Dec 23rd, 2006
Not Made Up: Part III
Continuing from yesterday’s post, here’s the t-shirt from 2000, made professionally based on my 1998 prototype.
Here’s how it came about: After growing weary of the invisibility of marching with PFLAG for a few years — I was presumed to be a young lesbian with rabid activist PFLAG parents marching behind me — I started to think about ways to find “my people.” I pitched the concept of my column, “Families Like Mine” to Rudy Renaud, then-editor of Lavender Magazine.
Here’s an excerpt from the book (p. 2) about how the column helped me with my community organizing:
Within a matter of months after my debut column, I was delighted to receive “Me too!” emails from teens and adult children who were just as thrilled to find me as I was to find them.
By June 2000, there was enough of a local network to march in the Pride parade. We revived my slogan from the homemade t-shirt, and ordered some that were made professionally. There were twenty-five of us; a mass of periwinkle shirts…we giggled at the perplexed expressions on people’s faces…most parade watchers are now accustomed to the ever-growing brigade of strollers that LGBT parents push down the street every year, but few people put much thought into what happens to the children after they are potty trained.
Here’s the shirt. Front:
Back:
Yeah, so that shirt was real, too. And there are a couple dozen queerspawn that can vouch for me. Or you can go see it yourself at the Tretter Collection.