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About Us Fathers of Invention
Gay dads create new website for GLBT families
By Nancy Ford
It was a curious problem that required a pro-active solution.
In 2005, as they anxiously waited for their adopted daughter, Cleo, to be born, Steven Tesney and Grant Caplan began searching the Internet for baby apparel and basic accessories for families like their own.
“We were looking for things like a bib or a T-shirt that said something like, ‘I love my two daddies,’” Tesney, a corporate trainer, says.
“But we couldn’t find anything.”
In searching for items a non-traditional family with traditional needs would use, the two determined that GLBT families are underserved when it comes to products that appeal specifically to them.
“If there are so many of us having babies now with this ‘Gayby Boom’ phenomenon, where are the products that serve our
community?” Caplan, a business travel management consultant, asks. “It’s curious to look around and realize that, although there might be so many of us having babies now in the gay community, there are very few products to support us.”
Necessity being the mother of invention, the two fathers stopped looking online and started looking at themselves for answers.
“Could we make some bibs and onesies that say ‘My mommies rock,’ or ‘It’s cool to have two daddies,’ or whatever?” Tesney
recalls wondering.
Sure, they could. Thus, the idea for PrideFamilies.com was born.
“Our vision is that PrideFamilies.com become a one-stop shop,” Tesney says. “You want to buy a T-shirt for a friend who’s having a baby? You want to build a website that celebrates your journey to becoming a family? Whatever the need might be, we want PrideFamilies.com to be the place to satisfy that need—kind of a GLBT family clearinghouse.”
First on their Things-To-Do-To-Make-PrideFamilies.com-A-Success list was to design a logo—a symbol—so other GLBT families would be able to look at their products and services and immediately recognize the PrideFamilies.com brand.
Enter Jenny Conte, a freelance designer and owner of SharpEgg.com. Conte took Tesney and Caplan’s original design and refined it into a flag incorporating traditional Gay Pride rainbow colors with the image of a home embedded in a heart.
“Jenny’s design went way beyond the image we were expecting,” Tesney said. “You just look at it, and you know right away it symbolizes all GLBT families. This flag doesn’t just stand for PrideFamilies.com, it symbolizes our entire community”
The couple says they intend the Pride Family Flag to connect GLBT families everywhere, honor their relationships, and show their pride to the world. But it’s not just the parenting community PrideFamilies.com hopes to assist.
“GLBT couples without children are families, too, and we want to celebrate those families, as well,” Tesney insists.
PrideFamilies.com will evolve in three phases, Tesney continues. May 2007 saw the realization of Phase One, the launch of PrideFamilies.com and PrideFamilyFlag.com, introducing infant and adult apparel featuring the Pride Family Flag “and other really hip designs,” Tesney says.
Phase Two, expanding PrideFamilies.com’s product line to include CDs, books and other products, is next. The company’s debut CD, featuring Girls With Guitars’ Kelly Wallin and Ferryn Martin singing about same-sex families, will be recorded in June and released in the fall.
“‘Traditional’ children’s CDs are filled with messages of gender roles, slavery imagery and sea shanties about drunken sailors,” Tesney says. “It’s time for a more inclusive message.”
The couple is also currently recruiting young writers and GLBT book publishers to represent.
Phase Three consists of an online community, scheduled to launch early 2008, where families will go to build their own websites and share their stories with the world.
“GLBT couples currently have no place to set up a family website or a commitment ceremony site, other than heterosexual sites that will ‘allow’ you to open an account. There is no GLBT focused website for that kind of thing that we know of,” Caplan said. “But soon there will be.”
The site will also link families seeking insight regarding wedding planning, adoption and fertility clinic information—topics about which Tesney and Caplan have a stockpile of personal experience to share.
“After Cleo was born, we began receiving two or three calls each week from gay and lesbian couples,” Tesney said. “They have questions about agencies, attorneys—the entire adoption process,” Tesney said, “Our research was relatively easy,” Tesney said, “largely because of pioneering families that have already been there, done that.”
Tesney and Caplan recommend that Houston-area GLBT couples thinking of becoming parents join Houston Gay & Lesbian Parents (HGLP.org). “The members are the pioneers who have blazed the parenting trail and made the process much easier for the rest of us,” Tesney says.
Tesney and Caplan, together for seven years, strongly believe the time has come for same-sex families to be considered a viable target market. Statistics prove they are correct: As of 1990, 6 million to 14 million children in the United States were living with a gay or lesbian parent, according to the National Adoption Information Clearinghouse, a service of the U.S. Administration for
Children and Families.
Furthermore, The Williams Institute/The Urban Institute found in March 2007 that more than one in three lesbians have given birth and one in six gay men have fathered or adopted a child.
And the 2000 US Census Bureau of Household and Family Statistics confirms that same-sex couples raising children live in 96 percent of all counties nationwide in the United States.
So perhaps same-sex parents raising children isn’t such an anomaly after all, despite the previous lack of products and services for those families.
“Look at our lives,” Tesney says. “We come home from work, have dinner with Cleo, read her a bedtime story, and put her to bed. We’re just your normal everyday family.”
Caplan agrees. “It’s exactly what our parents did with us when we were kids.”
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