The Rise of the Gay Family
More and more American children are growing up with same-sex parents
During middle school and part of high school, A. J. Costa, now a freshman at Texas Lutheran University outside San Antonio, kept his mother's relationship with a live-in partner secret. He grew close to his mom's partner, even preferred the arrangement to his mom's previous marriage, which ended when he was 7, but never invited friends to the house. "I didn't want anyone to make fun of me," says Costa. "Nobody was going to mess with my family."
Costa's fears were reinforced by some classmates who did find out and referred to his moms as "dykes." But in the summer before his junior year in high school, Costa visited Provincetown, Mass., for "Family Week," an annual gathering of gay parents and their children. "I couldn't get over how many families there were, all like mine," he recalls. "I realized that it wasn't about whether I have two gay moms. It was that I have two moms . It was getting past the fact that they're gay."
Support. In recent years, support networks for children of gay parents and for parents themselves have expanded dramatically. Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere, or COLAGE, has chapters in 28 states. The Family Pride Coalition, whose dozens of local affiliate organizations attract gay parents who want their kids to meet other children of gays and lesbians, has doubled its member and volunteer base in the past five years, to 17,000. Vacation companies like Olivia, founded 30 years ago for lesbian travelers, now offer packages specifically for gays and lesbians with children, and R Family Vacations, underwritten by former talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell, will launch its inaugural cruise this summer. Tanya Voss, a 36-year-old college professor in Austin who, with her partner, has two young boys through artificial insemination, plans to attend the first Family Pride Coalition weekend at Disney World next month. Kids need environments where "they don't have to explain their families," she says, "a safe place where they could just be."
Still, neither COLAGE nor Family Pride Coalition has affiliate groups in Mississippi, South Dakota, or Alaska, the states where gay and lesbian couples are most likely to have kids. ("The way you manage in a more hostile environment," says Gates, "is to go about your business and not draw much attention to yourself." ) Many such states also present the highest legal hurdles for those families. Roughly two thirds of children with same-sex parents live in states where second-parent or joint adoptions--which allow the partner of a child's biological or adoptive parent to adopt that child without stripping the first parent of his or her rights, much like stepparent adoption--has been granted only in certain counties or not at all.
Absent such arrangements, a biological or adoptive parent's partner could be powerless to authorize emergency medical treatment or denied custody if the other parent dies. When Voss and her partner were planning to have their first child, they decided Voss wouldn't carry the baby because her parents--who disapprove of Voss's homosexuality--would have likely claimed custody in the event that their daughter died during childbirth.
advertisement
