The Purpose: We hope to address a lack in self-produced narratives about kids of queer families. Documentaries and books about us are often made by people who are not themselves kids of LGBTQ families. Often, they focus on questions like: What's it like at school? Are you gay too? Queerspawn Diaries offers an alternative to this perspective. It also broadens the relevant issues: sexuality and school are not the only arenas in which queer family affects identity or experience. What about education, culture, religion, friendship networks, activism and work?

Queerspawn Diaries aims to put out into public U.S. discourse new stories about what family is made of. We are at a particular historical moment, given public policy debates about gay marriage and civil unions, when it is absolutely critical that queer communities raise our voices and our questions about the meaning of family, marriage, citizenship and queerness. Queerspawn Diairies contributes to that conversation by saying loudly and clearly: before and after presidential proclamations about who is allowed to be family and what the state will sanction, there are all kinds of queer families. It is not up to the state to decide who we are and how LGBTQ family affects us: it is up to us to take the lead in that conversation.

The People: Queerspawn Diaries co-directors Nava and Chana grew up a few blocks from each other for some of our childhood and the next bunk over for many of our summers. With rabbi dads and lesbian moms, we found we had some things in common. When we were thirteen, Nava came out to Chana about her mom on a bench at summer camp. Chana never came out the Nava about hers -- but Nava somehow figured it out, and when she did we started talking about our families.

Queerspawn Diaries in Clamor: From 1999 to 2006, Clamor Magazine was an incisive independent bi-monthly publication featuring articles about politics, culture, economics, people, sex, gender and media. The July/August 2004 issue (#27) contains an article featuring Queerspawn Dairies about what's at stake for non-nuclear queer families in the current social and political climate.

Thank you to the Oberlin College LGBT Faculty Committee! Queerspawn Diaries was supported in part by its Andy Cemelli Research Grant.