There are now a number
of books written for gay men and lesbians on parenthood.  You could fill more
than a shelf with titles like The Gay and Lesbian Parenting Book, Primer
for Queer Parents, The Essential Guide to Lesbian Conception, Pregnancy
and Birth.  Throw in another shelf or two for chronicles of personal
experiences like The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to
go Get Pregnant, Getting Simon:  Two Gay Doctors’ Journey to Fatherhood,
and The Other Mother.  Round out your collection with books written
exclusively for young children with gay or lesbian parents, including not only
the infamous Heather has Two Mommies, but also Daddy’s Roommate, Zach’s
Story, and ABC: A Family Alphabet Book.  There are even a few books
for adolescents with similar themes, among them Jack and Holly’s
Secret.  You get the idea.  One might honestly wonder if there is anything
left to be said about gay and lesbian parents and their children.  It turns
out, there is.

Families Like Mine begins to
fill in a gap that exists within the literature:  how now-young adults describe
their experience of growing up in LGBT families. Author Abigail Garner is typical
of the people she writes about.  She learned that her father was gay when she
was five years old.  As an adult, she has worked as an advocate for LGBT
families, and with her website (www.familieslikemine.com),
appearances on the lecture circuit, published articles (the most famous one
probably being the op-ed piece that appeared in Newsweek), and now this book,
she is the all but official spokesperson of children with gay parents.  Our
children could not ask for a better spokesperson.  (Full disclosure:  I am a
lesbian mother, and I have met Abigail.  We both spoke at a reading in Provincetown
one summer during the annual Family Pride Week.)

Families like Mine examines
the experience of growing up with LGBT parents.  Garner has interviewed over
fifty young adults who grew up in LBGT-headed families, and includes many
quotations from these young people. She probes their experiences, and their
interpretations of their experiences, in a thoughtful and thought-provoking
way.  The first thing most people think of, in terms of children with gay
parents, is the issue of teasing.  Garner addresses this issue, but she goes
deeper.  She also talks about the more subtle effects of growing up with gay
parents.  For example, a number of her participants speak about feeling the
pressure to be perfect; an unintentional by-product of feeling like everyone is
judging the fitness of their parents by how well the children turn out.  Any
failures or shortcomings will likely be ascribed to their parents’ sexuality,
and they know it. 

Garner delightfully skewers the
typical newspaper article that appears about children with gay or lesbian
parents:

"It starts out with a profile
of a typical child.  Like any five-year-old, Mia is a little nervous about
her first day of kindergarten.  The article will mention a quintessential
family activity in a gender-neutral way.  Around the dinner table her
parents are taking turns telling Mia about all the exciting things she will get
to do at school.  Then comes the kicker:  Just the typical all-American family
except for one thing–her parents are lesbians." (p. 22)

She goes on to note that the incessant positive spin that
such articles represent can be isolating, even burdensome, to children in LBGT
families.  "…[I]t becomes easy to overlook that not all children of LGBT
parents have a circle of supportive friends, are class president, and lettering
in three sports." (p. 22). This book allows these children to talk about
their real lives, not the sanitized versions.

Children go through a coming out
process too, and one of the skills they must learn is becoming more selective
in whom they choose to tell about their family.  Many of them speak about the
high school years as a time of gradually coming out of the closet themselves,
and learning the lesson that losing the friendship of someone who would reject
them for their parents’ sexuality was not much of a loss.  As Garner herself
recounts, after asking her father and his partner to "straighten up"
for a party she hosted in high school, "I began to understand for myself
that if people could not accept my family, I probably did not want to be
friends with them." (p. 120)

Children also often have to deal
with homophobic family members, some of whom are simply uncomfortable around
the gay parent and some who actively reject him or her.  She offers advice on
how to deal with homophobic family members, and counsels patience as
individuals come to terms with their family member’s sexuality.

I personally found two of the later
chapters the most interesting.  One, entitled Second Generation:  Queer Kids of
LBGT Parents, discusses the scrutiny that children feel about their own
sexuality.  Dan Cherubin, founder of Second Generation, an organization for gay
young people with gay parents, puts it succinctly: "When queer parents
want to highlight well adjusted children to prove how normal our families are, ‘well
adjusted’ is often a euphemism for ‘straight.’" (p. 168).  Garner points
out that, once people learn she has a gay father, she is often asked about her
own sexual orientation.  Her interpretation, which I believe is correct, is
that people use that as a litmus test.  If she is straight, then her father did
an adequate job raising her.  If she is not, she has been unfairly influenced,
brainwashed, or damaged in some way.  It is not only the straight world that
makes such assumptions. Garner points out that gay parents, too, sometimes use
the same litmus test, unwittingly putting subtle pressure on their children by
showing a little too much pleasure at their interest in members of the opposite
sex, for example.  Hard as it may be to believe, some gay parents are dismayed
when their own children come out as gay.  Homophobia runs deep.

My other favorite chapter, Tourists at Home: 
Straight Kids in Queer Culture, deals with how children who have grown up in
the gay community maintain their connection with it as straight adults, and how
they become more integrated into the straight community.  "’I think that
it’s hard for both the queer community and the straight community to know what
to do with us,’ says Orson, who is heterosexual.  ‘What are we part of?  Are we
part of the queer community?  Are we part of the straight community?… I think
that maybe it’s a little easier for second generation people to feel welcomed
into the community.’" (p. 199).  Garner recounts the experience of one
son, Arthur, who was not able to attend a women’s music festival with his
mothers because boys over the age of ten were not allowed (in order to keep the
festival a "women-only event"), and how this made him feel shut out
of the community he had always felt was his own. 

At some points in the book Garner
addresses parents, and at other times she is speaking to the children.  She has
a list of resources, including books, support groups, and web sites, on
interest to both parents and children.  The book will, of course, give straight
people plenty to think about, in terms of exposing them to issues that must
never have occurred to them.  More importantly, it gives us gay parents plenty
to think about, and givers voice to our children’s experience.  I plan to give
it to my daughters, when they are a bit older.  Then I will listen to what they
say.

 

© 2005 Elizabeth O’Connor

 

Elizabeth
O’Connor, Ph.D. is co-author with Suzanne Johnson of For Lesbian Parents
(Guilford,
2001) and The Gay Baby Boom: The Psychology of Gay Parenthood (NYU
Press, 2002).

Categories: Relationships, Sexuality