Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is
In the children's book classic Heather Has Two Mommies, Leslea Newman offered kids a chance to read about nontraditional families. Now Garner, who created the site FamiliesLikeMine.com, attempts to do the same for teens, young adults and their families by interweaving her experiences growing up with a gay father and straight mother with those of other children who were raised by lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender parents. She intends "to advocate for our families to be just that: families." Although there is no exact figure for the number of children who have grown up in LGBT families over the past two decades (estimates vary from one million to 16 million), the issues Garner raises about the messages that we pass on to our children "on what a "well-adjusted" child is; on the risks and advantages of coming out (for both parents and children); and on the effects of a "homo-hostile" world "affect increasing numbers of children whose parents are straight or queer. Despite Garner's decision to interview only children in their 20s and 30s, their concerns about finding a way to name family members (e.g., should a lesbian mother's long-term partner be called a "step-mom"? Are that step-mom's children stepsisters or -brothers?) and learning how to maintain nontraditional families in the wake of a parent's death or the breakup of a relationship between parent and partner, will reverberate for young people confronting similar difficulties. Nor does Garner flinch from addressing the complex issues surrounding what it means for children raised in LGBT families, herself included, to be, in the words of advocate Stefan Lynch, "culturally queer, erotically straight."Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.