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.

He’s not always kept a firm grip on this belief.  In the first years following his first grandson’s cancer death — five years ago, now, later this month — he framed it as a question rather than a statement.  At times he simply admitted that he felt it couldn’t be true. I’d try and reflect as much truth back that I could.  ”It’s a heck of a world, Pops. It’s a big one, a stupefying one, with capriciousness side by side next to grace.  No more good than bad, maybe even.  Surely beyond my ken.”

Still, we agreed that capricious or no, we ought to love as many as possible, as well as possible, as frequently as possible.  I like the “possible” part there, since it cuts a hard working person a little break.  We may not always be successful, but the point is to try.

In the photograph above, taken last fall, my dad is posing in front of some conifers his father planted in the early 1940s. It was on a patch of land overlooking the Monterey Bay, a place to build a home, the first and last my grandparents had owned.  There were few trees on that meadow at the time, and my grandfather thought that, on general principle, there ought to be some. Since these trees were saplings, our family has seen marriages, divorces, births, and deaths.  Triumph and tragedy and every mundane thing in between.  The stuff of life.  Meanwhile the trees kept growing, paying our comings and goings and squabbles no mind.  One eventually caught a disease that denuded it.  Still, it stands tall, awaiting storm winds strong enough to topple it.

The land and what’s on it are now another family’s.  They, like our family has three times now, are fighting cancer.  We all hope they have better luck than we’ve had.  Whether or no, it gave us a good deal of comfort that this place — its home, its trees — would now shelter a family  drawn there by, among other things, a sense that it might make a good place to heal.

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.

Without even skipping a beat I could list a half-dozen other blogs which I think serve or represent LGBT people and interests far, far better than this one. Here are the ones that spring instantly to mind:

• Pam’s House Blend
• Bilerico
• Mombian
• The New Civil Rights Movement
• Box Turtle Bulletin
• Joe. My. God.

See? Didn’t even work at that. Mostly because most of them are in the LD sidebar.  They’re all huge, either group-authored or ridiculously hard-working single-author-authored; they all have deservedly wide audiences and provide a daily digest of critical news and analysis for a good many of us. Go to any of their blogrolls and you’ll find a ton more.

Then there are gobs of great culture (mostly pop) blogs, also big and must-reads for many — for us gals, AfterEllen, Dorothy Surrenders, AutoStraddle, and Grace the Spot, for instance.  Countless other writers do an amazing job of sketching out their individual queer lives in personal narrative blogs like this one; I read a ton of them, mostly the parenting ones of old friends or folks who’ve become friends thanks to the internet (there’s a humungous, if sometimes not utterly updated *cough* list of lesbian family blogs at LesbianFamily.org).  A lot are in my rolling “Featured” blog roll over in the LD sidebar, along with hetero ally friends from the blogosphere. I wish I had time to discover and read more.

One of the best things about awards dealies like the Bloggies is that they can enable new readers to connect to new clumps of blog community.  So I want to extend a hearty welcome to those  among you who meandered over here to answer the question, “Who is this Lesbian Dad anyways? Never heard of him. Her.”  If you hang around and check it out, you’ll quickly find that this is no general interest LGBT blog. It represents just one slice of LGBT community: mine.  And those like me, whoever they may be.  On our behalves I’ve jumped feet-first into some political battles and issues, but then I’ve spent a good long time by the side of the pool (or wherever one jumps feet first) towling off and recovering, thanks to my advanced years and tender sensibilities. I write predominantly about my parenting experience, but many other topics shoot off from around that.

Like with us queer folks, we’re basically a ton of other things in addition to being queer folks.  With queer parents, we’re even a ton of other things in addition to queer parents.  Or even genderqueer parents.  Living on the West Coast.  Running around with white skin- and middle class-privilege.  Trying hard to pay attention, and spread the wealth of love.

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.

[Addendum: a hearty congrats to Vikki, of Up Popped A Fox, this year's reigning Lezzy Award-winning Best Parenting Blog! Go! Read! Get hooked!]

To make matters reasonable, I am going to pull off the feat of keeping all the answers to Twitter-length, otherwise known as 140 characters or fewer.  For those of you who are not Twitter denizens (Twenizens?), you will see, over and over again, both its strength and its weakness. Brevity: the soul of wit, but also of vast oversimplification.

When kept to this constraint, we can see that sometimes a pithy reply is best.  Many Twiterers (-erers), however, myself included, are compelled to post strings of related Tweets when one won’t do.  Do let me know if you think a thought/conversation ought to be strung out a bit more and we can carry on in comments or in another post.

For context, students were assigned the six-part essay I excerpted here a few years back: “Confessions of a Lesbian Dad.”

Q: Has your brother, brother’s wife, partner’s mother, and spouse adjusted to you referring to yourself as “baba” or lesbian dad?

A: Easy, on the 1 hand: I’ve never been anything else. But family slipped a little 1^st few wks; newbies do weekly. I explain; it all works out.

Q: How old is your child and how is your child handling having a mom and baba? Does the child refer to you by those titles or has the child opted for something else?

A: Girl 5, boy 3. They’ve only known us, so our family’s the baseline reference pt. Gal often calls me Babbi. I try not to think of the kid in The Brady Bunch.

Q: Do you regret not being the one to bear the child or labeling yourself as “baba” or lesbian dad?

A: Never, never, & never. Much to my great relief on all points. I use descriptor “1/2 way betw. a mama & papa” most often. Makes sense to all.

Q:  ”…the more we talked, the more I realized…how clearly the existing paradigms make space for biomom, and biodad. Bio, bio. And then me: nonbio. I was off the radar, legally, socially, viscerally.”  What did the term ‘bio’ mean to you? How did you define it? And did it change after your child was born?

A: Good Q. It meant a ton more before kid than after. But 1^st yr was challenging. Now? Hardly relevant, except in eyes of the law. There? Huge.

Q:  Did you suffer from an identity struggle? If so, how did you overcome it?

A: I’ve not met the queer person my age who didn’t. Closest I got to suicide: 1^st yr in love w/ my best friend. Overcame slowly, w/ community.

Q:  I found it particularly interesting that throughout all of the articles, one main thread that wove the events together was the concept of legitimzing. Whether it was your relationship, your feeling “non-mommish”, the idea Baba. How important do you think it is to express and begin to formulate concepts like the kind you have made recently?

A: H-UGE. W/out sense of clarity re: who I am, parentally, this all might not have been possible, or so easy/rewarding. Me AND kids benefit.

Q: All of these articles resonated innovation of ideas, definitions, and behaviors that go against the ones society is used to. How have you dealt with this in the past before, that has helped you when dealing with something like parenthood?

A: I think it was great that I was very stable w/ my gay identity before parenthood. Faced, won the battles. P-hood requires focus on the KID.

Q:  How has your role as a Baba evolved or grown than what you expected it would be like?

A: I find I’m who I’ve always been, just now the parent version. But I do float in space between straight dads & moms. That’s been interesting.

Q:  What is the toughest part about being a parent?

A:  1. LACK OF SLEEP! 2. Obligation to confront own character flaws daily (ouch). 3. That it’s all so very transient. I love this gig.

Q: How do you express your masculinity and femininity?

A: With as much flair as possible. I feel most akin to an 18th. c. dandy.

Q: Looking at your first blog [ed note: essay excerpt], I noticed that you speak in sociological terms of the concept of gender. Do you have an educational background in sociology?

A:  Why yes, as a matter of fact I do! Ethnic Studies minor + Sociology coursework @ Berkeley. American Studies Ph.D. program @ Minnesota.

Q: Why do you think that humans need to place themselves in categories? What else in your life have you tried to categorize, define, or identify?

A:  Mysterious, but: makes “thinking” simpler. Sometimes helps, usually hinders. As a scholar type I seek to identify & define a lot, & categorize AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE.

Q: You mention that children are the easiest to explain being a “Baba” to. Who, or what type of people, are the most difficult to explain to and why do you think that is?

A:  Kids lack preconceptions & their biases are gut- & experience-based. Adults w/ disdain for innovation find new ways of seeing harder.

Q: did writing and reading what you thought help you understand something you over saw when u were thinking?

A: Absolutely. Always does. That’s gift #1 of the writing process.

Q: do think the title of “baba” gave you the confidence of being the parent figure or if you didn’t have it you would have been as determined or confident as a mom or dad figure?

A:  Interesting. I do feel like making/using a 3^rd name has ultimately been BRILLIANTLY LIBERATING. Must. Escape. Reductive. Dichotemies.

Q: What is it about the term father that you feel is inaccurate to describe your role and title in your family and our society? Why is it that the term mother needs no alteration or even produces any hesitation in a lesbian-couple family?

A:  The term describes my *role* OK. Lots of mannish lesbians love stretching the meaning of “mom.” More than those who want to stretch “dad.”

Q: Do you think that with the dynamics of what gender is to our society these days that we should re-evaluate all gender-role based terms we encounter in order to better reflect the true feelings behind each person or party?

A:  That’d be nice. Language does evolve with both our conscious & unconscious help.  In the end, we all probably hear what we want to anyway.

Q: What do you think is the most important message your feelings, experience, and explanation of your role as a lesbian dad or baba offer to adults and/or children?

A:  Other than love conquers all? That parenthood betwixt conventionally fixed genders offers both parent and kid a TON. It’s available to all.

Q: What role did a father/father figure play in your life, and how did that influence your perception of parenthood and your identity as “Baba”?

A:  My dad is one of the beacons of love in my life. My mom, now gone, had a bigger hand in daily parenting. Pops sees us both as 21^st c. dads.

Q:  Are you still concerned with verifying your authority to be a parent in the eyes of those who are less understanding of same-sex parents? If so, in what ways do you confirm your authority to them?

A:  Getting my kids to see me as an authority figure is way more pressing. Truly? It all boils down to them, & they love me, hell or high water.

[Liked this? Go vote LD Best Parenting Blog for this year's The Lesbian Lifestyle Lezzy Award. Or cast a vote (daily 'til March 2) for any other of the other fine gals' work. We're all one big happy family.]