Windy City Media Group Frontpage News

THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

home search facebook twitter join
Gay News Sponsor Windy City Times 2023-12-13
DOWNLOAD ISSUE
Donate

Sponsor
Sponsor
Sponsor

  WINDY CITY TIMES

"A Secret I Can't Tell" book updated and reissued
-- From a press release
2022-12-07

This article shared 6027 times since Wed Dec 7, 2022
facebook twitter pin it google +1 reddit email


NEW YORK, NY — NOVEMBER 14, 2022 — In 2020 the United States Supreme Court ruled that 1964 Civil Rights Act protects gay, lesbian, and transgender employees from discrimination based on sex. But now Florida's "Don't Say Gay/Trans" law plus another 300+ virulently discriminatory bills have made 2022 the worst year ever for legislative assaults on LGBTQ people. And horrendous attacks on safe spaces like Club Q in Colorado Springs underscore LGBTQ people's vulnerability in a climate of hate speech from far right organizations, pundits, and politicians.

This moment bears resemblance to a time in our not-to-distant past: In 1977 a county ordinance was passed in Florida which banned discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodation based on sexual orientation. After Anita Bryant's successful "Save Our Children" campaign which demonized gays and lesbians, the law was overturned, and it launched a wave of repeals of civil rights for gays and lesbians in other states.

Incensed by Save Our Children's hateful slogan, "Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit," author Joe Gantz decided to attack head-on the rhetoric that gays and lesbians were a danger to children. He located five same-sex headed households in different parts of the nation, embedded with each family for a week, and from 1979—1983 interviewed these lesbian and gay parents and their children about what effects the fear-mongering and anti-gay pressures had on them.

The resulting foundational book, A SECRET I CAN'T TELL: THE FIRST GENERATION OF CHILDREN FROM OPENLY GAY AND LESBIAN HOMES by Joe Gantz (Carpenter Hill Publishing, 2022, paperback, $15.99, kindle edition $9.99), updated in 2022 with new interviews from some of the children (now adults in their 50s) and a new foreword by Scott Gatz, founder and CEO of Q.Digital, tracks the effects of keeping their parents' relationships a secret in a time when it was dangerous to be out, particularly as a gay or lesbian parent. In addition to the loving, joyful, and supportive families that parents built, the book also shows how they struggled coming out to their children without any community or legal support, or even representation in the media at that time. The secrecy these families had to maintain forced the kids into a kind of a closet along with their parents, and the effects have lasted decades.

Today's political climate in which zealots intentionally whip up anti-LGBTQ hatred, replete with baseless and appalling claims about "groomers" or conflating school lessons about LGBTQ history with teaching sex, and in a time when there's a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court ready to dismantle the Obergefell (2015) or Bostock (2020) decisions that guaranteed important civil rights, it's vital to understand that LGBTQ families are not statistics, but real people. In this book, families tell us who they are—in their own words.

Comments on "A Secret I Can't Tell"

"A moving testimony to the courage, determination and inventiveness of same-sex parents who battled against all odds to create loving, happy families."

—Peter Tatchell, human rights campaigner and gay rights activist

"…four decades ago, as now, the kids of pioneering gay parents had their share of complaints, too, alongside joys, triumphs, and love. All are skillfully rendered in the family vignettes that make up the bulk of A Secret I Can't Tell."

—Evan Wolfson, founder and president of Freedom to Marry

"…we must remember that, back in the 1970s and 1980s, lesbian and gay mothers and fathers suffered tremendous shame for having challenged the traditional model of heterosexual parenting…. As both a psychotherapist and sexologist, I hold this iconic book in very high regard indeed."

—Professor Brett Kahr, Senior Fellow at the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology in London

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joe Gantz is a writer and award-winning documentary filmmaker. He is the producer of Taxicab Confessions, which was on HBO for 16 years, as well as many feature length documentaries, including American Winter, Ending Disease and The Race to Save the World. For more: joegantz.com


This article shared 6027 times since Wed Dec 7, 2022
facebook twitter pin it google +1 reddit email

Out and Aging
Presented By

  ARTICLES YOU MIGHT LIKE

Gay News

Kara Swisher talks truth, power in tech at Chicago Humanities event 2024-03-25
- Lesbian author, award-winning journalist and podcast host Kara Swisher spoke about truth and power in the tech industry through the lens of her most recent book, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, March 21 at First ...


Gay News

RuPaul finds 'Hidden Meanings' in new memoir 2024-03-18
- RuPaul Andre Charles made a rare Chicago appearance for a book tour on March 12 at The Vic Theatre, 3145 N. Sheffield Ave. Presented by National Public Radio station WBEZ 91.5 FM, the talk coincided with ...


Gay News

Without compromise: Holly Baggett explores lives of iconoclasts Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap 2024-03-04
- Jane Heap (1883-1964) and Margaret Anderson (1886-1973), each of them a native Midwesterner, woman of letters and iconoclast, had a profound influence on literary culture in both America and Europe in the early 20th Century. Heap ...


Gay News

There she goes again: Author Alison Cochrun discusses writing journey 2024-02-27
- By Carrie Maxwell When Alison Cochrun began writing her first queer romance novel in 2019, she had no idea it would change the course of her entire life. Cochrun, who spent 11 years as a high ...


Gay News

NATIONAL Women's college, banned books, military initiative, Oregon 2023-12-29
- After backlash regarding a decision to update its anti-discrimination policy and open enrollment to some transgender applicants, a Catholic women's college in Indiana will return to its previous admission policy, per The National Catholic Reporter. In ...


Gay News

NATIONAL School items, Miami attack, Elliot Page, Fire Island 2023-12-22
- In Virginia, new and returning members of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and Fairfax County School Board were inaugurated—with some school board members opting to use banned books on the topics of slavery and LGBTQ+ ...


Gay News

Chicago author's new guide leads lesbian fiction authors toward inspiration and publication 2023-12-07
- From a press release: Award-winning and bestselling lesbian fiction author Elizabeth Andre—the pen name for a Chicago-based interracial lesbian couple—has published her latest book, titled Self-Publishing Lesbian Fiction, Write Your ...


Gay News

NATIONAL Tenn. law, banned books, rainbow complex, journalists quit 2023-12-01
- Under pressure from a lawsuit over an anti-LGBTQ+ city ordinance, officials in Murfreesboro, Tennessee removed language that banned homosexuality in public, MSNBC noted. Passed in June, Murfreesboro's "public decency" ordinance ...


Gay News

BOOKS Lucas Hilderbrand reflects on gay history in 'The Bars Are Ours' 2023-11-29
- In The Bars Are Ours (via Duke University Press), Lucas Hilderbrand, a professor of film and media studies at the University of California-Irvine, takes readers on a historical journey of gay bars, showing how the venues ...


Gay News

BOOKS Owen Keehnen takes readers to an 'oasis of pleasure' in 'Man's Country' 2023-11-27
- In the book Man's Country: More Than a Bathhouse, Chicago historian Owen Keehnen takes a literary microscope to the venue that the late local icon Chuck Renslow opened in 1973. Over decades, until it was demolished ...


Gay News

Photographer Irene Young launches book with stellar concerts 2023-11-20
- "Something About the Women" was appropriately the closing song for two sold-out, stellar concerts at Berkeley's Freight & Salvage November 19, in celebration of the new book of the same name by Irene Young, the legendary ...


Gay News

Rustin film puts a gay pioneer into the spotlight 2023-11-16
- The story of activist Bayard Rustin is one that should be told in classrooms everywhere. Instead, because Rustin was an openly same-gender-loving man, his legacy has gone relatively unnoticed outside of LGBTQ+-focused history books. Netflix hopes ...


Gay News

Billy Masters: The times Streisand failed to make a splash 2023-11-13
- "Fame is a hollow trophy. No matter who you are, you can only eat one pastrami sandwich at a time."—Wise words from Barbra Streisand. You all know that Barbra Streisand's book is out. And I ...


Gay News

Charles Busch dishes on life as a storyteller 2023-11-09
- Performer/writer Charles Busch, who recently penned his autobiography, Leading Lady: A Memoir of a Most Unusual Boy, said that collecting his most precious and salient memories in a book felt "inevitable." "Storytelling is such an essential ...


Gay News

LGBT HISTORY PROJECT: Exploring 70 years of lesbian publications, from 1940s zines to modern glossy magazines 2023-11-02
- Since the '40s, lesbians have created a vibrant history of publications. From the exploration of daily lesbian life to literary and feminist pursuits, to the modern age of glossy magazines, for over 70 years, lesbians have ...


 


Copyright © 2024 Windy City Media Group. All rights reserved.
Reprint by permission only. PDFs for back issues are downloadable from
our online archives.

Return postage must accompany all manuscripts, drawings, and
photographs submitted if they are to be returned, and no
responsibility may be assumed for unsolicited materials.

All rights to letters, art and photos sent to Nightspots
(Chicago GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times (a Chicago
Gay and Lesbian News and Feature Publication) will be treated
as unconditionally assigned for publication purposes and as such,
subject to editing and comment. The opinions expressed by the
columnists, cartoonists, letter writers, and commentators are
their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Nightspots
(Chicago GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times (a Chicago Gay,
Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender News and Feature Publication).

The appearance of a name, image or photo of a person or group in
Nightspots (Chicago GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times
(a Chicago Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender News and Feature
Publication) does not indicate the sexual orientation of such
individuals or groups. While we encourage readers to support the
advertisers who make this newspaper possible, Nightspots (Chicago
GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times (a Chicago Gay, Lesbian
News and Feature Publication) cannot accept responsibility for
any advertising claims or promotions.

 
 

TRENDINGBREAKINGPHOTOS







Sponsor


 



Donate


About WCMG      Contact Us      Online Front  Page      Windy City  Times      Nightspots
Identity      BLACKlines      En La Vida      Archives      Advanced Search     
Windy City Queercast      Queercast Archives     
Press  Releases      Join WCMG  Email List      Email Blast      Blogs     
Upcoming Events      Todays Events      Ongoing Events      Bar Guide      Community Groups      In Memoriam     
Privacy Policy     

Windy City Media Group publishes Windy City Times,
The Bi-Weekly Voice of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans Community.
5315 N. Clark St. #192, Chicago, IL 60640-2113 • PH (773) 871-7610 • FAX (773) 871-7609.