Now That You Know: A Parents' Guide to Understanding Their Gay and Lesbian Children, Updated Edition - Softcover

Fairchild, Betty

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156006057 ISBN 13: 9780156006057

Publisher: Harper Paperbacks, 1998

Synopsis

Written by two mothers of gay children, this award-winning book discusses the nature of homosexuality and works toward helping both children and parents understand each other. Fairchild and Hayward counsel parents on how to respond supportively to gay children and focus on bringing families together to maintain the bonds of acceptance. They also inform parents of the pressing health and emotional issues that affect the gay and lesbian communities today.

About this title

Review:

If the coming out process is difficult for gay people, it is often equally difficult for their parents. Confusion, anger, and fear frequently cause fathers and mothers of gay men and lesbians to disavow, strike out against, and even resent their children. For many parents, a child's coming out feels like the ultimate rejection--not only of their dreams and hopes but of their own heterosexuality. In Now That You Know: A Parent's Guide to Understanding Their Gay and Lesbian Children, Betty Fairchild and Nancy Hayward--the mothers of, respectively, a gay man and a lesbian--have charted the rough seas that almost every parent of a gay person travels.

Fairchild and Hayward presume that homosexuality is a positive good, and that it is willful ignorance and homophobia that are moral wrongs. They also believe that families can and should love all members and that it is distraught or confused parents (not their gay offspring) who must change. Mixing common sense with a firm sense of social justice and love, the authors systematically address almost all of the problems faced by parents of gay people. Answering questions on religion, AIDS, health, children, alternative families, and sex, they make the complicated gay world--often a nightmare vision for "just out" parents of gays--not only manageable but happy and nurturing. --Michael Bronski

About the Author:

Betty Fairchild is a contributor for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt titles including: "Now That You Know".

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0156006057
• ISBN 13: 9780156006057
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 300