December sidewalk, Berkeley, CA.
Street faces, Berkeley, CA.
Art is everywhere all the time, but it sure has an extra pizzazz, an extra je ne sais quois, when you find it staring back up at you from the pavement.
You. Must. Watch. This.
“Family Time,” COLAGE’s new documentary about its first twenty years, tells the story of this generation of LGBTQ family history along the way. I can’t even find hyperbole enough to describe how moving it is.
About COLAGE’s founding, Hope Berry recalled saying to others, following a support group for kids who had an LGBT parent who’d died of AIDS:
Wait! We want to talk to each other. Parents: help us. Support us. Give us a place where we can meet and follow this through.
And Hope Berry again, from a Canadian talk show appearance where she and another COLAGE co-founder were bum-rushed by a professional homophobe guest:
[The problem] is not about our parents! It’s about this attitude!
Beth Teper (current COLAGE Exec. Dirctor), on what COLAGE did for her young self:
That’s what COLAGE has given me: pride in my self, my family, and my community.
And finally here’s Felicia Park-Rogers, in response to an off-camera question by some media person, presumably along the lines of “What would you say to others?”:
I would say to parents: be courageous and proud of who they are, and your children will follow. And they will be courageous and proud of who they are.
Needless to say, the 14 minute documentary includes lots more wonderful stuff along these lines. Useful for LGBT parents to watch, period, regardless of your interest in COLAGE’s founding decades or the evolving issues facing kids of LGBT parents.
After you’re done watching, those of you who feel you have something to spare and/or those who annually actually seek tax deductible donation opportunities because you want to reduce your tax burden (you know who you are! the both of youse!), please consider supporting COLAGE and/or your local LGBTQ family org. Don’t know your local org? See if you can find it at Family Equality Council’s national parents’ groups page here.
Son, almost four, Berkeley, CA.
One of the ways I’ve experienced photography, since the advent of children in my life, is that it freezes them (somewhere! somehow!) in a way that makes it possible to take their measure. Â Given that the way of youth is to be nearly constantly in motion, this is a special treat, inaccessible to us at all other times except during the stillness that settles over them in sleep (“Look how big s/he is! I had no idea!”, our voices joining a chorus of marveling parents the world ’round).
Sometimes, though, an image foretells as much about one of my kids’ futures as it does about their present. For a second I get an inkling that they’re growing older every minute, becoming somebody I might know, but don’t know. Yet.
Kitchen scene, Castro Valley, CA. Original image (which I tinkered with a bit): David Rae Morris.
Long ago but not so very far away. My sister and me, in the all-around love-fest leading up to the beloved’s and my commitment ceremony, summer 1997.
A dear friend, photojournalist David Rae Morris, gave us the gift of photographing the whole shebang and then printing up a photo essay of it. Instant décisif after instant décisif (H. Cartier-Bresson’s notion here), for a long weekend of gathered friends and family, of which he was a longtime member. Utterly exhausting for him, utterly priceless for us.
Busking sax player, Civic Center BART station, San Francisco, CA.
More fun with the Lo-Mob application and my beloved’s fancy iPhone, which takes as good of pictures as point-n-shoot digital cameras of yore. Yore being, last year.
For fun, if you haven’t seen it yet, check out Josh Brustein’s “Breaking Up With Your Point-and-Shoot.” It’s totally suitable for work, though not suitable for your point-n-shoot camera to overhear.
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LesbianDad is a personal essay/photography blog. It began as a document of my parenthood but, like life, its ambit has stretched to include much more than I expected. My kids call me "Baba," and together we work toward a world in which amor really does vincit omnia.

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