Family Values 

Rory and Frank* had a fairytale meeting in New York City, at a gay bar Rory's mother had dragged him to because it was across the street from their hotel. When Frank left his F.A.O. Schwartz bag by his seat, Rory, at his mother's insistence, followed Frank out to return it. Outside the club, Rory and Frank exchanged phone numbers and they began dating, eventually moving in together."My mother still just thinks that men in New York really know show tunes," says Rory.

Eventually, both came out to their parents and family, and not quite four years ago held a commitment ceremony in the backyard of their Elizabeth home. While their dog howled from the bedroom, they clasped hands by the fishpond and exchanged rings, one of which each now wears on his right hand, before a Unitarian minister and gathered family and friends.

When both recently entered their forties, with good jobs and good salaries, they felt they had some options to consider with the arrival of a stable and happy early middle age. Both loved to travel, so expensive and carefree trips overseas were an option. So was a beach house. So was a chance for Rory to go back to school and follow his dream of becoming a social worker.

What they really wanted was a child.

While gays of past generations lacked today's gay-parent role models (from Rosie to the two mommies down the street), more and more gay people are aware of the option. Due to changing attitudes and opportunities in society, gays are now less prone to end up in a wrongheaded attempt at married heterosexuality, and are in greater and greater numbers raising children within a co-parenting relationship with a same-sex partner.

Early in their relationship, Rory and Frank made it clear to one another that becoming a parent was something each wanted to pursue. "We are both maternal," says Rory. "We recognized that part of us and were attracted to that part of us."

Rory and Frank chose overseas adoption because they felt its labyrinthine legalities better protected them from losing custody of a child. Baby Mark had been cared for in an Eastern Europe orphanage that was built to house 200 children but held 250. Instead of a tub bath, he was hosed down with a water wand, and was so fearful of water that Frank observed three orphanage workers having to hold Mark down for his "bath" as the child kicked and screamed. At 15 months, Mark could not walk. Quiet and thin, with large brown eyes and an observant gaze, he did not even register on the percentiles for height and weight for a child his age.

The day Mark was adopted, Rory says, was "the most emotional day of my life, the most emotional day of both our lives."

Rory and Frank were the first gay couple their social worker had ever worked with as adoptive parents. They were open with her about their parenting arrangement, and have been equally forthright with everyone else involved in Mark's welfare. They say they have had no negative experiences in revealing their couplehood to caregivers, doctors, or fellow church members.

"At some point we're going to have a negative experience," says Frank. "But the way we've approached this is, we just think people look at you, and think, "Well, these are normal people.' You make a conscious effort to go forward into whatever situation that you are in and to not show that you're ashamed in any way. There's always a point where you have to say, "I'm not going to hide anymore.' But while you should stand up for who you are, you also have to make a choice. What's more important? Making a stand, or my child?"

"Daycare people have been unanimously positive and accepting," adds Rory. "I think people in that position would have to love kids. And because of that, they see two people who are available to be good, loving parents. They know we offer a home to a child who otherwise never would have had one."

Accepting is one thing; truly making Frank and Rory's household dynamics part of what is taught at the daycare is another.

"We have had to ask them to please make sure that when they're saying "mom and dad,' or "mama and papa,' that they're saying "mama and mama' and "papa and papa,' too. Because that's the way it is for us, and we need to make sure that that world is represented to our son."

Some parents at the daycare were uncertain about the two men raising a child. There were stares and silences. But "it's progressed to where they now recognize that we are good parents. We've changed their opinion," says Rory.

Even Rory's own mother was initially uncertain about her son and his partner becoming parents. "My mom is so Roman Catholic, so Irish, I think that her response sprang from that background and not from looking at us. But my mom is intelligent enough that she witnessed and watched and observed, and as she continued to be around us, and with us around all the nieces and nephews in our family, she thought, "Why not these two?' We won her over. Now she is ecstatic."

The desire for a child is hardly a need hidden in the heart of every gay man. Many of Frank and Rory's friends do not share the delight in the new arrival that family does.

"In a gay environment, almost none of your friends are going to have children," says Frank. No one in the couple's social circle has young children. "[Our friends] were turned off because we talk about the baby so much. You can almost see, as soon as the subject comes up, they are trying to fight making some sort of grimace."

Frank and Rory both think that while gay parents experience social disadvantages from those who do not accept homosexuality, in some ways homosexual people actually have advantages as parents.

"I think we as a couple are more sensitive," says Rory. "I think that's a positive that comes from being gay. We are more aware of the differences between people, and more accepting of these differences."

Frank and Rory plan to teach Mark about his Eastern European heritage. The three will celebrate a yearly "gotchaday" on the date that Mark was adopted. While birthdays will be celebrated with friends and family, gotchaday will be for just the three of them. While in Europe to adopt Mark, Frank purchased 16 gifts and toys from the area where Mark was born. The gifts have been hidden away to present to Mark on each of the next 16 gotchadays. "It will always be a reminder, every year, that this is where you are from," says Rory. "One day we'll all go there, when he is big enough to understand."

Mark, now aged 19 months, has gained eight pounds and grown an inch and a half in the four months since his adoption. His face has filled out so much that he is recognizable as the thin and quiet boy of four moths ago almost solely by his coloration. He can now walk, zipping through the house with the erratic speed only a nearly-two-year-old can attain. He has appeared at last on the percentiles for height and weight for his age. And to the relief of Rory and Frank, he now loves to take baths. "Especially with all his clothes on," says Rory.

"I never dreamed this would be as great as it was," says Frank.

Rory agrees. "It's all worth it. Whatever you go through, it's worth it when he laughs." The last decade has seen an increase in families like Frank and Rory's. Researchers now estimate that the total number of American children living with at least one gay parent ranges from six million to 14 million. But hard numbers about gay parents are hard to come by, as evidenced in the eight-million person gap in the estimated range. Gay people have reason for their reticence to be counted and studied -- ex-spouses have successfully used a former spouse's homosexuality to have the children removed by the court. For many gay parents, keeping their families safe has meant keeping their families in the closet.The closet is safer when negative stereotypes about homosexuals continue to saturate our culture: fears that they will molest children, that they will influence children to themselves become homosexual, that they will fail to provide them with role models of the opposite sex of the parent or parents, that gay-fathered sons will be effeminate and lesbian-mothered daughters overtly masculine.

Two states (Florida and New Hampshire) have even adopted laws that expressly bar lesbians and gay men from adopting children. Some states, like North Carolina, allow gays and lesbians to adopt, but only singly, not as co-parenting couples. The child does not legally belong to both. Legally, while Rory may change Marks' diapers and celebrate his birthdays, Mark is only Frank's child.

Mom and Mom (and Mom and Mom)

Together now for five and a half years, Sonja Austin and Beverly Mitzel are raising four children: two girls who live primarily with Sonja's former partner and part-time with Sonja and Beverly, Beverly's adopted son Jordan, and a fostered boy, Joseph, that Beverly hopes soon to adopt.

Beverly received both her boys through Lutheran Family Service's foster-to-adopt program, a service that matches medically fragile children with foster parents prepared to deal with the children's special needs. Children within programs such as this are largely unadoptable through mainstream adoption agencies -- unhealthy and usually from ethnic minorities, the children lack the mainstream, picket-fence appeal of healthy white babies. Beverly and Sonja's brood, three of which are black and the oldest of whom is only ten, have faced a brace of illnesses that would have discouraged all but the bravest and most giving of prospective parents.

Joseph, a plump and active boy of 3, has a rare gastrointestinal disorder affecting his body's ability to process waste, and he spent most of his first two years of life in the hospital. He had gone through six familieshis birth family, relatives, and several foster homesbefore coming to live with Sonja and Beverly on his second birthday. All of the children are drug and/or alcohol exposed. Some were exposed to a host of STD's, both in utero and during the birth process.

Aside from the children's medical problems, there are legal problems Beverly and Sonja must face, problems specific to parenting in a gay relationship. In North Carolina, same-sex couples cannot legally adopt together as co-parents. Since Jordan is legally only Beverly's, Sonja cannot sign Jordan's legally binding school forms. In the absence of domestic partner benefits and dual-parent adoption legislation, gay and lesbian co-parents must either develop extensive legal documentation delineating a medical "chain of command" in the event of a child's illness, or simply hope that such drastic measures won't be needed. This lack of shared power to authorize healthcare is made more worrisome to Beverly and Sonja because of the children's health problems. Should Beverly become unable to care for her adopted son, he would not necessarily remain with her partner Sonja -- an unheard-of consequence within a marriage.

Married couples have it easier when it comes to names, too. Both boys have the middle name of Austin, Sonja's last name, in an attempt to unify them as a family and tie them to Sonja in name. The women considered hyphenating the boys' last names, but are not yet comfortable in having Sonja change her last name, or legally changing all of their last names to mark them by name as a family unit.

Unlike Rory and Frank, neither Beverly nor Sonja had dreams of childrearing.

Beverly says she never envisioned herself as a mother "because I was a lesbian. I just never thought it was possible." She says she had no role models, "nothing to look at." Sonja concurs, saying it wasn't in her realm of possibility until, ten years ago, she and her former partner "saw that couple at church."

The "couple at church" Sonja and her former partner saw was a lesbian assistant pastor and her partner who were caring for an infant with full-blown AIDS. The baby was from a group of parentless HIV+ babies being treated at Duke University Medical Center, babies who were dying without knowing, even in their last days, the loving care that only a parent can provide. Social workers and clergy were mobilizing to find homes for these children, specifically seeking gay people to serve as foster parents. Gays are themselves a disenfranchised group, and so were the babies. Gays are themselves scourged by AIDS, and so were the babies. To all involved, it seemed a natural fit. "We got to know [the baby], and we were just enamored with him," says Sonja.

With seeing and holding and knowing this child, Sonja's worldview grew wide enough to admit an infant into the life of a lesbian woman, wide enough to allow a lesbian to assume the role of mother, even without the act of childbirth. Having found a role model, Sonja and her then-partner wanted a baby of their own. The girls arrived in their lives not long after that, and the two women raised them as co-parents.

After fifteen years together, five of those years spent raising the girls, the relationship ended. "We managed, even through the roughest times, to have a stable co-parenting relationship," says Sonja. "The kids are what matters."

Sonja had known Beverly socially, and the two women were good friends and attended the same church. Friendship deepened gradually into love, and the two women moved in together. They co-parent the girls, who spend equal amounts of time with both sets of moms. Beverly attends their school sports events with Sonja.

"People say, "You are one of the four moms!'" she says, "and we say, "Yes!'"

After barely a year together, Beverly and Sonja decided to make an addition to the family, fostering and eventually adopting a boy, Jordan. Joseph arrived two and a half years later.

The idea of parenthood, particularly adopting special-needs children, spread within the couple's church congregation and social group. Gay couples who had been considering adopting through the regular channels or becoming pregnant with donor sperm began instead to consider fostering a medically fragile child. At last count, four couples that are friends with Beverly and Sonja have adopted special-needs children.

These children face a future of greater acceptance than gay-parented kids of the previous generation.

"Within the past year I have felt much more acceptance," Beverly says. "People see us as the Brady Bunch. Two lesbian moms going out to eat with three black children and a white child. We were at Golden Corral the other day, and the cashier asked, "Are these all yours?' And I said, "Yes, but these three are adopted.' And she said, "No, really?'" Beverly laughs. "I felt really stupid! But the interest people have about us now is a healthy interest. I'm much more confident now referring to Sonja as my partner, and saying these are our children. You know, a family in today's society is very different. It's not necessarily male/female with 2.5 kids. There are caregivers. Grandparents with grandchildren. Foster children. We are not the only kind of "alternative' family. We never were."

When asked how motherhood makes her feel, Beverly thinks for a moment.

"Complete," she replies.

Son

When Gabe Hinceman was five years old, a group of women "came to the house to move me and my sister out of my dad's house." His mother, Concetta, sat him down and explained that they were leaving in part because "given the choice between men and women, she liked women more.

"I didn't really have any questions about it," he says. "I was like, well, all right, that's cool. I was always told that if I had any questions, to just ask."

Concetta was an out lesbian from Gabe's kindergarten days on. Later, when the family moved to Charlotte, Concetta would run a women's center, edit a lesbian newsletter, and play on an all-female, mostly-lesbian traveling rugby team called the Charlotte Harlots.

As he grew up, Gabe's mother's lesbian friends "really just became a big support group." At little league baseball games, he always had a cheering crowd of lesbians. Concetta and a group of lesbian friends, including more than a few Harlots, attended "every athletic event I ever participated in."

Despite Concetta's openness about her sexuality, Gabe was never teased or ridiculed -- until the social stakes were raised by the move to junior high. Close friends never made fun of him because "they all really liked my mom. To them, it was nothing really shocking." But those less close to Gabe and Concetta weren't so accepting.

The worst insult "of my life" directed at his mother's homosexuality was from a seventh-grade girlfriend whom Gabe had given his yearbook to sign at the end of the school year. "When I got it back, [she had written] stuff like, "you're gonna be a fag, your mom is gay'. It hurt me."

There was only one other negative incident, occurring at a local pizza parlor during Gabe's high school years. A group of older boys from a neighboring school started taunting him about his lesbian mother. Gabe's friends immediately leapt to his defense. "They were like, "What do you think you're doing, saying that! We'll beat your ass! He's a great guy, and if you met his mom you'd fuckin' love her!'"

Gabe says he has been profoundly affected by the love and support he received from Concetta's lesbian friends. He feels that his many older, mother-figure lesbian mentors, all friends or lovers of his mom, have given him insight into the female character, insight that most men lack.

"I've had quite a few surrogate moms in my life," says Gabe. "And if you were to ask anyone who knows me what was the greatest thing about me, they would say, "He understands women.'"

Gabe says this unique understanding has helped his ex-girlfriends to become "my best friends," even after the end of the relationship. "They hold me up there on the shelf with some of their best girlfriends. Here's a guy, someone from the opposite sex, who understands them the way a woman does."

As a child, Gabe spent time around the women's center his mother ran. There he saw "women who were being exposed to feminism, women who got beat up by their husbands, women who had nowhere to go but this place." He feels he received "more than a double dose" of feminist ideas from this exposure to a hidden side of women's lives. "The greatest thing I ever learned in my whole life, from being around so many women, is that women are looked down on as inferior. I never once bought that. If anything, I think the opposite. I think that if women ran things, we'd all be a lot more joyful."

Mom

At a family reunion, Aunt Mary Beth was pointed out to 21-year-old Carolyn Dempsey. You see Mary Beth over there? You don't want to be like her. An old maid. She's all alone. You don't want to be like that. She has nobody.

"I got the message loud and clear that as a female, I needed a man," she says. In college in the seventies she found one. Despite sexual feelings towards women, feelings that dated from the third grade, she married her sociology professor.

"Do I believe that I loved [my husband], and that I loved the men that I was with prior to him? Yes. Do I believe that I would have been happier had I followed my heart and [loved women]? Yes. Had I realized earlier that I am gay, I would have been much happier. I always kind of knew," she says, "but I am of an age where there were no gay role models."

In 1984 her son Eric was born.

When Eric was in elementary school, Carolyn's husband accepted a job in another state, returning home to Vermont every third weekend. At that stage of their marriage, "I needed that distance from him," she says. "He was very controlling and at that point in my life I was very comfortable with that."

A theatre major, Carolyn didn't do plays during her marriage because her husband "didn't want me to do [that] because [it] took too much time from him and the family."

Distance from her husband brought a chance for her to explore her identity more freely. She became active in women's groups. She joined a local Unitarian church. She started seeing a psychotherapist. She met a woman named Kelly and began a romantic and sexual relationship with her. "I fell in love. I think that happens to a lot of us. And then I knew."

She did not tell her son. Not in so many words.

"I never sat him down and said, "Eric, I'm a lesbian,'" she says. The family attended Pride parades and supported the gay community at local events. "I always knew people in the parades," says her son Eric. "I thought we were there to support friends."

Carolyn says that "Eric and my girlfriend in Vermont were very close. Kelly loved him, and he loved Kelly. But he thought we were really good friends."

Eric says he didn't really think much about his mother's sexual orientation, but didn't know if she was straight or gay. Carolyn had assumed he had known since fourth or fifth grade, around the time she began the relationship with Kelly. But when questioned, Eric says that he didn't learn for sure that his mom was gay until a Gay Bingo fundraising event two years ago, when Eric was a teenager. Eric was there with his mom, his girlfriend, and a family friend. The emcee asked everyone in the room to stand up, and then asked all the non-homosexual people to sit down. Eric and his girlfriend sat down. Carolyn remained standing.

Carolyn believes she had good reason for keeping the truth from Eric. "I was still married. I felt like I had to maintain a certain status quo until I was strong enough to get out."

During divorce proceedings, she was afraid that her then-husband would "pull out the lesbian card, and that kept me quiet. I saw what he did to his first wife to get custody."

"I still feel in many ways I have a dual life, and many of Eric's teachers might not have known," she says. But she feels she "never really did anything different as a parent." She does, however, believe that her homosexuality has powerfully affected her son.

"Eric was exposed to so many kinds of people, and labels were never placed on these people. Or on me. Eric's view of the world is so much broader and so much more accepting. Eric has opened the world for his friends in many ways. As a fifth grader, he would say to his friends, "My mom's friends are lesbians,' and then he would talk about it. He would make it OK. He doesn't go into situations looking for differences. He goes into situations saying, "Oh, wow, look at this new experience!'

"When Eric was in second grade," she continues, "there was a girl in his class who had Down Syndrome. She had difficulty communicating. Eric became her champion, her translator. He took the time to listen to her when the other kids were just too busy or too put off. Eric has always had a sensitivity that I haven't seen in a lot of other kids."

Carolyn, though now an out lesbian for nearly two years, regrets being closeted for most of her life, and does not always find understanding from today's generation.

"I went with friends to see the Indigo Girls. These women were younger than me. They were in their 30s and three were fresh out of college. And one of them was giving me a hard time about not coming out until I did -- "What do you mean, you couldn't come out? You either know or you don't!' And I got really angry, because it was different then, dammit! The women who were strong enough to come out made it a different place. I wasn't strong enough to be one of those people."

"I feel like I missed out," she says. "But I would not give up Eric for anything. He is the light of my heart."

Daughter

One day Michelle Morrison came home to a quiet house, empty of everyone but her mother, Phyllis. A few items of furniture were gone. The woman that had been living with Michelle and Phyllis was gone, too.

"I was like, "What's goin' on?' And that's when she decided to tell me."

The woman who had just moved out had been more to her mother than close friend and housemate.

Michelle's parents were married for only two years, divorcing while Phyllis was still pregnant with Michelle. Phyllis and her lover, each of whom had a daughter, had lived together six years longer than Michelle's parents were married.

Michelle and her "stepsister" had always suspected that their moms were gay. "We had our suspicions, but no confirmation. I did think about it. But it was just something that we accepted. It was just our life."

Michelle had been close to her mother's lover, but also jealous of her. "I had a very close relationship with my mother, very close. Closer than a lot of kids. At the time, she was competition. I was jealous because of her closeness with my mother. You could tell they loved each other."

Even after the end of the living arrangement, Michelle and her mother's ex-lover remain friends. Nearly 20 years later, "she is still in my life. She came to my house two weeks ago for dinner. She is like a stepmother [to me]."

Though from age 13 she knew her mother was gay, Michelle never told her school friends. "Not in North Carolina in 1985!" she says. "I . . .remember never having people spend the night because my mom and her lover were sleeping together. I also remember feeling I didn't have to hide it from my friends, from the close friends I had. I just don't remember it ever coming up with them."

Michelle's father died of cancer less than a year after Michelle's mother came out. Michelle thinks she would have benefited from having more male role models during adolescence, but "my mom always did as much as she could for me. She was both the mom and the dad. But [a lack of male role models in my life] has certainly affected my relationship with men. I wasn't used to being around males."

Michelle, now divorced, married a half-Italian, half-Jordanian Muslim man. While her mother had died, also of cancer, before Michelle's marriage, Michelle feared that her husband's conservative religious beliefs might get in the way of his treating her mother's memory with the respect Michelle felt it deserved.

"I tried to keep it from him, a little bit," she says. Her caution wasn't needed. Even after the secret came out, "he always talked about my mother with the utmost respect."

There was only one person she made a concerted effort to hide it from. "A guy. I was 15. I would hide pictures of my mom with women. If she had any gay symbols, I would hide them. Later I learned that this guy's mom was bi." She laughs. "She was friends with my mom, actually."

The Future

Charlotte psychologist Dr. Lisa Griffin has a female partner and is the mother of two children from a former marriage. Based on her own experiences as a mother and as a clinician both within and without the gay community, she predicts a future in which there will be "fewer families broken up because a gay person felt obliged to marry in order to adhere to societal pressures, and then, because of internal pressures to live an authentic life, had to come out to the family."

In the future, Griffin believes, partnered gay people will raise children together from the child's birth, less frequently raising children fractured by a coming-out and eventual divorce. With earlier identification, the days of the oops-honey-I'm-gay marriage and divorce seem to be numbered. Griffin feels gays and lesbians will be more and more likely to choose parenthood, "and be more free to do so, and more inspired to do so. There are role models now. Barriers to parenthood are being removed."

As gay couples together raise children from birth, and as gay-parented families are more mainstreamed, Griffin thinks that both heterosexual relationships and accompanying gender stereotypes could be transformed.

"The heterosexual world can learn a lot from [the example of] a flexible enough partnership that you can make up new rules to suit the two of you, rather than use the predefined roles of marriage. When you enter into a same-sex relationship, there are fewer gender-role expectations. . .It's much more likely to be a consciously chosen set of decisions that the couple makes. When children see that as their role model, they see that. . .growing up to be a woman doesn't necessarily mean that you are the one who cooks and cleans and does laundry and takes care of the kids. Or that growing up to be a man doesn't necessarily mean that you are the one who works and brings home the paycheck and mows the lawn and takes out the garbage."

Recent research and medical opinion seem to indicate that gay-parented children show significant differences from children raised in mother/father households: daughters of lesbians have higher self-esteem than daughters of straight women, and lesbian-raised sons are more caring and less aggressive.

Griffin thinks gay parents are uniquely positioned in society as agents of change in societal attitudes. "There is a handful of gay parents at any given school. And if those parents [are] visible to their children's friends, their children's friends grow up not having been in a gay family, but having seen that gay families can be happy and normal and do the things that every other family does. These kids may raise their own children differently, with a greater acceptance of different types of families.

Research on gay parents and their children is limited and does not yet express a body of decisive evidence, and, due to gay parents' fear of being outed and losing their kids, is still relatively scarce. But the inarguable day-to-day reality of present-day society is that gay and lesbian people are birthing, fostering, adopting, and raising children. Is the long-term well-being of those children best served by the parents' ability to conform to the heterosexual behavior model, or by the parents' ability to create a loving and nurturing home? As more gay parents allow clinicians the data they need to conduct studies, a clearer answer to this question will emerge.

Meanwhile, Beverly Mitzel and Sonja Austin have put in a request for another foster child.

This year's OutCharlotte festival will include a workshop called "The New Family: Parenting 101 for Queers," facilitated by Dr. Lisa Griffin. The workshop will be held on Saturday October 5, from from 2:30 to 4pm at the Carole A. Hoefener Center at 610 E. 7th Street. Children ages 10 and up can attend a simultaneous breakout session, facilitated by Rev. Mick Hinson of the Metropolitan Community Church, in which they can share their strategies for living in alternative families. Admission is free.