My Family, Your Family, Our Family

Overview

My Family, Your Family, Our Family is a 2004 coloring book by Jennifer Lovvorn and Libby Black, associated with San Francisco's Our Family Coalition. The local catalog describes it as an activity book showing many family forms, including two-father and two-mother families. Its public record is unusually important because later scholarship treats it as a rare English-language children's book that attempted to include bisexual-parent representation. The title is thinly documented in public catalogs, but it has scholarly value as community publishing, family-diversity pedagogy, and evidence of how LGBTQ families produced educational materials outside mainstream trade channels.^[1][2][4][5]

Activity-Book Form

The coloring-book form matters. It invites a child to participate visually rather than simply receive a finished picture-book world. In community education, that format can make family diversity tactile and local: children color families, recognize structures, and encounter difference as ordinary. This helps explain why a lightly cataloged item belongs in a research collection.^[1][2]

Community Publishing

The Our Family Coalition context places the book in Bay Area LGBTQ-family support and education. Such materials often circulated through organizations, schools, family networks, and resource lists rather than through large publishers. That path gives the object historical value because it preserves how communities made representational tools for themselves.^[5][4][1]

Bisexual Representation

Later scholarship gives the item a distinctive place in the collection. Knopp-Schwyn and Fracentese discuss it as a rare children's book attempting to include bisexual parents while also arguing that the book's vignettes do not fully make bisexuality legible. That tension is valuable: the item records both an effort at inclusion and the representational limits of the format.^[2][3]

Many-Family Frame

The local catalog and public checklist evidence place the book among many-family materials that include gay fathers and lesbian mothers. Unlike a single-plot story centered on one child, this item appears to work by accumulation: a set of short family portraits. That structure connects it to alphabet, counting, classroom, and concept books elsewhere in the collection.^[1][4][2]

Timeline

1. 2004PublicationScholarly and local evidence identify My Family, Your Family, Our Family as a 2004 San Francisco publication by Black and Lovvorn.^[2][1]
2. 2011Collector checklistA children's-books checklist compiled by Randall Tarpey-Schwed lists the title among books portraying LGBT parents.^[4]
3. 2019Scholarly discussionThe Journal of Bisexuality article Challenges and Possibilities for Bisexual Picturebooks discusses the book in relation to bisexual representation.^[2][3]

Edition And Object History

Public evidence points to a 2004 community coloring book. The held copy can clarify exact cover, pagination, and publisher wording.

Citation

My Family, Your Family, Our Family. Jennifer Lovvorn and Libby Black. Our Family Coalition, 2004. Tarpey-Schwed LGBT Families Children's Book Special Collection, Mechanics' Institute. Collection ID: KB-093.

Sources

1. Local collection catalog record for My Family, Your Family, Our Family · catalog
2. Challenges and Possibilities for Bisexual Picturebooks · scholarship
3. Taylor and Francis DOI page for Challenges and Possibilities for Bisexual Picturebooks · scholarship
4. Checklist of children's books portraying LGBT parents · resource_list
5. Our Family Coalition family support context · organization