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Welcome to the Burgdorf family's Web site! You'll find here a lot of information about us, as well as notes on GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) history and links to various GLBT resources. This particular page will give you some basic background information about us, assuming that you're sufficiently interested to actually read it!
(This page was last updated in late August of 2008.)
The Burgdorf family consists of me (Darryl), Lydia Joy (my wife), Cassandra, Carl and Deirdre (our kids). We live in Omaha, Nebraska, with a cat (Jack), a guinea pig (Dizzy), a rat (Speedy), a parakeet (Margarita), four gerbils (George, Digger, Angelina and another female who somehow never actually got named), and a leopard gecko (Asagi Yamori). The kids are in tenth, seventh and sixth grades, respectively. (None of the pets are currently attending school.) Joy and I are of course married, though ours is not exactly a "conventional" relationship. It is, in fact, what's known as a "mixed-orientation marriage," which is to say that she's straight and I'm gay. But we'll get back to that shortly. First, the important stuff.
Our eldest daughter, Cassandra Danielle, was born on September 4, 1993. Carl Thomas, her brother, was born on November 27, 1995. Our third child, Deirdre Anne, was born on April 21, 1997.
Cassandra is 14, and a sophomore in high school. She's extremely focused and perfectionistic. She's in JROTC, plays flute in the school marching band and at church, and takes a variety of honors classes. She earned her black belt in taekwondo in 2006, and then began training in judo; she now meets all the requirements, save for age, for a brown belt in judo. She writes and sketches almost constantly. (Some of her poetry can be found here, and a special "free form" poem can be found here. She's also allowed us to post one of her short stories, Fledgling.) An avid reader, she is particularly fond of fantasy, especially anything involving dragons. She is very interested in theater work, both on stage and behind the scenes, and plans to major in stagecraft in college.
Cassandra has been involved for several years, now, as well, in GLBT activism, including with her school's GSA, and attends a local GLBT youth support group. She chose the occasion of her 13th birthday, in September of 2006, to officially out herself as a lesbian.
Carl is 12, and is in seventh grade. He enjoys riding his bike and playing soccer and chess. (He's been playing soccer either at school or through the YMCA since first grade.) He plays the baritone horn (aka euphonium) in school and in the Omaha Area Youth Orchestra. He reads, though not as fanatically as his big sister. He enjoys both fantasy and SF, particularly if the stories have a military bent. He's quite bright, especially in math; in fact, he's often far too bright for his own good. He's also very unfocused, though, and all too often willing to get by with the least amount of work possible. At times we think he could be a poster child for Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), though for the record, he's made great strides in dealing with it over the past couple of years, and his performance at school and his behavior at home have both been improved significantly. He also loves finding loopholes in instructions. We sometimes joke that he'll eventually become intimately familiar with the U.S. criminal justice system, though whether as a defense attorney or as a convict remains to be seen. He loves computer games and cartoons, and has an almost encyclopedic retention of related trivia, with which he will often regale those around him.
Finally, Deirdre (a.k.a. "Mouse" or "Deedee") is 11, and is in sixth grade. She's been quite active for several years now in Girl Scouts, and is much more of a "social butterfly" than anyone else in the family. She's also much more "girly" (Cassandra's term) than her big sister. She plays with stuffed animals and dolls, babysits, and doesn't mind wearing the sort of frilly, flowery clothes in which her sister wouldn't be caught dead. At the same time, though, she's enough of a tomboy that she has no trouble keeping up with her brother and his friends. She's also already a major flirt, and excels at "wrapping people around her little finger."
And now, on to the adults.
I was born in Rochester, New York, but grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. I spent five years in the '80s in the United States Air Farce, two of them at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Mississippi, and three at Rhein-Main AB in Frankfurt, Germany. When I returned to civilian life, I settled initially in the San Francisco Bay area, but moved to Omaha in 1991. Joy grew up on the east coast, spending much of her childhood in the Washington DC area. She obtained unusually divergent degrees from the University of Maryland in art education and mathematics. She moved to Omaha in 1986.
We met on June 21, 1991, only a few days after I arrived in Omaha. A year later, on June 12, 1992, we were married.
It was after almost a decade of marriage that I came out to her, having finally realized that I was gay. Things were rough for a while, but we are, to abuse a cliche, "in a much better place now." We've both become active in the Omaha GLBT community, and participate in PFLAG/GLSEN speakers' panels and other educational outreach events. As well, we've been featured in both local and national media stories, as our situation became "newsworthy" after New Jersey Governor James McGreevey came out as a gay man with a wife and children in 2004, and again after Rev. Ted Haggard was outed in 2006.
(Elsewhere on our site, you can find my own account of just how I finally came to realize that I'm gay, Joy's account of how she eventually came to terms with that realization, and a copy of the newspaper article which was published locally about us.)
Of course, our decision to be open and public about the nature of our relationship hasn't been without its downsides. Some of the friends we had prior to my coming out have drifted away. (In a few cases, to say they "drifted" is an understatement.) The kids lost a few friends, as well, whose parents no longer wanted their children associating with ours, and Carl, in particular, endured a fair amount of taunting from classmates, before we moved the kids from Catholic to public schools. But we've been fortunate in that the negative reaction has been relatively low-key. And we have made many new friends in the past few years, who actually appreciate us for who we are, rather than for who they think we ought to be.
I've dated a few men over the past couple of years, most rather casually. To date, though, I still haven't found "the right guy," and to be honest, I'm not really looking all that hard. Life's just too busy. So we'll see what we see.
Joy has worked in the accounting department of the Omaha World-Herald (our local newspaper) since 2003. I went back to work in retail in 2001, when the income from my own briefly-successful business venture, Affordable Web Space Design, tapered off. More recently, I decided to return to the "9 to 5" world, and am now working as an administrative assistant at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. I'm also taking classes there, with the goal of finally obtaining a long-overdue degree in communications.
Joy and I both read a great deal. There are well over a thousand books in our home. We dabble in "literature," especially Shakespeare's plays, and often enjoy non-fiction, especially of a political bent. But the bulk of our reading isn't quite so reputable. In fact, we both have rather "geekish" tastes, and have been fans of science fiction and fantasy books and movies for many years. Joy favors "Golden Age" and military SF and light fantasy, where I tend towards "hard" (but not necessarily military) SF, darker fantasy, and occasionally, horror. Joy also has a fondness for mysteries, and we both have a weakness for British humor.
We have rather eclectic musical tastes; in fact, between the two of us, there's hardly any style of music we won't listen to. I also sing with the River City Mixed Chorus, Omaha's GALA chorus.
I've never been much of a sports fan, but Joy enjoys baseball. We both (and the kids, too, for that matter) enjoy computer games, especially MMORPGs. Joy typically has several needlework or "crazy quilt" projects in progress at any given time, as well.
Joy was raised Roman Catholic, and until late 2005, still attended mass weekly. However, after we came out as a mixed-orientation couple, she felt more and more ostracized by those at the church she was attending, and found her own feelings and beliefs to be increasingly at odds with the Church's teachings. The "last straw" was a document released by the Vatican in November of 2005, which stated that homosexuals and those who support "gay culture" have no place in the Church's ministry. The declaration wasn't surprising, but was nonetheless disappointing, and forced her to the realization that it was finally time to leave the Church in which she'd grown up. (A copy of the letter she wrote to the Archbishop of Omaha, explaining her decision, can be found here.) Though she's now officially left the Roman Catholic Church, she hasn't given up on God. In fact, her faith now is stronger than it's been in years, and she's becoming very active in the Metropolitan Community Church here in Omaha.
As for me, I was raised as a Presbyterian, and for quite a while took the matter very seriously, but finally admitted to myself in the early 1980s that I didn't really accept any more the view of the world portrayed by Christianity. I'm not precisely an atheist, but neither do I believe in any sort of "personal deity."
Politically, we're moderates, with libertarian leanings. Joy grew up a Republican, and still has a slightly conservative bent. My own views have shifted several times over the years, though I'm currently back to leaning more toward the liberal end of the spectrum.
Well, there you have it. "Us in a nutshell."