Can Same-Sex Marriage Save Straight Marriage from Itself?

Last week, I published an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle about the Proposition 8 ruling. It's nice and short and topical, and I hope you'll go check it out and send it to friends and family who might benefit from reading it. However, that op-ed is derived from a much longer essay, which will appear in the anthology Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood, forthcoming in September 2011. I'm publishing that longer piece here, slightly updated, just because I can:

* * *

I was never a great friend of marriage. When I was growing up in a series of east coast and Midwestern suburbs in the 1970s and 80s, the institution of marriage seemed more like a gory roadside smash-up than the loving union of one man and one woman. And as I spent junior high school witnessing the disintegration of my family and of many of the families around me, I was also discovering that boys were boys and girls were girls, and boys who acted like girls were faggots.

You see, when I was a kid in Saginaw, Michigan, I made a horrible mistake: I chose to play the flute in my school band. I was the only boy to do so. And at first, I was just awful. There were twelve chairs, and for the first half of the first year, I was dead last. The girl flutists ignored me. The all-male drum section made it their habit to inflict on me the full range of junior-high-school torments, from tripping me up in gym class to writing “faggot” on my locker in magic marker to straight-up beat-downs. But I persisted in blowing the flute, that silvery phallus.

Do I sound like a rebel? A gender nonconformist? Don’t be too impressed. I just never got the memo. Eric Roeder would call my friend Jim Petee a “fag” and Jim would say, “I’m not a fag! Your’re a fag!” Then Eric would give Jim a push into the locker, and that would be that. But when Eric Roeder called me a fag, I would just shrug. What’s a fag? I wondered. I had no idea. I was just a kid, and so was Eric Roeder; I don’t think he really knew what a fag was either. I still got pushed into the locker, but, unlike Jim, I just didn’t see the problem with the whole “fag” thing.

And yet an undeniable menace lurked inside the word. Being called a “fag” meant that you were weak, an easy target….in short, a girl. But the word’s true menace, I now realize, arose from its inchoate intimation of sex. Real sex. Fucking. It was more than an insult. “Jerk” was an insult. “Fag” was a cage that boys built around other boys, one that was intended to stand between the alleged fag and true manhood. A boy in the cage would never be permitted to experience the glories of fucking. Instead, he would be fucked. Like a girl. My mistake, my fatal blind spot, was that I didn’t see the cage being built. I just wanted to play the flute; I liked the way it sounded and looked. In my 6th-grade naiveté, I didn’t realize that it was a girl’s instrument and that boys of my age should not play with girly things.

When I finally started to see the bars that divided me from everyone else, I fought back in two ways. First, I started to furiously practice the flute, two to three hours a day. And so one fateful Monday I zoomed past all the girls from last chair to first, and I held that first chair for the rest of my time in the band.

At roughly the same time, I challenged one of the asshole drummers to a fight. I went down in a hail of fists, of course. The next time someone called me a faggot, I threw myself into him as well, arms flailing. I lost that fight, too. In fact, I lost every single battle I was in that year—perhaps twelve in all. Of course I lost: I was a skinny kid who weighed in at a lower class than my opponents.

But ultimately, I won the war. Eric Roeder called me over to his kettledrum one day, like Fonzie calling Potsie and Richie into the bathroom that served as his “office.”

“Jeremy,” he said. “Why are you always trying to fight me?”

“Because you hassle me all the time,” I said, perhaps a bit sullenly.

“So you’re just trying to stand up for yourself?” he said, surprised, as though the idea had just come to him that I might try to do this.

“Yeah,” I said, dumbfounded. “Of course.”

“OK,” he said. “Let’s not fight.” There was no handshake and we certainly never became friends; this is not an after-school special. But after that terse little interaction, the bullying evaporated.

It wasn’t just the boys who seemed to gain new respect for me; my fellow flutists finally noticed me, and started talking to me. Michelle Gase, on whom I had a huge crush, even invited me over to her house. I didn’t know what to do once I got there, but the journey of one thousand miles begins, my friends, with a single step.

Perhaps it goes without saying that I didn’t stop being a geek: the following year, when my friend Colleen communicated my romantic interest directly to Michelle, Michelle reportedly laughed out loud, an event from which I am still recovering. But I had found a comfortable niche in the junior-high-school (and later high-school) social ecology, and it was a niche in which I could thrive on my own terms.

Do you see the lesson I learned, the one that every American boy must learn? The formula is simple: a) dominate the girls and b) fight other boys. It’s never good for a boy to do a girly thing, but, if you must, you had better be better at it than any girl, and you had better be willing to punch any boy in the face who says that doing it makes you a girl. This formula worked for me, I am sorry to report. It’s worked for millions of American men of my generation. And even as we’re were being trained to fear the queer, we were at the same time watching heterosexuality, in the form of our parents’ marriages, disintegrate before our very eyes.

My own parents are now divorced, of course, as are virtually all the parents I knew growing up, as are the parents of the mother of my child. Thus it should not surprise anyone that marriage did not seem very desirable to us. Olli and I got together in 1994, lived and traveled together for years, moved to the Mission in San Francisco together in 2000. But in all those years, we never married. We didn’t consciously reject marriage, mind you. It just didn’t mean very much to us.

When Mayor Gavin Newsom—for whom I did not vote—legalized same-sex marriage in San Francisco in February 2004, I was entirely a bystander. Yet I was still moved by the spectacle of beaming gay and lesbian couples lining up in front of the San Francisco City Hall, sometimes hemmed in on all sides by unpleasant people with ugly signs. Walking by City Hall one afternoon on my way to the library, I saw two slim women dressed in white, sitting on the grass, their hands folded on each other’s laps, their foreheads touching. I assumed that they had just been married. For the rest of the day I felt strangely peaceful, perhaps even slightly stoned.

My son was born—after a 60-minute labor!—in July 2004. And in the months that followed, my resistance to marriage started to melt away. Yes, both Olli and I thought marriage would be convenient, now that we were parents. But in my eyes at least, it was also true that San Francisco’s season of same-sex weddings had raised the value of marriage. I remembered that couple in white, sitting in the grass; perhaps I hoped marriage would give me the peace it seemed to give them.

Of course, not everything changed; we still stubbornly rejected the trappings of a traditional wedding. We slunk off to City Hall, our baby son in arms, and “eloped,” to use a quaint old word. The judge was a trim, diminutive, mannish woman of late middle years, and her eyes held a reassuring twinkle that said to me, Hey, I’m not taking this too seriously either. I didn’t tell my parents; we hardly told anyone. A year later my mother visited and accidentally saw our marriage certificate hanging in the back of my closet. “What?!” she cried. “You got married and didn’t tell me?”

She was furious; I just shrugged. It was as though I was thirteen and she had discovered a Playboy magazine hidden in my closet.

Marriage didn’t much change anything in my life or the way I felt about myself and the world, but parenthood certainly had. By the fall of 2005, our old life had been wrapped up in a dirty diaper and tossed in the trash. There were no more evenings in the Make-Out Room shooting pool and drinking margaritas and dancing and then crawling over to the Latin American for shots and then perhaps to the Elbo Room to see bands with names like Double-Jointed Donkey Dick or Death Valley High.

Instead, I worked part-time and took care of my infant son Liko for most of the day while Olli was at her job. In sunny, desperate playgrounds I taught Liko to walk, his little fists clenched around my aching forefingers. Pushing a swing, I’d eye the mothers and they eyed me, or so I imagined. I was typically the only father. The moms seldom spoke to me and I was frankly afraid of them. I feared—it sounds ridiculous to admit—that if I initiated a real conversation, they’d think I was hitting on them. Deep in my bones, I felt that I didn’t belong on weekday playgrounds. Not just because I was a dad; I didn’t even feel like a parent, not then. I felt like a spy, an interloper, an anthropologist studying a lost tribe of stroller-pushing urban nomads.

By this time we lived on the border between Noe Valley and the Castro, a mad scientist’s laboratory of new family forms, whose representative on the city’s Board of Supervisors is a gay man who co-parents a biological child with his lesbian best friend. But at first I didn’t realize how many of the other parents on the playground were gay and lesbian; despite the fact I had had many queer friends, at this time I still assumed breeding was what straight people did. And I remember the first time I met Jackie and her smiley toddler Ezra; beckoned by her friendly smile, she was one of the first stay-at-home moms I decided to talk to. Later I saw Ezra with a woman named Jessica, and I thought she was his babysitter.

Wrong. Jessica was one mommy and Jackie was the other. Fortunately, I figured this out before my new friends discovered my ignorance. In time, I met many other families, both gay and straight, and we formed a new kind of child-centered community, one I never expected to have. After we became close, Jessica (the non-biological mother) told me that it drove her crazy when people assumed she was the nanny, which put her constantly in the position of having to explain her relationship to her own family. Embarrassed, I didn’t tell her about my early assumption, and I still haven’t told her.

When the California Supreme Court approved same-sex marriage on May 15, 2008, Jackie and Jessica just knew, as soon as they heard, that they would marry. At the wedding, Jackie wore black and she smiled in a way that seemed simultaneously bright and distant; Jessica, who had been stressed for weeks about the wedding, held her face very still, as if afraid that the wrong emotion would slip out. The ceremony was conducted by their close friends Laura and Peter, who is Ezra’s biological father and someone Jackie and Jessica consider to be a member of the family.

“I now pronounce you happily married,” said Peter, and the two women kissed.

For Jessica’s parents, their daughter’s marriage was an intensely meaningful event. “It was wonderful to see Jessica so dressed up and looking so beautiful,” said Jessica’s mother Elizabeth. “I was just so happy for them.” Every member of Jackie and Jessica’s circle of friends and family that I interviewed felt the same way: It made us happy to see our friends marry. That’s a commonplace feeling at weddings, but, of course, not everyone in America has the right to a legal marriage. Their wedding was extraordinary because it came to us all as a gift we never expected.

Not everyone accepted the gift. I know of several same-sex weddings depopulated by the neutron bomb of homophobia. When Angela and Mary (not their real names) wed, Angela's mother Shirley refused to attend on vaguely religious grounds. I’ve met Shirley many times: She’s a frail, sweet, slightly foggy old woman who seems to have had a hard life. The year before the wedding, she had to stay with Angela and Mary for months while recovering from a serious illness, a period that was a financial and emotional burden for Mary, who is the breadwinner of the family. As the months wore on, Shirley witnessed the daily accumulation of caring acts that forms a family; but despite depending on this family structure in her return to health, Shirley never accepted the relationship.

Shortly after the wedding, Angela, Mary, and their girl Suzie visited Shirley in the small town where Angela grew up.

“So, do we look like a married couple?” joked Mary when they arrived.

“No,” replied Shirley, her voice flat. “One of you would have to be a man.”

On November 4, 2008, Californians voted to amend the state’s constitution to define marriage as between “one man and one woman,” thus throwing the marriages of my friends into a legal limbo. I haven’t asked, but I assume that Shirley was one of the millions of Californians who voted to ban same-sex marriage. Most people of her generation, it later turned out, voted for Proposition 8; most people my age (and even more younger than me) voted against it. Most people in rural areas voted for it; most people in cities voted against.

“I was very disappointed when Prop 8 passed,” Jessica’s mother told me. “Jessica was depending on being able to live a legal married life with Jackie, and Prop 8 was so upsetting. But somehow I don’t think it’s over yet. I think it’s just going to take awhile for this culture to get used to the idea.”

She's right. Nationally, Prop 8 turned out to be only a setback: Within a year, Iowa, Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire—largely rural and suburban states—all legalized same-sex marriage, joining Connecticut and Massachusetts. At this writing, Prop 8 is getting struck down or propped up every few months, as legal teams exchange blows in the courts.

But at this stage in the game, there is little doubt (at least in my mind) that marriage will ultimately open up to include people of the same sex, and that this evolutionary advance will affect every area of family law and every nook and cranny of community life. If gay men can now get married in Iowa, nothing can stop it. It’s like a strapping, corn-fed freight train, roaring wholesomely past the amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties on its way to the coastal American Sodoms. It’s Iowa that is delivering same-sex marriage to San Francisco and New York, not the other way around. The old American image of the family is being carried away; a new one is coming over the horizon, but we’re not there yet. The journey is changing us—all of us, Red and Blue alike—in ways that no one could anticipate.

As Exhibit A, I submit myself: Watching the battle for same-sex marriage unfold in San Francisco taught me, after a lifetime of ambivalence, that marriage might actually be worth defending. It might strike some folks as ironic that I needed a lesbian wedding to teach me that, but that’s the nature of institutional renewal: Just as the black voting rights struggles of the 1960s taught previously apathetic young whites the worth of voting and civic participation, so this new civil rights struggle has something to teach us all about the value of commitment and family.

Or at least, it had something to teach me. Look, I know lots of people reading this essay think marriage is oppressive patriarchal bullshit; others might think marriage is heterosexually sacred. I’m not actually trying to convince you of anything. Instead I’m trying to describe why the struggle for same-sex marriage has been meaningful for me and for so many people in my community. The changes go much deeper than marriage: Remember how I had assumed that Jessica was the nanny? Despite being as gay-friendly as straight people come, I still had a picture in my mind of a mother and a father. That picture is gone, friends, and it’s not coming back. This isn’t just happening in San Francisco. It’s happening all over the country.

I agree with conservatives who say that childhood is what is at stake in the same-sex marriage debates. But while they see gay and lesbian couples as the threat, to me the threat comes from bullies like Eric Roeder. My greatest fear as a father is that my son will face the same ferocious teasing and fighting I did. Worse than that, I fear that he will embrace the same solutions I did, and that he will stand back and watch other boys be teased and beaten up. That’s not the world I want him to live in; that’s not the person I want him to be. From that perspective, this change that we are all going through feels like a race against time. I want the world to be entirely different by the time my son turns twelve, though I know that’s impossible. I want him to be freer than I was; I want us all to be free.

Decency in Iowa

Iowa Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal refuses support Senate Minority Leader Paul McKinley's effort to amend the state constitution to ban gay and lesbian marriage on April 6, 2009, the first day the Senate met after the unanimous decision by the Iowa Supreme Court to allow same sex couples to marry:



Transcript
One of my daughters was in the workplace one day, and her particular workplace at that moment in time, there were a whole bunch of conservative, older men. And those guys were talking about gay marriage. They were talking about discussions going on across the country.

Any my daughter Kate, after listening for about 20 minutes, said to them: You guys don't understand. You've already lost. My generation doesn't care.

I think I learned something from my daughter that day, when she said that. And I've talked with other people about it and that's what I see, Senator McKinley. I see a bunch of people that merely want to profess their love for each other, and want state law to recognize that.

Is that so wrong? I don't think thats so wrong. As a matter of fact, last Friday night, I hugged my wife. You know I've been married for 37 years. I hugged my wife. I felt like our love was just a little more meaningful last Friday night because thousands of other Iowa citizens could hug each other and have the state recognize their love for each other.

No, Senator McKinley, I will not co-sponsor a leadership bill with you.

Supremes uphold rights of lesbian moms

Good news from bad:

The U.S. Supreme Court has let stand a ruling that Virginia must enforce a Vermont court order awarding child-visitation rights to a mother's former lesbian partner.

The high court Monday declined to hear the case of Lisa Miller, who claimed that the Virginia Supreme Court improperly ignored a state law and constitutional amendment that prohibit same-sex unions and the recognition of such arrangements from other states.

The decision let stand a victory for Janet Jenkins, who has been fighting for visitation rights since the dissolution of the civil union she and Miller obtained in Vermont in 2000. Miller gave birth to the daughter, Isabella, in 2002, and the child was at the center of a legal battle closely watched by national conservative and gay-rights groups. (Associated Press)

I can't post this without noting that this family is obviously in a terrible situation. As Mothertalkers notes, "Few things annoy me more than a lesbian mom who splits from her partner and then sues for custody on the basis that the ex's sexual orientation makes her unfit to parent"--which is, in fact, what happened. But this is still a victory for the rights of lesbian moms.

The wind at our backs, the struggle ahead

Many wonderful things happened on Tuesday. But in California, one awful thing happened: Proposition 8, which enshrines bigotry in the state constitution, passed. Specifically, prop 8 bans gay and lesbian marriage.

You wouldn’t have known it if you were walking through the Castro on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. Thousands of people were on the streets in the world’s largest gay community. They knew that prop 8 was leading, but people were exhilarated, even ecstatic, about Obama’s victory.

I kept walking, wanting to see how San Francisco’s neighborhoods were reacting; I was tired but I wanted to see all of it.

I stopped at the home of my friends Viru and Beth; it hit us that if a man named Barack Hussein Obama could become president, so could my boy, Liko Wai-Kaniela Smith-Doo, or their little girl, Anna-Priya Saiki-Gupte. America is now officially a multiracial country. It means a lot to us. This is personal, not political.

Back on the street strangers shook my hand and said, “Congratulations.” At one point I was walking down Market St. and a black man walked past me singing, “We got a black man as president!”

One member of the white gay couple walking in front of me shouted back, “Hell yeah, we got a black man as president!” The two men, one black and one gay, high-fived each other, and laughed.

Their voices sounded equally joyous; that moment encapsulated the best of the night for me. All of us saw the election as a triumph for our city, for San Francisco values, for progressive urban values: Cosmopolitanism, tolerance, thoughtfulness, fairness.

It’s three days later. I’m writing this in a crowded Castro café, and people all around me, most of them gay and lesbian, are still talking about Tuesday, recalling the thrill and the feelings of unity. (The barista is greeting costumers with, “Happy Obama!” which keeps getting a delighted little laugh.)

So Prop 8 won, but life goes on, and, for the first time in a very long time, we can feel the wind at our backs. The biggest question people in my social circle are asking is, what will happen to the 18,000 gay and lesbian couples, including our friends, who have been married?

For now, it appears, their marriage vows will be respected. California Attorney General Jerry Brown has stated in court papers and affirmed in the media that those marriages should remain valid in the wake of prop 8’s passage.

“I believe that marriages that have been entered into subsequent to the May 15 Supreme Court opinion will be recognized by the California Supreme Court,” Brown told the Chronicle. He noted that prop 8 is silent about retroactivity, and said, ‘I would think the court, in looking at the underlying equities, would most probably conclude that upholding the marriages performed in that interval before the election would be a just result.”

In time prop 8 will be overturned. America is urbanizing. It’s becoming steadily more educated. These are progressive developments, but they create contradictions, especially widening inequality.

Right after I watched the gay man and the black man celebrate together, I walked past someone sleeping on the sidewalk and someone else rummaging through a garbage can. Both homeless people were white; today in America, the lost and dispossessed can come in any color. They seemed oblivious to the election and they were utterly isolated from the people and city around them.

Perhaps I was just tired, but I ended the evening feeling sad, an emotion that seemed to arise from the certain knowledge, visceral and intellectual, that we never stop struggling. But at least now, for the moment, many of us can struggle together.

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A note: I feel like the recent focus on the election has cost Daddy Dialectic some readers; comments and traffic are both down. And that's fine on both counts: I had to focus on politics, I couldn't think about much else, and it is supposed to be a blog about fatherhood. No apologies, no regrets, but we'll be turning back to fatherhood in the coming weeks, and I hope you'll consider joining in on the conversation.

Good things

You might have heard about this:

A group of San Francisco first-graders took an unusual field trip to City Hall on Friday to toss rose petals on their just-married lesbian teacher - putting the public school children at the center of a fierce election battle over the fate of same-sex marriage.

The 18 Creative Arts Charter School students took a Muni bus and walked a block at noon to toss rose petals and blow bubbles on their just-married teacher Erin Carder and her wife Kerri McCoy, giggling and squealing as they mobbed their teacher with hugs.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, a friend of a friend, officiated.

A parent came up with the idea for the field trip - a surprise for the teacher on her wedding day.

"She's such a dedicated teacher," said the school's interim director Liz Jaroslow....

The students' parents are planning to make a video with the children describing what marriage is to them.

Marriage, 6-year-old Nolan Alexander said Friday, is "people falling in love."

It means, he added, "You stay with someone the rest of your life."

The San Francisco Chronicle article has drawn over 3,000 comments, many of them full of hate. “It’s just utterly unreasonable that a public school field trip would be to a same-sex wedding,” said Chip White, press secretary for the anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 campaign. “This is overt indoctrination of children who are too young to have an understanding of its purpose.”

As a straight parent in San Francisco--who is raising his son on Castro St., right on the border of Noe Valley and the Castro--I want to tell these people: In San Francisco, this is normal. Hell, my family is going to a lesbian wedding this weekend. There will be something like twenty kids there, all of them members of my son's community.

I can pretty much guarantee that the hateful comments on the Chronicle article are from people who don't live in San Francisco. Because those of us who are raising children in neighborhoods with large numbers of gay and lesbian families know a secret: They are great environments in which to raise kids. We have a good community and we're happy.

To people like Chip White, I say: You can rant, you can rave, you can shout your ignorance at my kid through your TV ads, Prop 8 might even pass, but you can't win. Gay and lesbian families are here to stay, and that makes our world a better place.

"I have two moms"

If you live in California, Arizona, or Florida, please, please, please, vote no on the hateful, idiotic anti-gay propositions on each state's ballot.

Yah!

Florida Gay Adoption Ban Declared Unconstitutional!

And if you want to help defeat the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 in California, consider making a donation to the "No on 8" campaign.

This is what love looks like

It's Thursday and the news alert pops into my email: California Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage. I think, "I'll have to blog on that.” That afternoon I meet with a colleague. He’s a gay dad who has raised two children (now grown) with his partner of many years, and he’s overjoyed. I don’t find the time to write a blog entry.

I get home and my wife calls: She and my son are stranded at a bus stop—the twenty-four bus, she says, is being routed around the Castro because of spontaneous street partying, but a friend is coming to pick them up.

I can’t resist: I jump on my bike and ride down Castro and walk through the gathering throng. People are dancing and talking in small circles on the street, and I see many couples wander through crowd with dazed looks on their faces: the mood somehow combines wary happiness with giddy disbelief. Cops stand at barricades, but they look relaxed and they laugh and joke with the people streaming into the Castro. A DJ sets up at the intersection of Castro and Market.



When I get home, my family is there. That night, it’s warm enough so that you can leave your house without a coat. This happens maybe five or six nights a year in the usually very cool and foggy city of San Francisco, and so I drag the mattress out onto our deck and the three of us go to bed outside.

I look up at the clear sky and the big dipper is directly overhead. The tree in our yard rustles in the breeze. The street party at the bottom of the hill is now in full swing, and we drift asleep to laughter and the thump-thump-thump of electronic dance music. Liko throws an arm over my chest and snuggles into my neck.

Friday, another hot day, I get a text message from our friends Jessica, Jackie, and their little boy Ezra: Do we want to have dinner that night? We meet at Savor and get a table on the patio, and two other families join us.

Jessica orders wine. We want to celebrate, she says.

Why? I ask.

We’re getting married, says Jessica, throwing her arm around Jackie.

It hadn’t even occurred to me: our friends can now get married.



A feeling of happiness sweeps through my body; I feel a smile pop onto my face. It’s a rare kind of happiness I’m feeling, the kind that has nothing to do with me. I happy for Jackie, Jessica, and Ezra, genuinely happy for them, through them.

Why? I’ve never been a great friend of marriage. I’ve always seen it as optional. But I see how much it means to my friends: They never expected it, never dreamed of it, but here it is, marriage. They are silly with plans: they quiz the straight couples on venues, clothes, vows, invitations, costs, the whole crazy thing. Mark volunteers to get the food; Karen says she’ll design invitations. Their marriage becomes one more thread that ties our little community together.

Now I am thinking of the California Supreme Court judges who wrote the decision. Their working lives consist of books, papers, arguments, precedents, a place apart from our small, private lives. Did they know this one decision would create such happiness and improve so many lives? Could they have imagined it? And do we as a society have the courage to embrace the happiness they helped create?

Harvey Milk for President!

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay politician "in the history of the planet," to quote Time magazine. He represented my neighborhood on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and was killed in 1978 (along with Mayor George Moscone) by city supervisor Dan White, a seemingly nice guy, by some accounts, who turned out to be a raving lunatic.

But when White was sentenced to a mere seven years for the crime, there were riots at City Hall and in the Castro. Here's some (murky) footage:



Now director Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, Paranoid Park, etc.) is making a film of those events, staring Sean Penn as Milk, and much of the shoot occurred during the past several months on Castro Street, where I live on the border between the Castro and Noe Valley neighborhoods.

It's fascinating to watch a film put together: the facades of many Castro businesses were torn down and rebuilt to appear as they were in the 1970s; we saw famous people loitering around coffee shops; we watched staggering amounts of preparation for scenes that appeared to last for two minutes; and we residents were herded like cattle to avoid stumbling into scenes where our clothing would have made us anachronisms. Here's a little video someone did on the transformation:



But it was also interesting to hear gray-haired gay men reminisce about those days--and to hear the Castro's children ask about this Harvey Milk person. Liko wanted to know what all the fuss was about, of course, and I explained as best I could.

He gets that some of his friends have two mommies or two daddies, and it doesn't seem weird to him. I don't need to explain "gay" to him, though he doesn't know that word. He just knows that kids have different mixes of parents, and that boys can be affectionate with boys and girls with girls, just like his mom and I are affectionate. That's not so complicated, is it?

But it was painfully difficult to explain that there was once a time when the parents of his friends could not be parents--they couldn't be anything. They were invisible. And people like Harvey Milk helped create a place for them in playgrounds, schools, neighborhoods, and every area of life.

Love is easy to explain; hate is hard. It's not really suitable for children. One early morning I walked with Liko down Castro, and they had apparently just finished filming scenes of the "White Night Riots." The Castro was once again transformed, now with smashed windows, burned-out cars, and graffiti.

"What's going on, daddy?" Liko asked. I didn't say anything and I was just thankful that this was the reenactment of the riot, not the real thing. It was genuinely chilling to see the neighborhood in a state of ruin, however temporary and imaginary.

This history is often news to children of both queer and straight parents--both are learning about Harvey Milk and what he meant for the neighborhood. One afternoon during the shoot I heard this conversation between my friend Lisa (a lesbian mom) and her oldest son, about 9:

"Why was Harvey Milk so important?"

"He helped stand up for the rights of gay people."

"But what does that mean?"

"It means that we can take care of you and not be afraid of anyone taking you away."

Which is really cool, in every single way. I'm glad Van Sant is making this film, and I'm looking forward to seeing it, and I'm proud to live in a place with such great history.

By coincidence, the video of an updated version of Wyclef Jean's "If I Was President" was shot in the neighborhood at the same time as Milk. Liko and my wife Olli got roped into it one afternoon and they cheerfully participated, and now the video is out and they're in it, with many amusing San Francisco street scenes. They appear (for about a second in front of the Castro Theater) at the three minutes, eleven seconds point, near the end:



It's an accidental, personal juxtaposition, but it seems to me that "If I Was President" has a lot to say to Milk:

[chorus]
If I was president,
I'd get elected on Friday, assassinated on Saturday,
and buried on Sunday.

If I was president...
If I was president

An old man told me, instead of spending billions on the war,
we can use some of that money, in the ghetto.
I know some so poor, they use the spring as the shower,
when screaming "fight the power."
That's when the vulture devoured

[chorus]
If I was president,
I'd get elected on Friday, assassinated on Saturday,
and buried on Sunday.

If I was president...
If I was president...
If I was president...
If I was president

Tell the children the truth, the truth.

Not-so-new after all

In my August 14 meditation on family history, I call gay families "something totally new under the sun."

But my landlady, Ruthanne Lum McCunn, an award-winning author of Chinese-American historical novels, says that it's more complicated than that.

"Gay families may be new here in America," she told me, "but some of the 19th century independent spinsters who lived as couples in China's Pearl River Delta adopted and raised daughters."

That's interesting, and I just learned of a new study by Allan A. Tulchin of Shippenburg University that argues for evidence of homosexual civic unions in 15th century France.

Yes, I agree, that sounds pretty freaking unlikely. Turns out that Tulchin doesn't have a smoking gun of hot man-on-man marriage, but he did discover a legal framework, called a affrèrement ("brotherment"), that allowed same-sex people ("affrèrés") to set up households together.

“All of their goods usually became the joint property of both parties, and each commonly became the other’s legal heir," writes Tulchin in the September issue of the Journal of Modern History. "They also frequently testified that they entered into the contract because of their affection for one another. As with all contracts, affrèrements had to be sworn before a notary and required witnesses, commonly the friends of the affrèrés.”

Most of the affrèrés were brothers, but Tulchin finds examples of single unrelated men. "I suspect that some of these relationships were sexual, while others may not have been," he writes. "It is impossible to prove either way and probably also somewhat irrelevant to understanding their way of thinking. They loved each other, and the community accepted that."

My verdict: Intriguing and fun, but highly speculative. Gay and lesbian families might have historical precursors, but I still think that we are witnessing a rare and wonderful event: the emergence of a new family form, where same-sex parents can live their lives free of euphemism and fear--in San Francisco, anyway, and in plenty of other places.

Incidentally, Ruthanne just published a new novel, God of Luck, that is well worth a read. You can see Ruthanne read tomorrow, Sept. 26, at the San Francisco Main Public Library at 6:30 pm in the Latino Community Room.

Jackie and Jessica's Story: The missing piece of the puzzle

I am in the process of interviewing Bay Area families for a series of writing projects on stay-at-home fathers and non-traditional families, collected as the "21st Century Family Project." For the next year or so, I will periodically post sketches of the families based on the interviews, as a kind of public notebook of the work I am doing. What follows is the story of Jackie and Jessica, who live in San Francisco's Noe Valley.

Jackie and Jessica met ten years ago. “I think we were destined to be parents,” says Jackie. “We would stay home, we would watch movies, then we moved in together. It was always about creating this home. We always talked about having a kid.”

Of course, a lesbian couple cannot simply stop using birth control in order to get pregnant.

“We decided to put the word out that we were looking for a donor,” says Jackie. “When we met Dave, we knew immediately that this was going to work. He didn’t want to have any fathering responsibilities, but he just thought it would be a great idea and he wanted to help us.”

After work, Dave would drop by the couple’s apartment, where he found a discrete glass of wine, a tube of lube, a stack of porn videos, and a small jar waiting for him in the living room. It didn’t take long for Jackie to get pregnant.

After a 28-hour labor, Eli (“the only name we could agree on”) was born.

“I don’t think I slept for literally a month after he was born,” recalls Jackie. “I was pretty messed up for that first month of his life. Jessica needed to work, she only got two weeks off, and she slept in the living room so she could actually sleep and function at work. I remember just being with him 24-7 and I don’t remember sleeping, and he would just sit there awake or I would be awake while he was sleeping, and I remember actually hitting my head against the wall at one point, because I just couldn’t control it at all. I couldn’t go away from it, I knew needed to be there, and it was so much, so crazy. It was such an intense beginning, that it just kind of broke me. There is just something that you have to succumb to, in order to maintain your sanity.”

Meanwhile, Jessica’s life and self-image were being turned inside-out. Though she had read dozens of books on birth, nothing prepared her for the brute reality of the labor—or the demands her new role as breadwinning, non-biological parent placed on her. “I remember during the labor just feeling really useless,” she says. “After we got home, we had this situation where she was in bed with him and I was on the couch. I was just like, ‘Are you OK, can I get you anything?’ That surprised me. Because I think culturally we’re trained to assume that that’s what the father does. In the movies, the mother does stuff and the father runs around looking silly and saying, ‘Are you OK?’”

“I did feel silly,” says Jessica, “but I definitely didn’t feel like a father, because I’d grown up learning to be a mother. Growing up and in our relationship, it was always my intention to have a baby. I think anyone who gives birth has this very instinctual knowledge of what that baby needs, but I didn’t know how to make myself a part of the nourishing of this little person. We had both grown up believing that this is the mother’s role, and she was doing the mother’s role, but I wasn’t going to do the father’s role. To call myself the father felt like that was a further step away from being the parent, from being the mother.”

“When I’m not at work or not here at home, then I feel very guilty,” continues Jessica. “I don’t have a lot of time to myself. I feel like I have a job that I’ve had for eight years and I guess that makes a career, but I could just as easily have a different job. I grew up with a father who said, you don’t take a job unless there are benefits and health care. He taught me first you get the things you need, then you get the things you want.”

Both moms say that parenthood has invested their lives with a meaning that they’d never had before. “Before I was a parent,” says Jackie, “I’d be running these errands and doing grocery shopping, and it just felt so meaningless to me. I feel like with Eli there’s more meaning now, with the cooking and dish-washing. Everything is so structured. When am I going to have that moment when I scream, ‘I just can’t do this anymore!”? I’m waiting for myself to go crazy and just let everything go, and then I’ll have one of those houses that everyone is really scared to come to, but it hasn’t happened yet. Right now I just live moment to moment.”

Though he now lives in Hawaii, the donor, Dave, is close to the family. “We had a hard time with that in the beginning,” reports Jackie. “I was very, very possessive, and I didn’t want Jessica to lose that feeling of being a parent, because people are so focused on that question of who’s the father. But Dave is just such a love, there’s such an honesty to him, that it makes me want to open up more and allow this extended family to work out. Today, he’s more than an uncle, he’s closer than that.”

Jackie and Jessica have also found a wide circle of parents, straight and queer, who share their values and accept them as part of the community. “The companionships that we have developed over the past year or so have felt genuine and that has meant the world to me,” says Jackie. “Respect plays the main role in my day-to-day existence. When I see other parents respecting other parenting styles that are unlike their own, I take note and appreciate their ability to be open and accepting. I find myself instantly drawn to them and I, who used to be an extremely shy person, am sparking up a conversation and making a new friend. Parenthood has definitely turned me into an open person. Something I thought I would never be.”

Jessica agrees. “We are finding that because Jackie took Eli to the playground so often, and we go to the farmers’ market together, we have started to find a legitimate community of people we like. [Now] hanging out with Eli and other kids and their parents is essentially my only social interaction with adults. Outside of work, play dates are my social life...and it’s pretty nice.”

“When Eli was born,” says Jackie, “we felt like he was the missing piece of the puzzle, for some reason. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go back to being just Jackie.”

Interview with Family Historian Stephanie Coontz

Stephanie Coontz is a professor of history at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families. She is widely recognized as one of the leading authorities on the history of the American family.

Coontz has authored numerous books and articles, including, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap and The Way We Really Are. In 2005 Viking-Penguin published, Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage—a tremendously important book that's just been released in paperback.

Marriage, A History argues that marriage has evolved from the economic and political alliance of two or more family groups, to an individual love-match, which over the past thirty years has catalyzed the creation of new family forms like gay and lesbian families and helped dissolve the division of labor between husband as breadwinner and wife as homemaker. The result, says Coontz, is not the end of the family as we know it, but instead its revitalization as a more just and equitable institution.

I sat down to talk to Coontz at the tenth anniversary conference of the Council on Contemporary Families, an organization she helped to found.

In your books, you’ve demonstrated how the family is constantly evolving. But have you identified any traits shared by all families that successfully cultivate the health and well being of their members?

In the broadest sense, there are some universals. For example, helping members to go outside the family – I think there’s been an incest taboo for a good reason, for thousands of years. We even find a primitive version of it in chimpanzees. It’s important to create individuals who not only can build successful relations within the group, but that are not so physically or emotionally incestuous. The good family teaches its members to reach out and form bonds with others.

So the family is a facilitator of human diversity.

Or rather, of social connection. The healthiest families are those families that don’t try to be everything and do everything. But I do think that what makes a family work really depends on social circumstances.

Let’s take the question of marriage. I think that in the 1950s you could build a successful marriage and rear kids who were going to do pretty well on the basis of a union of two gender stereotypes. And it wasn’t really necessary to have the depth of intimacy and friendship that is required now. That could lead to all sorts of abuses, and did. But on the whole, it could produce pretty decent people in the context of that time.

Today, that doesn’t work. When you have two people coming together at an older age, they are both economically and emotionally independent in very important ways. Men don’t require women to do their housekeeping services, women don’t require men to support them. In that circumstance, the level of friendship has to be much deeper and the level of intimacy needs to be much deeper. You can’t raise your kids with the same degree of authoritativeness—or especially, with the same level of authoritarianism—that they could, many years ago.

And each of these changes, I think, creates new problems. We solve old problems but create new ones. A good example is parenting. We have solved so many old problems in parenting. There is so much less child abuse, both emotional and physical, than there used to be in the past. There is a real interest in developing the child’s individuality—not necessarily individualism.

But, some parents go too far in the opposite direction and forget the need to establish generational boundaries and not be their kid’s best friend. So over and over again, what families need changes with the social and historical context and we create new challenges in the process of solving old problems.

As new family forms are emerging—and I mean the whole range, including reverse traditional families, gay and lesbian families, stepfamilies, and so on—how might that evolution contribute to the well-being of family members and society as a whole? How does the evolution hurt well-being?

Well, it’s another one of those trade-offs. Families have always been diverse, but that diversity was swept under the rug, and they were made to be ashamed of it. They were not helped, nobody analyzed their potential strengths and helped address their absolutely clear weaknesses. So as we’ve brought this diversity into visibility and increasingly legitimized that diversity, we’ve opened the way for all sorts of positive things. For example, preventing people from being forced to stay in a heterosexual marriage when, in fact, their impulses go the other way, or forcing people to stay in an unfair or unsatisfying marriage, which has been a huge relief for many people, I mean, literally a life saver. In every state that adopted no-fault divorce, the next five years saw twenty-percent declines in the suicide rates of wives.

But again, it certainly opened up more opportunities for people to make more bad choices, more opportunities for failure. It’s opened new opportunities to misjudge how much work it takes to build a new family form in an environment where the economy, the work practices, the school schedules, and the emotional expectations favor—privilege—one family form. So you have some people being overly optimistic about how easy it is to carve out a new life – they might say, “Oh, I can be a single mom, no problem,” and they’re not prepared for the difficulties they’ll encounter.

So I think that it does have some negative effects, but I would emphasize that these changes are not going back underground. They’ve had tremendous positive effects by rescuing people from very difficult situations and they pose us the challenge of helping people make more informed choices.

In Marriage, A History, you show love and intimacy have become more important to marriages. How has that evolution contributed to the rise in male caregiving?

This is one of the real, unambiguous good news stories that we’re finding. When the women’s movement first encouraged women to make these demands on their husbands, to spend more time at home, it caused a lot of conflict in families. And I think the conservatives are quite right to say that women’s liberation destabilized marriage.

But as men made adjustments—and they really have—the result has been tremendous good news, that, first of all, these adjustments have strengthened marriage. Men who do more caregiving have more satisfying marriages, they are less likely to have their wives leave them, and their kids do better. It’s a win-win situation, because if the parents do divorce, men who have been involved in such caregiving are much less likely to walk away from their kids. They have developed an independent relationship with the kids that is no longer mediated through the mom, and they don’t have that old-fashioned idea that, “Since I no longer get the mom’s services, so I can’t relate to the kids either.”

So I think that there are all sorts of positive things about it. There’s a myth in sociology and among many feminists that there’s been a stalled revolution, that there’s been a lagged one, but the fact is that men are changing very rapidly. In fact, as a historian, I have to say that they are changing, in a period of thirty years, in ways that took most women 150 years of thinking and activism. Every cohort of men is doing more in the house, and if you look within a cohort, the longer a man’s wife has worked, the more likely he is to do caregiving and housework. This is a huge change.

How has the rising importance of love in marriage contributed to the emergence of gay and lesbian families?

Social conservatives claim, as James Dobson put it, that gay and lesbian marriage is turning 5,000 years of tradition on its head. I actually believe that 5,000 years of tradition has been turned on its head, but it was heterosexuals who did it, and they changed marriage in ways that encouraged gays and lesbians to say, now this institution applies to us – after, in fact, having rejected that institution, because of its rigidity and inequality. I think this is good evidence that the institution has been evolving in a way that means it is not inherently oppressive.

Now I have gotten attacked by a couple of feminist authors for saying that. They want me to keep arguing that there’s something inherent in the institution of marriage. I think, in fact, we’ve transformed it and discovered that it’s not inherently oppressive, except in so far as it is put forward as the only way to honor long-term obligations. But if it is not, then I think marriage has become much fairer through the ages and much more capable of really being equal, and I think that’s why many gays and lesbians have started to embrace marriage.

You describe a lot of change. What hasn’t changed?

There are still a lot of rigid gender roles. It’s a lot worse around the world, where women still face incredible amounts of domestic violence. There are massive gender inequities on a global scale to be addressed, and there is the residue, and a serious residue, of inequality at home, too. But the biggest problem we need to address is the peculiarly American assumption that individuals can learn individual responsibility without any social responsibility. We ask individuals to keep commitments that we don’t ask corporations or politicians to keep, and that needs to change.

Mary Cheney vs. Borat

Newsflash:

“Every piece of remotely responsible research that has been done in the last 20 years on this issue has shown there is no difference between children who are raised by same-sex parents and children who are raised by opposite-sex parents,” said [Mary Cheney, daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney]. “What matters is that children are being raised in a stable, loving environment.”

I also read in this article that Ms. Cheney "came 'pretty close' to quitting when President Bush endorsed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage." Way to stand up against evil, Mary! I'm sure the President was quaking in his boots.

Meanwhile, Borat does the right thing.

Yes, I'm in a snarky mood.

Queer vs. Queer

Still working on my "Science vs. Parents" post. In the meantime, see this essay in the Bay Times about the impact of the "Gayby boom". Writes Dr. Rick Loftus:

KGO anchor Pete Wilson's idiotic remark calling the birth of Supervisor Bevan Dufty and his friend Rebecca Goldfader's baby Sidney a "travesty" resulted in a firestorm which brought the reality of gay parenting into sharp public focus. Once, parenthood might have seemed to gay men like an exotic tourist destination across the ocean... More and more, however, gay men are snapping up real estate and putting down roots on the "Father Shore." According to the Urban Institute, between 1990 and 2000, the percent of gay male households including at least one child had quadrupled, from 5% to 20%...

What's striking to me is how invisible these men often remain in our community. Until I started doctoring them, I had no idea how many gay men in San Francisco were parenting. Some would say the absence of gay parents from gay culture isn't an accident that "gay parent" is an oxymoron, that the two worlds collide. And Pete Wilson is hardly the only person to suggest gay life and parenthood are incompatible. An April 2006 story in the Los Angeles Times, for example, illustrated the tensions resulting from the increased presence of families with children in the Castro. Concerned over how the street's racy storefront displays might affect their kids, parents - straight and gay - complained to the city. Traditional gay activists countered that there's only one neighborhood in all the world with as unabashed an embrace of gay sex as the Castro, and if parents - straight or gay - don't like it, well, they can live elsewhere.

I live on Castro St. at the Noe Valley/Castro border, and I confess that I've started to wonder how I really feel about Liko seeing posters of men in bondage getup, striking provocatively explicit poses - which, as Loftus notes, is a dilemma that unites gay and straight parents. (I'm actually curious if readers, especially older parents with a bit more perspective, have any thoughts on the issue.) Loftus continues:

What does all this mean for the cultures of gay men in San Francsico and the world-at-large? To my mind, it’s a welcome annex to the ever-expanding Winchester Mystery House of queer life-paths. I also see it challenging assumptions about gay culture, both by enemies external to our communities, but also by those within LGBT cultures. Recent efforts on behalf of gay marriage, for example, have uncovered rifts in our ranks, as radicals worry advocacy for presumably monogamous LGBT marriages may neglect, even undermine, queers with less “conventional” lifestyles. Some may see queers who choose parenting and family paths as “sell-outs” betraying “true” LGBT culture.

Of course that’s ridiculous, and provincial. When you consider that the Castro twenty years ago had taken on the icy pall of a ghost town due to AIDS, its present-day rejuvenation—including the patter of a few tiny feet—is a sign of resilience. What could be a better symbol of hope in the face of so much death, than the smattering of baby carriages and snugglies now spotted amongst the next generation of gay men walking its streets?

Well, it'll be interesting to see how the Castro - and queer families - will evolve over the next several years, and what differences and what common ground they'll find with straight families, both traditional and non-traditional.

What if it were your family?

A quick follow-up on my Oct. 13 post about Bevan Dufty and his new child: A smart and strikingly sane op-ed on the "what-if" scenarios often posed to non-traditional families appears in today's Chronicle.

Also: Salon has an essay on parenting that's well worth a look.

Also: Check out the blog "Navigating the On-Ramp," documenting Kim Moldofsky's efforts to transition from stay-at-home- to go-to-work mom. "How will I handle a full-time job plus everything already on my plate and not turn into an overstressed bitch?"

Bevan, Rebecca, and Sidney vs. Pete Wilson

I've blogged before about Bevan Dufty, my representative on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Bevan got together (in vitro!) with lesbian friend Rebecca Goldfader to have a baby, who was born two weeks ago and dubbed Sidney.

Talk-radio host Pete Wilson rushed to the defense of the traditional family:

The Dufty-Goldfader baby is, in my mind, a travesty... I do not now nor have I ever accepted the idea that a baby is a toy, that it is a social science project or a possession. A baby is a human being, a delicate thing, our past, present and future. It is not an experiment. It is not an opportunity to see how far you can carry your views on parenting, alternative lifestyles or diversity in family structures.

I wonder, how does Wilson know that Dufty and Goldfader see Sidney as "a toy... a social science project... or a possession"? His only evidence for this assertion seems to be that Dufty and Goldfader are queer and therefore, in his little mind, incapable of true feeling for a child born of both their bodies.

It is raw, bleeding prejudice that drives Wilson to attack two-week-old Sidney as "a travesty," and it doesn't take much of a leap to connect Wilson's comments to attacks on stay-at-home dads, working and single moms, and anyone else who doesn't fit the version of the family that conservatives pass off as immutable. (In fact, historians date the nuclear family as starting sometime in the mid-19th century, coinciding with the move from agricultural to industrial society.)

So much for stating the obvious. It's much more interesting to think about the impact of the birth on the upcoming District 8 election, in which Dufty is facing off against two opponents who are positioning themselves as culturally, though not politically, to his left. I don't need a poll to know how my neighbors are going to react: now that he and his family have been attacked, we'll circle our wagons around them. Queer and non-traditional families are simply too widespread in the Castro and Noe Valley; residents will take Wilson's comments as an assault on the identity of the district.

I've stopped making predictions about elections, since I'm usually wrong, but in this case I'll make an exception: Dufty was going to win anyway, but as a result of this incident, Dufty will win in a landslide.

----------------

Speaking of San Francisco exceptionalism, I recently discovered the Left in SF blog, which has an amusing post on Bill O’Reilly's latest attack on San Francisco. Also, Jason at Daddy in a Strange Land pointed me to the new Anti-Racist Parent blog, which seems promising. Check it out.

Same-sex parenting and kids

Last year my then-14-year old daughter CB stumbled upon a right-wing online political discussion board. What shocked her was a post, and numerous followup comments, that were about a lesbian couple and their daughter. The post and comments were crude, homophobic and hateful. CB thought the post was very much what immature teenagers would say, and asked if most adults were so immature.

For CB this is mystifying, because she has a number of friends who have same-sex couples as parents. So does my son. For them, the bigotry and hatred against gays and same-sex parents doesn't make sense.

I had to tell her that on this particular issue, way too many adults are in fact very immature and intolerant. We had a discussion about why that is so, how many people are ignorant, or somehow that their own sexual identities are threatened in some way. I explained to CB that another part of the reaction is because same-sex couples who want to marry and adopt children are directly challenging traditionally defined gender and parenting roles.

As Rogers Cadenhead has pointed out on his blog (which I found via RebelDad), some conservatives fear that if homosexuals marry it will undermine "the basic grammar of marriage," that is, the traditional and narrowly-defined gender roles of husbands and wives.

There is also a growing movement among states to ban the fostering or adoption of children by gay couples, based again on a traditional notions of gender.

These attitudes have culminated in a fear of even discussing with children the fact that two men or two women can love each other and be committed to each other just as much as a man and a woman, and that gay couples can be good and loving parents. This fear is taking the shape of a crusade to prevent school children from being exposed to gender roles that differ from the traditional two-parent, mom at home with the kids and dad at work image. Heather Has Two Mommies has been banned in order to "protect" our children. Tinky-Winky and SpongeBob Squarepants are portrayed as nefarious underminers of traditional values.

I'm not in a same-sex relationship nor have I adopted children, but my personal experiences and those of my kids directly contradict the fear and heated opposition to same-sex relationships and parenting that we're seeing in this country.

At the most basic level, I've yet to see a convincing argument as to how exactly same-sex marriage threatens my own relationship and marriage with my wife. But what I've come to realize is that this issue is not about facts, it's about deeply ingrained conceptions of gender.

The issue of committed same-sex relationships does indeed challenge traditional gender roles and stereotypes. But of course any stay-at-home dad is also a direct challenge to this "traditional" definition of gender roles and of parenting. What could be more subversive of that definition than a dad who stays home full time with the kids and a mom who works full time bringing home the paycheck? Do those who claim to be protecting "traditional values" intend to outlaw stay-at-home dads?

It seems that all too many people approach these issues without the crucial ingredients for making good, informed decisions: personal experience and empathy. And that lack of experience and empathy just reinforces their inability to get beyond traditional gender roles to see the human side of these issues.

Those who are so viscerally opposed to gay marriage, gay adoption, and open discussion of non-traditional families seem to be those who don't personally know any gay couples or gay parents. Personal experience can make all the difference, and makes it really difficult to demonize a whole group of people just because they are different from you or your expectations.

What's interesting on this front is the generational divide. Young people approve of gay marriage at much higher rates than their elders; even many young Republicans have no problem with the idea. Given the extent to which the Republican party in general has seized on this issue, and has adopted an electoral strategy that demonizes the idea of same-sex couples marrying or adopting children, this is particularly striking. My hunch is that this generational difference is due to personal experiences, that younger generations have much more direct personal experience with gay men and lesbians in loving, committed and long-term relationships, and that they are more accepting of non-traditional gender roles.

But won't the children be confused?

My own kids know quite a few children who have gay parents, that is, two mommies or two daddies. My kids have known kids with same-sex parents from their first days in kindergarten, not because it was focused on, but because it was just part of the natural conversation between kids about their families. And they accept it as natural.

One kindergarten friend of my daughter explained in a matter-of-fact way that she had been conceived through in-vitro fertilization, and that she had two mommies. This was not upsetting or disorienting to my daughter or the other children in the class. She accepted it, just as she accepted her friend as just another kid.

Both of my kids over the years have had really good friends who have committed gay couples as parents. These parents are like any other parents. The kids spend a lot of time at our house, and a lot of time at their friends' houses. They go to birthday parties, have play dates, have sleepovers at their friends' homes. My kids are not confused, they know and have seen that what matters is having parents who love their kids and are committed to them.

Likewise on the issue of homosexuality itself, both of my kids see it as a very unproblematic issue, though they understand that others do not. I remember one conversation when my son BK was about 9 or 10, and we were talking about homosexuality and heterosexuality. My daughter, then 12 or 13, stated that she did not think she was gay. BK said, well, I'm not really sure, I don't think I am but I'm not sure. There was no defensiveness or fear in his statement, it was just a matter-of-fact statement that indicated to me that our kids understand that sexual orientation comes in various forms, that it's not necessarily a choice, and that there's nothing wrong with gay people. Given the amount of homophobia in our society, I was heartened by BK's attitude.

Above I said that the same-sex parents we know are no different from other parents. But that is not totally true. Same-sex parents face challenges that heterosexual married parents don't have to worry about. They don't have: the right to visit their partner or child in the hospital; bereavement leave if their partner or partner's child dies; sick leave to care for their partner or child; social security survivor benefits; the right to be recognized as a co-parent with full parental rights. The list is a very long one. In short, society actually puts enormous obstacles in the way of these couples, making it even more difficult for them to achieve the most basic goals that any family has.

Gender roles and expectations all too often stand in the way of healthy, happy families. They've prevented dads from expressing their love for their kids in tender ways, from trading off career and status for time with kids. They prevent same-sex couples from having their relationships protected in the ways that heterosexuals' relationships are protected. They prevent kids from finding secure homes in loving families just because both parents are of the same sex. They prevent children from learning that loving families come in more than just the traditional variety.

The bottom line for me is love and caring. What's important is that people love each other and care for each other. What's important is that kids have parents who love them.

Just as traditional roles limit men and dads, by preventing them from being able to express themselves as full human beings, so too these attitudes towards same-sex couples and their families prevent those families from having what any family wants: security in the knowledge that they are safe, that they are valued as parents and as human beings. And that's not only important for them. It's important for all of us.

Reposted (and slightly revised) from Daddychip2

"Height of the campaign season" vs. "A very active, engaged co-parent"

Scenes of parenthood in San Francsico, from my fine neighborhood newspaper, The Noe Valley Voice:

Having a baby is hardly revolutionary, but District 8 Supervisor Bevan Dufty is destined to put his own unique stamp on it.

A gay man, Dufty announced in April that he is partnering with a lesbian friend, Rebecca Goldfader, to create a family. The couple plan to move under the same roof and raise the child together, while remaining open to other relationships.

The response in Noe Valley? Congratulations!

Actually, I found myself snickering at how the happy couple imagine life with baby:

The coming fall will bring not only the birth of Goldfader and Dufty's daughter, but it's also the height of the campaign season. Dufty plans to "campaign hard" for election to a second four-year term as supervisor, but being a good father is his top priority.

"I intend to be a very active, engaged co-parent," he says....

Dufty envisions creating a unique and diverse home environment... "I hope our home is like a fun salon, mixing food, politics, and good causes," he says. "I think that will be a great environment to raise our daughter."

Ha ha ha! Good luck on all that, Bevan. See? Straight, gay - it doesn't matter. People are all equally delusional.

---------------

Speaking of San Francisco: on Wednesday, May 10, I'll be taking part in a "rapid fire" (three minutes, tops!) reading at Valencia Street Books, along with people like Charlie Anders, Tim Pratt, and Pat Murphy. The event, which starts at 7pm, is a fundraiser for Strange Horizons and the Speculative Literature Foundation, two of my favorite science-fiction related organizations.

Dad vs. Mr. Mom

Something strange – you might even call it “queer,” a term to which I shall return – happened two weeks ago. The day started ordinarily enough. I came home and Shelly went to work. I took Liko to a café for lunch and then we strollered to the Noe Courts playground. It was about 12:30 PM on a Monday.

Suddenly, at the playground gates, we stepped into a parallel universe where the laws of gender bent and vanished (cue Twilight Zone theme): Liko and I found ourselves surrounded by…men. Three men playing with three toddlers. No women in sight. What the hell?

One dad left, but another arrived. At one PM, it was still only dads and kids.

Naturally, we compared notes. All four of us agreed that this situation was, in our collective experience, unprecedented. It emerged that one of us was a full-time stay-at-home dad but looking for a job; two of us had quit careers to take care of our kids but still, out of necessity, worked part-time as freelancers; the fourth was ABD on a Ph.D. All four of our wives worked more hours than we did. For the ABD, this was his second time around; he had a two-year-old and a seven-year-old. “There are definitely more dads on the playgrounds now than there were five years ago,” he said.

At about 1:30 PM, the first mom arrived with her baby. Liko and I went home for a nap.

This incident raises the question: how many of us – and by “us” I mean men who are the primary caregivers to their children — are out there? The 2004 census says that there are 147,000 stay-at-home-dads – that’s at home, all day, every workday, with the kids. That’s about 1.7 percent of all U.S. parents who are taking care of children, which is, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, pathetic.

But recently I’ve started to wonder, is that number misleading?

I’m not one of those full-time SAHDs (hate that acronym), by the way. I work part-time. In most contemporary families, the primary caregiver, mom or dad, works at least part of the time – but we don’t how many men have powered down careers to stay home as much as possible with their kids. I’ve seen non-sourced estimates as high as two million, but even half of that number is significant. Why don’t we hear more about it? Despite a handful of trend stories about “New Fatherhood,” the at-home dad is largely invisible in the media and in most people’s minds – perhaps deservedly so.

Despite the doubling in the number of stay-at-home dads from 1995-2004, by almost every other measure – housework, making child support payments, etc. – men in aggregate are not pulling their weight with domestic labor. “American women put in additional five hours a week in housework once they are married, while marriage doesn’t significantly effect the number of hours a man does,” writes Ashley Merryman. “American women do 70-80 percent of the total domestic work – regardless of their employment status.” And so forth – I don’t think I need to beat this dead horse. We all know it’s true. So 147,000 men stay home with their kids? So what? Those guys are freaks. (I’m kidding, dads. Actually, I'm not. You are freaks. Don't be afraid. Fly your freak flag!) Part of the reason why I’m reluctant to jump on the whole stay-at-home bandwagon is that I understand how such choices are driven more by economic necessity than a parent’s individual desires. Lots of dads - 56 percent, according to one poll -- would like to stay home with their kids. So would a lot of moms. We’ll need to change the way the economy operates before we can change family life in any kind of positive way.

Perhaps – and I really am just speculating – the SAHD “trend” is just another symptom of the bifurcation of America into blue states and red states, urban centers of social progressivism vs. suburban and exurban redoubts of reaction. Are proliferating stay-at-home dads a bunch of affluent, latte-drinking, BMW-driving metrosexuals who wouldn’t know how to fix a water heater or shoot a deer if their lives depended on it? Are Red State dads all patriarchal deadbeats who couldn’t wash a dish or change a diaper if their lives depended on it? Part of the answer is probably locked in the census; someday I’ll have time to research it (just by looking at the geographical concentration of SAHDs and then superimposing distribution of income and education – seems like somebody’s probably already done this).

The dads-at-home I know in Noe Valley do, in fact, tend to be highly educated, cultural-creative, espresso-loving guys: an archeologist, a Web developer, a writer, a private gourmet chef. One is a former teacher who now sells real estate because that offers more time to be with his son. Most are white; one is Asian; one is mixed race, predominantly black. None are as vain as metrosexuals are supposed to be; it’s hard to preen when all your shirts have baby-drool spots on the shoulder. But yes, these are all comparatively privileged men who have ended up on the right side of the information economy, educated and creative. They have options. Staying at home with their kids is almost, from this perspective, a status symbol.

But all that might just reflect the class and demographic character of my neighborhood. (Also: we are all straight. On the other side of Castro, I do encounter a small number of gay dads.) Nationally, I suspect stay-at-home dads are quite a bit more diverse. In fact, according to a Spike TV survey – I have no idea how reliable this survey is – majority of stay-at-home-dads are black. Many stay-at-home-dads are simply unemployed and looking for a job, and according to data, many of those men are actually not doing their share of housework.

What about the ones who voluntarily father full-time or most of the time, and take primary responsibility for running homes? In addition to meeting more at-home dads in my neighborhood, I’ve recently spent quite a lot of time lurking on online forums and blogs for dads-at-home, absorbing who these guys are and how they think about their work as fathers. A couple of qualities strike me.

First, no one is complaining. No one particularly worries about being invisible, ignored, whatever. Most – not all, but most – are doing what they want to do, and they’re happy doing it. “None of us at home fathers go into it in order to be some sort of social role model,” writes “Tragula” in response to one of my blog entries. “So, no, we don’t deserve medals. At least not for that. If anything the correct response from people would be a completely neutral one. But we do have to put up with some shit from the less enlightened crowd, and face some additional obstacles in a mom-centric world. For that a pat on the back once in a while can be nice, but is not required.” Exactly.

Second, they are alienated. Dads-at-home know they’re outsiders. “I soon learned that the stay-at-home dad is not included in the social network of stay-at-home moms who typically have playgroups,” writes a fellow named Bill Dow. “When you are at the playground with 10 other mothers, it's easy to feel like a fish out of water.” It doesn’t matter how progressive you feel yourself to be (and many of these guys, BTW, are not at all politically progressive) or how much you love being with your kids, you’re still a man in concentric worlds of women and children. You stand out and you stand outside the circle, listening to conversations you can’t participate in. You know you’re hurting your career prospects. You know that many men look down on your choice, or at least wonder if your choice means you can’t hold down a real job.

And yes, as the contents of "Daddy Dialectic" testify, all that does sometimes make me anxious. But mostly, I don’t care. I’m glad to be an outsider. In online SAHD circles, Mr. Mom is supposed to be an offensive term, but I find it fitting. When I’m taking care of Liko, I don’t feel like I’m “fathering” him. In my mind – and this is just the thought I was raised with, not the one I want to have – a father goes to work and comes home in the evening. "Fathering" is playing ball, patting on the back, putting food on the table. An honorable role.

A mother, meanwhile, is home changing diapers and cleaning baby food off the floor and kissing skinned knees. That's also honorable and often honored. That’s what I do. So I feel like by staying home with him, I’m “mothering” Liko. I’m a mom, or at least, that’s my role. In many respects, a man out in the middle of the afternoon with his toddler, who is known to neighbors and neighborhood shop clerks and waitresses as a “Mr. Mom,” is a man in drag, and queer in the most political sense of the term. Why shouldn’t I be proud to be a Mr. Mom? I hope someday “Dad” and “Mom” will be interchangeable with regard to childcare, but we ain’t there yet. For now, I’m happy to be queer.

To end where I started: there are indeed more and more of us queer dads on the playground, or so it seems. Good. Despite all the social ambiguities, I'm glad. Now here's the really interesting question: what effect will our choices have on the next generation? Hopefully, Liko won't see "fathering" the way I do. To him (hopefully; things can change) a dad will be somebody who cooks, does dishes, and takes care of him. Hopefully, he'll have company. Hopefully. We can always hope.