OverSampled is a project created by me, Abigail Garner, creator of FamiliesLikeMine.com and author of Families Like Mine:
Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is. Oversampled is an extension of the mission of FamiliesLikeMine.com, which is to decrease the invisibility of people with LGBT parents (i.e. “queerspawn”).

The word “oversampled” comes from research practices in academia, for which queerspawn are often recruited to determine how we “turn out” which then is supposed to determine if gay people should have the “right” to raise children. The questions involved in such research are not really about the whole picture of how we turn out, but rather, they focus on homophobic fears and/or sympathetic assumptions. These questions have to do with what genders we would consider having sex with, what genders we have actually had sex with, and if we are meeting traditional “norms” of what it means to be a “man” or a “woman.”

Understandably, few of us are clamoring to subject ourselves to what I call the “specimen mentality” — that everyone is entitled to scrutinize and judge us, and that no intrusive question is off-limits. With limited ways to “see” these kids in our society, the invisibility of grown children skews research and public perception by continually going back to the same voices to contextualize how we “turn out.” Many of my activist-oriented peers have participated in more than one of these interviews, and have been asked many more times to participate in interviews they turned down. Media echo this pattern of oversampling, when they are unable to locate kids of gay parents to go on record, and instead opt to approach already-interviewed kids reporters learned about from an earlier report by another media outlet.

While the number of queerspawn in the U.S. alone is estimated to be in the millions, the same tired questions are being asked to the same small group of “articulate” kids. There has been an oversampled few, speaking for an overlooked many.

Oversampled pulls together the voices of queerspawn on their own terms. Some are among the oversampled; others are the overlooked.
Combined, we are still underestimated.