Who's Your Daddy?

I just posted a blog (entry) and then hit submit and it lost the entire thing, so now I am really pissed off. I wrote about how my son Henry is going to sleep-away camp this summer. He is going for 3 weeks because I think he's a bit apprehensive. Most camps are 6-7 weeks. He hasn't liked sleep-away camp in the past, so I wasn't going to force him to go longer. Anyway, I downloaded the camp admission forms from the camp website and printed them out. I was shocked to see that the forms read "Mother's Name", "Mother's address, "Mother's phone number", "Mother's occupation", blah blah blah. Then below: Father's name, Father's address, Father's phone number, Father's occupation, blah blah blah.

People do not realize how awful this kind of stuff can be for children of gay parents, let alone the parents, themselves. I crossed out the words mother and father and put parent and parent. After 9/11, when so many families were broken and so many single parents were made, I really thought this kind of stuff would stop -but it is everywhere. Henry came home from school a few weeks ago and he didn't know what to do because his health teacher told the students to ask their same sex parent a question.

These are teachers!!! So, I did what every "loud-mouthed I'm not going to take this anymore" gay parent would do. I wrote an e-mail to the camp director. Now, I didn't want to piss him off since this is the first year Henry is going to this camp. But as usual, I couldn't keep my mouth shut. I asked him if he had ever considered changing their forms to say parent 1 and parent 2; oh, and I mentioned how excited we all were that Henry would be attending camp this summer. He wrote back and said they were on it. Forms were being changed. That felt great. Now I have to work on the NYC Public Schools to do the same. I don't ever want children of gay parents and single parents to feel that their family is less valid than any other family.