Same-sex couples are faced with many different options when choosing to have children today. In Journey to Same-Sex Parenthood, author, activist and father Eric Rosswood guides and helps prospective LGBT parents to explore these five popular options: Adoption, Foster Care, Assisted Reproduction, Surrogacy and Co-Parenting.
Each section includes a description of the specific family-building approach, followed by personal stories from same-sex couples and individuals who have chosen and gone through that particular journey. The appendix contains important legal issues to consider and questions to ask before deciding to move forward, along with a list of reasons why people may choose each of the five family-building paths and the challenges they may encounter.
Journey to Same-Sex Parenthood provides a unique combination of inspirational firsthand accounts combined with the critical information, tips and advice needed to help couples successfully navigate the complex road to parenthood.
An honest, unfiltered memoir about a girl with an unconventional family.
“The story everyone wants to hear isn’t the story I want to tell.” Lara Lillibridge grew up with two moms—an experience that shaped and scarred her at the same time. Told from the perspective of “Girl,” Lillibridge’s memoir is the no-holds-barred account of childhood in an atypical household. Personally less concerned with her mother’s sexuality and more with how she fits into a world both disturbed and obsessed with it, Girl finds that, in other people’s eyes, “The most interesting thing about me is not about me at all; it is about my parents.”
It won’t be long before readers realize that “unconventional” barely scratches the surface. In the early years, Girl’s feminist mother reluctantly allows her to play with her favorite Barbies while her stepmother refuses to comfort her when she wakes up from nightmares. She goes skinny dipping on family vacations in upstate New York and kisses all the boys at church. Girl and her brother travel four thousand miles—unaccompanied—to visit their father in rural Alaska, where they sleep in a locked cabin without running water, telephone, or electricity. Raised to be a free spirit by norm-defying parents, Girl has to define her own boundaries as she tries to fit into heteronormative suburban life, all while navigating her mother’s expectations, her stepmother’s mental illness, and her father’s serial divorces.
Lillibridge bravely tells her own story and offers a unique perspective. At times humorous and pithy while cringe-worthy and heartbreaking at others, Girlish is a human story that challenges readers to reevaluate their own lives and motivations.
As Houston's beloved KPRC weatherman for more than 20 years, Frank Billingsley seems like a relative to many people. His optimistic presence comes into their homes and reassures that even the gloomiest of rainclouds probably has a silver lining. He has such a way with people that it is obvious that he comes by his sunny, outgoing demeanor naturally.
Billingsley always wondered if he got his personality, his bright blue eyes, or his love of people from his mother or his father. But he was adopted, so he never knew. Swabbed & Found is the fascinating story of how he combined cutting-edge DNA tests and genealogical programs in combination with his investigative skills to put the pieces of his family tree in order. Along the way he discovered that people are not always who they seem, or even who they think they are. Each time he would think that he had come to a dead end, he found himself helped by a new friend or a newly discovered relative, until finally, he was able to find the family he had wondered about for his whole life.
When something embarrassing happens to you, what is the first thing you do? Look around to see if anyone else saw you? Not Keith Stewart. Instead, he writes it all down and shares it with the world. Join in on the fun as Keith shares his Hysterical stories that include ripping down gas pumps, fighting with a bird trapped inside a grocery store, and confronting the one and only Bernadette Peters. After reading the hilarious memoir of this klutzy, southern man, you will feel better about your own humiliating moments, and instantly feel like you have gained a new best friend.
An acclaimed spokesperson for equality at the helm of And Baby, a pioneer magazine, radio show, and TV series on alternative parenting, Michelle Darné found herself at once callously erased from the lives of her children and silenced by the law. Parent Deleted is a gripping tale of one non-biological, lesbian mother’s fight for her children?an intimate, infuriating, and infectious story of perseverance, sacrifice, and hope in the face of debilitating adversity. And it is a courageous, disturbing, and necessary exposé of a likely emergent social justice frontier: the rights of all children to be with their parents, whether they are biologically linked, straight, gay, prepared or knocked up, perfect spouses or fallible ones.
Carol Anderson grows up in a fundamentalist Christian home in the 60s, a time when being gay was in opposition to all social and religious mores and against the law in most states. Fearing the rejection of her parents, she hides the truth about her love orientation, creating emotional distance from them for years, as she desperately struggles to harness her powerful attractions to women while pursuing false efforts to be with men.
The watershed point in Carol's journey comes when she returns to graduate school and discovers the feminist movement, which emboldens her sense of personal power and the freedom to love whom she chooses. But this sense of self-possession comes too late for honesty with her father. His unexpected death before she can tell him the truth brings the full cost of Carol's secret crashing in compelling her to come out to her mother before it is too late. Candid and poignant, You Can't Buy Love Like That reveals the complex invisible dynamics that arise for gay people who are forced to hide their true selves in order to survive, and celebrates the hard-won rewards of finding one's courageous heart and achieving self-acceptance and self-love.
This heartfelt memoir captures the life-changing power of unconditional love and perseverance. Even though this Big Brother/Little Brother match has little in common, they learn how to grapple with life's struggles together. A narrative that by its nature risks sentimentality or maudlin hyperbole never falls over that edge, nor even skates near it. That's a rough task, handled with a sure and compact force that allows the reader to discover the remarkable delicacy that runs through the journey taken by this boy and man.
In this sometimes painful narrative, Douglas finds beauty in unexpected places and relates it in forthright, sometimes blunt terms. His gift for unadorned, wry metaphors lead readers to insights that might be lost under the weight of more customary embellishment, as in the description of his childhood backyard: "filled with plywood cut-outs of Disney characters, painted and nailed like little sacrifices to the redwood-stained fence." Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the book is the way in which the boy and man reshape each other; from Rico, Douglas draws insight into his own life. In a very complicated fashion, they both end up gaining from each other.
Our brains have numerous functioning parts, all of which serve us at any one moment. But decades of research reveal the existence of two basic brain “operating systems”, two fundamental ways in which the whole brain processes incoming information. Because of this phenomenon of brain dominance, most of us tend to favor the input of either our “dualistic” left-brain (which focuses on parts instead of wholes) or our holistic right hemisphere. This means that typically only half of our innate intelligence informs our thinking and since the left-brain operating system dominates most males, our culture has itself become left-brain dominant.
How Whole Brain Thinking Can Save the Future explores this left-brain bias in our civilization, revealing it to be the root cause for centuries of war, racism, and political polarization, and eons of misunderstanding between the sexes. While most of our technological and scientific progress is driven by left-brain thinking, the great advances to come will require that we consciously harness both sides of our brain to greatly improve our cognition. Award-winning author James Olson goes on to explain how we can achieve greater internal harmony between the two operating systems of the brain both as individuals and as a culture thus showing us how ad why thinking with our whole brains will lead us to peace and to the ultimate healing of our relationships and our world.
From Paris's famous opera house to its gossip-rich salons,KISS ME AGAIN, PARIS celebrates youth at the end of the 1970s, when women werein fashion and every woman, gay or straight, fell in love with women.
Author Renate Stendhal ekes out a living as a culturaljournalist in Europe's most cultured city. She walks Paris at night dressed asa boy, has friends and lovers among artists and writers, and falls under the spellof the mercurial actress Claude, who has all of Paris talking. At the sametime, she finds herself in the crosshairs of an alluring stranger who seems toappear everywhere and nowhere at once. There are mysteries with and withoutclues. Is sexual obsession a way to avoid the risk of love?
Filled with sensuality, style, romance, and suspense,Stendhal plays with the concept of memoir as a genre and transports the readerto another time and place. No matter what age you are, you'll be young and inlove again when you reach the last page.
