Poignant family portraits demystify who we are

August 6, 1999

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 13

Love Makes a Family Portraits of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Parents and Their Families Photographs by Gigi Kaeser Edited by Peggy Gillespie U. Massachusetts Press, trade paper

Reviewed by Lynne Page

Love Makes a Family is a beautiful an poignant compilation of family portraits and textual interviews with families inside our LGBT community.

The book itself is a result of a traveling exhibit of photos and text about lesbian and gay families which debuted in May of 1995 in four Massachusetts elementary schools. Filmmakers Debra Chasnoff and Helen Cohen filmed the opening for their documentary It's Elementary and the exhibit began its nationwide tour.

Paralleling struggles in the LGBT community, the exhibit itself incited extreme controversy, which led to a court battle in

Massachusetts in 1996. Local families sued school superintendents, but the exhibit won its First Amendment right for free speech. Due to thoughtful and positive responses from school children, the exhibit was published in book form, and the focus was broadened.

A poignant foreword is offered by author Minnie Bruce Pratt, who describes the pain of losing her two sons in a custody battle, how she struggled to keep them the center of her life, and to maintain her family connection with them. This experience is very different from that of authors Dorothy Allison and April Martin, who also provide glimpses of their personal lives as lesbian parents.

The book is extraordinary, and presents the reader with a wide range of family structures with racial, cultural, geographic, and socioeconomic diversity.

The portrait of each family is accompanied by the story of their life as a family, what life was like for each parent as they were growing up and realizing they were gay or lesbian, and their own parents' reaction to that. This.

alongside the personal experiences of their

own children in today's world, is extremely insightful and powerful.

This book is beautiful in its display of all the different configurations a family is created, but it does not candy-coat the true, adverse issues that malign its existence, such as hate, homophobia, the struggle to legitimize the parent relationship and the family in the eyes of our government. This is the real difference between heterosexual families and those composed and formed in nontraditional ways with our LGBT parents.

The book also succeeds in its attempt to demystify who we are. The bottom line is: If you are a parent, either lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or heterosexual, we all are living very similar, ordinary American lives, in that we wake up, somehow get ourselves and the children dressed and fed, and then it's off to work and school, and there are jobs to do, and bills to pay, and baseball and softball games to attend, and homework to do, and off to bed, until the next day.

Lynne Page is a freelance writer living in Cleveland.