You. Must. Watch. This.
“Family Time,” COLAGE’s new documentary about its first twenty years, tells the story of this generation of LGBTQ family history along the way. I can’t even find hyperbole enough to describe how moving it is.
About COLAGE’s founding, Hope Berry recalled saying to others, following a support group for kids who had an LGBT parent who’d died of AIDS:
Wait! We want to talk to each other. Parents: help us. Support us. Give us a place where we can meet and follow this through.
And Hope Berry again, from a Canadian talk show appearance where she and another COLAGE co-founder were bum-rushed by a professional homophobe guest:
[The problem] is not about our parents! It’s about this attitude!
Beth Teper (current COLAGE Exec. Dirctor), on what COLAGE did for her young self:
That’s what COLAGE has given me: pride in my self, my family, and my community.
And finally here’s Felicia Park-Rogers, in response to an off-camera question by some media person, presumably along the lines of “What would you say to others?”:
I would say to parents: be courageous and proud of who they are, and your children will follow. And they will be courageous and proud of who they are.
Needless to say, the 14 minute documentary includes lots more wonderful stuff along these lines. Useful for LGBT parents to watch, period, regardless of your interest in COLAGE’s founding decades or the evolving issues facing kids of LGBT parents.
After you’re done watching, those of you who feel you have something to spare and/or those who annually actually seek tax deductible donation opportunities because you want to reduce your tax burden (you know who you are! the both of youse!), please consider supporting COLAGE and/or your local LGBTQ family org. Don’t know your local org? See if you can find it at Family Equality Council’s national parents’ groups page here.
Wow, powerfull stuff, thanks for sharing.
In a crazy cosmic coincidence this september I moved into a shared student house for my second year of uni. One of my housemates who I’ve become fast friends with recently revealed to me his Dad is MTF and the only people he’d ever told in his life was me and his girlfriend. I know he struggles with it, I know he goes to counselling, and I know he isnt getting any support from the local LGBT community. I wish there was an organisation like this around here that I could direct him to so he could see there are 100,000s of kids out there who come the same kind of family as him, he is really struggling with coming to terms with it still. I shall go on vast trawl of the internet untill I find a similar organisation in the area, and surruptistiously give him the details. I suppose it’s up to him if he wants to go.