"I'm okay," I said, "Shh!"

I was perched on the edge of the seat, heavy belly balanced awkwardly on my thighs. I couldn't shift to a comfortable position until movie baby emerged from successful reconstructive surgery.

Later, I began to obsess on the possibility that our baby would be born with the same condition.

When the nurse placed Waylon on my chest, my mouth fell open. I should close my mouth, I thought, but a noise like chirping crickets was swelling in my ears, a wall of sound between thought and action.

Finally, a familiar voice distinguished itself from the din. "Paige, he's beautiful. He's beautiful, Paige. Paige, he's beautiful." Katy's words were a trail of breadcrumbs; I followed them back to the present.

At that instant, a black lump slid across my belly.

It was meconium, the first shit. I looked at Katy: "He has an anus!" Joy and relief and love washed over me in waves. He was beautiful! And healthy!

I was so absorbed that I didn't see the puzzled looks on the nurses' faces.

"She saw a documentary, you know, about a baby who was born with no anus," Katy explained. "She was worried."

Inside the house, the kitchen counter was crowded with boxes of kolaches. I knew that food would continue to roll in throughout the evening and the next day. Friends and family would appear in an intricately choreographed dance, unloading ice and coolers, cookies and casseroles, sodas and red Solo cups.

Philip Koonce II, beloved husband, father and coach, passed away on Tuesday, January 29, 2013. He was born on October 16, 1926, in Shreveport, Louisiana to Dr. Philip B. Koonce, Sr. and Mabel Koonce. Philip is survived by his children: Philip Koonce, III and his wife Gail, Blaine Koonce and his wife Lynn, and Katy Koonce and her wife Paige; his grandchildren: Cody, Bryan, Brent, Haley, Andrea, Jenna, Stephanie, Dylan, and Waylon; and seven great-grandchildren.

Growing up in Carthage, Texas, Philip dreamt of becoming a famous country singer like Tex Ritter (another Carthage native son). His mother, the indomitable Mabel Koonce, wrote to Ritter for advice. The country music legend responded with a long letter that said, essentially, "It's a hard life. Go to college. Explore your options."

After the war, Philip attended the University of Houston. He walked on to the football team and eventually won a scholarship. He met his future wife, earned a master's degree in education, got married, and moved to Texas City to begin his career as a high school football coach.

The Koonces are a musical people. Katy's mother, Donna, wrote volumes of rhyming verse. Her couplets could be simultaneously sappy, pointed and inspired. She might wax poetic about a mother's love, but she was equally likely to compose an epic guilt trip.

Katy's oldest brother, Phil III, has been known to rhyme as well. His ode to Father's Day, "A Few Things I Remember About Dad," hung on the wall above the old man's bed.

As lead singer for Butch County, Katy growls her rhymes. They're less sentimental, more sexual, filled with fictional characters and intricate rhetorical acrobatics.

Katy's middle brother, Blaine, is the kind of musician who can play anything with strings. He's been in all kinds of bands, from bluegrass to gospel, but his real genius is improvising songs for any occasion, which he delivers in a charismatic comic deadpan.

On the evening of Daddy Phil's funeral, friends gathered around the card tables in the garage. They came to eat and talk, to comfort and commiserate, but mostly to listen and to sing.

Sandra and April brought a cooler full of ice.

Pammie brought pasta.

Leigh Ann and Redonda brought King Ranch casserole.

Dede brought paper products, including extra t.p.

Someone brought shrimp slaw and made sweet tea.

Someone else wrote it all down on a yellow legal pad in the kitchen.

Blaine held court with his guitar. As the night wore on, he and his friend Victor played everything from "Let It Be" to "Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother." The mourners overflowed into the driveway and coalesced around the beer coolers. In the darkness, the warm yellow light of the garage was like amniotic fluid, enveloping and protecting the dearly beloved. I put my arm around my queer-as-shit wife and sang along about "kicking hippies' asses and raising hell."

I had hoped to see Katy's nephew, Bryan Koonce, hip-hop impresario and aspiring MC. After Katy's mom's funeral, he had delivered a manic, virtuosic description of what it was like to smoke salvia. I was curious what more I might learn.

I found him inside the house with his two sisters, Andrea and Jenna. They were sitting on the family room couch, texting, seemingly separate from the rest of the party.

"Do you remember me?" I asked, plopping down on the rocking chair. "I'm Paige, Katy's wife."

"Yeah, I remember you," Bryan answered, friendly but distracted by his phone. All three siblings have young kids, and all three live together at their mom's house. His sister said something under her breath. They seemed to be sparring in real time and via text simultaneously.

"We're kind of the Jerry Springer side of the family," Bryan said, bashfully.

I gazed at the family photos on the wall. If they had captions, they'd read like a rolodex of reality show plots: "Addiction Killed My Mama," "The Brother I Never Knew I Had," "My Daughter Looks Like a Man."

"Which side isn't the Jerry Springer side?" I asked, sweeping my arm around the room and including myself.

"True," he laughed. I'm not sure if he registered the irony that I, the unlawfully wedded wife of the prodigal daughter, was awkwardly trying to reassure the first-born son of the first-born son.

In 1969, Philip moved to Lake Jackson, Texas, to work with at Brazoswood High School. For 16 years, Koonce served as Assistant Head Football Coach and Defensive Coordinator, helping to guide the Brazoswood Buccaneers to eight district titles and to the state championship in 1974. Former players remember him as stern and disciplined yet compassionate, an introvert with a sense of humor and a talent for storytelling.

I did not grow up in a close-knit community. I never learned to anticipate the needs of grieving neighbors, nor did I know the spiritual comfort that these small gestures give.

However...

I have been honored to write obituaries for both of Katy's parents, and I have rarely felt so purposeful, rarely known such a fit between the task at hand and my humble tools.

I can't spin rhymes, can't keep a tune, but I'm lucky to cast my lot with people who know how to sing and to grieve.

Me: Do you know how we made you?

Waylon: You got that thing from Uncle Brian.

Me: Sperm?

Waylon: Yeah.

Me: And then? We used my egg, right?

Waylon: Yeah.

Me: So how are you related to Mommy?

Waylon: Well, I've been with her a lot. And also, when you two kissed [mimes sloppy French kissing] some of Mommy's DNA got inside of you and then it got in me.

I love Waylon's version of the story. Part of me wants it to remain exactly the same forever. But I also worry that we should be more strictly scientific about the mechanics of reproduction. I don't want some playground smartypants to give him the 411.

That's why I was so excited about Cory Silverberg's book What Makes a Baby. Silverberg, a Toronto-based sex educator and writer, set out to create a "where do babies come from" story that would be inclusive for transgender, gay, lesbian and other nontraditional families.

As an adult reader, I appreciate the book's attempt to uncouple sex from gender. Playful gender-neutral figures are accompanied by matter-of-fact statements:

"Not all bodies have eggs in them. Some do, and some do not....Not all bodies have sperm in them. Some do, and some do not."

I couldn't wait to read What Makes a Baby with Waylon. He's a little old for picture books, but I thought he would appreciate a story that was flexible enough to include our funky family.

When we finished, Waylon was thoughtful for a moment. "What did you think?" I asked.

"Is Uncle Brian kind of like my dad?"

Okaaaaay. Not what I was expecting. Maybe reproduction is a little too culturally overdetermined to be so easily unmoored from gender.

Or maybe Waylon is more interested in the question "how did I, personally, arrive on this planet" than in the general question of how babies are made. Still, it's an important question, and one that we need to approach over and over again from multiple angles. I appreciate almost any occasion to start a safe and meaningful conversation.

While What Makes a Baby has broad appeal, I suspect it will be most helpful to families where two parents contributed biologically to making their child. I think it will be especially valuable in families where one or both parents' gender presentation is different than the gender typically assigned to the role that they played in reproduction.

To continue to answer Waylon's questions, I've ordered the COLAGE Donor Insemination Guide. I've also been talking up the idea that he's Katy's "brainchild," because she contributed the single most essential ingredient in his conception: the idea to have a baby in the first place.

What Makes A Baby will be re-issued in 2013 by Seven Stories Press. Silverberg is currently working on two more books about sexuality for kids of various ages. Can't wait!

Have you read What Makes a Baby with a child in your life? What was your experience?

Emily Freeman's play, And Then Came Tango, was performed for second graders at Lee Elementary in Austin, Texas, on October 16. According to the Daily Texan, the principal at Lee expressed concern over the content, and Austin Independent School District moved to suspend and later cancel the play's tour of other Austin elementary schools.

As an LGBT parent who interfaces with AISD almost everyday, I can't say I was surprised. Consider this:

Given all of this context, I would have been astonished if And Then Came Tango had moved smoothly through AISD elementary schools. However, I was still disappointed that the play was cancelled with so little public soul-searching about the district's responsibility to create an LGBT inclusive environment.

If you are in Austin, I hope you will ask the district to honor the spirit of its nondiscrimination policy. The main number for the school district offices is 512-414-1700. Superintendent Meria Carstarphen is at superintendent@austinisd.org. The Board of Trustees office is at 512-414-1704 or trustees@austinisd.org. A complete list of current board members is here. (Incidently, Jayme Matthias, AISD's first openly gay board member, will begin his term in 2013.)

You can also take your children to see And Then Came Tango this weekend. There will be several free performances at UT's Oscar G. Brockett Theatre.

(h/t Dana Rudolph at Mombian for the link to the ALA and the AISD contact info. Photo credit: Paul Mannix on Flickr)

Over the past several years, resources for transgender elementary students and their families have grown rapidly. They now include multiple mainstream media reports (with varying levels of accuracy and sensationalism), new organizations such as Trans Youth Family Allies and Gender Spectrum, and innovative medical protocols to delay the onset of puberty. While access to these resources is by no means universal, it is becoming increasingly possible for elementary-age children to begin their transition before the maelstrom of middle school.

However, as Elizabethe Payne and Melissa Smith suggest in their recent Huffington Post article, most elementary school teachers and administrators have not been trained in strategies for creating an inclusive learning environment for gender nonconforming and transgender students.

As an elementary parent and an educator, I am passionate about welcoming schools. Katy Koonce and I recently had the privilege of creating a training for teachers and staff at a local elementary school. There are stellar materials available, and I wanted to share our outline and some of the things that we found most helpful.

As Payne and Smith point out, "Americans think of young children as 'innocent' and 'asexual,' so sexuality is considered unmentionable in elementary classrooms."

Children are perceived as 'too young' for such conversations. Because of the ways gender and sexuality are connected in our culture and thinking, addressing non-normative gender brings the ideas of 'sex' and 'sexuality' into the 'innocent' elementary school space and is thus dangerous.

The first task of our training was to reorient teachers and administrators with accurate information about gender and child development. We used Stephanie Brill and Rachel Pepper's The Transgender Child, specifically chapter three, "Developmental Stages and the Transgender Child," which contains a detailed breakdown of gender identity at different ages. (If you don't have access to the book, there is a version of this timeline available on the Gender Spectrum website.)

Information about developmental stages (hopefully) speaks to elementary educators in the language of their professional education. Our next step was to introduce them to the words and experiences of transgender and gender nonconforming elementary students. (Again, our overarching concern at the outset of our presentation was to convince listeners that "this really happens at the elementary level.")

To this end, our training included excerpts from Abe Louise Young's Queer Youth Advice for Educators, which is based on interviews with LGBT youth from across the nation and includes several personal stories about elementary school experiences. This book is available as a PDF download from What Kids Can Do, and hard copies are available for $9.95. I give copies to school counselors and administrators whenever I can.

Establishing the Costs of Inaction

Once we had established that gender identity is within the purview of elementary education, we wanted to briefly highlight the social and emotional costs of unprepared schools. The personal narratives from Queer Youth Advice for Educators continued to be helpful on this point, especially when paired with GLSEN's Harsh Realities: The Experiences of Transgender Youth in Our Nation's Schools. Based on the 2007 National School Climate survey, this report speaks to educators in their language, linking harassment and lack of safety to poor educational outcomes.

In our case, we felt it prudent to follow the carrot of educational outcomes with the big stick of federal anti-discrimination law. Presumably most educators are already familiar with Title IX, the section of the Education Code that prohibits gender discrimination. We were excited to learn about a 2010 letter from the Department of Education that interprets Title IX as applying to gender-based discrimination that targets transgender students.

Title IX prohibits harassment of both male and female students regardless of the sex of the harasser--i.e., even if the harasser and target are members of the same sex. It also prohibits gender-based harassment, which may include acts of verbal, nonverbal, or physical aggression, intimidation, or hostility based on sex or sex-stereotyping. Thus, it can be sex discrimination if students are harassed either for exhibiting what is perceived as a stereotypical characteristic for their sex, or for failing to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity and femininity. Title IX also prohibits sexual harassment and gender-based harassment of all students, regardless of the actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity of the harasser or target.

Special thanks to the National Center for Transgender Equality for making this letter available as a PDF on their blog.

Outlining Best Practices

At this point, we felt it was important to move into practical, proactive policy recommendations. For this particular educational context, our recommendations included the following:

• Honoring preferred name and pronouns
• Maintaining confidentiality
• Restroom accessibility
• Staff and faculty training
• Addressing gender inclusion in the curriculum

Our recommendations were based on personal experience as well as three excellent resources:

• GLSEN and NCTE's Model District Policy for Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students
• Miami-Dade County Public Schools Gender Resource Guide (available from the YES Institute)
• Gender Spectrum's "The Education System and Your Family"

Curriculum for Teachers and Students

Initially, making suggestions for gender-inclusive curriculum seemed like the tallest order. After all, we live in Texas, a state that's not exactly known for its progressive curriculum. Luckily, my friend Abe Louise Young alerted me to Gender Doesn't Limit You: A Research-Based Anti-Bullying Program for the Early Grades, which was developed by the Gender and Racial Attitudes Lab at the University of Texas and distributed through the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance website.

While not explicitly designed to speak to transgender issues, these detailed lesson plans include case studies and rhyming scripts to help young children learn to analyze and respond to gender-based bullying, and many of the examples involve behaviors that don't conform to rigid gender norms. As an added bonus, the rhyming scripts can be useful for teachers who need words to respond to gender bias and bullying on the spot in everyday classroom contexts.

Future Presentations

We learned a great deal from our first training with elementary educators, and we hope to continue to work with more schools and to share resources with other people engaged in similar projects. Personally, I'd like to write some case studies based on experiences of elementary students who have transitioned at school.

Do you have other suggestions?

(Cross-posted at queerrocklove.com)

It was summer, I had a deadline, and I was supposed to be watching my six-year-old son and his friend. In an act of desperation, I googled "wifi" and "bounce house" and we embarked for Let's Go Bananas! - a dusty warehouse filled with listing inflatable landscapes. I propped my laptop on a picnic table that was usually reserved for birthday parties. Every five minutes or so, I unfolded my legs from a pint-size plastic chair and checked to see if the ambient screams were emanating from one of my charges. In this manner, I managed to produce perhaps 200 words (half a page) in just under two hours.

Around this time, a friend loaned me two collections of Jackson's domestic memoirs: Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons.* In these tales, which first appeared in magazines like Good Housekeeping and Women's Day, Jackson creates a glib and distant fantasy of family life. She always seems to be stirring a pudding, sewing costumes for the school play, beating dust from the curtains, and attending little league games - all while observing her four children with a wry yet loving eye.

A casual reader of Life Among the Savages might assume that Jackson's husband, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, was the sole writer in the family's book-lined study. The word "typewriter" appears only once, and it is identified as "father's typewriter." Jackson's stories might as well have appeared on the doorstep like milk bottles, for she certainly never discusses her work habits. You would never guess that she published six novels, two memoirs, a play, and scads of critically acclaimed short stories in the years while her children were still very young.

"She learned early that the special breed known as the housewife-mother-writer must make important choices and firm decisions. If she looked up from her typewriter and noticed that the windows were dirty, she did not get up and wash them."

- Lenemaja Friedman, Shirley Jackson

Jackson has been on my mind again lately. It's summer, I'm freelancing, my now nine-year-old son is skulking around the house, and I haven't worked on my personal writing in more than a month. My wife, the therapist, gets to leave the house every day and no one can call her in the middle of a session to complain that they've lost the batteries for the Wii remote.** I'm here with the kid and the dogs and the dirty dishes, and I have the sensation of needing to do ten things at once and doing a little bit of everything a little bit badly.

To top it all off, we're really broke right now. We've been amassing the paperwork to apply for a home equity loan, and I had to explain my work history to a 25-year-old loan officer in matching Banana Republic career separates.

"I was working part-time because I was, uh..." Oh for heaven's sake, just say it. "I-was-trying-to-write-a-book." The loan officer regards me impassively. Her doe eyes neither confirm nor deny the validity of my literary ambitions.

Later, I notice that she has simply entered "homemaker" as my profession.

This tickles me to no end. I wish that she could see my home - the piles of unfolded laundry, the tumbleweeds of dust and dog hair, the brown sludge at the bottom of the refrigerator drawers. If anything, I've become more resistant to household chores since I've started working from home. And the irony is even sweeter because I have been supporting myself by writing chatty copy about seasonal veggies, home-canning and other domestic pursuits - this despite the fact that my son only eats toaster waffles, Granny Smith apples (regardless of season), pizza, bean tacos, and California rolls.

There isn't a really great biography of Jackson, but there is a compulsively readable one: Judy Oppenheimer's Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. Oppenheimer is overly given to psychologizing - except in the moments when one might crave it the most. (For instance, when Jackson develops a debilitating writer's block after a critic suggests that her novels feature lesbian themes...)

There's a particular moment in Private Demons that I cherish: Jackson is invited to speak at a writer's conference, and her daughters have been farmed out to neighbor women for the weekend. "Without premeditation," Oppenheimer recounts, "each woman, in response to an irrepressible urge, immediately grabbed the little girl left to her, and dumped her into the bathtub to wash her hair." It's almost as if their hair has never been combed before, one of the neighbors recalls. The matted snarls are so intractable that the girls end up with haircuts. Then Shirley comes home, and she's pissed, because she thinks the other moms are trying to show her up by cleaning her kids.

In citing this story, I'm not indulging in schadenfreude; I'm in awe of Jackson as a writer and as the "housewife-writer-mother" who managed to look away from dirty hair and dirty windows. I am continually reproached by dirt and disorder. I can't help it; I come from a lineage of repressed artists and impeccable housekeepers. At my grandmother's memorial, every single testimonial included a reference to her legendary cleanliness. My mother likened her mom's spotless refrigerator to a still life.

Oppenheimer describes Jackson's frequent letters to her parents, in which she depicts herself as a "mature, well-organized, serene housewife and mother." I imagine the letters as rough drafts for the domestic memoirs - fictional feats in which feminine expectations are deftly transformed into a commodity to support her unorthodox life and writing.

"Her letters were her revenge," says her son, and I'm struck by the warmth and empathy that the Jackson children seem to harbor towards their mom despite the snarled and dirty hair. It's a sharp contrast to my paranoid fantasies of my son's future. I tend to imagine him on a therapist's couch. "She was always tyyyyping," he complains. "She made me toast my own Eggo."

Earlier this summer, The Atlantic published a much-discussed article by Anne-Marie Slaughter titled "Why Women Still Can't Have It All." (Nothing sells magazines like a disillusioned feminist.) Personally, I can't remember the last time I worried about having it all. I am usually too focused on staying sane for the next fifteen minutes.

My recipe for sanity has many ingredients: writing, exercise, activism, sex, family, friends, dresses. I need to make money and care for my loved ones and keep my personal space clean enough that it doesn't interfere with any of the aforementioned items. On a given day, I'm lucky if I manage to juggle three of these priorities. Usually it's writing that falls to the very bottom of the list, until I begin to feel pent up and frustrated and then it pushes back to the top.

In the summertime, it's even harder to keep all the balls in the air. I've been lucky to have lots of paying jobs, but they've come right at the moment when I had hoped to spend more quality time with Waylon. We've had several visits from family, and I always seem to watch them approach through dirty windows.

Can't wait for fall.

*I suppose that the title "Life Among the Savages" is partly a Romantic reference to childhood and partly an ironic reference to Jackson's white, Christian neighbors. I imagine that the publishers were eager to capitalize on the fame of "The Lottery" and Jackson's reputation as an observer of small-town New England mores. My paperback copy of Life has a picture of a white woman posed between a white child in an African mask and a white child in a Native American headdress, which may also be a reference to husband Stanley's writing about African folk traditions and African American literature. I can't help wondering what Shirley's friend Ralph Ellison had to say about the title and the cover (see Ellison's "Slip the Yolk, Change the Joke," which is a response to Hyman and a meditation on masks and archetypes).

**In all fairness, Katy tried to talk me out of working from home with Waylon. I believe her professional prediction was "It will drive you crazy."

Photo credit: Paige Schilt

I wasn't sure how I should react. Was I supposed to try to change my child's mind? If I didn't, what would people think? Luckily, guidance arrived in the form of a pep talk from my stepdaughter Shelby, a clinical social worker. "Your job," she informed me, "is to be the most supportive father you can be." Shelby's comment was the best thing I could hear from someone I loved so much. She was the poster child of the reaction I was looking for in most people.

You can read the rest of the story in the Portland Press Herald. Derry, Nicole and I are working on a book about a dad's journey through his daughter's transition. It's a funny, dramatic, suspenseful tale about a somewhat unlikely ally. I believe it will be a valuable resource for parents of trans people.

If you like, leave us a comment about the topics you'd like to see the book cover.

Paige: These days, it seems like half the strangers you encounter read you as a man and the other half read you as a woman. That's a pretty good match for your identity, but it's awfully unpredictable. What is it like to live with that uncertainty?

Katy: You know, it's mixed. It feels exciting and right, but it can also be really hard. The other day, I was in GNC shopping for vitamins, and the sales guy started calling me "sir." Then, about half way through our interaction, he seemed to change his mind. Before I left, he actually asked whether the masculine terminology was correct. I loved that! I told him I was very comfortable with both and that he "couldn't get it wrong." Poor guy. I think it was like a "Pat" moment and he was left more confused than before. I kinda want to go back and interview him about what made him question his assumption and where he got the nerve to ask. Part of me feels responsible, like I should try to ease his discomfort. But I also want to reinforce that it's okay to ask. Cuz that's how I roll.

Paige: Our son is in third grade, which has been the threshold of greater self-consciousness about his family. You volunteer in his classroom every week. What's it like being the indeterminately gendered parent in that setting? How do you navigate that?

My approach to the elementary school setting is very specific to my personality. I am just plain old counter-phobic. I used to be afraid of heights, so I bungee jumped and skydived. At Waylon's school, I often find myself being extra charming and behaving as if no one should be shocked when I casually mention that I am identified as transgender and then ask them if I can pick their kid up next week for a play date at our house.

Paige: Sometimes you say you feel tempted to transition simply because the pressure of staying in the middle is too much. When do you feel that most?

Katy: BATHROOMS! Also at the mall when they "sir" me the whole time and then, when I am giving them my money, they ask for my name and address so they can send me spam.

Paige: How has being a parent affected the way you inhabit your body?

Katy: In every way possible. Waylon likes to be on me. It appears I am very comfortable to "lay" on. (In Texas, we say "lay down.") He likes to grab my belly and knead it. It can be a challenge, because I come from a fat phobic family and my belly has typically been a source of shame and discomfort. But I really feel that he loves every inch of my menopausal body, wrinkles and all. In response to this, I have felt shame just completely transform. I can't say it's completely gone, but it is different, no doubt about that.

Paige: What's your favorite thing about being mommy?

Katy: Even in a room full of people who think I am a dude, it still makes me so happy to hear "mommy, mommy look!" I love the way he loves me. I love that he knows I am the mama bear that will protect him at all cost.

Paige: Hey, I'm the mama bear! You are the mommy bear. Step off my nomenclature!

Anything else you'd like to add?

Katy: Yes. Happy Mother's Day to the best co-parent a girl/boy could ever ask for. You really are the best!

Paige: Happy Mother's Day to you! I love you!

Two years ago this month, Mom's dad died. Grandpa was an artist and entrepreneur, a small-time inventor who owned a custom frame shop. Over 65 years of marriage, he and Grandma amassed a large archive of slides and photographs that documented everything from their courtship to Grandpa's business ventures and countless family camping trips.

My sister and I both flew to Phoenix for the funeral, but Kristen got there first. She ended up spending a day with the family archive, helping Mom select pictures for a coffin-side photo collage. Ever the social scientist, Kristen wasted no time in sorting through the evidence and identifying her own salient data. By the time I arrived, she had the slide projector set up in Grandma's living room.

"There's this picture you have to see," she said, when we had a moment in private. "It's Mom and Dad right after their honeymoon. They actually look kind of hip. It's weird. I need to have that picture."

"Oh, stop it," she said. "Just stop."

The problem was as clear as the Arizona sunlight. In the photo, my father is sprawled in a mid-century lawn chair in my grandparents' backyard. His hair is slightly long, and he's wearing Wayfarer-style glasses with black frames. Although my grandparents were teetotalers, he seems to be holding a scotch and soda. His lanky legs are crossed at the knee, and he's wearing a pair of extremely loud plaid pants.

In other words, he looks like he should be having cocktails with Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. He looks like a great big gay.

The next day, after the funeral, we were all too sad and tired to bother with the slides. Mom said her husband was going to digitize them, so it seemed like we'd all be able to have a copy of the picture. A few weeks later, when Kristen asked about it, Mom said she would send the picture. Instead, she emailed a copy of the glamour shot that she uses for her Facebook profile.

When you grow up with a closeted parent, there's a big part of your family history that's missing. It's not simply that people are guarding secrets; there are even bigger gaps from the unconscious effort of resisting what is already known.

As adults, my sister and I can spend hours analyzing a remembered word or gesture, trying to figure out where we came from and how it shaped us. It's personal, sometimes it's sad or frustrating or harrowing. But it's also pleasurable. The truth is, we like being sleuths in the archive, putting the pieces together in different combinations, trying to see what stories we can tell.

For my parents, the photo elicits different feelings. In these black and white snapshots, they are literally exposed. What should I have known? What did I show? Who knew? Did I seem like a fool? A joke?

Last Christmas, Kristen raised the question of The Photo with our father. Since my dad came out in 1994, I have seen him wear some truly outrageous ensembles. My favorite was the time he showed up at a (Mormon) family reunion in shiny black pants with a chain mail belt. However, as Kristen began to describe the missing picture, he grimaced. It was as if somehow he already knew.

"Am I wearing funny pants in that picture?"

Yes, funny pants, we love you. And, for the record, my mom is at a language school in Mexico this month, and I know she's rocking those irregular verbs, because she's super smart.

This is my favorite photo of my parents. You can read more about my crazy family on my blog, Queer Rock Love.

It has not escaped my notice that both of these topics have to do with boobs.

All my life, breasts have been vexed. As a fourth grader under the influence of Judy Bloom, I waited vigilantly for signs of "development." In the absence of any mammarian swellings, I was too embarrassed to ask my mother for a bra. I was afraid she'd ask the obvious question: "what for?" My best friend, the frighteningly precocious Susie Patterson, smuggled 29AA hand-me-downs to school. She delivered the goods under the watchful eyes of the cafeteria ladies, and I hastily shoved the mass of straps and padding into my Muppet Movie lunchbox...and proceeded to forget about them, until later that night, when I heard my mother shrieking with laughter as she unpacked my lunch.

By the time I reached high school, I was furtively searching my health textbook for information about the outlying age range for breast development. Was it possible that I was just a late bloomer? Are you there God? It's me, Paige. I'm not asking for a miracle. I'm just asking for a B cup.

Eventually I realized that a late-adolescent growth spurt was not going to materialize. I purchased a Maidenform padded push-up bra. In Speech class, I memorized a section from Nora Ephron's classic essay, "A Few Words About Breasts." I played my flat chest for laughs, but the words resonated more than I wanted to admit. Like Ephron's narrator, I believed that breasts were the magical badge of femininity. My A-cup assets made me slightly uneasy - not just about my attractiveness - but about my identity.

It was not a style that complemented a softball uniform. Or a basketball uniform. Or any of the other sporty ensembles that might otherwise have offered androgynous refuge for a budding butch. In the context of Katy's broad shoulders and chiseled jawline, the bullet bras made femininity seem like awkward and unfortunate drag.

Throughout her teen years, Katy's parents enjoined her to "Lose some weight." Have a stomach ache? "If you lose some weight, it would feel better." Sprained your ankle? "You need to lose some weight." A hangnail? "Lose some weight." Looking back at old pictures, it's clear that Katy didn't really need to lose weight. She was a natural athlete who played multiple sports. "Lose some weight" was her family's way of expressing discomfort with physical difference. They couldn't very well tell her to stop moving and looking like a linebacker with boobs - they had no language for gender nonconformity. They might have known words like "butch" or "dyke," but their implications would have been unspeakable. Weight became the focal point for the desire to fix a body that refused to be fully feminine.

Her parents, especially her mother, would live to regret it. When Katy was nineteen, she moved to Hollywood. She stopped wearing bullet bras and began wearing tight long-sleeved leotards under her clothes. At first she favored the leotards because they flattened her chest. Later she needed the leotards to cover her track marks.

When Katy came home to Texas for a visit, her parents were ecstatic. "Finally," Donna wrote in the family photo album, "a size 6!!!" It's easy to understand how she was beguiled. In photographs from that era, Katy looks skinny, even a bit gaunt. But she also looks comfortable in her body, more congruent, confident, and even sexy. Katy told her parents that she had discovered a remarkable new diet medicine. In fact, she had discovered a powerful means to androgynize her body: crystal meth.

The tale of Katy's addiction is a long story in itself - one that I will delve into elsewhere. When she was homeless, hungry, living in her car and cheap motels, her mother came to fetch her from Hollywood. Even then, Katy wasn't ready to give up on speed and the relief it afforded from dysphoria. She clung to it until she realized that the drugs had changed more than her body - she had become a person whom she did not like or respect - and then she quit.

By that time, Katy's parents had changed too. Katy had come out as a lesbian when she moved to Hollywood, and her family had accepted the news with love and grace. "You know," her dad said one day, in his deadpan East Texas drawl, "that k.d. lang is a lezben." They were less attached to having a particular kind of daughter and were simply glad that she had survived. Thus, when Katy gained back weight and boobs, she was able to convince her parents to pay for a partial breast reduction.

Katy's mother, Donna, was a lovable narcissist. It grieved her that Katy didn't treasure their shared hereditary abundance. Still, to her credit, Donna did accompany Katy to nearby Galveston to meet the plastic surgeon, Dr. Ted Huang.

"She'd just like a nice B cup," Donna informed the doctor, making a suggestive cupping gesture with her hand.

"Mom! I want to be flat," Katy corrected. "I want people to look at me and say 'that girl is so flat!'"

Katy had no idea that Dr. Huang was affiliated with the Rosenberg Clinic, one of the oldest gender clinics in the South. She'd never heard of genderqueers or transmen or transgender community; she had no idea that there were other people who felt the way she did.

Apparently, Dr. Huang did not feel compelled to enlighten her on these points. But he did remove eight pounds of breast tissue from Katy's chest. The breast reduction didn't leave her totally flat, and it didn't resolve her feelings of gender dysphoria, but it did make living in her body a lot more bearable.

The first time I saw Katy, she was wearing a prosthetic plastic man-chest with perfectly molded pecs and sculpted abs. It was 1999, and Katy was performing with Raunchy Reckless and the Amazons, a Xena tribute band/queer performance troupe whose motto, "keep the dream alive," was literalized in outrageous mythological costumes that transformed private fantasies into fabulous public realities. Katy's character was called "Koonce the Vulgar Viking," and she sang a catchy song about her masculine physique:

All the girls love it,
While the scrawny boys want it.
Don't you wanna touch it?
Don't you wanna touch it?
Man-chest!

Despite its chirpy surf-rock style, "Manchest" never seemed like kitsch to me, and Katy's costume never exactly read as drag. In contrast to the bullet bras of Katy's youth, the man-chest looked comfortable, and it seemed clear that she would have worn it all the time if she could have gotten away with it.

We didn't meet that night. I didn't even know Koonce the Vulgar Viking's real name. I was standing in the back of the darkened room, feebly trying to sell t-shirts to support the grassroots youth organization that I had created with my sister and a bunch of other riot grrl-inspired feminists. I hadn't come out yet, and the crowded club - packed with sweaty, dancing, libidinous queers - filled me with longing and despair. I had no idea how to make this thing inside of me, my queerness, visible.

A year later, I was on stage before a live audience of sweaty, dancing, libidinous queers. In my continuing quest to shed my straight-girl image, I had volunteered to go-go dance at a Valentine's Day dance party at Gaby and Mo's, a ramshackle coffeehouse with a tiny stage that served as Austin's main lesbian art space.

With my silver hair and black tights, I was dressed like my small-breasted fashion idol, Edie Sedgwick. I felt that I didn't have a good enough go-go dancer body, and, as I ascended the homemade plywood go-go box, I began to feel painfully self-conscious. I had thought that I wanted queer visibility, but now I wished I could just fade into the woodwork. The room became a blur of bright lights and loud bass beats.
Suddenly, someone was saying my name.

"Paige, do you want me to fix that spotlight? It's shining right in your eyes."

S/he wasn't wearing a full beard or a plastic man-chest, but I knew immediately that it was the Viking from Raunchy Reckless. I also knew that this person, with his or her butch chivalry, was the sexiest thing I had ever seen. And s/he knew my name! I had a crush so brutal and instantaneous that my face blushed and I could barely speak.

"No," I mumbled, turning my face away from the spotlight and the directness of Katy's gaze. "It's okay."

Katy shrugged and walked back to her friends. My heart skipped a beat. I had blown my chance! And now I had to dance all night with that stupid light shining in my eyes.

Later that week, on February 18, 2000, The Austin Chronicle ran one of its first major stories about trans issues. The previous year, on January 8, 1999, a young transwoman named Lauryn Paige Fuller had been brutally murdered. As the murderer's trial approached, it was a watershed moment, a time when terrible violence forced the city to take a closer look at itself. The story quoted a local therapist named Katy Koonce, who spoke about the dire lack of services for transgender youth.

I felt a particular connection with Lauryn Paige because we shared a name. I scoured the news for details of her life. When I read The Chronicle story, I made a mental note to contact this Katy Koonce to see how my grassroots feminist organization might be able to connect with young transwomen.

What happened next strains the limits of plausibility. And yet, it's true.

A few days after I danced at the Valentine's party, I was due to begin group therapy. It was something I had been thinking about for a long time, and I'd met several times with the therapists who led the group, to make sure that the group was right for me and that I was right for the group.

When it was time for my first group session, I arrived early. Outside on the street, I smoked a cigarette and gave myself a pep talk. Being part of a group would be good. It would help me learn to deal more directly with my emotions. I would gain self knowledge. Hoo-fucking-ray.

I stubbed out my cigarette and gathered enough courage to go up the stairs and into the therapy office. The door was open. Some people were already sitting in couches and on chairs. I took a seat close to the door and glanced nervously around. No one spoke. In the unforgiving light of self-consciousness, my prospective peers looked like they'd been photographed by Diane Arbus. I began to have doubts. What was I doing with all these crazy people?

Suddenly, a majestic figure came barreling down the hall and through the office door. Head tilted, long hair falling forward like a shield - it was the Viking person. And s/he pointed straight at me.

"I know you," Katy said, plopping into the chair next to mine.

Group therapy is an odd place to meet your future partner. Long before we ever went on a date, Katy knew that I was a depression-prone approval-seeker with an addiction to vintage clothes. She knew that I was divorced, that I was ambivalent about my academic career, and that I tended to smile and joke when I was hurt or angry.

I knew that Katy was a former drug addict with hepatitis C. I knew that her anger could command a room, but her vulnerability could take my breath away.

We bonded over body issues. I had grown up in a family of unrelenting dieters. Katy's mom had warned her never to wear white shirts or horizontal stripes. In response, Katy wore oversize men's shirts with outlandish patterns. They were calculated to distract the eye and disguise her body. I longed to run my hands down her back, to explore whether she was wearing a binder or an undershirt or nothing at all, but group rules forbade physical contact.

In one of my earliest group sessions, Katy was agonizing because she had been misquoted in the Austin Chronicle story on Lauryn Paige. Suddenly, it dawned on me: Katy from group = Koonce the Vulgar Viking = that smart Dr. Koonce (that was how I thought of her) from the newspaper. But Katy was mortified, because the story had bungled the distinction between sex and gender and sexuality.

To be fair, it was an era with a pretty steep learning curve. New language and new identities were proliferating. Although she used a feminine name and feminine pronouns, Katy also ran a support group for transmen. I guessed that she was moving toward transition, but that her own identity hadn't quite caught up to the available options.

We saw each other once a week for an hour and a half, in a room full of other people. At the end of six months, I took a teaching job in Pennsylvania. Despite the fact that I was moving across the country, despite the fact that we had never been alone together, never kissed, had never even hugged, I felt strangely confident that we would end up together.

I was almost equally sure that Katy would eventually transition. At the time, I didn't realize that Katy's baby clock was ticking faster than her gender clock.

To be continued...in the meantime, check out my personal blog, Queer Rock Love for more stories about a gay, transgender, rock-n-roll family raising a son in the South.

Special thanks to Katy for helping me find the right pictures.

The story unfolded over dinner at our favorite neighborhood Texmex restaurant. Waylon was well into his second bean and cheese taco when he broached the subject. "Mom, B-- said that being gay is bad."

B-- is a familiar character in our dinner table conversations. He's an older kid who attends Waylon's after-school program. He has a prime position in the elementary school social hierarchy because his parents allow him to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Every day after school, B-- captivates the children of our hippy dippy neighborhood with his encyclopedic knowledge of military weaponry.

"What did you do when he said that?" I was trying to keep my voice calm. I was thinking do not freak out, do not freak out, do not let him see that you are kind of freaking out.

"I said, 'My parents are gay.'"

"What did he say?" my wife, Katy, asked. She was using her professional therapist voice.

"He said that must be why I look like his dog when I smile."

I'm not going to lie; I wanted to track B-- down and shake him 'til his eyes rattled. Then I wanted to drag Katy in the next room and chew her out for convincing me to have a kid in the first place.

Instead, I said, "How did that make you feel?"

Which sounds like a stupid thing to say. But somewhere, in the little part of my mind that wasn't indulging in violent retributive fantasies or wallowing in guilt, I felt a tiny glimmer of hope that Waylon was willing to confide in his parents. I knew this wouldn't be the last incident, and I needed to convince him that I could handle the truth.

"I don't know," Waylon said, looking kind of vague. "Bad, I guess..."

"Well, I feel really mad," I said. My voice was calibrated to convey approximately 10% of my actual rage. "It's not okay for him to say that." I felt I was walking a tightrope, trying to help him identify his feelings without turning the whole conversation into the Seething Mom Show.

"Do I need to kick his ass?" Katy asked.

Waylon looked shocked. "I'm just kidding," she said. "Sort of." He smiled. I could tell he was glad that his mom had his back against a bully, even though he knew it was a fantasy.

Katy is a former bully herself, a gender nonconforming kid who kept people from messing with her by being the meanest, toughest kid on the playground. I emerged from a momentary reverie to hear her explaining about bullies, how they lash out because they're scared, how B-- was probably parroting his parents, repeating some version of the messages he'd received about himself.

Waylon was absolutely clear that he did not want us to intervene directly with B--. He wanted to see if he could handle the situation on his own before he risked antagonizing a powerful older kid.

The next morning, I was on the phone with the director of the after-school program. I didn't violate Waylon's trust; I didn't tell her the name of the kid or any identifying characteristics, but I did let her know what had been said.

The director promised to respond with a generic lesson about name-calling and respect. I suggested that a unit on family diversity might be more effective, and she made some vague placating noises. I sent her a link to a research-tested curriculum about different kinds of families. I'm sure she and her colleagues had a good laugh about that one.

This is, after all, Texas public school. No one, not even the most progressive teacher, seems quite sure what they are allowed to say to public school children about the gays. Last year, I asked if our school could print the district's nondiscrimination clause - which includes sexual orientation - in the school handbook. The principal deftly suggested that the school might run a statement in support of the nondiscrimination policy without actually printing the inflammatory words.

The next evening, when I picked Waylon up from aftercare, the head teacher approached me. He'd heard the details of the incident from his supervisor, and he wanted to assure me that they had a plan to respond.

"Yeah, we've got a whole bunch of worksheets for them. You're probably going to hear Waylon complain about how boring it is for the next couple of days."

Apparently, that's our response to bias in Texas - bore the victim.

I was angry all over again. I coldly suggested that there might be a problem if he could predict in advance that his lesson would be mind-numbingly dull. It's not, I explained, inherently boring material. Difference is actually pretty juicy.

But I knew I was barking up the wrong tree. The aftercare program is staffed by college students, and it takes training to facilitate the kind of conversation that these kids needed to have. It requires the freedom to acknowledge and describe all kinds of differences and the intense feelings they engender. I didn't have much hope that kind of freedom was going to blossom from a worksheet.

As we walked to the car, I was feeling pretty low. I was ashamed of myself for snapping at the teacher. I felt guilty for being a self-employed writer who sends her son to low-cost after-school care. I felt like a self-indulgent jerk who had saddled her child with the burden of a weird family.

There's nothing like parenthood for bringing out internalized homophobia.

Luckily, Waylon was in a talkative mood. "Did you see B--?" he asked. "I can't believe he said I look like his dog!"

"I know," I said. I stopped and looked him right in the eye. "I'm so sorry that that happened to you. I feel terrible."

"Wait," Waylon asked. "Why do you feel terrible?"

"I just think you're so great, and I feel awful that someone would say something that made you feel bad about yourself."

"Oh I don't feel bad about myself," Waylon said in a Mom-you-are-weird kind of voice. He opened the car door and tossed his backpack inside.

I've reviewed this moment many times. Was he feeling pressure to reassure me? Was he repeating something we'd said? Or could he really separate the slur from his own self-image?

When I was a kid, if people picked on me or called me names, I felt shame. I was afraid to tell my parents, because I didn't want them to know that something was wrong with me. I thought it was my job to keep everyone happy with me at all times, which is probably why I didn't come out until I was almost 30.

I'd like to believe that Waylon's experience has been completely different. I hope he knows that the problem isn't him - or even B--. It's about whole systems of power and inequality, privilege and oppression, which we try to discuss in everyday words on everyday occasions.

In any case, we've lived through the incident, and I'm sure we'll weather many more.

Mostly, I just hope Waylon keeps talking.

(Photo from Zoramite's flckr stream. Shared under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.)

They're not Christmas cards. My holiday inbox overfloweth with end-of-year fundraising letters from nonprofits.

Most of these organizations have my address because I made small donations to support specific services or projects. But, despite the fact that I'm so popular during year-end fund drives, I've never thought of myself as a philanthropist. After all, philanthropist is someone who has serious money, and I'm an English major.

For me, the term "lesbian philanthropy" conjures up a vision of a rich white lady with lots of shawls. I am a non-rich white lady who looks terrible in shawls. Thus, although I have often heard about the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, I never thought of myself as a potential foundation donor.

However, all that changed when J. Bob Alotta came to town.

Two things changed for me that evening. First, Bob spoke passionately about the relevance of intermediaries in a world shaped by social media. She cited Amazon and Kickstarter as examples of thriving intermediaries. Since I recently helped my partner organize a Kickstarter campaign to send her gender-bending rock band to perform at SF Pride, this was the kind of DIY example a shawl-less lesbian could understand.

The way Bob explained it, a foundation can function like a grassroots kickstarter, connecting people with the projects and artists they care about. But instead of making money off of emergent organizations and starving artists, a foundation like Astraea nurtures its beneficiaries--both financially and organizationally.

Which brings me to my second revelation of the evening. I was sitting in the room with several Astraea grantees, including Priscilla Hale and Rose Pulliam of ALLGO, Texas's statewide queer people of color organization. Priscilla and Rose spoke about Astraea's founding and sustaining support for the Roots Coalition, a group of lesbian, gay, bisexual, two spirit, transgender and gender nonconforming groups working for economic justice. In addition to ALLGO, the Roots Coalition includes organizations like Queers for Economic Justice and Southerners on New Ground. It emerged from Astraea's U.S. Movement Building Initiative, which set out to build the capacity of lesbian- and trans-led people of color organizations and to propel a broad-based movement for social, racial, economic and gender justice in the U.S.

This was not my stereotype of philanthropy. This was an agenda that I support with my time, energy and occasional small financial contribution.

I've spent the past week drafting a year-end fundraising letter for Girls Rock Austin (subliminal message: GIVE US MONEY). In our classic DIY, grassrootsy way, we're sending our year-end fundraising letter at the last possible moment. As I tinker with a long stream of late-breaking revisions, I've been heartened by something I read online. According to some random fundraising guru, the majority of year-end giving happens late at night on the evenings of December 29 and 30.

When I read this philanthropy factoid, my mind immediately manufactured an image of a man (with a pipe and smoking jacket) sitting in a leather chair in a book-lined study and doling out thousands of discretionary dollars. I realized (once again) that my stereotypes about philanthropy are out of touch with reality, because I'm pretty sure that that's not a realistic portrait of our average Girls Rock Austin donor.

So, as the end of the year approaches, I'm committed to challenging my own stereotypes of philanthropic giving. This doesn't mean that I will miraculously develop large sums of money to disperse. But I can meditate on Astraea's statement on the "philanthropy of inclusion." According to the Astraea web page, the philanthropy of inclusion is based on a belief that

"everyone, regardless of income or giving amounts, is a vital part of philanthropy. We are committed to building a diverse, informed and strategic community of donors across the economic spectrum."

Since visualizations are obviously key to my ideas about philanthropy, I've decided to replace my stereotype of the year-end giver. Instead of a man in a smoking jacket or a woman in a cashmere shawl, this year I'm going to picture a queerdo in mismatched flannel pajamas. As New Year's Eve approaches, she's warming her feet on a beat-up space heater, wrapping up another year of grassroots activism, and dispensing her tens of discretionary dollars.

Okin is loosely based on the story of Jeff's family. Jeff and his partner, Gary Stein, are the proud fathers of three children. Gary and two of the kids are deaf, and American Sign Language is the primary language in their home. "Okin" is an anagram for the name of their oldest child, who was adopted from China.

Okin the Panda Bear Finds His Family can be purchased with a remarkable DVD that tells the story in ASL and English. Like the book, the DVD features beautiful, hand-painted illustrations by Hiroko Sakai.

The Austin launch party for Okin was packed with folks from overlapping deaf and LGBT communities. After the reading, I asked my eight-year-old son what he thought. "I never knew so many people spoke sign language!" he answered.

Waylon was particularly taken with the early pages of the story, which show Okin playing with panda friends like Pang, Kew, and Bao Yu. "It was sad that he had to leave his friends," Waylon said.

I bought one copy of Okin the Panda Bear for our family, and I bought another for friends whose son is autistic. They have their own story of finding ways to communicate what's in their hearts, and I thought they would identify with Okin's journey.

I also bought a copy to give to my son's school library here in the heart of Texas. I'll keep you posted on how that goes. If you give a copy to your local library, drop me a comment and tell me what happens. (You know us queers: always trying to promote our agenda of acceptance for panda-panther-tiger-fox-raccoon families!)

Looking for more books for LGBT families? Check out the rainbow book list, a project of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table and the Social Responsibilities Round Table of the American Library Association. The Rainbow Project presents an annual bibliography of quality books with significant and authentic GLBTQ content, which are recommended for people from birth through eighteen years of age.

My son, Waylon, is in third grade, so we've been around this thorny mulberry bush a few times before. But this year the path took a new turn.

"Mom," Waylon asked, "how come some people don't have kids?" He was hanging on the back porch door and swaying in and out of the house in a fidgety eight-year-old kind of way.

I was in the middle of draining a boiling pot of noodles into a colander, but I still wanted to provide a wide-ranging answer. It came out something like this: "Maybe-they-don't-want-to-or-they don't-have-the-money-or-the-support-or-the-interest. Maybe-their-pet-is-their-baby-or-their-work-or-their-art...or something else."

"But what about carrying on the generations?" Waylon asked.

Perpetuating the ancestral line is not something we discuss much in our donor-inseminated domestic domain. As far as I am concerned, my family's dominant genetic traits are early baldness, alcoholism, and a propensity for moles. If the Schilt line had stopped with me, the chief mourners would be rich dermatologists.

As a teacher, I can understand why a unit on families makes sense at the beginning of the school year. Getting students to talk about their backgrounds creates opportunities to examine similarities and differences. Direct talk about differences (and similarities across differences) is one of the best ways to dispel stereotypes and create real community in a diverse setting.

A unit on families is also a way to encourage students to connect to their cultural heritage. The other day, in the middle of a play date, Waylon's friend Jimmy solemnly asked me if I would like to hear his cultures. He listed them on his fingers:

"Hopi, Cherokee, German, Polish, Canary Islander, Spanish...oh, what's that one, oh, oh, um...French..."

All in all, Jimmy reported eight different "bloods." Waylon was extremely disappointed that we did not have a similarly compelling list for him. He refused to be mollified by the fact that his great great grandfather was a polygamist with two wives, because Canadian Mormonism could not be distilled into a specific bloodline.

I was happy for Waylon's buddy because I could tell that their classroom unit on families had given him a sense of confidence and pride. Theoretically, the family curriculum could work the same way for kids from nontraditional families, including kids from LGBT homes.
In reality, however, we live in Texas.

In a state where nontraditional families are decidedly outside the official curriculum, classroom discussions about family structure can be a source of anxiety instead of pride.

The beginning of third grade has meant the dawning of a new self-consciousness for Waylon. Last year he told us, "I love being from an odd family." This year he told us that he wasn't going to correct kids who assumed that his genderqueer mommy was his dad.

He's more strategic about how he comes out to other kids now. He prefers to wait until he's established a level of comfort and trust before he tells them that he has two moms. A few weeks ago, he let us know that he was planning how to break the news to an older kid in his after-school program. When the deed was done, Waylon expressed relief. "He didn't seem like he wanted to stop being my friend or anything."

Luckily, Waylon has never experienced anything more malevolent than skepticism ("that's weird"), or incredulity ("that's impossible.") But I suspect that will change as he gets older. And, if the school curriculum continues to feature families at the beginning of the year, I suspect it will continue to be in tension with his desire to come out about his family at his own pace.

(On a side note, if I could ask one thing from traditional families who want to be allies, it would be that you talk with your kids about all kinds of family structures - including single parents, divorced parents, gay parents, trans parents, absent parents and multigenerational families - so that little kids from nontraditional families don't have to bear the burden of educating their peers.)

At the end of the unit on families, Waylon had to interview family members and write a paragraph about his family heritage. I tried to suggest a few questions, but - as usual - Waylon had his own agenda for inquiry.

"Where did I get my blonde hair?" he asked. It was a logical kind of "where did I come from" question, because neither Katy nor I are natural blondes.

"I think you got your blonde hair from your grandfather," I replied. "Or maybe from Uncle Brian," I added, referencing Waylon's sperm donor. (Waylon has a dazzlingly handsome blonde donor sib.)

"But what about from Mommy's side? What did I get from my Koonce blood?"
Back to blood again! I was torn between being factually accurate and honoring the spirit of our queer family tree.

"Well, you don't technically have Koonce blood... but you're definitely a Koonce!" I hastened to add.

"I know I'm a Koonce," he retorted, as if I'd just said the most obvious thing in the world. "And I do have Koonce blood in me."

"Oh really," I said cautiously, "tell me about that."

"When you and Mommy kissed, some of her blood got inside you. And then it got inside of me when you made me."

"Oh," I said, feeling thoroughly enlightened and instructed.

Third grade is definitely a turning point. I remember it as the year I looked up every single cuss word in the dictionary. The year I learned what "virgin" meant and realized that I wasn't the smartest kid in my class. It was also the last year I really believed in Santa Claus.

Maybe it's wrong, but I hope he'll keep believing in his own magical version of his family "blood" for just a little while longer.

(Poster image from the LGBTQ Parenting Connection. They have a whole host of inclusive alternatives to typical family tree assignments. Check it out.)

In our regular life in Austin, this is less of a problem. In Texas, Katy gets read as male about 50% of the time and as female about 50% of the time. Her Gender Attribution Average (GAA) is actually pretty close to her internal gender identity, which is cool - unless she needs to pee. Still, in her day-to-day routine, Katy is usually able to avoid unfamiliar public restrooms.

In Hawaii, however, Katy's GAA was 100% male. This is not usually a problem either. When she's in a highly gender-conforming context, it's often easier for Katy to use the men's restroom, because she experiences much less rubbernecking and gender policing.

The problem lay in the fact that we were on vacation with our 8-year-old son.

Thus, the beginning of our vacation found me pacing anxiously outside a men's room at LAX, possibly looking like some kind of creepy bathroom peeper, while I waited for Waylon. I was worried that this would turn out to be one of those labyrinthine airport bathrooms with multiple exits and that my baby would wander out into the wrong corridor and be swept onto the busy streets of Los Angeles.

It seemed like hour later, although I suppose it was only five minutes, when Waylon emerged, looking disturbed. "What happened?" I cried, expecting the worst.

He crinkled his nose. "It just smells like a bunch of URINE in there!"

Clearly we needed to try a littler harder to help our son adapt to the restrooms of his gender tribe.

*
Our hotel in Kauai was located on a breathtaking beach in a rocky cove. In the mornings, when mist hovered over the water, it made me think of Homer's "rosy-fingered dawn." Waylon was going through a Greek mythology phase - not a casual "I enjoyed The Lightning Thief" kind of thing, but more of an "I'm crying because I realized that I'm reading an abridged version of The Odyssey" kind of thing.

He'd discovered a quiz that could determine which Olympian god a person most resembled, and he'd pegged Katy as Zeus and me as Athena. I was flattered that my son considered me to be the goddess of wisdom, but I was also uncomfortably aware that I was gay married to my own mythological father.

Still, the strangeness of our mythological May/December union paled in comparison to our queer presence at a swanky beachside resort. Katy's cousin had generously given us a weeklong stay at her timeshare, which turned out to be Honeymoon Central. There were honeymooners in the hot tub, newlyweds at the bar, and humongous wedding parties posing for group photos next to the koi pond.

Perhaps it was the overwhelming heterosexuality of all those honeymooners that predisposed people to read Katy as male. Whatever the cause, Katy's Gender Attribution Average seemed impervious to the fact that Waylon called her "Mommy" every few seconds.

On our first full day in Hawaii, Katy and I lounged around the hotel's enormous, flower-shaped pool while Waylon demonstrated 500 variations on the basic cannonball. "Hey, Mommy, Mommy, watch this! Did you see that one Mommy? Watch! Mommy, how big was my splash? Mommy!"

A polo-clad waiter appeared to check on Katy's drink.

"Can I get you another beer, sir?"

"Mommy, Mommy, look at this!"

Katy had the deer-in-the-headlights look that means she's afraid someone will revise their gender attribution in the middle of an interaction. It's not that she cares so much how they read her; she just dreads the rollercoaster of confusion, embarrassment, and hostility that sometimes ensues. I decided to try to help her out.

"What is it, Waylon?" I asked, lowering my sunglasses.

"Not you! I'm talking to Mommy!"

Despite the fact that Waylon had blown Katy's cover, the waiter continued to address Katy as "sir" for the remainder of our stay.

*
The highlight of our trip was a day spent snorkeling at a secluded hike-in beach on the north side of the island. At first Waylon was hesitant to swim out to the reef, so Katy wrapped her arm around him, and he clung to her like a happy submarine sidecar. As we approached the reef together, the sun burst through the morning clouds, illuminating brightly colored fish in all kinds of fantastic sizes and shapes.

By the time we hiked back to our car, afternoon rain clouds were beginning to gather, and Katy really needed to pee.

I think that there's something particularly ominous about state park bathrooms. Maybe it's the polished metal "mirrors," which hint at violent acts of vandalism that the state has foreseen and precluded. Maybe it's the latrine smell, which reminds me of Girl Scout camp and mandatory sports. Or maybe, as the partner of a transperson, I've begun to develop a sixth sense for locations where gender policing is likely to take place.

Whatever the reason, I could tell that Katy was not going to use the crowded bathrooms at Ha´ena State Park.

Later, I learned that Ha´ena is also referred to as the "end of the road" in Kauai. We were about as far as we could possibly be from our hotel, on an island where the average speed limit is 35 miles per hour. Katy got in the car with a grim look on her face.

As we passed through tiny towns, I could see Katy scanning for something. Each time we passed another unsuitable option, she grew a little bit quieter and grimmer. Waylon was in the back seat, loudly recounting one-liners from all the cartoons he had watched the day before. Katy gritted her teeth and turned up the radio.

"For god's sake," I wanted to cry, "just pull over and go behind a tree!" But I knew it was no use. My modest, pee-shy partner would never, ever be able to pee in the open.

Finally, just as I began to fear irreparable damage to Katy's bladder, she spotted what she was looking for: a rundown gas station with single stall bathrooms that were accessible from the parking lot. She pulled the car over so fast it made my heart race, slammed it into park and jumped out without bothering to close the door.

Our perfect day was saved.

*
For the last night of our trip, we decided to splurge on the poolside buffet. In addition to his Greek mythology phase, Waylon was also going through a sushi phase. He'd been starring longingly all week at hotel posters touting an amazing variety of delicious-looking maki.

We all dressed up for the grand occasion. Even Waylon was wearing one of the preppy outfits that his gay grandpa likes to buy him at TJ Maxx. In his polo shirt and khaki shorts, he looked just like one of the waiters.

As soon as we had placed our orders, Waylon got a stricken look on his face.

"I have to go pee," he said. I could tell it was urgent.

"I kind of need to go too," Katy admitted.

"Let's go together!" Waylon said.

Katy looked around at the other diners. Drunken honeymooners seemed completely oblivious to her plight. For the past seven days, every single stranger we'd met had read Katy as male. "Waylon," she said, "if we go in the men's room together, you can't call me 'Mommy' all the time."

"I know! I'll call you Zeus!"

For the next five minutes, Waylon proceeded to say "Zeus" as often as he usually says "Mommy."

"Come on, Zeus," he said, shepherding her into the men's bathroom like an old pro. "You take the stall, Zeus," he added as he graciously headed to the urinal.

*
It was kind of hard to readjust to regular life after our glamorous vacation in Kauai, but I was glad to settle into our regular bedtime routine again. Katy and I usually spend a few minutes lying down with Waylon before he goes to sleep. It's a time for us to talk about whatever's on our minds, and I had a question that I needed to ask.

"Waylon, what did you think about using the men's room with Mommy?"

"Good."

"I mean, how did it feel to call her another name besides Mommy?" I asked, trying to dig a little deeper.

"It was okay." he said, elliptically. "But I wouldn't want to do it all of the time!"

Photo from yukihiro m.'s flickrstream. Shared under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

"My dad was secretly gay too!" I said.

"How was that for you?" she asked, barely suppressing a yawn. I had the sinking sensation that she'd heard it before, from a few hundred other children of closeted parents who were desperate to share a rare moment of literary bonding.

It's not surprising that these stories remain largely in the shadows. Ours are not the affirming, heart-warming "I love my gay dads" stories of the gayby boom. Rather, as Mike Mills' recent film Beginners captures so brilliantly, our stories are complex tales of generations affected by the closet, even after the triumphant moment of coming out.

Writer and director Mike Mills conjures the sweet, awkward moments of an older parent's coming out. When Hal calls Oliver in the middle of the night to ask the name of the "wonderfully loud" music that he's just heard at a gay bar, I was reminded of the time that my own father called me from a payphone at 2 am.

"I'm in the Castro!" he shouted, jubilantly. "And I just saw Marky Mark!"

But while I loved the funny, tender moments in Beginners, I was even more compelled by the film's depiction of the emotional ripple effects of the closet. As probably any child of a formerly closeted parent will tell you, the habits of the hiding one's true self do not magically dissipate the moment that someone comes out. In Beginners, Hal can't bring himself to tell his new boyfriend (played by Goran Visnjic from ER) that he is dying. He puts his son in the awkward position of playing along with the fiction that his father will recover.

Themes of artifice and authenticity are highlighted by the fact that Oliver's love interest, Anna, is an actress whom he meets at a Halloween costume party. As their relationship progresses, Oliver struggles to be trusting and emotionally open with a woman who seems to have her own dark secrets. (Ultimately, Anna remains too much of a cipher to become a completely compelling character. Although I loved watching the beautiful Mélanie Laurent light up the screen, I sometimes felt myself longing for the moment when the film would return to the father-son plot.)

Beginners probes the family culture of the closet through flashbacks from Oliver's childhood. Oliver's mother (Mary Page Keller) prompts young Oliver to practice dramatic pantomimes in the way that other kids practice multiplication tables or spelling words. In several scenes from the parents' marriage, the film invites us to ruminate on the emotional maze of their relationship. As in Fun Home (and Richard Rodriguez's "Late Victorians," another classic text of the closet), architecture functions as a metaphor in these sequences, which are often shot in layered corridors and doorways.

In the end, the thing that I loved the most about Beginners was Oliver's obsession with the past, with context and history and documents. The flashbacks and montages of still photos reminded me of countless conversations with my sister, the two of us pouring over snapshots and recollected fragments, trying to put together the puzzle of a childhood with a secret at its center.

Excerpt from Fun Home courtesy of Wikipedia. Copyright Alison Bechdel 2006.

Here's a live video of the band, which describes its genre as "silicone cock rock."

(Despite the fact that random women are throwing bras at her in this video, and in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that Katy Koonce, the sexy frontman for Butch County, is also my life-date.)

Butch County will take the stage at the San Francisco Civic Center at 1:45 on Sunday, June 26, 2011. More video links after the jump.

Here's a scantily clad picture of Butch County from Houston Pride 2010: