Family Pride’s Blog

Last year when I arrived in Provincetown (after our 11 hour car ride) I was a fresh, new Family Pride employee who had only been with the organization for 6 weeks.  Let’s just say, Family Week is like trial by fire–it is a constant stream of celebration and excitement mixed with hauling firewood, chasing kids, and attending workshops (just to touch on the tip of the iceberg). Above all, what I looked forward while preparing for this year’s Family Week was the thought of meeting individual families and having the time and space to connect directly with the people we work with and for everyday.

Needless to say, what excited me most about this year was not seeing the sights of Commericial Street (although, that did bring back the memories) or running into the house we stayed in last year delighted to find I knew where the mugs were, but seeing our families one year later – because in kid time one year means quite a bit.

Saturday, registration and the first day here, we went to the beach for a BYOP (bring your own picnic) gathering.  There were umbrellas pitched, kids rolling down the sandy hills, and plenty of sandwich fixings floating around. I walked around to say hi (in our bright orange t-shirts we are hard to miss) and see what kind of kid games I could play along the way (you know, “please pretend you’re a monster and chase me” or “run in and out of the water really super fast”).  After circling the beach, Dustin and I were sitting in the sand watching the families play and one child I recognized from last year walked by me with his parent.  I didn’t remember his name right away (it was Michael, don’t worry, I asked), but we chatted about Family Week, how much fun it is to be in a safe space, and what they were looking forward to this year (let’s face it–there is a lot to choose from). 

Now everytime I see that family there is a huge smile and a wave even if we are on opposite sides of the street.  I’ve decided that this is what Family Week is all about (the spirit of Family Week if you will); building community, connections,and a place where, once a year, we can all come back together yet again.

It’s only been two days since the 12th annual Provincetown Family Week began, and I’m already astounded by the growth! I’ve seen many old faces and also a lot of new. This year, R Family Vacations is running the large social and entertainment events, like their Under the Big Top Circus Dinner and their Classic Disco Family Tea Dance, and already 3 of the 4 major events are SOLD OUT with more than 650 people attending each one! Last year, our biggest dinner (also run by R Family and pirate-themed) was 350 people. We estimate well over 500 LGBTQ-headed families in PTown this week–that’s at least 1,000 if not more than 1,500 people from our community. The growth is tremendous!

So much has happened since we arrived Saturday morning, not to mention the drive up. (I surprised my boss, Family Pride Executive Director Jennifer Chrisler, with my fancy driving. Hey, that rest stop crept up on me, and I hadto get over two lanes of traffic to get there. Parents understand: when someone in the car has to go, someone in the car has to go.)

We had a great time at check-in and registration Saturday morning, down on MacMillan Pier. We’ve moved most of our events down there this year–both to create a one-stop shop for our families and because the breeze off the water is oh so nice! We busted out the sound system and I plugged my iPod in–I have a special “Family Pride” playlist for just such occasions, with great LGBTQ family hits like “We Are Family,” “Love and Happiness,” “Freedom 90,” and more. As R Family staff handled tickets and program books, the Family Pride staff was able to do what we’ve always wanted to have more time to do at Family Week–talk and share with all the wonderful families!

We have a full workshop schedule this week, continuing the tradition of bringing fresh, valuable education and advocacy programming to LGBTQ-headed families even as we ratchet up the fun side of the week through our partnership with R Family. I’m particularly excited to present on safe and inclusive schools with Jennifer on Tuesday and to lead parents through our “Toughest Questions” workshop Wednesday morning, an exercise pulled directly from our OUTSpoken Families Speakers Bureau toolkit.

Other highlights of the past few days include:

The Gathering for Families with Members of African and/or Caribbean Descent (held at the Family Pride staff house!)
The Broadway Belters Brunch (think bacon, eggs, vibrato)
The Welcome Family Beach Picnic (complete with cool breeze and even cooler water)
The Blogging and Online Activism Workshop (with our good friend, Dana Rudolph of Mombian.com)
The Sandcastle Building Contest (complete with Family Pride ribbons for all the families that participated)

Tomorrow’s our first full day of workshops and entertainment programming, with “little gatherings” for the under 4s first thing, followed by a workshop conducted by Jennifer Chrisler on “Talking to Our Children” about being LGBTQ. Then it’s on to “Relationship Success,” a presentation on keeping LGBTQ partnerships strong, followed by Beach Olympics, the 7th Annual Guatemalan Barbecue (for families with children adopted from Guatemala), and the big deal, big-time Under the Big Top Dinner!

I can’t say I’m not a little exhausted already, and I think I speak for the Family Pride staff as a whole. However, there is a strange energy that develops around Family Week–an energy that keeps a smile on our faces (through the pounds of sweat) and pep in our step (with burns on our necks). The truth of the matter is that there’s no way to explain or describe this energy as anything other than the warmth and good vibes we get from being around all these beautiful families. I’m excited to keep you all posted as we work through the week, and to have other Family Pride staff members update you, as well. It’s not easy finding a few minutes each day with packed schedules like these to share what’s going on here on the Cape, but we believe in sharing our work with as many people as possible, especially the ones who can’t be here.

And now for some much-needed rest…

Stay tuned!
Dustin

It’s Saturday, July 28. That means that the Family Pride team, along with hundreds (perhaps thousands!) of LGBTQ families and allies are descending on the sandy shores of Provincetown, MA for the biggest and best Family Week yet.

Family Week is a fun filled week of workshops, gathering and special events aimed at LGBTQ parented families (you can read more about the week in a recent New York Times article). Thanks to our partnership with R Family Vacations, we’ll even have Broadway quality events and entertainment! So, if you’re sitting at home and can’t make it, don’t worry… we’re bringing the fun and excitement to you through our blog. So, bookmark our blog or subscribe to our feed, and check back all week for updates and pictures. Can you smell the fish-fry already

Congratulations to the Ragan-Plowman Family for being selected as our latest family of the month. Their story will be featured on our site for the next four weeks. To read their story, click here. If you’d like your family to be featured on our website, send us your story!

I have just launched a podcast called “John Selig Outspoken” that is aimed at the GLBT community and it focuses on three main areas. First, I interview GLBT leaders and role models often showcasing individuals and organizations of importance to our community. Secondly I share insights and readings from writers because I believe that our culture is so strongly represented in writing and with the number of GLBT titles being published sinking along with the number of GLBT bookstores closures I feel a need to do what I can to promote the written word. Finally, I include a commentary about an issue that I believe to be critical to our community. Nobody has ever accused me of being lacking in having an opinion or being shy about expressing it.

It is no coincidence that Ken Manford and Family Pride are being highlighted during my first two podcasts. I came out of the closet seventeen years ago after the collapse of a thirteen-year marriage. My wife felt unfulfilled, as I was emotionally and physically unavailable. After she wanted out I finally faced the fact that I was gay. We had a son who was twelve at the time and both decided that it would be best for him to live with me though we would both co-parent him. As I entered the gay world, which was totally foreign to me, I was concerned with keeping my son whole. The first organization that I contacted was the Gay Parent group (later to become GLPCI and now Family Pride). The support I received through his school years and that my son received from a group for kids of gay/lesbian parents run by a lesbian couple was a lifesaver.

Upon my son’s graduation from high school in the mid 90s I drifted away from my connection with Family Pride but the organization has never drifted away from my heart. GLBT parents are special people. The straight world has moved a long way toward understanding the need for civil rights protection for gays (especially when it comes to work place discrimination, hate crimes and even serving in the military). The two issues that seem to be most difficult are same-sex marriage and GLBT parenting. I have experience in both since my husband and I were married in Toronto, Canada in April 2004. So the straight world finds GLBT parents a bit of a misnomer and we often find ourselves in the place where we have to prove ourselves. In fact, Abigail Garner in her excellent book, “Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It is,” wrote that our kids feeling the need to be perfect to lend credence to GLBT parents being just as good as straight parents.

On the other hand GLBT parents often find themselves to be at odds with our gay friends because so many gays and lesbians haven’t been around kids since they left school. To be honest many are uncomfortable around kids since many have bad memories of their own childhoods. Most of our GLBT friends are able to drop everything and go out with friends at a moments notice. We on the other hand are concerned with after school activities, doctors’ appointments, helping with homework, taking care of a sick child or one who is home on school vacation and all the many other challenges and joys of raising our kids. For those of you who are single parents I am not even going to go into the unique dating obstacles that arise. So we are alien at times to our own community. We get odd looks when we can’t make a meeting or go out to dinner or a club on a Saturday night or go out on a date or even mention that we would rather stay home with our kids.

Still I wouldn’t change being a gay parent for the world. My son is now twenty-nine and he married a wonderful woman in September 2005. As I look back at my life, both what I have seen and what I have been able to accomplish, without even the slightest blink of an eye, there is no doubt in my mind that the greatest accomplishment in my life was the rearing of my son. Though he lives two time zones away and we don’t get to see each other nearly often enough, we speak on the phone almost daily and he provides me so much joy. I feel so fortunate to have this wonderful unique relationship that so many of our GLBT friends will never have the opportunity to experience.

I salute all of you because being a GLBT parent is a challenge that only those of us that have experienced it can possibly understand. Enjoy the love and cherish the time you have with your kids as they do grow up far too quickly and they do leave the nest. The time and energy you invest while they are young will be with you for a lifetime.

Please feel free to listen to “John Selig Outspoken”  as I think you will enjoy it. From my podcast blog www.johnselig.com/podcast you can stream it over your computer or download it via iTunes or whatever podcatcher you use. Also be sure to check out some of my photographs and commentaries at www.johnselig.com.

We’ve been speculating for some time about which state will be the next Massachusetts and recognize same-sex marriage. Of course, civil unions continue to crop up here and there, and Massachusetts’ same-sex marriages are recognized in Rhode Island and now New Mexico. Nonetheless, Massachusetts is still the only state that offers full marriage equality to its citizens.

So who is next? Vermont, back in 2000, became the first state to offer civil unions. Now, it appears that they are exploring same-sex marriage. Today, The Burlington Free Press is reporting:

Legislative leaders announced this morning that they have formed a commission to study how Vermonters feel about gay marriage.

House Speaker Gaye Symington and Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin said the commission will hold six meetings across the state and report back to the Legislature by the end of the April 2008.

“It is time to ask whether it is in Vermont’s interest to continue to maintain a separate legal status for same-sex couples,” Symington said.

Though marriage equality may be on the horizon for Vermonters, it’s certainly a distant horizon. With an April 2008 report date, it won’t be happening anytime soon. In the meantime, we’re doing more than keeping our fingers crossed. We’ll continue to work on the ground changing hearts and minds, building support for equality and making safer environments for our families.

There’s been a lot of talk about civil unions lately. In fact, civil unions have become very popular among democratic presidential candidates. Civil unions enable candidates (like John Edwards in the last debate) to say I things like gays should have rights but I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. Candidates have found civil unions to be a safer middle ground.

I realize that the climb to full equality is a process. But civil unions just don’t cut it for me. Greta Christina sums it up perfectly in her blog, stating:

There are legal reasons why they’re not equal — marriage is recognized in every state and indeed every country, while civil unions aren’t; so the rights and responsibilities don’t necessarily travel with you when you leave the state that granted them. There are emotional reasons — marriage is an institution/ ritual/ relationship that has existed for thousands of years, one that has tremendous resonance in our culture in a way that civil unions simply don’t. And there are moral reasons — as history has born out, separate but equal is pretty much by definition not equal.

Above all, marriage is the only currency of commitment that this country understands. I immediately think to hospital visitation rights. Would you trust a nurse or hospital administrator to interpret the rights that a civil union bestows? What about employers? According to Garden State equality, the equality organization for the state of New Jersey (where civil unions are the law), 1 out of 7 civil unioned couples is being denied partner benefits by employers.

The fact is, civil unions are unequal in every sense. I would like to think that history has taught us that separate is never equal.

But we’re making strides. Same-sex couples from Rhode Island who are married in Massachusetts are being recognized, and now New Mexico has followed suit. Yes, it’s a long climb to equality, but civil unions are not a rung in that ladder.

Last night brought a different kind of debate. Hopefully, you were able to catch it on CNN. Americans were able to submit video questions to the candidates via youyube.com And, the topic of marriage equality came up. Twice.

The first marriage equality related question was asked by a reverend:

Senator Edwards said his opposition to gay marriage is influenced by his Southern Baptist background. Most Americans agree it was wrong and unconstitutional to use religion to justify slavery, segregation, and denying women the right to vote. So why is it still acceptable to use religion to deny gay Americans their full and equal rights?

Watch the video clip below:

Is it me or does Senator Edwards contradict himself? He states that it is wrong to justify political actions with religion, but reaffirms his position against full marriage equality.

Marriage equality came up again when a lesbian couple in Brooklyn, New York asked, “Would you allow us to be married to each other?” It was nice to see names and faces attached to a question. It made their question personal.

Kucinich answered the question beautifully:

Mary and Jen, the answer to your question is yes. And let me tell you why.

Because if our Constitution really means what it says, that all are created equal, if it really means what it says, that there should be equality of opportunity before the law, then our brothers and sisters who happen to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender should have the same rights accorded to them as anyone else, and that includes the ability to have a civil marriage ceremony.

Yes, I support you. And welcome to a better and a new America under a President Kucinich administration.

Watch the clip below:

The topic of marriage equality received an unprecedented amount of air time during this debate. It will be interesting to see if the question comes up again during the Republican youtube debate. It will be hard to say “no” to a couple like Mary and Jen without coming across as a bigot.

Provincetown Family Week got some mainstream attention this week as the New York Time’s published an article yesterday about the event and it’s history.

Many people don’t realize that Family Week started as a very small gathering in 1996 before it grew into the mammoth that it is today:

In 1996, Tim Fisher and Scott Davenport, a couple living in New Jersey, brought their daughter, Kati, and son, Fritz, to Provincetown for a vacation. After a week of meeting other gay and lesbian parents at the beach, they invited about 15 families to their rented house for dinner. It was a magical event, Mr. Davenport recalled, at which children of gay parents — many of whom didn’t know other families like theirs — suddenly felt less alone.

ver the next decade, the event — which came to be known as Family Week — grew so large that by last summer a family parade seemed to stretch from one end of Provincetown to the other. Among those working as volunteers were Kati and Fritz, now teenagers.

From 15 families to a few thousand, Family Week has grown by leaps and bounds. But the week’s magic is not deluded by its size; each year is better than the previous. Seeing so many beautiful, loving families is a transforming experience for even the most hardened of hearts.

Provincetown Family Week officially kicks off in five days. Some things will be different this year: our partnership with R Family Vacations, broadway-quality performances, and more robust workshops, programs and events. But the heart of family week will be the same; the magic that is Family Week will be in full force.

Mr. Davenport, who was present at the creation, said he wasn’t unhappy that Family Week was changing. “Gregg and Kelli have been to enough Family Weeks that I think they understand the magic,” he said.

Besides, Mr. Davenport (who now lives in Maryland) said, it didn’t matter if children who attended Family Week went to a fish fry or a circus. What matters, he said, “is that they get to grow up knowing other families like theirs.”

If you’d like more information about Family Week, click here. And check out pictures from last year’s event.

Polly Pagenhart lives with her partner and their two kids in Berkeley, California. She has published in the areas of feminist pedagogy, queer theory, and popular culture. Her essay “Confessions of a Lesbian Dad” appeared in the anthology Confessions of the Other Mother: Nonbiological Lesbian Moms Tell All (ed. Harlyn Aizley, Beacon 2006). She is the author of the blog LesbianDad, and is currently at work on a book about parenting at the crossroads of mother and father.

Your Gamete, Myself
Many of you will have read Peggy Orenstein’s cover piece in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, “Your Gamete, Myself.” For those who didn’t, or who just now linked to it and balked when you saw that it spans nine pages online, here’s a synopsis: Orenstein, an astute writer on matters feminist and maternal, looks at the medical and social evolution of egg donor conception. She interviews several families (mostly the mothers therein) who conceived their kids using donor eggs. She talks to doctors at fertility clinics, and weaves in anecdotal notes from her own journey to motherhood.* Throughout, she explores the ethical and emotional ramifications (to parent and child) of donor egg conception. She muses about how, in ways both like and unlike sperm donor conception and adoption, donor egg conception blurs the “bright lines” that ordinary, “biogenetic” parenthood draws around parents’ “genetic, biological and social relationships to their children.” Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I have an answer, though you’ll have to wade through my own thicket of paragraphs to find out.

Those queer and queer-cognizant readers that do mosey through the entirety of Orenstein’s piece might find themselves nodding and murmuring in assent to this or that point, all the while waiting patiently for the moment when Orenstein would of course consider how queer family-making sheds a bright light from a fresh angle on the myriad emotional issues she’s examining. After all, we couldn’t be bigger boosters of alternative conception, both via egg- and sperm-donation. “Ah,” these readers might have said to themselves as they watched paragraph after paragraph slip by, “the sly dog! Orenstein’s holding her big guns ‘til the last section of the article!”

And many of these readers will have, like me, scratched their heads when they arrived at the end of the piece having never seen the word “lesbian” or “gay” in print. Well I have just one thing to say to that: lesbianlesbianlesbian!

Okay, maybe I have more than one thing to say.

Been There, Thought About That
It’s not that I’m simply on a campaign to see to it that queer families be duly represented whenever parental issues are taken up in the mainstream press. If that were my mission – and it’s a noble one — I’d be at my pro bono blog 24/7, wearing the fingerprints off the ends of my digits in a never-ending quest for visibility. Fortunately, organizations like Family Pride and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force are on the job. No, there’s another reason I’m drawing attention to the omission of queer family-making in this piece: damned if we haven’t already asked ourselves — and figured out wise answers to — most of the questions in it. When Ornstein considered egg donor conception, she had a lot to ask herself:

Would I have felt less authentic as a parent than my husband, or would my gestational contribution have seemed equivalent to his genetic one? Would we tell our child? And when? And how? What about strangers on the street who commented on how little the baby resembled me? What if someone said the baby did look like me and I smiled — would I feel dishonest? How would the experience be different from adoption? What kind of relationship would the child have with our friend, the donor? Would my husband feel awkward about pointing out similarities between our child and himself? What if the child someday turned to me and said, “You’re not my real mother?” What if I secretly agreed? What if she wanted to put the date I met our donor on her sixth-grade [family events] timeline?

I can say with absolute certainty that every non-biological lesbian parent asks herself most of these questions (minus the ones about disclosing donor conception to the child, of course). It is axiomatic that we will face questions – our own, not to mention others’ – about our maternal authenticity. And while we each may come to different answers, we’ve been asking the questions as a feverishly reproducing demographic for quite some time now. More than twenty years into the “gayby boom,” we’ve begun to develop not just insight, but conviction about it, based on an ever-expanding wealth of experience. And a lot of what we’ve learned has to do with cultivating pride about our openness, and openness about our pride.

Any family that is, at its biological level, dependent on some kind of community outside its nuclear unit – be it with the help of an adoption agency, the help of a fertility clinic, or the generosity of friends, acquaintances, or strangers as donors – is an open family, not a closed one. This quite obviously is an area in which LGBT family folk are immensely practiced. Queer family-making begins with sharing, and can only happen when we open ourselves to others. Because of this, we have a hell of a lot to teach heterosexual family-makers about not just making peace with that fact, but understanding it for the gift it genuinely is. In other words: we’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers, and therein lies the strength of our families, not their weakness.

Yin, Meet Yang
In a fascinating balance of opposites, our positions are flipped from those of straight families. We have no choice but to look outside our couplings for help in becoming parents; to do so is ordinary, and not a sign of biological mishap. But they find themselves disheartened (if not devastated) by the need to look beyond their own bodies to make their families. Ironically, straight couples using egg or sperm donation to conceive a child are “right,” socially (as members of the normative majority, and as people whose legal parenthood of the child remains stable, due to the institution of heterosexual marriage). But they are “wrong,” biologically. Queer families that come about with the use of egg or sperm donation are “wrong,” socially (as members of the non-normative minority), but as recipients of donor eggs or sperm, we suffer no especial implication that we’re not “right” biologically. The counterbalancing of social and biological power between us is worth prying into if we’re going to evolve our notions of what makes a family. From quite different standpoints relative to social and biological correctness, we all – donor-assisted straight families and queer ones – have a vested interest in the slogan “Love makes a family.”

Problems with either fertility or virility imply a disruption to central, naturalized beliefs about “proper,” or “correct,” or “healthy” femininity and masculinity. Loss of fertility, to many women, very much feels like the loss of an essential element of their womaness; likewise it is not lost on men who are infertile that the word “impotence” stands for the lack of masculine fertility, or worse, of masculinity; more nakedly, even, a loss of power. Here again, queer folk have more than a little life experience. Sexual object choice has always been presumed to be one of the main descriptors of one’s gender (i.e., part of what defines normative femaleness is the attraction to males as object choice, and vice-versa). In our coming of age and our coming out to themselves and others, all queer folk have had to examine and make some kind of fresh sense of their femininity and masculinity.

Do Ask; We’ll Tell
What to do, one might ask, with all these intriguing criss-crossings? Well, if the “one” asking is a heterosexual feminist writer examining matters of donor-assisted parenthood, I would suggest that one might ask queer moms and dads about their parenthoods, many, many, many, of which were donor-assisted. I would suggest the writer sit herself down and listen long and hard and be sure to bring a notepad and a copious supply of sharpened pencils. Likewise if she’s looking at the related sub-topics of fighting stigma associated with non-traditional families, and questions regarding whether “to tell or not to tell” the children about their nontraditional origins.

Perhaps I feel so evangelical because my own views have changed so much from the time that my beloved and I began to conceive of having kids, to when we actually conceived them. At first I, too, cleaved to a narrow, possessive, “poverty mentality” about my parenthood. Biology was all, I thought. I was sure that my lack of genetic connection to our kids would leave me adrift, even more so than the women in Orenstein’s piece who gestated and gave birth to children from donor eggs. Since of course not only did I see myself isolated on an ice floe of biological irrelevance, I was chilled by legal invisibility and social condemnation to boot. By necessity, my view has had to expand. And from experience I’ve learned that it’s right to have done so.

It’s All Relatives
From the moment I cut my first umbilical cord, I have known in my blood that my children are my children because my love makes them so. Ask them. Okay, ask the one who can talk. She’ll tell you. And the little one, the one that only grunts and squeaks: look at the expression he flashes when he sees me. Note his response to my pinkie finger. It’s manna to him. You don’t have to be subjected to yet another report of parental abuse to know that the ability to conceive does not automatically confer the ability to parent. By the same token, you don’t have to wonder whether non-birth parents like me will move heaven and earth to help my kids live the fullest, most love-bedecked lives. (Studies will tell you that anyway.) What I have to give my kids is all nurture, no nature, and I have had to learn to be fine with that. After all, no matter how anyone landed the kids in their family, it’s the nurture that takes most of the effort. And, it’s the one thing you can change.

Would I have confidently projected this sense of belonging years ago – let’s say, even as recently as four years ago – before I diapered my first child? Hell, no. But I do now. Without benefit of the living, loving body of your child in front of you, you can run all kinds of amok with fears. But after they’ve arrived, look into their eyes for a moment – dab the tears from them, drink up the glee in them – and it’s a no-brainer. The fact that the social and legal system lags long behind us is of some practical consequence, but it makes my love no never mind.

Matter of fact, if I’ve learned anything else from being dependent on the kindness of strangers (or, happily, in our case, friends), it’s been that we are, genuinely, all members of the same human family. It sounds corny but goddamn it it’s true. Social and legal systems organize and divide us, as do cultures, religions, and more. But we are all brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers to one another under the skin. This is no saccharine bromide to queer families, it’s the god’s honest truth. And the sooner the rest of the world catches on to this understanding, the better.

________________
* The title of Orenstein’s recent memoir is Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother. And you thought I was loquacious!