The Bilerico Project | Daily experiments in LGBTQ

An important part of National Coming Out Day--and changing hearts and minds at any time--is telling our stories. I therefore wanted to share a collection of recent stories about LGBT parents. Unfortunately, lesbian moms and our kids seem to be the only ones anybody is writing about. (The fictional gay dads on ABC's new Modern Family are getting a lot of coverage, and that's good, but I'm talking about real families here.) I did include one story by the mother of a gay son in Maine, who takes a multi-generational look at her family to argue for marriage equality.

If any readers know of other recent stories of LGBT parents and our kids to help round out the G, B, and T, please leave a comment (and a link). In the meantime, enjoy the following mostly L stories, many of which were in mainstream publications and may help with that heart-mind transformation.

• The U.K.'s Mirror brings us the story of Emma and Laura Flanagan, who used the same known donor to get pregnant five months apart, and plan for their children to know the man as their father, though not a legal one. It's pretty well done, although the paper gives some sense that their situation is rarer than it probably is. "This is their unique family," it says. Here's a previous post I did at Mombian on simultaneous pregnancies among lesbian couples, proving that it certainly isn't unique--and I know there are many of you out there with involved known donors, so that isn't unique, either. Still, it's a sweet story, and I wish the couple my best.
• Margaret Daros, the mother of a gay son, gives us a moving, multi-generational look at her family, including her in-laws (through her son's partner), as an argument for upholding marriage equality in Maine.
• A couple of weeks ago, I posted the touching video of Chelsea Montgomery-Duban speaking at her dads' wedding. Mississipi's Sun Herald has an article about the video, Montgomery-Duban's YouTube fame, and her thoughts on her family and marriage equality. Florida's St. Petersburg Times also has a piece about the video.
• Indy Week profiles Julia Boseman, North Carolina's only out state senator and a mom who recently won a custody battle with her ex-partner over rights to see her seven-year-old son. She and her new spouse, Chrystal Medlin, are expecting a baby boy in January. In the article, Boseman talks both about her personal life and about measures like the anti-bullying bill she helped institute.
• Nevada's domestic partnerships just went into effect, and while that's not parenting-specific, it did give the Las Vegas Sun a reason to publish a profile of Carline Banegas and Jodie Dearborn and their three teen children, one of the first couples to register. They are field trip chaperones and enjoy trips to Disneyland, making them a pretty typical family of any sort--but they met during a softball game and moved in together after just a few weeks, making them pretty typical lesbians.
• Canadian lesbian site The Pink Elephant brings us the reminiscences of a teen daughter of a lesbian mom, who tells us when she first started thinking of her mom as a person, not just a parent--and it wasn't the day her mom came out to her.
• Paige, right here at Bilerico, shares the very funny story of her son asking about his body parts (his word mix-up almost made me spill my coffee), and discusses her difficult search for children's books that talk about bodies and sexuality in an age-appropriate, feminist, queer-affirming, sex-positive way.