CHILDREN OF PRIDE
Kids who grew up in LGBTQ families publish anthology in an effort to reclaim their own stories.
Growing up in the 1990s in families headed by two moms, both Makeda Zook and Sadie Epstein-Fine were cute little girls who got their pictures taken at Toronto’s Pride parade.
While debates about things such as marriage equality and whose name could be added to a child’s birth certificate unfolded, theirs became a highly watched cohort whose lives were often documented by journalists and academics.
But there’s been a notable absence of stories actually told by themselves, Zook says.
“What often we see is our stories are put out there, but usually with the assistance from reporters, from academics … who don’t have that experience themselves of growing up in queer and trans families.”
The two friends are aiming to change that with their new anthology, Spawning Generations: Rants and Reflections on Growing Up with LGBTQ+ Parents, which gathers a range of first-person essays written by people raised in queer communities.
The book will be out June 18, and the occasion is being marked with a Pride week public launch party at Toronto’s Glad Day Bookshop on Church St.
One of their objectives in curating and editing the anthology was to reflect a diverse set of experiences, Epstein-Fine says. The book opens with an essay by 9-year-old Liam Sky on life with his two moms (now four following a divorce). But it also includes an essay by Christopher Oliphant, who was born in the mid-1950s in a household that included a closeted gay dad.
The book also explores what it was like to be under the lens during childhood. Epstein-Fine’s two moms were prominent members of the LGBTQ community; her mother Rachel Epstein founded the LGBTQ Parenting Network, for example. Naturally, their number was the first to be dialed when reporters were assigned stories about same-sex parenting.
Epstein-Fine writes about one of many moments before a camera with a film crew directing her through their version of a typical school morning.
“As I performed putting the apple in the lunch bag for the fifth time, I hoped we were somehow normalizing queer families.”
It’s that kind of thing that has led to what some in the community of people raised by same-sex parents refer to as “poster-child syndrome.”
When Epstein-Fine realized around age 16 that she herself is queer, coming out wasn’t as easy as one might assume.
“While I knew my parents wouldn’t be mad at me for it, of course they wouldn’t, I somehow still felt like I was letting them down,” she says.
That’s because there’s a stereotype that same-sex parents “turn” their kids gay, or otherwise deprive them because they don’t have parents of both genders.
After the apple scene in that TV segment for instance, Epstein-Fine writes, “was a man with a binder that claimed the research in that binder concluded that children raised in homosexual families would not fare as well as children raised in heterosexual families because they were missing either a mother or a father.” Nevermind that close examination of that clip showed the binder was a prop just like the apple. And it was empty.
Zook says they really wanted to challenge poster-child syndrome in the book, the idea that “we have to be ambassadors for our families and our communities because the assumption is that we won’t turn out ‘all right’ if we have queer and trans parents.”
She says there’s an unspoken pressure “because we want our families and our communities to have the same rights as everybody else, and we want to be seen in the eyes of larger society as worthy and valued and equal.”
Of course no one constellation of genders in a set of parents is a lock on children turning out to be perfectly well-adjusted, focused, contributing members of society. If that were the case there would be no one in our prisons, everyone would be fully employed and therapists would be out of work.
“And we’re trying to create that space to say that’s OK, because we’re as imperfect as everyone else, we’re just not able to show that as much as other people and other families, I would say,” Zook says.
Brandie Weikle writes about parenting issues and is the host of the New Family Podcast and editor of thenewfamily.com. Twitter: @bweikle.