Today closes our Best of Love list. As the 2011 year comes to a close, we wanted to end it with our favorite Love stories of the year. We culled through the stories that were shared the most on Facebook, and chose our fav 5 stories from the list. If you missed it, here are the stories we’ve featured so far: "For Girls Who Love Themselves Enough to Talk Back to Lil Wayne", "67 Sueños Shows Love for an Undocumented Majority", "Yo-Yo Ma Shows Love for Lil’ Buck’s Brand of Street Dance" and "Today’s Love Goes to Khaliyl, Our Favorite 2-Year-Old Rapper." And to bring our top 5 to a close, today we have "Latina Moms Show Love for Their LGBT Kids." We love that our readers love our Celebrate Love series as much as we do. Enjoy!
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#5 Latina Moms Show Love for Their LGBT Kids
by Bryan Gerhart
It goes without saying, but it can be challenging to care for what you don’t know. Trying to comprehend the abstract usually means relating it to something that you are familiar with, and if a connection can’t be made, taking a stance that’s already been paved is so often easier than formulating a unique opinion. For this reason, advancing civil rights almost always involves attaching the personal to the political; giving faces to statistics so that those who doubt their investment in a cause are forced to see how connected they really are.
Tres Gotas de Agua (Three Drops of Water) is a short series of interviews with three Latina women, each of whom has a child that identifies as gay. Mirna, Dolores and Susana speak about their children’s coming out processes, the hardships they’ve faced in taking a stand for gay rights, and acceptance of LGBT people in Latino communities. Throughout, the women display unconditional love at its purest.
Somos Familia, the organization behind the videos, hopes that the videos will spark discussions in Latino communities about the normally taboo subject of homosexuality, and that they can help begin to break down some of the established beliefs that stand in the way of full acceptance of LGBT youth. As Susana says during her segment, "I am a firm believer that a drop of water wears away a stone."
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