by Dan Savage
Dozens of legitimate, sound studies of children with same-sex parents have demonstrated again and again that our kids on average are just as likely to be happy, healthy, and well-adjusted as children with opposite-sex parents. Case in point: UCLA released a study, published in October of 2012 in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, comparing (and tracking over time) children who were adopted out of foster care by gay men, lesbian women, and heterosexual couples. The study followed eighty-two Los Angeles County children, a quarter of whom were adopted by homosexual parents, and then followed up with them for two years after being placed. Researchers found that “children in all three types of households benefited from adoption: on average, they made significant gains in cognitive development—their IQ scores increased by an average of 10 points—and they maintained stable levels of behavior problems. What’s more, the kids adopted by gay and lesbian parents actually started out with more risk factors, and were more likely to be of a different ethnicity than their adoptive parents, but after two years were on equal footing with their heterosexually-adopted peers.” Coauthor Letitia Anne Peplau concluded, “There is no scientific basis to discriminate against gay and lesbian parents.”
This study and the many others like it are supported by the reality that social workers, pediatricians, and family counselors nationwide see every day. Which is why mainstream child health and social services organizations unanimously support adoption by qualified gay parents. The American Academy of Pediatrics offers this endorsement of same-sex adoption: “The Academy supports the legal adoption of children by [same-sex] coparents or second parents. Denying legal parent status through adoption to coparents or second parents prevents these children from enjoying the psychologic and legal security that comes from having two willing, capable, and loving parents.”
Fischer’s bigoted rants stoke the vilest form of anti-gay bigotry: the belief that gay people, and gay men in particular, prey on children. The religious right continues to promote the myth of the gay sexual predator—gay people “recruit” by sexually abusing children—but that lie is fast losing its toxic cultural currency. It simply isn’t borne out by crime statistics (pedophiles are almost always straight-identified men, as Jerry Sandusky was, and they are attracted to children of both sexes, but they have easier access—as coaches, for instance—to same-sex victims) or by personal experience (most straight Americans know openly gay people now, and the openly gay people they know aren’t sexually abusing children). Anti-gay voices on the right are attempting to stuff the same old fears (gay people prey on children) into a brand-new bag (gay couples steal children from straight couples).
Gay couples aren’t stealing children from straight couples. Even with more same-sex couples adopting children than ever before, there are still more children who need to be adopted than there are couples (or singles) who are willing to adopt them. The choice for children waiting to be adopted isn’t between gay parents and straight parents. It’s between parents and no parents. And as nearly half a million children languish in foster care across the United States, political organizations with the word family in their names spend millions of dollars every year lobbying for restrictions that would block many of those children from ever having families of their own.
Whenever someone asks me why the United States is such a mess about sex and everything that touches on sex—why the United States, out of all Western industrialized nations, will never stop fighting about abortion, sex education, birth control, the sex lives of politicians, the existence of gay people—I shrug and say, “Canada got the French, Australia got the convicts, the United States got the Puritans.” But, in one area, the United States isn’t doing too badly when compared to lands that are braver, freer, and that have, every now and then, elected actual socialist heads of state. And that’s in adoptions by same-sex couples. On this issue, and pretty much this issue alone, the United States leads. It is legal for same-sex couples to adopt jointly in eleven states; adoptions by single gay people are legal in forty-five states; and second-parent adoptions are legal in thirteen states. Same-sex couples who live in states where they can’t adopt are free to do out-of-state adoptions in states where they can. Our relatively liberal adoption laws weren’t the result of an orgy of progressive, pro-gay legislation. In most states “liberal” adoption laws are something of a legislative oversight. Adoptions by same-sex couples and single gay people were never specifically banned, which allowed judges and social workers, their sights set on the best interests of children, to quietly approve adoptions by single gay people and same-sex couples.
Belgium, by way of comparison, created a “statutory cohabitation” law in 1998 that granted limited rights to same-sex couples. The country legalized same-sex marriage in 2003, but it wouldn’t allow adoptions by same-sex couples until 2006. Portugal granted same-sex couples limited rights in 2001 and legalized same-sex marriage in 2010. But same-sex couples in Portugal are still barred from adopting children. The same pattern has repeated itself in other European nations where gay people have secured their civil equality: First comes marriage—or some form of marriage-lite (civil unions, domestic partnerships)—then come gays pushing baby carriages.
Here in the United States we’re doing it in reverse. Same-sex couples have been adopting—and having children through surrogacy and artificial insemination, and raising children born to us in previous heterosexual relationships—long before the marriage equality movement in the United States got off the ground. Same-sex couples that wanted to start families didn’t wait for permission or marriage licenses. We created our families and trusted that the culture would catch up. And that’s just what seems to be happening.
When President Obama announced his support for marriage equality in an interview on ABC News in May of 2012, he emphasized the gay parents he personally knew. (“When I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed…same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together…I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”) If the gay men and lesbians who work for Barack Obama had waited for the president to endorse marriage equality before starting their families, they never would’ve started their families. Instead they met, fell in love, started families, and trusted that the culture—to say nothing of the president they served—would eventually recognize their humanity and affirm their basic human rights. The effort to bring gay families into the established social order—the movement to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples—isn’t about upending the traditional understanding of marriage. It’s about recognizing new realities, and new kinds of families, and bringing these families inside our shared marriage tradition.
“I suppose marriage equality is socially liberal inasmuch as it tries to defend and integrate a previously despised minority,” Andrew Sullivan writes. “But it is socially conservative in its attempt to envelop that minority in the traditions and responsibilities of family life.”
Exactly.
Louise Pratt, a member of the Australian Senate, may have said it best, though. During a debate over a marriage amendment bill in September of 2012—a bill that, had it not failed 26–41, would have legalized same-sex marriage in that country—Pratt, whose partner is transgender, said this: “We exist. We already exist. Our relationships exist, our children exist, our families exist, our marriages exist, and our love exists. All we ask is that you stop pretending that we don’t.”
The president of the United States has stopped pretending that our families don’t already exist. Nine states and counting have stopped pretending that our families don’t already exist. It’s only a matter of time before the other forty-one states—and the federal government—stop pretending.
Our son—who is being raised by same-sex parents in a state that has passed marriage equality—well, he most certainly exists. He’s fifteen years old now, and he gets taller and more opinionated with each passing day. D.J. is a snowb
oarder, a skateboarder, a challenge, and a fan of rap music. (Rap music? Where did we go wrong?) He also came out to his parents a few years ago—as straight.
Terry and I knew our only son was straight long before he officially came out.
We knew before we became parents that the odds of having a gay son—or a lesbian daughter—were pretty slim. (According to a Gallup poll conducted in 2011, the average American believes that 25 percent of the population is gay. The best current estimates put the total of the US population that is gay, lesbian, and bisexual at roughly 3.5 percent.) And unlike the straight parents Terry and I have known, loved, and been raised by, we weren’t emotionally invested in our child sharing our sexual orientation. We were open to a gay kid, of course, and being adopted by gay dads would’ve been a lucky break for any gay babies that happened to be gestating when we were in the process of adopting. But we knew going into it that our child’s sexual orientation wasn’t something we could control.
And it didn’t take long for us to realize that the kid we wound up adopting wasn’t gay. We had him figured for straight back when he was a trucks-and-guns-obsessed toddler, just as my parents suspected I might be gay back when I was a musical-theater-obsessed fifth grader. (Some guns-and-trucks-obsessed toddlers grow up to be gay, it should be noted, just as one or two musical-theater-obsessed fifth graders are rumored to have grown up to be straight. There are numerous confirmed cases of the former but none of the latter as of this writing.) And the older D.J. got, the straighter he got. However complex or nuanced the question, D.J. has always been able to construct a monosyllabic response. He has never expressed the remotest interest in art or theater or books. He feels that farts are the height of wit and that all other foodstuffs should have been retired after pizza came along. By the time D.J. was in the fifth grade, Terry and I realized that we were essentially raising the kid who beat us up in middle school.
We weren’t the first people that D.J. came out to as straight. Just as I first came out as gay to a couple of not-so-close friends to test the waters before breaking the big news to members of my immediate family (first my older brother Billy, then my mother, then my other siblings, then—years later—my father). The first person D.J. came out to as straight was John, a stay-at-home dad who lives across the street with his wife, Mishy, and their four kids. Heartbreakingly, D.J. swore John to secrecy, just as I had sworn my not-so-close friends to secrecy. D.J. wasn’t ready to tell us, he told John, because he wasn’t sure how we would react. Hearing that kind of broke our hearts.
We thought we had communicated to him that we loved him no matter what. And we hadn’t just told D.J. that we would love him whether he was straight or gay; we went out of our way to make sure that he understood—and to make sure he knew we understood—that this wasn’t a coin toss. We told him it wasn’t a fifty-fifty chance he would be gay or straight. No, the odds were most definitely in straight’s favor. (One night, years before he came out to us, D.J. and I sat and made a list of all of the couples we knew. Same-sex couples in one column, straight couples in another. Most of the couples on our list were straight, I explained, because most people are straight. I told him that one day his heart—and another organ that I neglected to mention at the time [keeping the convo age-appropriate]—would let him know if he was straight or gay or if he fell somewhere in between.)
D.J. finally told us he was straight about a week after he told John. We were standing in the front yard when D.J. tossed it out. “So you guys know I’m straight and stuff, right?” We said that we knew. Not because John had told us, although John had, but because we sensed it all along. We told him we loved him and that we never wanted him to be anyone other than the person he is. We told him that his being straight didn’t change anything. Then we told him to go do his homework to drive that final point home.
D.J. was not supposed to turn out straight—at least not according to opponents of adoptions by same-sex couples. Another chief argument against gay couples adopting is that our kids will “adopt” the “gay lifestyle” when they “grow up.” Gay parents sometimes offer clumsy responses to this argument. Don’t get me wrong: It’s among the easiest anti-gay arguments to refute. Terry and I have four straight parents between us, seven if you include stepparents. (My parents divorced and remarried; Terry’s mother remarried after Terry’s father died.) If a person’s sexuality is determined by his parents’ sexuality, then why aren’t Terry and I straight?
And where did gay people come from before same-sex couples began parenting?
Tony Perkins, president of the anti-gay hate group Family Research Council, believes he has the answer to that last question: Gay people come from lousy straight parents. In a 2012 appearance on Hardball on MSNBC, Perkins told host Chris Matthews that good straight parents prevent gayness by “teaching their children the right way to interact as human beings” (i.e., the penis-in-vagina way to interact). And by “controlling” for certain “environmental factors,” factors Perkins neglected to name, good straight parents can prevent their children from growing up to be bad gays.
Where do gay people with straight siblings fit into Perkins’s theory on the cause of homosexuality? I have three siblings, all straight, and Terry has one brother, also straight. Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, has one sister, Elizabeth, and she’s straight. Did my parents and Terry’s parents and Mary’s parents teach our siblings the right way to interact while failing to teach us those same lessons? Did they provide heterosexuality-inducing environments for our brothers and sisters while creating homosexuality-inducing microclimates just for us? Or—and this seems much more likely—is Tony Perkins full of shit?
Let’s go with Perkins being full of shit.
The mistake many gay people make, though, when we attempt to refute the it-will-turn-kids-gay argument, is primarily one of tone. In our hurry to reassure straight people that having gay parents doesn’t make kids gay, we sometimes sound like we agree that it would be some sort of tragedy if our kids grow up to be gay. But reassuring straight people that our kids are no more likely to be gay than their kids are, without sounding like gayness is a tragedy, is trickier than it sounds. (And it’s important that same-sex couples get this stuff right: Many gay adults who were raised by same-sex parents report feeling shame when they realized that they weren’t straight. Many of these kids had a difficult time coming out to their gay and lesbian parents as gay because they felt they were somehow giving ammunition to their families’ enemies.)
I lost track of the number of times we were asked, when D.J. was very young, if we were going to try to “raise him gay.” Terry would stand beside me rolling his eyes while I patiently explained that sexual orientation doesn’t work that way. We couldn’t control D.J.’s sexuality any more than our parents could control ours.
But if gay parents could turn their kids gay—if it works the way the Tony Perkinses and Bryan Fischers of the world would have us believe—how on earth did D.J. escape gayness? That kid didn’t just have gay parents. He had me, America’s Gayest Parent. I sang D.J. show tunes at bedtime for Christ’s sake. (“Maybe This Time” from Cabaret was a particular favorite before D.J. outgrew lullabies and turned to rap.)
We can’t say for certain yet that gayness is entirely genetic, although all current evidence points that way. But seeing as my son turned out straight, I think we can state with some certainty that gayness isn’t contagious.
And now, a dozen years after I wrote The Kid, and with roughly a million books out there by fathers about fatherhood, what can I possibly say about parenthood that hasn’t already been said? How about this: Having a child is like having a heroin problem. When you’re high, man, you’ve never been so high. When you’re high, maaaaaan, all you want is more children. But when you’re low, fuck, you have never been so low. When you’re low, fuuuuuuuck, you regret ever picking that first needle up.
Looking back, our low moments seem pretty mundane, and they will be familiar to most
parents: sleep deprivation and projectile vomiting when D.J. was young; sleep deprivation and epic conflicts about who’s in charge as D.J. moved into his teens. But the highs have been so sweet—and so unique—that they’ve gotten us through the lows. And the highs arrive when you least expect them, and they often come disguised as lows.
When D.J. was four years old we went on a trip to Paris. D.J. slept on the plane all the way over; Terry and I did not sleep. We arrived at our hotel in the wee hours of the morning completely exhausted. Terry and I wanted to go to bed. D.J. did not. D.J. would not. It soon became clear that neither of us would get any sleep so long as D.J. was in the room. Someone was going to have to take D.J. for a walk, Terry observed, and his tone of voice made it very clear just who he thought that “someone” should be.
I was pissed when I left the room with D.J. that morning—pissed at Terry, who had successfully played the more-exhausted-than-you card (every parent is issued a deck), not at D.J., who was only guilty of being wide awake.
But my anger faded and my exhaustion lifted as I strolled through the streets of Paris with D.J. on my shoulders as the sun was coming up. At one point I noticed some Parisians—not tourists like us, but honest-to-God locals—slipping down an alley and returning a moment later with bags of pastries. D.J. ran ahead to investigate. The baker at a patisserie was selling warm pastries out the back door of his not-yet-open shop. We picked up a large bag of warm sugar brioche, found a bench in a small park along the Seine, and sat together, talking and eating, as Paris came to life around us.
