A proud mother creates a gay-friendly greeting card collection that goes mainstream.
A quick browse through the card aisle in your local supermarket, it’s hard not to notice the lack of gay-friendly greeting cards amongst the Hallmark-driven anniversary two-folds predominantly featuring straight couples.
Sandi Timberlake of San Diego, Calif., spent 15 years searching for elegant, same-sex sentiments to send to her son and his husband on special occasions. Finally, with a gentle nudge from him to just “create them yourself,” Timberlake set out to launch A Little to the Left in 2008.
Sandi Timberlake with her son Sean and his husband Paul
“I wanted to be able to send an anniversary card to my son and son-in-law that is more than an image of two turtles looking at each other and no sentiment inside,” explains Timberlake. “Why should the gay community be separated from the rest of society in even such a small element of life as this? And why should their mothers and fathers, grandparents, aunts and uncles and friends have to be separated as well?”
The line of greeting cards are targeted to LGBT couples, and designed with tasteful, elegant motifs that appeal to mainstream buyers, with themes that include same-sex weddings, anniversaries and holidays, as well as everyday occasions openly addressing same-sex relationships, offering gay-friendly prose to “son and son-in-law” and “daughter and daughter-in-law.”
“I want them to be so lovely, so simple, and so subtle that you pick them up because they are beautiful and notice later that it is a card with two women on the front or two men. It should be that simple,” says Timberlake.
On January 25, Timberlake’s cards were stocked on the shelves of the mega grocery store Albertsons in Palm Springs, Calif., with plans to soon expand to other stores in the region, and then hopefully, nationwide.
“My wish is to bring the gay community and the straight community into one community of people,” says Timberlake. “We all have events in our lives that we want to celebrate with our friends and families, and our sexual orientation should make no difference in these matters.”
