (These are all great—but I want to give a shout out to all the single gay, bisexual, and transgender dads out there, too, though.)
- Finally, Dove Soap gives us this lovely montage about dads, including a two-dad family about 30 seconds in: