Hi there,
I’m Conor. I’m one of the people involved in Believe in Equality (BE). What I’ll try and do here is give you a bit of an outline of who BE are, why we’re here and what we’d like to do. It won’t just be me blogging here, a couple of the others involved in BE will start telling their side of the story too.
Who?
We are Believe in Equality (BE). We’re a small group of young people, ranging between 16 and 24, who are the sons and daughters of lesbian and gay parents. We come from a range of different types of families. Some of us have two mums, some have a gay dad, some have a lesbian mother, some have a combination of parents and sexualities.
When?
Well, we all met as a group last October. Before that, some of us had known already each other. I, for example, went to the meeting with my brother. There were a couple of friends and two sisters there too. We came together to participate in a research workshop, which aimed to explore our experiences and opinions of growing up with LGBT (lesbian, gay bisexual or transgender) parents (Incidentally, we launch the report from that workshop at a conference a week and a half ago – check my own blog post here for a brief introduction). In the afternoon of that workshop, we chatted about meeting up for frequently and getting some sort of group going. We’ve met up a few times since then and are keen to get a bit of momentum behind us.
Why?
Well, most of the time having lesbian or gay parents doesn’t make a damned bit of difference. We function like any other family. However, we encounter a fairly unusual set of challenges. Most of the time, they’re legal problems that we face, but too frequently it’s homophobia. There’ll be more about that sort of stuff in later blog posts.
What?
Good question. There are loads of things we’d like to do, but we have to be realistic. We all have jobs, school, college and lives to negotiate with. Our short-term goals are to establish ourselves as a group, with individual responsibilities, while getting in touch with other children of LGBT families. Long-term, we’ll be campaigning for legal equality for our families, among other things.
So, that seems like a good way to start off. I hope you find us interesting. If you want to get in touch, email believeinequality[at]gmail[dot]com
All the best,
Conor
