The first ComingOutInfo: how do we become parents?
The first IComingOutInfo became a very important event, the consequences of which, as we do hope, will affect not only LGBT community in St. Petersburg   but our society at large - if there should be a baby-boom among St. Petersburg gays and lesbians and the sociologists would speculate as to why and how come, you and I will know the answer.

Joking apart, however, everybody that came to the event has shown that the issue of parenthood and the questions as to how one would have a baby in a homosexual family are very important to us. The room with a maximum 100-persons capacity was filled to brim, and the experts occupied a tiny space surrounded by guests on all sides. According to our estimates, nearly 150 people have joined our event. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough chairs, but the attendees weren’t a bit shy and made room for themselves on tabletops and directly on stage. And so this is how it was, indeed, the more, the merrier. Now don’t let anybody tell me or any other LGBT person, that we can’t have kids. Oh, yes, we can. It may be more difficult to accomplish for us as compared to heterosexual couples, but we can, nevertheless. And we can also consider adoption options. And, what’s most important, we not only can, we really want to.

We wee, as most of our audience, I’m sure, were truly impressed with the level of knowledge of our invited experts Valentina and Alexandra, who managed to pack maximum of information on themes ranging from artificial fertilization to adoption, having also focused the attention of potential moms and dads on certain important aspects of these procedures. What’s important - our experts imparted their own experience as well as the feedback from people they know and alerted the audience of pitfalls that might be encountered on the way to happy parenthood. The experts were truly informative, capturing the audience’s attention for over two hours, and now and then would throw in a joke or a humorous remark. All this information has been recorded. You can download the audio recording as well as the presentation on adoption/adopting family/foster family and the price list of reproductive medicine services in the clinics of St. Petersburg from our site (below).

Valentina and Alexandra have also offered to answer the remaining questions electronically. ComingOut is planning to hold a series of seminars and training sessions on more specific topics concerning parenthood: preparing for pregnancy, issue of motherhood/fatherhood, clinics, legal issues, etc. To plan and prepare these sessions, we need your request. We are also considering to conduct seminars and training sessions in other cities. Please write to us: Valentina (reproductive medicine issues) at valvl@list.ru, Alexandra (foster care/adopting family/adoption) at sasha411@yandex.ru

Finally, we would like to thank everybody for coming to the seminar on behalf of ComingOut. We were happy to see so much enthusiasm and interest. Not only the first InfoVykhod  was a success, it became a milestone in our community’s life and produced so much interest. We have been offered lots of new topics to discuss in the future. So, there’s a lot of work ahead of us. A work we so much enjoy.

Audio recording, ComingOutInfo seminar “Parents”

InfoVyhod - roditeli part1

Infovyhod roditeli part2

InfoVyhod - roditeli part 3

InfoVyhod - roditeli part4

InfoVyhod - roditeli part 5

InfoVyhod - roditeli part 6

InfoVyhod - roditeli part 7

The list of required tests, clinics in St. Petersburg, the cost of their services as well as useful information sites:  Kliniki pitera_tseny
Presentation on foster family/foster care/adoption  priemnaya semya_opeka

The entire seminar was aired by Internet radio queerfm http://queerfm.ru/home.php

By Gulya Sultanova, Dima Chizhevsky