The Rise of the Gay Family
More and more American children are growing up with same-sex parents
"We were afraid people out here would be skeptical of us," says Sheri Ciancia, sipping a glass of iced tea outside the four-bedroom house she and her partner bought last fall in Tomball, Texas, a half-hour's drive from Houston. "Afraid they wouldn't let their kids play with ours."
"But we've got to take chances," adds Stephanie Caraway, Ciancia's partner of seven years, sitting next to her on their concrete patio as their 8-year-old daughter, Madison, attempts to break her own record for consecutive bounces on a pogo stick. "We're not going to live in fear."
A trio of neighborhood boys pedal their bikes up the driveway, say hello to the moms, and ask Madison if they can use her bike ramp. The boys cruise up and down the ramp's shallow slopes while Madison continues bouncing, the picture of suburban serenity. Despite their misgivings about relocating from Houston to this tidy subdivision, the family has yet to encounter hostility from their neighbors. "We have to give straight people more credit," Caraway says with a wry smile. "I'm working on that."
Tomball--its roads lined with single-room Baptist churches and the occasional sprawling worship complex, known to some locals as "Jesus malls" --may seem an unlikely magnet for gay couples raising kids. A year before Caraway and Ciancia moved here, activists in the neighboring county got a popular children's book that allegedly "tries to minimize or even negate that homosexuality is a problem" temporarily removed from county libraries. So imagine Caraway's and Ciancia's surprise when, shortly after moving in, their daughter met another pair of moms rollerblading down their block: a lesbian couple who had moved into the neighborhood with their kids just a few months earlier.
Growing. Gay families have arrived in suburban America, in small-town America, in Bible Belt America--in all corners of the country. According to the latest census data, there are now more than 160,000 families with two gay parents and roughly a quarter of a million children spread across some 96 percent of U.S. counties. That's not counting the kids being raised by single gay parents, whose numbers are likely much higher--upwards of a million, by most estimates, though such households aren't tracked.
This week, the commonwealth of Massachusetts will recharge the gay-marriage debate by becoming the first state to offer marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The move has raised the ire of conservatives who believe gay marriage tears at the fabric of society--and earned support from progressives who think gay men and lesbians deserve the same rights as heterosexuals. But the controversy is not simply over the bond between two men or two women; it's about the very nature of the American family.
Gay parents say their families are much like those led by their straight counterparts. "I just say I have two moms," says Madison, explaining how she tells friends about her parents (whom she refers to as "Mom" and "Mamma Sheri" ). "They're no different from other parents except that they're two girls. It's not like comparing two parents with two trees. It's comparing two parents with two other parents."
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