COLAGE. - Lets Get This Straight

Table of Contents

Hello! My name is Tina and my mother is a lesbian. I have partnered with COLAGE, a national movement of children, youth, and adults with one or more lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or/and queer (LGBTQ ) parents, to bring this book to other kids of LGBTQ parents because of what Ive learned from being a part of this organization. Their mission is to build community and work toward social justice through youth empowerment, leadership development, education, and advocacy.

I first found COLAGE in 2000, when I volunteered to assist at an LGBTQ family conference held at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois. I was employed there and had a lesbian colleague who invited me to help out because she knew that my mother was a lesbian. I volunteered with COLAGE for the youth programming portion of the conference. It was there that I saw more than three individuals with LGBTQ parents in the same room at the same time. I was blown away at the dozen or so faces looking into each others lives and creating the connections that I never had growing up. That early experience helped me see that I was far from being the only person on the planet with an LGBTQ parent, a revelation that changed my life. In 2000, I started the Chicago chapter of COLAGE and coordinated it for eight years. Throughout my time there, I learned that although I was about fifteen years older than my attendees, we shared many of the same feelings and experiences. We had similar questions and struggles. I also realized that many of them came looking for the same thing that I once soughta meaningful connection to others with similar families. As a high school teacher, I often come across LGBTQ teens, as well as teens with one or more LGBTQ parents. As a result of my own experiences, I am able to provide a safe space for them to talk and help them to develop a stronger sense of community at our school. I am also able to challenge the wider student community on their homophobia/transphobia and help individual teens who are dealing with the discriminatory behaviors and attitudes that some of the other students might exhibit. It is unfortunate, but I find that many of todays students are confronted with the same disdain for and ignorance about the LGBTQ community that I experienced as a teenager at school in the 1980s.

My goal is that this book will give you answers to questions you have, tools to know how to talk to people about your family, and information that will serve you and your family. As a child, I longed to reach out to others with LGBTQ parents to share secrets, to complain about my mom not being a girly girl, or to gossip about the crazy stuff I saw at Gay Pride. I didnt feel like I could do that, though, because I worried that people wouldnt understand what it was like for me. Sometimes I felt like my life was a big secret. Sometimes I resented my mother for being a lesbian. Oftentimes, I felt lonely and isolated, like no one could possibly understand my family or me.

For me, finding COLAGE was like finding a family. Being in a relationship with others who had LGBTQ parents gave me that sense of community Id always longed for as a child. Lets Get This Straight is specifically designed with the idea of community in mind; its purpose is to create that sense of feeling connected to something larger than our own families and to make sense of both the wonderful and more challenging aspects of having an LGBTQ parent. We may not live next door to each other or attend the same schools, but we are presentand in large numbers.

Statistics tell us that there are about ten to fourteen million children living with LGBTQ parents in America alone. But whether there are one hundred people or more than twenty million is actually beside the point. What matters is that we do exist, and we deserve to be acknowledged. We also deserve to be treated with dignity and respect and not like faceless statistics to be studied or merely discussed.

There are too many family groups, religious leaders, and lawmakers telling us who our families are and debating about how well turn out. Its impossible to predict, however, how any given person who grows up with an LGBTQ parent will turn out because each of our experiences is different. With this book, Im proposing that its time we start talking about our families out loud so that others wont steal our voices or make up imaginary outcomes. Lets Get This Straight is a stepping stone to help young people reclaim their voices, connect to each other, and share an intimate part of their lives, their families, with the world. Lets Get This Straight is for all of the youth in sexual-minority families battling against often homo-hostile environments, including schools, communities, and religious institutions. The stories youll hear and the advice youll get within these pages will help you reclaim those spaces and create your own when necessary. Welcome to a space where you are not the only person with a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer parent. Oftentimes we feel invisible, isolated, or disregarded. Some of you may be the only one at school or on your block with an LGBTQ parent. Others of you may have felt angry with your parent or parents at times for being so different from the parents of your friends. Times are few and far between when we are completely surrounded by others living in LGBTQ families. Therefore, we are constantly trying to figure out where and how we fit in.

If youre lucky, youve been able to meet other kids in your situation at summer camps for LGBTQ families (like Mountain Meadow, a camp for alternative families), at COLAGE events, or aboard the R Family vacations. As wonderful and fulfilling as these outlets can be, they are only available a few times a year in most areas, if at all. And for lots of you, those kinds of events might not be on the top of your familys priority list, or they might be inaccessible because of where you live. This book is for all of youthose who are connected to other kids of LGBTQ parents and those of you who dont know a single other person with a queer parent.

The best part about this book is that a community of individuals with LGBTQ parents created it. I didnt and couldnt have written such an important work by myself. COLAGE and I received loads of guidance and support from many intelligent, brave, and inspiring tweens, teens, and young adults with LGBTQ parents. These individuals shared their personal stories and provided solutions to complicated issues like coming out, internalized homophobia, and surviving parent break-ups.

Since these voices are critical to this book, we would like to quickly share, statistically, who these wonderful participants are. Forty-four youth and adults with one or more LGBTQ parents were interviewed, or they provided their experiences through various questionnaires. The participants ranged in age from 8 to 36. Thirty participants were between the ages of 8 and 21; fourteen were between the ages of 24 and 36. A majority of the participants (57 percent) identified as biracial, multiracial, or persons of color. Twenty-five percent of the participants identified as low-income. Eighteen percent identified as second generation, which means that they, like their parents, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ). The majority of the participants have lesbian parents, whereas we had fewer participants with gay dads and transgender parents. Regardless of their backgrounds, all of the participants poured out their hearts to share the realitiesthe good and the badof growing up in an LGBTQ household while living in a homophobic and transphobic society.