Hi Lesbian Families and Friends of the Family!

What do you think of the idea of a monthly LesbianFamily.org email newsletter? We wouldn’t want to spam you, but we’re also looking at ways we might be able to generate more community within our community.

A newsletter would give us another way to highlight newly listed blogs, show off bloggers and photos we love, list activities of interest, and offer the possibility for things like classified ads or essays/posts/poetry from those of you with something to say who aren’t able to make the committment to be full blown contributing editors or authors.

Is there anything else you’d want to see in a newsletter? Or really NOT want to see?

If we do a newsletter, what we would probably do is spam all of you whose email addresses we have ONCE, with a clear opt-in for future newsletters. Unless you have another idea for how we might reach you. We’re open to ideas!

Our gals from Hydrangeas Are Pretty, Shelli and Narda, got official in Connecticut, with mega-adorable Noah Matan getting a ringside seat. Malka is reclining on the step behind them. You know, with slight changes in the scenery, this is pretty much exactly like what unfolded for my beloved and me on the other side of the country (geographically and politically speaking) last July. Little boy child in arms, girl child blazé on the steps behind.  

Much love and hearty congratulations to an old couple knee-deep in kids. 

New additions and updates await posting here at LesbianFamily, and they’ll be forthcoming soon.  Thanks for stopping by.

[Photo by Christopher Gannon, AP, in The Columbia Missourian.]

Above: Dawn BarbouRoske, second from left, of Iowa City leans towards her partner, Jen BarbouRoske, after learning of the Iowa Supreme Court ruling Friday in favor of legalizing gay marriage. Between them is their daughter Bre, 6. Their other daughter, 11-year-old McKinley, left, reacts to the ruling.

We extend our hearty congratulations to lesbian families in Iowa, who as of yesterday began to be able to receive the myriad legal protections afforded by state-recognized partnership.

In LesbianFamily.org news, we have two new additions and a transition:

• Geek and Lawyer, who live and write in Australia, joins the TTC listings, 
• adventures in making a baby has joined the Expecting listings, and
• Creating a Miracle moved from TTC to Expecting

Welcome, yay, and congratulations!

Two more blogs are on deck (also an addition and a transition), and as soon as we can find out what the URLs are, we’ll announce them here.  This makes for as good a time as any to remind you to include your URL in a comment when you’re letting us know you want to be listed or shifted.  :)

Over the past several weeks, a wonderful handful of folks have written in and offered to help tend the LesFam field here.  Next week I hope to run a welcome post, and will invite the new folks to introduce themselves (and the returning old folks to re-introduce and update us). ‘Til then, we raise a sippy cup to you, Iowa!

First off, what’s BlogHer? BlogHer is an online community of and for women who blog, and BlogHer, as a thing you might “go to,” is their bodacious annual conference.

From their About page,

 BlogHer’s mission is to create opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, community and economic empowerment. Today BlogHer provides the number-one community for and guide to blogs by women, reaching more than 14 million women each month via annual conferences, a Web hub (http://www.blogher.com), and an publishing network of more than 2,700 qualified, contextually targeted blog affiliates (http://blogherads.com).

BlogHer puts on regional conferences as well as a big national one, meant to enable women online to connect to one another, share expertise, ideas, network, and basically whoop it up a lot.

I went  last year in San Francisco, and I know LesbianFamily.org founder Liza spoke at the 2007 conference in Chicago and attended last year’s regional conference in Atlanta.  As Liza and others can attest, they are doing really impressive coalition-building across difference, and have made consistent overtures to search out and provide platforms for lesbian, lesbian mom, and women of color bloggers (lesbian/mom or otherwise).  They are good people.

So this year BlogHer’s national conference will be back in Chicago (sold out already, apparently; here’s the waitlist), and at least two of us from the LesbianFamily.org group (Liza and I) will be there.  Will you be there? Want to meet up over brunch after the conference? Yay!  

I only have Yelp! to go by, but the West Egg Cafe looks good, and is just a few blocks north of the hotel where the conference is taking place. I figure folks with neighborhood know-how can weigh in, and we can chit-chat in the comments here to fine-tune plans.

UPDATE: WE’RE GONNA MEET AT THE WEST EGG CAFE @ 9AM SUNDAY MORNING, GALS!

And even if you’re not going but want to help spread the word to folks who might, would you consider pasting the above button in your sidebar or in a post?  [FYI: It's 150px wide & 200 px tall.]

<a title=”lesfammeetupblogher09″ href=”http://lesbianfamily.org/2009/03/24/going-to-blogher-lets-meet-up/”> <img src=”http://lesbianfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/lesfammeetupblogher09.jpg” alt=”lesfammeetupblogher09″ width=”150″height=”200″/></a>

[Note: if the link gets wonky on you, you might have to fix the infernal "curly" quotation marks in the HTML, typing in your own "  " marks instead. I've tried to fix them here in the post & am stumped. Apologies.]

Dana over at Mombian is running her fabulous queer family fun-fest for the third year in a row today. Go check out the list of contributed posts, which will be added to on a rolling basis throughout the day. A great many of the Lesbian Family-listed blogs have posted something on the occasion. Here’s mine, for fun. And Liza, LesbianFamily.org founder, posted this.

If you’ve listed your blog here, and would like readers to see your Blogging for LGBT Families Day post, do let us know in the comments below!

My Custom Story is a site where you can order totally customized photo board books. What a neat way to make sure our kids see positive images of their families from a very young age! It would be great if they had gay and lesbian families represented in their example books, but it looks like all of the examples come from the owner’s family, so I guess I can’t expect her to make up a lesbian auntie getting pregnant with donor sperm just to be inclusive!

Speaking of sperm (what a segue!), Sfrajett has a great post about buying sperm, contemplating parenthood, and figuring out definitions of family. It’s been up for a while, but I just read it and found it very thought-provoking. Good luck to you & GF as you venture down this wild and wacky path to parenthood, Sfrajett!

On to my rant of the day.

Smashing, bashing, and crashing… “the 3 important stages of boyhood?”

That’s what Tonka says in a multi-page ad in Parents. “From the way they talk to the way they play, boys are just built different! And Tonka (of course) has the blueprint for the fun they love. The TONKA [no product placement here, thank you] grows with your child so he can sort, walk, and ride to his heart’s content.”

Because girls don’t sort, walk, or ride? Let alone smash, bash or crash?

“Boys don’t just like to be active, they need to be.”

I am the mom to one very very active little boy. One little boy who seems to be determined to conform to every stereotype – whose head whips around when he sees a truck go by, who has never met a ball or a wheeled object he doesn’t like – but that doesn’t mean that the little girls I know don’t need to be active too.

“Enjoy all the wild, wonderful moments and remember, you’re part of a very special group of women – you’re the mom of a BOY!” Gag.

Playing to these stereotypes may sell toys – though not to me – but it also hurts kids. It hurts little girls who want to run and make noise. And it hurts little boys who don’t.

Shame on you, Tonka.

Note that I’m not even mentioning that aside from one possibly-Asian looking kid, there are absolutely NO children boys of color in the whole 8.5 page spread? Oh wait, I guess I did just mention that.

Remember back when Babytalk ran a survey on “Married vs Single Moms?” I got a little cranky about it, to put it mildly. And while Babytalk didn’t call me, they heard from enough lesbian moms that we’re certainly included in the article.

And apparently, there are a lot of us! Of their 14,000 “nationally representative” respondents, 8%, or approximately 1100 of us, answered YES to the question, “Do you have a same-sex partner who co-parents with you?”

Interestingly, “more than two-thirds” of us strongly agreed that we feel discrimination because we’re not married. I had a hard time with the wording of the question, and think I might have been in the other ~30%, although obviously I think lesbian moms face discrimination.

The surprising statistic for me was that only 57% of us agreed, “I wish I were married.” I wonder how many of you in the 43% answered the question are in a semi-legally-recognized marriage or otherwise got caught up in the wording of the question. And I’m also curious about how many of you are more old-school, anti-patriarchial-institution radical feminist moms.

Coolest bit? The sidebar titled “Hollywood wives…and moms” listed some famous celeb moms who are either divorced with children, unmarried with children, single adopters, or have same-sex partners. It isn’t in the online version, so you’ll have to pick up a copy to see the cute picture of Cynthia Nixon and her daughter.

Way to go, BabyTalk! Thanks for including lesbian moms in your article.

I’m back from BlogHer07 (by back, I mean in Milwaukee spending a week on vacation at Grandma and Grandpa’s) and I’m full of excitement and ideas for the blog. Also, the panel I was on was a smashing success! But FIRST, I want to welcome new visitors and point out a few things.

Welcome, BlogHers!

The blogrolls should be self-explanatory, over there in the righthand nav bar. If you’re looking for pregnant lesbian blogs, look under “expecting,” for lesbian foster parents, look under “foster,” etc.

If you would like to be listed as a Friend of the Family, please either leave a comment, or send an email to lesbianfamily (at) gmail (dot) com. The only thing we ask in return is that you put up a button on your blog (or a link in your blogroll if you don’t do buttons). Scroll down for the really cute Friend of the Family buttons.

If you’d like to be added to the Resource page, also either leave a comment or send an email. If you could add a short (1 sentence) description of your resource, that would be great. I may or may not leave it precisely intact, but it helps! I do anticipate reorganizing the resource page soon.

AND, feel free to join the LesbianFamily.org Flickr group. Pictures you send to the group will go into random rotation in the Family Album on the right. This is what a lesbian family looks like! (Please note, suggestive/erotic pictures will be removed. This is a family album.)

Look for more BlogHer posts both here and at LizaWasHere!

Are any LesbianFamily.org readers going to BlogHer?

I’ve been invited to step in as a speaker on the panel “The Politics of Inclusion & Exclusion in Online Communities,” and would love to have you join me and the rest of the very interesting women who will be there. It should be a great discussion.

Today, for what feels like the millionth time in the past 3 1/2 years, the Massachusetts legislature is voting on whether to send a referendum to the votes to let them decide whether same-gender marriage will continue to be legal.

More than eight thousand families in Massachusetts would have their current legal status endangered, and both marriage rights and civil unions would be off the table for the rest of us queers. If we can kill this bill today in the Constitutional Convention, it’s over – there are no more versions of the amendment in the pipeline. It feels like do or die today.

I am off to the State House in a bit with Roo and will write more later when we know the outcome. A vote is expected between 1 and 3 today, and it’s going to be breathtakingly close.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in obsessively refreshing for up-to-the-minute reports, Bay Windows is live-blogging the day. If you live in Massachusetts, or if you have family or friends here, please make a phone call before 1 pm today.

***

ETA: if you’re looking for a more personal perspective on what marriage means for LGBT families – both in Massachusetts and elsewhere – Dana just posted a great review of a book called The Brides of March.

***

4:04: Just got home. Someone is refusing to nap when it’s convenient for Mama (the nerve), so for now, I’ll just say: HELLS, YEAH!!!

Details to follow.

***

So what we will do with ourselves now? Since November 2004, when the state’s Supreme Judicial Court rules that nothing in the state constitution prohibited consenting adults to get married, regardless of gender, the state legislature has voted on marriage rights no fewer than 14 times.

In the meantime, thousands of couples have gotten married, and dozens of lawsuits – some successful – have been filed by out-of-state couples to get their Massachusetts marriage recognized at home. The impact has gone beyond Massachusetts and the surrounding states, though: as people have seen the sky not falling, and the poll numbers show that an ever-increasing number of people in Massachusetts do support same-gender marriage, a handful of states have established civil unions or domestic partnerships. This is progress, despite the national backlash.

And today was huge. The amendment, which needed 50 votes to turn into a 2008 ballot initiative, got just 44 votes. Some legislators changed their mind at the last second, including the state rep in my mother-in-law’s district (and this after she wrote him an angry letter declaring that she hoped none of his children would grow up to be gay. Fair enough.)

I can’t help but feel pissed at those 44 legislators for having the audacity to think they get to choose who gets to be a legal family and who doesn’t. But 151 legislators – including some republicans in conservative districts – voted with their conscience. Wow, do I love this Commonwealth.

Because of Murphy’s law of babies, Roo took the longest nap of his life this morning, so we were on the train on our way to the State House when NSG called with the news of how the vote went down. I couldn’t believe we missed it. But the State House was still a site to behold when we arrived: throngs of people cheering, hugging, crying, and screaming congratulations across the crowd. A woman grabbed Roo’s hands and yelled “hooray for your moms!”

Across the street were the protesters. Their signs ranged from typically offensive – “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” – to appalling – “Fags burn in hell, wedding ring or no.” An older man screamed at some Episcopal priests about how all we wanted to do was teach “buggery” in elementary school. And then there was the guy with the sign that said “Unitarians are Jew-haters.” (Maybe he was lost.)

When the pro-equality legislators emerged with their staff to greet the crowd, the scattered screams and songs turned into a more unified chant of “thank you, thank you, thank you.” Some of them were crying. All of them were beaming.

I felt so grateful to be there to experience this, and to have Roo there with me. I can’t wait to tell him about this day, so he can say he was there the day his state made history by making sure his family would stay legal.

(Pictures courtesy of The Boston Globe, since I can’t figure out how to get mine of my phone).