Article by Abigail Garner

“Your dad is gay? What’s that like?”

I used to just say things like, “It’s just like your family,” or “He’s like any other dad, just gay.”

My family never really was “just like” families with straight parents. My gay dad was like no straight dad I had ever met. But I didn’t know how to begin to explain what made my family different, nor did I think that those differences would be acceptable.

For a long time, LGBT activists have been chanting “no difference” when it comes to how children fare in gay-parent families. As I got older I learned that being different from straight families is not automatically bad. When I realized this, I began to look critically at my “just like” response. Some researchers have, too.

In the April 2001 issue of the American Sociological Review, Sociology professors Judith Stacey and Timothy J. Biblarz from the University of Southern California released an analysis based on 21 previous studies of children of lesbian and gay parents from the past two decades. Stacey and Biblarz say that contrary to previous conclusions, these children do indeed have distinguishable differences from their counterparts who have straight parents.

Their interpretation of the data suggests that there is a high correlation between children who have lesbian and gay parents and the children’s tendency to challenge traditional ideas of gender roles, gender-based career choices, and compulsory heterosexuality.

Why were these findings previously downplayed? To fully understand the answer, it is important to look at why such research was done in the first place. Most research on children of gay and lesbian parents was conducted in order to build supporting evidence in defense of gay parents who risked losing custody of their children when getting a divorce from a straight spouse.

To ensure that gay parents would not be denied custody, the research needed to prove that having a gay parent would not influence the children in any way. The research needed to disprove homophobic assumptions, namely that the children would be no more likely to be gay themselves. (Homophobic court systems were not going to accept the retort, “Why should that matter?”) And since so much of homophobia is based on notions of gender nonconformity, suspicion of not being straight could arise if daughters were reported to be less traditionally feminine or if the sons were reported to be more sensitive.

Under homophobic pressure to prove that gay families are “just like” straight families, previous researchers have diminished the gifts of liberation that children gain as a result of being raised in their “nontraditional” families. Being raised in one home with two dads and another home with a single mother meant that I saw both genders operating outside of traditional gender roles. Did that have an impact on how I “turned out?” Yes.

I may be straight, but I’m still the Radical Right’s nightmare. At 30, I’m single, no kids, self-employed, opinionated, can’t cook, hate cleaning. Fundamentalists might even deem me “confused.”

Or they might call me what some classmates called me when I was a kid: “weird.”

“You’re soooo weird.”

Thanks. I call it liberated.

Originally published in Just For Us.

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