Do Gay Partners and Parents Have a Place in the Family of Values?

The holiday season always makes me a little queasy, as if I were expecting something that I know I won’t get. I think I feel this way because the season is so relentlessly about family and, like so many other gay people, I have to cope with the pain and sadness of growing up gay in an American family. That experience has left a wound that time, therapy and even happiness have not healed.

Gays who want the civil right to marry have many motivations, including the right to raise their children within a socially and legally acknowledged relationship. And it is wrong to think that the history of family confirms the notion that the sexual act that makes a child means that the biological father and mother are best equipped to raise that child. The Hawaii gay marriage decision cited the clear evidence of lesbians and gay men making good parents. We always have, of course, and there is no reason to think coming out and making same-sex unions legal will affect that, except to make us better parents because we are more honest and happier. The claim that it is selfish for us to want to have and raise children makes neither biological nor common sense. It is dangerous nonsense to take a father’s love for a daughter and a mother’s for a son as a rule for who can and should be parents. Too many of us have been well raised by others than our two biological parents or badly raised by our biological parents to believe that making a baby creates parents in anything but biological fact. The high incidence of suicide among gay teens is evidence of the failure of too many traditional families to protect the children in their care.

What can lesbians and gay men teach American families? First, coming out is a process of self-parenting that enriches family life even as it gives gays and lesbians back our own lives. Sharing your true self and your real life with your family frequently inspires your family to be more honest and caring. It isn’t just gays who have to disguise themselves from their families; ours is not the only authentic self unwelcome at home.

Second, gay men and lesbians are good at family. Having lived on the margins of our own families, we have found ways to function within them, suppressed our own lives in order to be devoted parents, uncles and aunts, siblings and children. Most of us have formed our own families, bound by shared experience, values and love. They are there when we return from stressful times with the families that raised us or when we are not welcome al home; too often, they have been the ones to care for our sick and dying. Gay parents in gay relationships can make good families, because we have had to discover on our own how to make family a choice, not a habit.

Third, gays know that family is always a choice, however involuntary it may feel. You don’t choose your relatives, but you can choose to make a real family out of the one you have. The proof of family values is how the family treats its own. Perhaps this very holiday season, American families might choose to welcome their gay members home. In time, we will gain our equality as citizens and our rights as human beings. But for now, being welcomed at last into our families as we really are is no more than we deserve. And it is something important that American families can do for themselves.