Lesléa Newman may be best known to readers here as the author of Heather Has Two Mommies and other children’s books. She is also, however, an award-winning poet, and her latest volume of poetry for adults is a wise and loving look at her father in the last years of his life.
Three new books variously offer insight, inspiration, and social science rigor as they chart the contours of queer parents’ lives.
I am thrilled to reveal a project I’ve been working on for months (and in some ways, years): the Mombian Database of LGBTQ Family Books, Media, and More: over 500 books, music albums, movies, games, and toys for and about LGBTQ families. This is not just a booklist: you can search and filter by categories, tags, and more. Want board books with queer dads? Picture books starring Black transgender girls? Memoirs by queer moms about adoption? You can find them, among many other combinations!
A must-read new anthology about queer women and nonbinary people who are nonbiological and nongestational parents looks at their paths to parenthood, their experiences as parents, and the evolving meanings of what it is to be a mother.
A new book by the hosts of a popular podcast captures the lively spirit of the show and the insights of their many guests as it explores LGBTQ family making.
A new memoir by a lesbian mom interweaves the strands of her life from San Francisco in the 1960s through teaching, law school, coming out, starting a family, and surviving two types of cancer.
November is National Adoption Month, so let’s kick it off with a look at some of the books for children and adults—storybooks, memoirs, and social science studies—that feature LGBTQ adoptive families.
When the first same-sex couple to marry legally in the United States, Hillary and Julie Goodridge, was feeling stressed from public attention, they didn’t want to seek couples’ counseling. Julie told NPR this past May, “It felt like too much of a risk.” They divorced a few years later. Their daughter Annie, who was 10 at the time, said in retrospect, “I felt like our family let everyone down.” Their situation highlights a long-time problem for the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups: the pressure to be perfect. Two new books, however, each look at topics often associated with failure—relationship break-ups and reproductive losses—in order to help LGBTQ people and our children better navigate them.
When my spouse and I first tried to start our family 17 years ago, we searched vainly for a book on assisted reproduction that was both authoritative and inclusive. There were queer parenting books, to be sure, but they covered such a range of topics that details of the actual babymaking processes and procedures were somewhat scanty. There were more detailed guides, but they omitted families like ours. A new book by a fertility expert—who also happens to be a lesbian mom herself—is just the book we would have hoped to have.
Many queer families, including my own, began with one parent’s eggs and donor sperm—and donor conception is also an option for many single parents and non-queer fertility-challenged couples. But the sperm of a single anonymous donor may be used to create children for numerous families—and many of these them are connecting to create new networks of kinship that sit at the intersection of chosen and genetic family. A thoughtful new book explores how these networks have evolved and the benefits and challenges for children and parents in them.
