Boyhood Reimagined: A Reading and Q&A

What is it like to be a queer mom raising a son in America today? Join us for an inspiring virtual reading and discussion with the authors and contributors of Boyhood Reimagined: Stories of Queer Moms Raising Sons. Together over Zoom, we’ll discuss the joys and challenges of trying to raise sons with healthy relationships to gender and masculinity amidst accelerating challenges to LGBTQ+ families.

All are invited to attend this free event, although registration is required. 

A family with two moms and a son seems pretty ordinary to many Americans in 2025. But with a Republican majority in all three branches, the rise of Christian nationalism, and the ultra-conservative Supreme court, queer moms face ongoing and accelerating challenges to their families. The personal essays in Boyhood Reimagined ask particular questions about parenting and feminism during a time when traditional male dominance continues to shape societal expectations, limit opportunities for women and non-binary individuals, and influence political and economic power structures. Do queer moms practicing feminist parenting raise sons with a healthy relationship to gender and masculinity? Are sons of queer moms protected from a culture of misogyny? And what important lessons do queer moms of sons have to teach other progressive parents?

Pre-order Boyhood Reimagined from your local bookstore today!

Gail Marlene Schwartz is a queer mom, a dual citizen, and the pickleball champion of her household. Her adult novel, Falling Through the Night (Demeter Press), won the National Indie Excellence Award for LGBTQ fiction and was a finalist for an Independent Publishers of New England book award. Other titles include My Sister’s Girlfriend, The Loudest Bark and Clementine in Quarantine. She is the co-editor of Boyhood Reimagined: Stories of Queer Moms Parenting Sons and a founding member of the magazine, Hotch Potch Literature and Art. She also hosts the Substack Writers in Relationship. Gail lives and writes in Ottawa Ontario with her partner, visual artist Erin Needham, and their occasional roommate Alexi, who is 15. Check out her website for more info.

June BlueSpruce lives with her wife in Seattle, where they raised their two sons, now grown. She has been an activist in movements for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights and health care justice for decades. She now focuses on protecting Seattle’s beautiful and life-giving tree canopy, fighting environmental inequity, and writing. Her essays have appeared in Whiteness Is Not an Ancestor: Essays on Life and Lineage by White Women; Sacred Stone, Sacred Water: Women Writers and Artists Encounter Ireland; Catamaran Literary Reader; the chapbook Coming Home; and HerStry. Her poems have been published in Sisters Singing: Blessings, Prayers, Art, Songs, Poetry, and Sacred Stories by Women; My Lover Is a Woman: Contemporary Lesbian Love Poems; and journals. June writes about healing, spirituality, and social change on her blog.

Lalita du Perron was born in Amsterdam and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has a PhD in South Asian Studies (SOAS, 2000) and is the Associate Director of the Center for South Asia at Stanford. She has published two books and a number of articles on the song texts of North Indian art music, and is currently working on a project on consent. In a separate incarnation Lalita performs and writes comedy, as Lalita Dee (@lalitadeecomedy). Lalita is the proud queer single mother by choice of a teenage son. 

Marie Holmes is a freelance journalist and fiction writer. Her work has appeared in HuffPost, Scary Mommy, Good Housekeeping and The Washington Post. She has received awards from Gival Press and the Bronx Writers Center, and was an Emerging Writer Fellow at The Center for Fiction. 

Katherine Mack is a professor of rhetoric in the English department at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, studying a wide range of topics including truth and reconciliation efforts in South Africa, motherhood and family in the United States, the genre and practice of life writing, and rhetorical pedagogy in the era of “truth decay.” Katherine has written From Apartheid to Democracy: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa and The Case for Single Motherhood: Contemporary Maternal Identities and Family Formations.