by E. J. Graff
But there’s a problem with those early studies on divorced lesbian and gay parents: their results can be—and have been—criticized on any number of grounds. Sometimes samples were small and recruited by word of mouth, and so are not “random”; sometimes the divorced lesbian moms lived with partners although the heterosexual moms did not (giving the lesbian moms’ kids the extra boost of their mothers’ happiness and an additional parent, two things that tend to improve kids’ well-being). Most important, while all those children were infants and toddlers—apparently when our sense of gender, sex role, and sexual orientation are forged—they did have parents of both sexes. And so these studies still do not answer our main question: do children need parents of both sexes to grow up okay? The only way to answer the question accurately, it seems, is by looking at children who have been raised, since birth, by two parents of one sex.
How lesbians and gay men become parents, 2: the “gayby” boom Which brings us to the second wave of research on children who grow up with lesbian or gay male parents: research on the children of the lesbian and gay baby boom. This boomlet is hard to measure, since many parents hesitate to identify themselves as lesbian or gay for fear of losing their kids. But everyone within the community has noticed that this boom is growing dramatically: more and more, lesbians and gay men are starting families after settling down with partners of the same sex.
The boom started among lesbians, since women have the more complicated equipment right there at home, in a handy duplicate set. It can be dated to the mid-1980s, when the generation who’d “come out” in the 1970s—a time heady with rhetoric about pride—started hearing their biological alarm clocks ticking and decided to start families. When lesbian couples in Boston and San Francisco were turned down by mainstream medical providers unwilling to inseminate women who weren’t legally married, those communities launched donor insemination (DI) programs catering to women unsupervised by men. Thousands have gone through their doors; thousands of others have made babies without medical help, asking a brother or friend to donate. In cities with large lesbian populations—like Boston, San Francisco, London, and New York—some HIV-negative gay men report wearily that they’ve been asked up to a dozen times to be donor dads. Some don’t mind the role: as a kind of thank-you for lesbian help during the AIDS crisis, one group of British gay men has an informal network that helps lesbians find donors who match their hoped-for specs.
The consequence: parents’ contingents head the latest lesbian and gay pride parades, and gay havens like Provincetown or Park Slope are teeming with paired moms or dads strapped to papooses or pushing strollers. Younger women, who are more likely to “come out” without the dour belief that being gay means forgoing other life hopes, are especially likely to plan for and conceive babies once they pair up. For lesbians and gay men who want to “coparent,” or share the efforts of conceiving and rearing a child with someone of the other sex, there are Internet lists, websites, gay community center “maybe baby” groups, and matchmaking services. What’s fascinating is that those looking for coparents sound much more like prospective partners in “traditional” matches than in twentieth-century marriages: their ads seek someone stable and reliable, with compatible genes (i.e., Jewish but no Tay-Sachs), temperament, and values. In other words, the way these families are formed sounds more like the matchmaking between Tevye and Golde than Mike and Carol Brady.
Finally, some adopt. Both gay men and infertile lesbians (like their heterosexual sisters) are adopting through social service agencies or privately. Lately gay men, in particular, have been adopting in larger and larger numbers, as they, too, see that it’s possible—that their life hopes were not dashed by the fact that they’re gay. Depending on where they live, some couples adopt jointly; others do so as sole legal parent and later add the other parent, if their state allows. The trend is so ubiquitous in some circles that recently I ran into an old friend who—after realizing how long Madeline and I had been together—blurted out: So do you two have a Chinese baby named Lily yet? (We do not.)
XX, XX/XX, XX/XY: same difference? It is on the first wave of these children—the children born to the early lesbian baby boom, from the mid-1980s to today—that the latest research is being done. And because our era’s questions about sex and gender are so hard to answer, a surprising amount of the research is being done by nongay psychologists and sociologists who’ve realized that these children are a natural way to learn whether kids do need an adult’s XY chromosomes at home. Examining lesbian families allows people to ask basic and provocative questions about what children need, about masculinity and femininity, about trucks and Barbies, about sensitivity and discipline, about competence and kindness. Here there is no need to adjust the results for one group’s abrupt loss of income or grief over the family’s shattering: these children can fairly be compared to children in the general population. And chastened by earlier public criticism over research methodologies, these new researchers are being far more meticulous in a variety of ways to ensure that their results are valid.
With all this care, studies of the lesbians’ DI kids show much the same things as the studies of the kids whose parents divorced: kids raised by two moms and kids raised by a mom and dad turn out just as well, on every conceivable measure. For instance, lesbians’ preschool children form “secure attachments” to both moms; have neither more nor fewer emotional problems or “separation distress”; show no differences in measures of social competence, behavior problems, gender identity, sex-role behavior (i.e., whether girls like the toys, characters, and games that girls usually like, and boys like those of boys); and are equally likely to see themselves as sociable or as enjoying attention. There is, however, a little variety among the results—as you’d expect from a discipline that looks at people instead of, say, H2SO4. For instance, one study found that children of lesbian parents saw themselves as less aggressive and more likable than children of single heterosexual moms; that doesn’t show up in the other studies. Another study found that lesbians’ kids reported both more symptoms of stress and a greater sense of well-being than those of comparable straight moms: in other words, the lesbians’ children more often said they were angry, scared, upset—and also said more often that they were joyful, content, and comfortable with themselves. Is that because having two moms brings you more stress and more happiness; or does being around two women give you more practice talking about your feelings; or can this not be generalized, since it hasn’t been tested in any other research? In either case, neither effect can be considered a problem—unless you’re dedicated to turning out only unflappable silent types.
Since so much of today’s pro-family rhetoric insists that children need two bio-parents, we might wonder whether the very fact of having only one biological parent handicaps those children in any way. Probably not—not only have a good large proportion of children in history grown up with just one biological parent, but also most studies of DI children born to heterosexual parents show no extra (in fact, less) pathology or developmental problems. And yet some studies on lesbian moms go the extra mile and compare children born by DI to two women with children born by DI to one woman and one man. All the children, in other words, have only one bio-parent but two emotional parents involved with them from birth, parents who are comparable on other measures, with the only variable the nonbio-parent’s sex. Once again, results are a big yawn: researchers find no differences in cognitive, emotional, behavioral, or gender development. (The kids in these studies are no older than nine, so no one can yet measure their leanings in love.) Interestingly, all the children feel more strongly about their biomom and just about the same amount of warmth toward their second parent, whether a mom or a dad, even though the nonbio-moms spent more time with the kids than did the nonbio-dads—suggesting that neither gender nor time together, but rather gestation and suckling, may give youngsters that extra bond with mom.
The most consistent difference is one most women would predict: in aggregate, t
he “other mothers” get much more involved in the nitty-gritty of childrearing than do fathers. The co-moms score as having a “superior quality of interaction” (warmer, when rated by outsiders; more likely to be there when you need her, as rated by the children themselves) than either biodads or social dads, and they’re much more involved in practical childcare and day-to-day discipline. One study found that—possibly as a result of having that extra support—the lesbian biomoms are warmer and more involved with their children, and less likely to fight with their daughters, than the heterosexual biomoms; another study found that children with two moms were more “securely attached” to their parents than children with a mom and a dad. It’s particularly interesting that the children of lesbian moms are not scoring any higher on any of these measures of well-being: perhaps so long as you have two reliable parents, it doesn’t really matter exactly how involved, day to day, the two of them are—so long as they’re there and they care.
Some people think only of sex when they think of same-sex couples—as if lesbians and gay men, simply by being in the same room, expose children to unseemly urges. But most contemporary parents—of the same or different sexes—go to extreme lengths to keep their sex life private and are more at risk of being too exhausted for sex than of having the kids walk in. Some people are edgy about the idea that children will grow up in a household where Mom and Mom cuddle in the family room while everyone’s watching The Lion King. But if you remember seeing your parents hug and kiss affectionately after a day apart, you’re lucky: warmth is good for children. And that’s proving to be true whether the parents are the same or different sexes.
In other words, the father-researchers and the lesbian-mother researchers are finding the same thing. What’s key about a second parent is not sex—either the sex they are or the sex they have—but behavior toward the children. A warm (read: caring, in whatever way they show it) parent turns out a happier and better-adjusted child than does an unkind (read: cruel, alcoholic, arbitrarily ridiculing) parent.
And there’s an even stronger result: when parents are more happily mated, share household tasks more equally, and find parenting less stressful, their children have fewer behavior problems and a greater sense of well-being. The parents’ behavior toward each other, in other words, matters a great deal: happy parents raise happy children. Which makes sense: we’ve all seen—whether from being a child or knowing a child—how excruciatingly responsive children are to adults’ emotions. Put children in a room where the adults are at swords’ points, and—even if everyone’s perfectly well-behaved—infants wail, toddlers throw tantrums, older children grow sullen or silent or aggressive. Conflict and stress are hard on kids, and harmony is good. To put it differently, how households are run affects children more than who runs them.
Or is it too soon to draw that conclusion? As those fatherless children get older, will measurable differences show up in such things as “aggressiveness” or sexual orientation? Reading those who insist it will, I’m surprised to discover that—since they have no research or statistics on their side—they keep lapsing into the mantra that it’s “common sense” that every child needs a mother and a father.
But their sense and my sense are not held in common. Really, how could you group all “fathers” or “mothers” together as if they were the same? If there are “innate” biological differences between men and women, there are also “innate” variations among men and women: just as one father is five foot tall and another six foot six, so one father is mild and another quick with the belt. What does my tough little mother—who as a tiny thing beat up the boys on her Brooklyn block, who was for years the mayor of our town, who loves nothing better than a political fight—have in common with yours, besides the fact that yours and mine (probably) bore us, fed and clothed us, and launched us into adulthood, and perhaps that you are also endlessly proud of your mother’s strengths and sometimes frustrated by her flaws? What does my father—who diapered and doted on me, who insisted I aim high, whose sarcasm can still make me wince—have in common with the junkie that my (heterosexual) friend Susan called a dad, or the kindly and mild-mannered guy who raised my (heterosexual) friend Laura, or the battered Holocaust survivor who fathered my (heterosexual) friend Jon? What do any of our late twentieth-century dads have in common with Roman aristocrats who refused to let their sons see their mothers, or the tenth-century father who committed his youngest at age three to the local monastery for life, or the twentieth-century Japanese salaryman who briefly stops home to sleep? What do 1950s mothers who fed their babies on a strict schedule have in common with Yucatan or Japanese mothers who believe the child must never cry or be put down? The idea that one XX and one XY per roof could possibly have the same effect across all this personal, historical, and cultural variety is simply magical thinking.
And so, as necessary as they may be for our era’s public debate, perhaps all these “measurements” are beside the point—something like the exceedingly careful Harvard study I have on my desk of “anthropometric” data on “cephalic index, length-height index, nasal index” in “Negro” and “Negro-White” families done in the late 1930s, in which teensy-weensy differences in head size or hair nappiness “prove” that children born to mixed-race parents are (a) inferior or (b) just fine, depending on the researchers’ point of view. Perhaps having two parents of one sex is something like having parents who are both doctors or janitors, Republicans or Baptists: you may grow up with a worldview slanted by the fact that your parents share many experiences and points of view, but you still benefit from the variety in their personalities and histories, their complementary weaknesses and strengths, their love or lack of it—in other words, from the “two-parent” advantage. But who ever said that every pair of parents must be precisely the same? This can be a hard concept for those of us who were raised by one mother and one father, to whom we are still passionately attached—whether with love and gratitude, frustration and anger, or all of the above. But why shouldn’t children feel strongly about whoever does the real, daily work of making their lunches, managing their crankiness, and insisting they can and will learn algebra?
Of course children need to know a wide variety of women and men, to learn how many ways there are to be human. Lesbian and gay parents, particularly sensitive to the charge that their children might grow up warped by not knowing someone of the other sex, often go out of their way to compensate for that cultural paranoia. One study finds that, like children of heterosexual parents, children of lesbian mothers usually stay in touch with grandparents, aunts and uncles, and other adult family friends—giving them more models than their parental units. And many lesbian families make sure they bring in a gay or straight “godfather,” or gay men a lesbian or straight “godmother,” who’ll widen the child’s world in more ways than just gender modeling. These strategies are hardly new. Parents and communities have long found ways to help children stay involved with role models of all kinds, whether or not both sexes live in that particular home: whether formally, by “fostering out,” handing a kid over to a nanny, sending him to military school, or requiring certain duties of the godparents; or informally, as when an uncle plays basketball with his widowed sister’s sons, or a much older half-sister raises the youngest after their parents are dead, gone, or overwhelmed. If such variety were detrimental, if “maleness” or “femaleness” are so fragile as to require daily observation to learn—and as important as many commentators insist—how could those qualities have survived?
Fear of fathers: or, won’t gay men abuse children? One concern that springs quickly to mind when people talk about gay parents is rooted in the cultural confusion between homosexuality and pedophilia: are two dads more likely to molest their child?
What’s true is that it is men, far more often than women, who sexually abuse children. If you open your newspaper, you will almost certainly find an example like one that’s in mine, this spring of 1998: a report of a male high school soccer coach who, from 197
3 to 1997, never went six months without either seducing or raping at least one of his under aged athletes (but since his athletes were girls, his superiors object that his fifteen-year prison sentence is too long). Another article, about a South African epidemic of child rape, describes police heading out to round up dozens of accused men at a time—men who’ve raped girls ages two to twelve.
Gay men are men, and so, in roughly the same proportions as do heterosexual men, some gay men abuse children physically or sexually. About 90 percent of substantiated child sexual abuse is by men—almost always by men who are married, have girlfriends, or otherwise identify or behave as heterosexual. Usually that man is someone within the family. A 1998 study of American adolescent boys found that one in eight had been abused—most physically, some sexually—and that among those who were sexually abused, 45 percent reported their abuser was a family member. In a 1994 study of all the sexually molested children examined at Denver Children’s Hospital during one calendar year, the abusers of eight out often girls and three out of four boys were either men who were involved with the children’s mothers, or some other family member; only one of fifty boys was molested by a gay man. That puts the percentage of child molesters who identify as heterosexual at 97 percent, roughly their proportion in the population. But while no newspaper headline ever reads “heterosexual man kills wife, children, and self”—heterosexual being the default assumption, and murder of a wife or ex-wife depressingly common—adding the word “gay” to a particular crime adds enough shock value to sell papers.