Archive

Daughters of Gay Moms

In the last few months, The Federalist has published pieces from two straight-identified daughters of lesbian moms who say their experiences have led them to oppose equal marriage and conclude that their lives could have been better if they had a pair of male/female heterosexual parents.

“Same-sex marriage and parenting withholds either a mother or father from a child while telling him or her that it doesn’t matter. That it’s all the same,” Heather Barwick writes in “Dear Gay Community: Your Kids Are Hurting.” “But it’s not. A lot of us, a lot of your kids, are hurting. My father’s absence created a huge hole in me, and I ached every day for a dad. I loved my mom’s partner, but another mom could never have replaced the father I lost.”

Brandi Wilson, author of “The Kids Are Not Alright: A Lesbian’s Daughter Speaks Out,” echoed similar sentiments in her piece. “Knowing next to nothing about males is hardly all that was hard about being raised by two women. It probably comes as no surprise that growing up in Podunk, Oklahoma, was not a walk in the park. Unlike other kids who were apparently raised in gay utopias, I grew up very alone and isolated. I was an only child and there weren’t other kids around like me to talk with and relate to. No one I knew understood what I struggled with each day, and I had no option but to keep it all inside.”

These two women are using their experiences to speak out against equality, despite Heather’s saying she’s a part of us (“Gay community, I am your daughter.”), and conservatives have been sharing these stories and others like them in hopes of gaining traction against marriage and adoption laws in the U.S. But the problem is that simply deciding these women are wrong or enemies of our fight doesn’t do anything to address their actual points, some of which could be valid. Which is why we spoke with four daughters of lesbian moms-both straight-identified and queer-to see how they felt about the assessments Heather and Brandi and others like them have made.

Christi Lincoln says growing up in Texas with her mom and her mom’s partner was definitely not easy.

“I only told a select few that my ‘aunt’ was really my mom’s ‘roommate’ and that she didn’t just come over on the weekend,” Christi said. “I understand there can be stress there. But maybe [Heather’s] mom tried to hide it more than mine. Depending on the friends and support her mom had, maybe she stressed about it a lot more than I had to.”

Erin Judge is also from Texas, and lived with her mother and her female partner from age nine on.

“I kept it secret, and so did my parents,” she said. “But yeah, the homophobia was all around, and I was scared of CPS coming and taking me away. I don’t know if I ever voiced that to my mother, but it was definitely something that caused my young mind a good deal of stress and anxiety. It would’ve been crazy for them to do so, because my mom and her partner took such great care of me. But, I was living in Collin County, where as recently as 2013 a judge ordered a same-sex partner out of the house of a divorced woman with kids.”

“It sounds like being raised in a homophobic environment was very difficult for [Heather], and I feel sad for her,” said Rosevan Vickery. “And anyone like her, that her experiences as a child and as an adult have been feeling excluded, put down, and not listened to by both straight and LGBTQ folks. That’s not been my experience, thankfully.”

One of the biggest points both of The Federalist pieces make against marriage equality is they missed out on having a father. The women interviewed for this piece could understand this wanting.

“I did ache for my dad for a while,” Christi said. “I think most kids who feel some sort of abandonment have more aches than others. I blamed my mom for a long time for keeping him away.”

But Christi didn’t identify with Brandi’s writing how she wished she knew more about men.

“I really don’t understand how that is a hardship. I understand ignorance and misinformation, but I don’t understand how that was a hardship,” Christi said. “It sounds as though she couldn’t even talk to her mom about anything including her feelings or curiosities about life.”

Christi said that her mom is “very much a butch lesbian,” and was “the most masculine role model I had.”

“She held stereotypical male jobs my whole life. Again, I never thought having a man around was the issue. I wanted a stable life where we weren’t always moving, where we had money to pay the bills, where she didn’t go through a paycheck in one weekend,” Christi said.

Emma-Tattenbaum Fine, a straight-identified writer living in New York City, says she wonders if perhaps the absence of a father affects her adult dating life.

“I am perhaps a bit compulsive as I seek out endless male attention,” Emma said. “Perhaps this is just because I’m a human, and a human narcissist at that, but maybe it can be attributed to growing up without a dad. Lots of women grow up without dads and I think it does find its expression in their dating lives later. I have had both wonderful and dysfunctional relationships as a result. “

But Emma also found herself wanting a dad as a kid because she “wanted to belong.”

“I still grew up aware that I wanted a dad and ashamed of that longing,” she said. “[My mom’s partner] Margie helped me with this once when we drew together what I thought he looked like. I was 8-years-old and was having dreams about him, or some sort of yearning. She helped me to visualize him and create tiny details about him and what he would wear, etc. and then we colored it in together and she drew the harder stuff, like, I dunno, arms, which I was bad at. I remember that as a powerful exercise and acknowledgement of what I needed.”

Emma said she tried to track her sperm donor down through siblingregistry.com when she was 20.

“It suddenly, sort of out of nowhere, became urgent that I find my father,” she said. “Dating re-opened the need to investigate who I came from. [My mom] faced her worst fears, about being replaced, about being discarded-even old old fears that child services would whisk me away from her when the two of us were traveling without [my mom’s partner]-she faced those fears and supported my search. At that time, we had a frank conversation in which I was finally able to explain that I wanted to find my father and that the search actually had nothing to do with her, that the two were mutually exclusive. Seems obvious in a way and there’s narcissism and fragility in her conflation of my search with her role in my life, but I think many non-biological moms live in fear this way, carving out an identity with not so many role models. ”

Erin said she finds the ideas of one mom/one dad households passé at this point.

“So-called ‘nuclear’ families peaked a few decades ago at about 40% of American households,” she said. “The truth is, there’s nothing normal about a Mommy and a Daddy and 2.5 kids. And besides, plenty of people who did grow up that way are nonetheless completely damaged, which is evidence that it’s not some ideal formula. As for men, I definitely had my loving grandfather and my wonderful uncles in my life, but I don’t think they provided some male influence that I was otherwise lacking.”

Rosevan said she never felt like she was lacking by not having a father in her life.

“This ‘aching lack’ or ‘something not right’ that the authors describe is not mine, not mine at all, and I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea that Barwick writes on behalf of ‘us all,'” she said.

Christi finds that some children of gay parents aren’t necessarily missing a male figure, but stability.

“An unstable home life is terrible for a child. Both women and myself, I think, grew up wanting a stability that they didn’t have as a child,” she said. “They think a father would have given them that. I totally disagree with that.”

Homophobia has been a huge part of most of these women’s lives, the threat of being taken from their homes or being subjected to violence by their local community.

“You weren’t allowed to look a certain way at another female, you couldn’t do anything outside your own doors that would be deemed a ‘homosexual behavior,'” Christi said of growing up in Texas. “The places gays met either didn’t have names, or lights, and you had to know someone who knew someone. It was deemed a choice, and a bad one at that. It was eternal damnation, and that’s what gay parents were living with. You had to be fake with all your coworkers or lose your job. Even that’s true somewhat now. To live your authentic life was to risk your life. Gay and lesbian parents did that. And they raised kids on top of it. Two lesbians living together with their small combined income raising kids was hard. And still is.”

A 2011 study of U.S. households with same-sex parents found that 62 percent of lesbians had children from a previous relationship and only 37 percent of lesbian women had them from a current relationship. This means most of the adult children of lesbian mothers today were born from previous heterosexual relationships (like in the cases of Christi, Erin and Rosevan). The report also accounts for adopted children with same-sex parents, but the four women we spoke with grew up with their biological mothers. Columbia University’s What We Know project aims to help provide stats from 71 different studies that conclude children of gay and lesbian parents “are no worse or better” than other children.

The women we spoke with cannot identify with the hurt the Federalist writers detail that comes from their moms’ being gay.

“I don’t understand the hurt and pain they are experiencing ‘because of’ their moms’ life,” Christi said. “They were taken care of, loved, provided for. That’s so much more than so many get. It wasn’t traditional, but they will have to accept that that is their life. And it’s in the past. And now they are providing a stable life for their respective four children. I have done the same in my life, I crave stability that I didn’t have as a child so I lead a very traditional life. I love routine and stability.”

Erin said her mom’s relationship with her step-mom set a great example for her on how to love a partner.

“When I look at my relationship with my husband today, it most resembles my mother’s relationship with her female partner,” she said. “We treat each other with kindness and tenderness and warmth, and we’re always laughing and joking. Most importantly, my husband and I are peers and equals. In some ways, gay parents are the best possible model for an egalitarian partnership.”

“Having two moms affected me positively because they were great parents,” Emma said. “If they had been not as good parents, or if I had grown up in a less desirable or homophobic environment, I might have different things to say about having two moms.”

As a straight woman, Emma says she, like Heather, feels like a part of the gay community.

“I feel a great sense of purpose, joy, and obligation… I feel very at home with gay and lesbian people,” she said.

Erin, who identifies as bisexual, jokes she’s “a terrible poster child for anybody who wants to argue that queer parents don’t raise queer kids.”

“The truth is, growing up in a family like mine gave me the freedom to be honest with myself about my sexuality at a fairly young age,” she said. “When I had my first girlfriend, coming out was a non-issue. I started to overcome my internalized homophobia when my mother came out to me, which definitely gave me a huge head start on that journey myself. “

Rosevan, who is identifies as queer and has a background in anthropology, says that when people like Heather and Brandi perpetuate the myth that male-female parented households are somehow ideal, it’s just not based on any truth.

“I have read many academic studies of family structures around the world,” Rosevan said. “There is tremendous diversity in the ways that children are raised and families structured, and which family members are counted as integral to the rearing of children. It seems facile to ignore the diversity of human kin relations in favor of the family structure that happens to work best or appeal most to the authors.”

Considering the very different stories that six different women of varying identities have based on their personal experiences with their gay mothers, it’s clear that there’s no one truth about growing up as a child of a lesbian parent. A person’s sexuality has no bearing on their ability to raise a well-adjusted child, as many children of straight mothers and fathers can tell you. The specific negatives that might accompany being raised by a lesbian mom, in general, has way more to do with the kind of homophobic environments we are surrounded by and less to do with a mother’s romantic partnerships. Needless to say, the women interviewed for this piece support marriage equality, although their views are way more nuanced than the women who opposed it based on reasons stated above.

“In all honesty, as someone who considers myself politically radical —much more so than my mother!-when I think of marriage equality, I see how it’s so important and I also see how this struggle has taken so many resources to essentially allow LGB cis-gendered people to become legitimate and share resources in the eyes of the state,” Roseven said. “I feel sad to see that it has taken that much, and sad and angry at how many people—most obviously trans* folks and gender-nonconforming people, as well as LGBTQ people with less wealth, and LGBTQ people of color, who experience racism on top of homophobia and transphobia—are marginalized and excluded from marriage equality and state recognition (if they want it) and are outright oppressed. Marriage equality does not solve these problems and it hasn’t included these intersecting oppressions in its campaigns. So in essence, while I wholeheartedly support marriage equality, I also think that the campaign for marriage equality as it has been articulated—as for ‘gay men and lesbian women,’ with enough means that pooling financial resources is a benefit rather than a problem—can detract from other types of striving for a more just and equal society.”

“The only thing that hurts children of gay people is homophobia,” Erin said. “If you’re standing there declaring you’re worried’ about me, what you’re actually doing is shitting on my family and insulting me. There’s no genuine love or concern there, only judgment and condemnation and malice. The opponents of gay marriage are happy to throw actual people like me under the bus for their baseless arguments. It pisses me off, especially because I know so many same-sex couples who are phenomenal parents, and it horrifies me that any kids growing up today might still have to hear the same bigoted, erasing messages I did.”

Lesbian Apparel and Accessories Gay All Day sweatshirt -- AE exclusive

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button