Spawning Generations: Rants and Reflections on Growing Up with LGBTQ+ Parents

by Sadie Epstein-Fine (Editor), Makeda Zook (Editor)

Spawning Generations is a collection of stories by queerspawn (people with LGBTQ+ parents) spanning six decades, three continents, and five countries. Curated by queerspawn, this anthology is about carving out a space for queerspawn to tell their own stories. The contributors in this volume break away from the pressures to be perfect, the demands to be well adjusted, and the need to prove that they turned out “all right.” These are queerspawn stories, airbrushed for no one, and told on their own terms.

Genres: Nonfiction, Queer, LGBT, Queer Lit, Essays, Anthologies

208 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2018

Reviews

[Ben Truong · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spawning Generations: Rants and Reflections of Growing Up with LGBTQ+ Parents is an anthology of essays (mainly narrative and descriptive essays) about queerspawn and growing up as such. It is collected and edited by Sadie Epstein-Fine and Makeda Zook spanning six decades, three continents, five countries, and twenty-four contributors from as young as nine years old.

Queerspawn is an affectionate term for children of LGBTQ+ parents and the term itself has been around for at least a decade. The term was prevalent mainly in North America, but has migrated and generally accepted worldwide. While queerspawn is not recognized as the official term for children of LGBTQ+ parents, it is the term that many use and generally accepted as a whole.

This anthology is an amazingly powerful and emotional wrenching collection of essays. Epstein-Fine and Zook has compiled a collection of essays that are poignant, challenging, angry, humorous, heartbreakingly sorrow, impassioned, weary, and most importantly unapologetically real. It breaks away from the pressures of trying to be perfect and the demands to be well adjusted from being the test-bed to see if whether LGBTQ+ parents could raise well-adjusted children.

In all honesty and for the most part, I enjoyed reading the anthology immensely – there wasn't a poorly written one in the lot. Each entry was sensitively and beautifully written with much candor that brought these essays to life. Despite being raised in what is considered a traditional family, reading these essays brought me closer to those who grew up with what is considered an unconventional family with parents from the LGBTQ+ community. It is interesting to read that the queerspawns yearn to find a place in society, to find those like themselves, yet couldn't find one – even under the LGBTQ+ community, but slowly and surely they are finding a place to call for themselves.

All in all, Spawning Generations: Rants and Reflections on Growing Up with LGBTQ+ Parents is a powerful and wonderfully written anthology about queerspawns, written by queerspawns for queerspawns and anyone who is interesting to hearing their stories.

[Abigail]

I know one of the editors of this anthology, and really appreciate the introduction the editors crafted about the complexities of queerspawn identity and and various complexities that are a part of that. However, I wish the rest of the anthology had more critical engagement of that type. The editors point towards some interesting themes of perfectionism related to being a poster child, of complex relationships with sexuality, and of feeling with and outside of a community, and I wish more of those aspects of identity were explored through the essays. I found some of the essays challenging, especially those by authors who perhaps failed to wholly recognize their trans parent's identity and by the author who wrote about their homophobia turned sexual openness through trantric massage. However, I recognize that this anthology gave space for imperfect relationships with queerness, which has value too.

[Emma Armstrong · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting to read a collection of essays written by people with queer parents. Some essays were better than others.

[Emma B · Rating 5 out of 5]

My people <3

[Scott Neigh]

EDIT: Here is my interview with the editors of this collection: http://rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/talki...

A collection of personal essays by queerspawn – that is, people with LGBTQ+ parents – edited by two Toronto-based queerspawn. As always with this kind of collection, it includes a broad range of voices and of kinds of stories, from the amusing to the inspiring to the heartbreaking, though it is quite open about the fact that there are many more voices and stories out there. Not only is it a space for queerspawn to talk about life and family and community and belonging, but it is a space that aims to nurture conversation about the messy difficult glorious complexity of all of those things, in the face of a world that does not necessarily make that kind of public conversation easy. I've always had a soft spot for this kind of queer or queer-adjacent personal essay collection, and this one was no exception – definitely found it an engaging and interesting read. As well, I did an interview with the editors yesterday, which should become an episode of Talking Radical Radio at some point in the next few weeks...I'll update this with the link when it goes up.

[Mills College Library]

306.8743 M6277 2018