I’m passing along a note that those of us who are members of Our Family Coalition, Northern California’s LGBT Family organization, received on Saturday. It’s huge news.

We’re painfully aware of the resistance to LGBT family- and gender- diversity in K-12 curricula elsewhere, even locally.  Alameda Unified School District is 10 short miles south of here, and in a whole different ball park.  (Last year I reported on their fight here; though the anti-bias anti-bullying curriculum was passed, it’s continued to encounter resistance, now at the law suit level.)  But those of us who know the Berkeley Unified School District would expect it to recognize and support this sort of social justice-minded, community-minded curriculum, what with its storied history as the first school district of its size in the nation to voluntarily desegregate, in 1968.  Forty years later, it’s still as committed.

Regardless of political pedigree, however, any school board can only be as forward-thinking as the community it sits in, and all of us with kids in the schools here owe a huge an incalculable debt of gratitude to those at OFC and in the school district whose long, hard work made this happen.

Much more to say about this in the future, but for the moment, just the good news:

Dear Families, Friends and Allies,

We have made history!

After four years of parents, educators and administrators collaborating to make their schools welcoming and inclusive for all families, the Berkeley School Board voted this week to adopt the vibrant Welcoming Schools Guide as official district curriculum.  Click here to watch video of the district staff presenting the curriculum (you can see my testimony here).

When my son Kobi was in first grade, he came home and told me that kids at school were using gay in a “bad” way.  Kobi is not alone. Children in elementary schools all over the country hear anti-gay slurs like “that’s so gay” and are subjected to bullying when they step outside of accepted gender norms.  As parents and caregivers, we know that this impacts all our kids.

If we are truly committed to addressing societal stigma against LGBT people and gaining full equality, we need to begin by making schools safe, accepting and inclusive. Our Family Coalition works with educators not only to end bullying, but to help them convey to their students that instead of being separate, LGBT people are a part of the community. We seek to shift fear and uncertainty to understanding and inclusion.

I want to commend the many Berkeley Unified principals, teachers, parents, school board members, union representatives and district administrators for their collaboration in, and commitment to this work.  In these past four years:

•  The school board passed a policy that supports family diversity curriculum.

•  In January, OFC teamed up with the teacher’s union and several PTAs to provide a staff development training for over 50 Berkeley teachers and after school staff from every public elementary school in the district.

•  The lessons have been tested in at least four of the eleven school sites.

•  And then finally, this week, they adopted the Welcoming Schools curriculum, with a commitment to train staff, purchase books, and most importantly, get the lessons into the classrooms.

The Welcoming Schools Guide is a fantastic resource offered by the Human Rights Campaign. Welcoming Schools is a new, comprehensive guide for administrators, educators, parents and guardians who want to strengthen their schools’ approach to family diversity, gender stereotyping and bullying. It is specifically designed for use in K-5 learning environments and is inclusive of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender families and individuals in the broader context of diversity.

We savor the victory and at the same time know it is just one step on a long road. Please let me know if you want to do work like this in your school.

Best Wishes,

Judy Appel

Executive Director, Our Family Coalition

Pops, holding his father’s maddock, Santa Cruz, CA (archival: November 2009).

This is what greeted me when I returned from a morning away, with Grandma on grandson duty.  From every other angle it’s an elaborate drape of blankets, towels, and sheets.  But through this one peep-hole, you can see the raison d’etre.

That little computer mouse-shaped object at the end of the white cord, sitting on the footstool under the rocking chair? It’s the baby monitor, piping in the Indian flute music the kids often listen to as they go to sleep. (We finally played the Jane Siberry Hush album into a pulp.  Apparently you can do that to a CD.)

“I hope you don’t mind, but he really wanted to take his nap in the fort,” was the essence of what Grandma conveyed. “He promised me he’d go willingly to his bed if he didn’t stay quiet and go to sleep.”

“Are you kidding? Of course I don’t mind,” was the essence of what I conveyed. “He’s lucky to have you around as his Grandma,” was the essence of what I added.

This Grandma has spent her life in the theater, you see, and does things with rubber bands, twist-ties, and duct tape that would make any upstanding engineer convulse with horror. “Long as it lasts the run of the show and you don’t see it from the first row!” is the theater denizen’s rallying cry.  Works like a dream on the grandkids, too.

His Mama’s youth music theater company’s Once Upon a Mattress might have closed this past Sunday, but not in the boychild’s mind.  Every day brings a fresh opportunity to dress up and sing along to pretty much every part, from Princess Winifred the Woebegone to Prince Dauntless the Drab and the whole royal retinue in between.

Oh, he skips some lyrics and provides his own original interpretation of others.  Artistic license.  In “Opening for a Princess,” he sings that “nobody’s getting any yogurt” (the rest of us thought it was “younger”), and “you can recognize a princess by her elegant hair” (and here I thought it was “air” all along).

Here’s his pace car, Carol Burnett, in a 1964 television version (she opened it on Broadway in 1959).

Pops, indicating the height of the trees when his dad planted them 70 years ago.

In my recent, breezy, Twitter-length series of As to some Qs about lesbian fatherhood, I wrote: “My dad is one of the beacons of love in my life.”  True story.  One of his most oft-repeated definitions of family is this line from the sympathetic speaker Mary in Robert Frost’s poem, “The Death of the Hired Man”:

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,  They have to take you in.

One of the clearest and warmest youthful memories I have of my dad, besides standing next to him singing as he played Broadway show tunes on the piano, or playing frisbee with him in the back yard, or walking the streets of San Francisco en route to an “old timey movie,”  is how he tucked my sister and me in at night.  I can’t vouch for what he might have said with my sister in her room, but I suspect it was fairly similar to what he said to me.  We would wax philosophic — mostly at first, he would, and I gradually joined in as the years wore on — pondering life’s big imponderables.  Then as he’d turn out the light and linger in the doorway, he’d say, “It’s a good world.”

He said it enough times that I pretty much came to believe him.

Continue reading ‘Family tree’

Daggone! Enough of y’all meandered over to the Bloggies website to vote this thing in as best glbt weblog!

I would like also to thank whichever mysterious nominator(s) tossed my well-worn baseball cap into the ring in the first place, and whichever Bloggie finalist-winnowing committee people plucked this blog out of the pile and brought it to wider attention as a finalist.  For most of us, publishing a blog with any sense of mission and regularity is a labor of love, receiving little or no fiscal compensation.  The quality of the community the blog helps to collect is our daily bread, and recognitions like these are our butter.  My plate runneth over.

I’d like to give a respectful bow to the other Bloggies best glbt weblog finalist blogs, Queerly Complex, Lesbifriends, Naked Blog, and Aussielicious (way NSFW! unless you work at Babeland or Good Vibes! Suitable For Major Winkie Viewage is what that puppy is! Plus general madcap Aussie fun!).  Now if you visit this link to a YouTube plea by Lesbifriends‘ author and feel regret about not voting for her blog because she’s so spunky, I can only offer condolences, since the whole shebang’s done this year.  But she makes a good point: we pretty much are all different, and are all mutual supporters, at the largest level.

As with The Lesbian Lifestyle’s annual blog awards (this year’s “Lezzys” will be announced Wednesday night , 9-11pm EDT, on The Lesbian Lounge podcast), it’s an enormous honor at all to be considered for special recognition among my peers.  I feel strongly that all us queer folk and our allies online value one another’s presence,  despite or maybe even because of the infinitesimal hair-splitting and incessant in-fighting that we can engage in over the political struggles that mean so much to us.  I’m so very glad we’re out there, being out, here.

Does Lesbian Dad represent queer folks online generally?  Oh hell no.

Continue reading ‘Well b-low me down’

Kid’s baseball card photo/talisman, Berkeley, CA.

Had to wait ’til Monday, since over the weekend the spirits flagged too much. Kept looking at pictures of pictures of my nephew, who would have turned 15 on Saturday. Couldn’t post a picture of anything other than him, but then couldn’t really post about him, either. So, a blank weekend.  Today, just a wee slice.

Every morning I pick up a bracelet I got in his memory right after he died, to keep him and what he teaches me in full view.  Just before I put on the bracelet, I kiss the tip of my index finger and touch it to his face in this peanut league baseball photo, taken several years before he died, and try to connect/summon/say a little something to him. We all do what we can.

My punkin lamb peeping the world through a pair of “100″ glasses.

The girlie’s Kindergarten class celebrated their hundredth school day earlier this week. So, so long ago was her first. An excited, nervous, pre-K little girl ago.

Who’s in her place now? If only I could can catch hold of the happy, self-posessed blur in front of me, I’d tell you.