Children’s Fiction About or Including Lesbian or Gay Families

• Mommy, Mama & Me (board book)
• Daddy, Papa & Me (board book)
• Uncle Bobby’s Wedding
• Heather Has Two Mommies
• The Family Book (and many, many other Todd Parr titles!)
• Emma and Meesha My Boy
• The Different Dragon

Children’s Non-Fiction about Lesbian or Gay Families

• And Baby Makes 4
• And Tango Makes Three (storybook with true story)

“Young Adult” (Teen) Fiction with Lesbian Parents

• Between Mom and Jo
• Donorboy
• From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun
• Jack
• Luv Ya Bunches (tween)
• Violet in Bloom (tween)

True Stories by People with Lesbian or Gay Parents (Teen/Adult)

• Let’s Get This Straight: The Ultimate Handbook for Youth with LGBTQ Parents
• What About the Children?
• How It Feels to Have a Gay or Lesbian Parent
• Families Like Mine
• Love Makes a Family (photo portraits of gay and lesbian families)
• Women in Love: Portraits of Lesbian Mothers and Their Families (photo book)

Books About and For Lesbian Parents

• Confessions of the Other Mother: Non-Biological Lesbian Moms Tell All
• She Looks Just Like You: A Memoir of (Non-Biological Lesbian) Motherhood
• And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents, and Our Unexpected Families
• Waiting for the Call: From Preacher’s Daughter to Lesbian Mom
• Buying Dad: One Woman’s Search for the Perfect Sperm Donor

Books About Pregnant Lesbians

• My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy (humorous memoir)
• The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians

More Interesting LGBTQ Bibliographies

• 2011 ALA Rainbow Project List (4th Annual)
• Mombian’s Comments on the 2011 ALA Rainbow Project List
• I’m Here. I’m Queer. What the hell do I read?
• Lambda Literary – YA Book Reviews
• Queer YA – Book Reviews of fiction for LGBTQ teens
• For Youth Services or School Librarians – Serving LGBTQ Teens: A How-to-Do-It Manual for Librarians
• 2010 ALA Rainbow List
• 2009 ALA Rainbow List
• 2008 ALA Rainbow List

Above, please give a warm LesFam hello to DJ Rebel and her family, from brrtha’s Flickr photostream. This is from Santa Cruz, CA’s LGBT Pride back in 2007.

As we mentioned on our October 21 post below, we cull these “Picture of the Week” images from the various photos (marked as “public”) in the LesbianFamily.org Flickr group .  If anyone’s face is in the image, we ask in advance to cross-post here, and will attribute as you specify. If you want us to link to your blog, we’ll gladly do so!  Consider hooking up with Flickr if you haven’t already. It’s free if you don’t upload a ton every month. And no, this is not a paid product endorsement. Oh, for the ethical quandary of an offer for a paid product endorsement.

…

News! We’ve got our first post-hiatus updater! PurpleLaurie55 wrote to say that she’d like her blog, Creating A Miracle, to be moved from “Expecting” to “Babies!” Which is now where you’ll find it. Congratulations, PurpleLaurie!! She also asked to have her wife’s blog, Mommies Making Miracles, to the “TTC” page. Done! Now go visit ‘em, folks!

…

Help! This brave updater gives us the opportunity to query those of you who list your blogs here and are reading this: can you let us know if we should nudge your blog from one page to another? What with the onward march of time marching your kids or your family-making process along? Ideally we’d have a fleet of paid editorial staffers combing the blogosphere for new blogs to recruit, checking on the status (still publishing? needing a shift in listing?) of the blogs currently listed here. Clearly we are lacking a fleet of paid editorial staffers, and so rely on you, the dedicated Lesbian Family readership community, to help focus our To Do list.

Updating and status-checking would be most obviously needed for the TTC page (55 of ‘em!), the Adoption page (17 of em! though most post-adoption, some are about the journey), the Expecting page (25 of ‘em, pretty durn time-dated!), and the Babies page (118 blogs, people! mother of god that’s a lot of babies!). I’m no mathematician, but that makes around 215 blogs in need of a status report.

These are only four out of the 20 pages we keep here at Lesbian Family, but they’re four of the most action-packed and fun/drama-filled. As any of you know who’ve trod this path before, it takes us SO G_D D_MNED much effort to make our families in the first place, and the first several years are a mix of shock, amazement, sleep-deprived hallucinatory delerium, and sincere hunger for a CLUE from a trusted source. The stories we tell about our lives are not simply entertainment, but MAP-MAKING for one another on (for most of us) the very most important journey of our lives. Please pardon the all caps but I feel just a tad strongly about this.

If any of youse wanted to adopt a page, even for this one-time clean-up sweep, we’d be hugely grateful. Just send us a note on this post, so nobody duplicates anyone’s efforts. The main things we’d want to know:

1. Blog no longer publishing? Let us know & we’ll nix it. Still publishing? Then:
2. Obvious change in status of family? What page should the blog be listed on now? After this, then also:
3. Is the blog redirecting to a new URL? Or is there a final post directing to a new URL? We’d love to update links.

All of this is about directing traffic and connecting good people to good people, all in the service of love-love-love! for lesbian families and the stories they’re telling about their lives. A sincere thank you in advance for any help you can give us.

The rag-tag skeleton crew managing and posting here (again: no Halloweeen pun intended) has been distracted by the business of parenting.  But we’re easing back up the onramp by (1) weeding through the 12, 643 as-yet unmoderated comments (any guesses as to which among these are not spam?), and (2) gloating over the fact that we finally (FINALLY!) snatched the URL <LesbianFamily.com>. It was heretofore wasted er, unappreciated by some overseas webmaster who was using it as a portal for, er, fairly salacious content. No salacious content here, folks! Unless you think ovulation cycles or adoption proceedings or spit-up rags are salacious!

So if you’re here because you went to your old familiar portal “LesbianFamily.com” and are surprised at what you find, well, BOO!  If you are here as an old chum the old fashioned way (via “.org”), welcome back. We hope to get ourselves back up and running again in proper fashion soon.

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.]

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!

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.

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.