Teaching my daughter that love is love

I was raised in a gay relationship in 1970s and ’80s in New York City, long before “Heather Has Two Mommies” hit the mainstream in the ’90s and just a few years after the American Psychiatric Association took homosexuality off the list of mental disorders in 1973. Of course I did not know that then. All I knew was this was my family and I loved them.

That experience in the lunch room was my first experience with homophobia, but it was not my last. As a tween, a girl once told me “You’re dirty like your lesbian moms.” All because a boy liked me. I punched her in the face and dared her to say it again. She did not.

I am a queer woman, raised by lesbians, raising my daughter with my butch partner. It means the world to me to see the model of love I have known since childhood finally acknowledged on the cover of a parenting magazine.

I thought I was doing a good job of teaching my daughter to be open-minded and inclusive until she came home from kindergarten several years ago saying, “That’s gay. That’s nasty.”

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