“Christmas Lullaby,” by Jason Robert Brown, eavesdropped after dinner early December last year. [Ed note: Once you start the video, double-clicking the image expands it to full screen, a decidedly mixed blessing since then you get more jostled by my improv'ed lo-tech iPhone cinematography.]

I couldn’t help but re-run this sweet gem which I first posted a year ago. Still sweet, still–with the exception of the diapers on the boy–true.  Love to all who reads and listens here.

Sisters, very long ago, Castro Valley, CA. [Mod from an original image by David Rae Morris.]

Halloween trick-or-treating peanut, Berkeley, CA (2010).

Visual coda to yesterday’s post, in which I mentioned our boy’s Halloween costume choice of last year. I wrote a few words about it at the time, here.  If I were to have to guess now, I’d say there’ll be a long gap ’til the next such outfit makes a Halloween appearance, though of course I could be wrong. In the intervening year, his haberdashery pace car has shifted from Big Sister to Main Boy Chum at Preschool.  For all the complex reasons that are behind such evolving self-understandings. Advancing years, increased exposure to peer groups, push of culture, pull of self, survival instinct; you name it.

The costume  above met a glowing reception throughout the neighborhood last year, though, and not just because there were blinky red lights underneath the tulle (yes there were).  I mean, really. The kid looks better in that outfit than I ever could.  Also? At least the grown-ups in our neighborhood love kids unconditionally and clearly share our conviction that the best thing we can do for them is clear the runway ahead and help them take flight.

Re: clearing the runway and helping kids take flight (into a world they’re in the process of making) – below, I’ve collected a smattering of nifty resources by and for parents of gender nonconforming kids. Halloween’s pretty much the primo occasion for this, since it’s the one day of the year kids have a wide(r) berth to explore performing different identities.

Here’s one of my favorite blogs on one family’s journey, genderwise: Labels are for Jars.  After you check out her extremely thoughtful posts, you can go on to check out the blogs on her blogroll.  Sarah Hoffman writes about her “pink boy.” Like so many (mostly mothers, but some fathers, Accepting Dad a stellar voice among them) writing about nonconforming boy kids, also has amassed a great list of valuable resources and done a lot of work at her kid’s school, which she’s written about. She’s got a book in the works, and if blog is prologue, we can expect it to be very good. Transparenthood, also very thoughtful, explores parenting a boy child born in a girl body; Sam’s now 15.

Like Sarah Hoffman, Cheryl Kilodavis, author of My Princess Boy, has done an enormous amount of consciousness- and awareness-raising, after she did some on herself as her son began to follow his own path. I met and interviewed her last February when she was on book tour locally, but had just become job-smacked and had to put the interview in the can, where several other notable ones are moldering. (Ordinary people have backlogged scrapbook and family photo album projects; bloggers have backlogged blog posts.) The succinct thing I can share from that chat with her is that she is enormously sincere, very very smart and open, learning all the time, and evangelical about spreading understanding among parents like her who were previously totally unprepared for nonconformity like this in her child. Check out her Acceptance Groups page.

No post on kids in gender nonconforming Halloween outfits would be complete without reference to Nerdy Apple Bottom, who blew the top off this topic last year when she posted about her son’s Daphne outfit and its reception at his (then) school.  And yes: comment count on that post is accurately reflected at over 47,000.  So not kidding about the “blew the top off”; the Today Show had her on as a result. Sarah (the blog’s author) is a phenomenal person, as I can attest now after having had the pleasure of meeting her last August in San Diego. This year she’s done a photo project, Just B, in which she’s taken portraits of her kids and their friends having a nondenominational blast with a box of costumes. (Whole series here.)

As to organizations, Gender Spectrum is the best one I know of, founded by (who else) a loving mother of a gender nonconforming child. Said mother, Stephanie Brill, just happened to be a midwife / educator / author of two books about conception, childbirth, and queer parenting, so she hit the ground running, as a perusal of Gender Spectrum’s resources will make clear. Their page Understanding Gender is a great first stop for folks, and her book The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals, cowritten with author/educator Rachel Pepper, is top-notch and one-of-a-kind.

Collecting this list of online resources has made it evident to me: parents (mostly mothers) are becoming transformed and expanded by their kids, and are turning around and working to transform and expand the world so it can fit them. Which I consider a pretty neat trick.

Pride brunch toast, Berkeley, CA.

Not a Bloody Mary to be seen. This here is Pride, the parents-of-young-children version. Coffee for the grown-ups, hot chocolate with marshmallows (it’s Pride, after all!) for the younger set. Can you make out the weathered rainbow flag down there as our table cloth?

This year, for the first time in over 25 years of Prides, (that number sounds appalling but it is indeed accurate), I didn’t march, rabble-rouse, party, boogie, or even stroll. The beloved had a bum ankle from a backfired dance move demo she’d delivered to one of her theater kids (JC Superstar: not for wimps!), and our own kids were so-so about the Parade (“It’s fun but it’s too hot and noisy,” said the girlie, pretty much nailing the characterization).

We had long planned a Post-Pride-Potluck-Picnic-Party chez nous, and this year we leaned heavily upon it for our mellowed-out dose of queer (family) love.  A baker’s dozen friends, old and new, each with a kid or two in tow, came to chillax in the back yard, swing on the swing, bounce on the trampoline, and wag the jumbo “Go Marriage Equality” foam hand one of them brought back from Pride (what will they think up next?).

Back at Pride, at the 8th annual “Family Garden,” the inspired Civic Center kid-centric fun-fest (a collaboration between Our Family Coalition, COLAGE, and the SF LGBT Center) one chum grabbed a handful of temporary tattoos for those of us back home. She pulled ‘em out of her pocket only to find most read “I love my Dads!” A beautiful sentiment, but no cigar, at least at yesterday’s party!  We mean to fix that next year, since up and down the street we have two pairs of dads.

At the end of the afternoon, it was widely agreed upon that regardless of whether we’re sidelined or back in the saddle next year, we’re going to keep doing this as a sanity-restoring post-Pride decompression.  Cheers!

From the archives, Pride posts past:

• •  Weekend bonus shot, 06.27.10 (quickie Pride edition) (2010)
• •  SF Pride Slideshow, I heart Pride, and Weekend bonus shot, 06.28.09 (2009)
• •  Happy Pride and Some Pride grace notes (2008)
• •  And so it goes (Pride in glimpses) (2007)
• • Plus ça change, or Prides I have known (2006)

From SF LGBT Pride, 2005, and still the God’s honest truth.

Window watchers, Berkeley, CA (July, 2010).

Sunrise over the Gulf of Thailand, from Chaweng Noi beach, Koh Samui. [Taken July 1997.]

Sylvan scene, Point Reyes National Seashore, CA.


A year ago in the fall.  He still looks up to her. Just from a different height.

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.

Yes, it’s a 1950-some-odd California Highway Patrol car. In downtown Copenhagen. (November 2005)

Since my last post here, much ado at the UN Climate Change Conference: roundup for day 10.  And here, “UN conference gearing up for make-or-break finale.”

A city dog takes in the scene along Strandvejen, north of downtown Copenhagen. (November 2005)

UN Climate Change Conference roundups, day eight and day nine.