Generations of pride: P-town's Family Week--and similar gatherings around the nation--is becoming the most important event of the year for many gay parents and their children. (Gay Parenting).

Sand castle building contests. Movie nights. Bonfires. Cookouts. It sounds like the itinerary of activities from virtually any summer camp--until you hear about a few of the other scheduled events, like a workshop for the children of transgendered parents or a seminar on artificial insemination. (The location, Provincetown, Mass., is a bit of a giveaway too.) Indeed, the annual Family Week, sponsored by the Family Pride Coalition, with youth programming by Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere, is fast becoming a tradition among hundreds of gay and lesbian families.

The August event, whose attendance has increased 20% almost every year since its inception in 1996 and which spawned a sister event in Saugatuck, Mich., is so popular because it combines kid-friendly fun with parent education and support groups--information many of these families can't access back home. Or as Beth Teper, executive director of COLAGE, puts it: "It's one of the only places where kids can hang out without being asked how they can have a donor and not a dad."

According to Aimee Gelnaw, executive director of Family Pride, Family Week has become essential to gay and lesbian parents who, for one reason or another, are isolated from other support networks. "It's so important to people's well-being that they really make the trek," she says. (The 400 families who attended last year's gathering came from 31 states as well as Canada, China, France, and the United Kingdom.) She cites a Florida father of triplets who, except for his own partner, had never had contact with another gay parent. He and his partner brought their nearly year-old girls on a plane to the Michigan gathering just to get a sense of community for the first time. And Gelnaw says that's not an unusual case. "For people who don't have the option to be out, this is an incredible experience," she says. "For many families, not going [to Family Week] would be like not celebrating Christmas."

And for kids who have fewer support outlets than even their parents may have, Family Week and similar events around the country, such as Family Pride's Dads and Kids in the Desert event in Palm Springs, Calif., or Rainbow Families' annual conference in Minneapolis, provide a much-needed sense of belonging. Ember Cook, 21, of Columbia, Mo., credits attending Family Week as a young teen with helping her to finally accept her dad's homosexuality.

"I was raised as a Mormon," she says, "and the church was the only thing I knew from my first breath. When my dad came out, it wasn't like anyone was saying 'Yay--thumbs up for you.' And I was ashamed. I loved my dad but [thought] he was going to hell. Even my supposed friends said that."

Cook had no desire to go with her father and younger sister to Provincetown. "I was completely dreading it. We're going to have to talk about our feelings, I thought. How lame." But when the reticent teen arrived, she says, she was amazed at how accepting other kids were of their parents. "Seeing others deal with this differently made me start to think that maybe this isn't the end of the world. Maybe my dad's not wrong, and the church is."

The combination of education and outreach with regular kid activities is partly what has made the event so uniquely helpful, Cook says. "Here, they give you an outlet to talk with people in the same situation, [and then] you can go see a movie, go swimming, talk about how school was for you. You could make regular friends with people who were cool about it, who weren't going to ask, 'How are you going to reconcile this with God?'"

Karen Bauman of Duluth, Minn., agrees. The lesbian mother of a 5-year-old, she says that she values Rainbow Families' Twin Cities conference less

for its information on being a lesbian parent than that on just being a parent, period. "Gay parents can be out of the larger loop because of cultural differences," she says. "So connecting with other queer parents is so helpful." Bauman recently started a smaller local chapter of Rainbow Families, which now has nine families as members, in an attempt to give Duluth parents a regular outlet--rather than just once a year.

Unfortunately, Family Week and other gatherings aren't easily accessible to everyone. Gelnaw acknowledges that Family Pride has made few inroads in the South and Pacific Northwest and says the Midwest has been a problem. "It's hard when there's no infrastructure" for reaching queer parents, she says. Additionally, the hefty price tag of attending the P-town gathering (it can cost thousands to bring a family with kids, once air travel is included') keeps many families from attending. And although regional events like the Twin Cities one are incredibly well-attended--a whopping 1,100-plus people attended Rainbow Families' blowout last February, and Rainbow Families Wisconsin has a number of events planned every year--few states have groups that are sufficiently organized to reach a large segment of the gay parent population.

Still, for those who manage to attend, it can be a life-altering experience. Thirty-one-year-old Abigail Garner, daughter of a gay dad and author of the forthcoming book Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is, says her three trips to Family Week reminded her of her "queer heritage."

As an adult, Garner wasn't sure she belonged at gay family gatherings anymore. But once she went and hung out with other adult children of gay parents, she felt that "I had met long-lost brothers and sisters. And because of that, I started to realize what parts of me were a result of coming from a gay family.... It made me realize that we have a queer heritage to protect and to pass on." It reminded her, Garner says, that she still belongs to the community.

Howey is the author of Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods--My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine.