Spawning Generations - Rants and Reflections on Growing Up with LGBTQ+ Parents Book

Spawning Generations: Rants and Reflections of Growing Up with LGBTQ+ Parents is an anthology of essays (mainly narrative and descriptive essays) about queerspawn and growing up as such. It is collected and edited by Sadie Epstein-Fine and Makeda Zook spanning six decades, three continents, five countries, and twenty-four contributors from as young as nine years old.

Queerspawn is an affectionate term for children of LGBTQ+ parents and the term itself has been around for at least a decade. The term was prevalent mainly in North America, but has migrated and generally accepted worldwide. While queerspawn is not recognised as the official term for children of LGBTQ+ parents, it is the term that many use and generally accepted as a whole.

This anthology is an amazingly powerful and emotional wrenching collection of essays. Epstein-Fine and Zook has compiled a collection of essays that are poignant, challenging, angry, humorous, heartbreakingly sorrow, impassioned, weary, and most importantly unapologetically real. It breaks away from the pressures of trying to be perfect and the demands to be well adjusted from being the test-bed to see if whether LGBTQ+ parents could raise well-adjusted children.

In all honesty and for the most part, I enjoyed reading the anthology immensely – there wasn't a poorly written one in the lot. Each entry was sensitively and beautifully written with much candour that brought these essays to life. Despite being raised in what is considered a traditional family, reading these essays brought me closer to those who grew up with what is considered an unconventional family with parents from the LGBTQ+ community. It is interesting to read that the queerspawns yearn to find a place in society, to find those like themselves, yet couldn't find one – even under the LGBTQ+ community, but slowly and surely they are finding a place to call for themselves.

All in all, Spawning Generations: Rants and Reflections on Growing Up with LGBTQ+ Parents is a powerful and wonderfully written anthology about queerspawns, written by queerspawns for queerspawns and anyone who is interesting to hearing their stories.