Gay Parents: Under Fire and on the Rise

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The day after they lost the right to have two-year-old Tyler ever set foot in their home again, Sharon Bottoms and her lover April Wade sat on a couch beneath a framed handwritten copy of the vows of love and commitment that brought on all their grief. Decorated with a rose drawn by April and signed Oct. 27, 1992, the pledge reads, "With this ring, I give you my love forever. I promise to be faithful, honest and totally yours, for as long as I shall live . . . I ask that you take me as I will take you, to love and cherish forever in life, till death do us part."

The words are traditional; their relationship is not. Sharon was declared "an unfit parent" last week by Henrico County Circuit Court Judge Buford Parsons Jr. His one reason: she is a lesbian.

That judgment, based on Virginia legal precedent and accompanied by the judge's personal reproof, turned Sharon and April into national symbols. Conservatives hailed the judge's ruling as a vindication of crusades against legitimizing homosexuality. Liberals denounced it as prejudice masquerading as jurisprudence. The case intensified heated questions resulting from the public emergence of homosexuals in American society: Are they just another oppressed minority, making the same arduous climb that faced so many other groups? Or are they morally and socially different? Is there -- and should there be -- a way to give homosexuals legal equality without compelling heterosexuals to endorse the equality of their life-style?

But inside the women's two-bedroom garden apartment, there was no talk of activism, of politics, of advancing a gay agenda -- only of somehow putting a family back together. Sharon was a divorced mother when she met April. From the beginning, they thought of Tyler as theirs together. The matching tattoos on their left arms combine their initials and Tyler's. The walls are covered with photos -- some of the boy alone, some with Sharon, some with both women. Upstairs is the room they still think of as his, the floor comfortingly littered with plastic trucks, musical instruments, toys and stuffed animals.

The women saw their relationship as a chance to turn around misdirected lives. Sharon, a high school dropout, works part time as a cashier at a Winn- Dixie supermarket. April, a recovering alcoholic who served in the military, manages a deli. They dreamed of buying a house, settling into middle-class stability. They hoped, one day, to give Tyler a younger sister or brother born to April by artificial insemination. Now they feel that all their dreams, and much of their sense of family, are "on hold." The loss is all the more painful because the "parent" who challenged them was Sharon's mother Kay.

April last saw Tyler six months ago, when the court ruled he could visit only if she were away. She wrote a poem, called "A Child in the Middle," which includes the lines, "The child we see will suffer forever/ Because of the bonds they force him to sever/ Today we pray that God is with us/ And corrects this wrong and painful injustice." Yet even as she speaks of injustice, April struggles with self-imposed guilt: "I have blamed myself for a long time. A part of me knows I'm not guilty; another part feels I am." She even talks of moving out if it will help. "We can live apart and still have an emotional connection. If living apart gets Tyler back, that's what will be done." Sharon resists that choice: "I don't want it to be a requirement. I'm a good mother. I'm a good person. I don't understand why, if you're gay or lesbian, you don't have the same rights as anyone else."

Most people believe in a mother's right to her child. Most believe equally fervently in the child's right to the best possible home -- and in their minds, that means a home where the child will grow up heterosexual. In Tyler's case, conservatives seized on the fact that the boy occasionally called April "Dada" as a sign of gender confusion. Sharon says he couldn't pronounce "April," so he called her "Addle," which evolved into "Dada" -- a term he also used for many other people. Like most two-year-olds, she adds, Tyler is just beginning to learn about everything.

In major ways, Tyler's story is highly unusual. Not because he has a gay parent -- so do tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of other American children and adults -- but because it ended up in court and on the evening news. The vast majority of such families live quietly, unobtrusively. When gay parents do face custody or visitation battles in court, the outcome is apt to vary from state to state -- indeed, from judge to judge or from social worker to social worker. Virginia is one of just four states where legal precedent deems gay parents unfit (Arkansas, Missouri and North Dakota are the others), and even Judge Parsons granted Sharon a weekly visit, ensuring she would remain a presence in Tyler's life. Only New Hampshire and Florida categorically bar gays as adoptive parents; in the nation's capital, by contrast, local officials held a seminar this summer to instruct gays on how to adopt.

New Jersey, Vermont and half a dozen other states permit a lesbian to adopt her lover's child and become a second parent. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court did so last Friday, allowing surgeons Susan Love and Helen Cooksey to adopt the five-year-old girl they have raised since birth. The child was conceived by Love via artificial insemination with sperm from a cousin of Cooksey's. Because of technicalities, the child's own mother had to adopt her for Cooksey to be made co-parent. Cases like this have led judges in several states to suggest that adoption laws need to be rewritten.

It's impossible to say how many children have gay parents, in part because there are no solid numbers on gay adults. Charlotte Patterson, the University of Virginia psychologist who testified for Sharon Bottoms, concedes that any estimate of children of gay parents -- hers is "millions" -- is an educated guess. A considerably lower yet still sizable figure is implied in a 1983 study by the Family Research Institute, a conservative think tank that distributed questionnaires in Los Angeles, Washington, Denver, Louisville and Omaha. Of 877 respondents who were fathers, 22 (about 1 in 40) labeled themselves either bisexual or homosexual. Of 1,705 mothers, 25 (about 1 in 70) said the same. A majority of gay or bisexual parents had two or more children.

What seems certain is that the number of children who are aware they have gay parents is growing. That in turn means that gay and lesbian parents are infusing the gay civil rights movement with a sense of family virtues, making it mainstream in a way Middle America can understand. When today's children are adults, their experience of growing up with a gay parent, or having a childhood acquaintance who did, is apt to have demystified for many the otherness of gays. In sufficient numbers, that could lead to precisely the matter-of-fact outlook that gays seek and antigay conservatives fear.

Children of gays are most often born to parents in heterosexual marriages who subsequently come out. That has always been true, except for the coming- out part. Today's gay father or mother is much more apt than those of a generation ago to be candid, so that a much larger percentage of today's children who have gay parents grow up aware that they do. Most of the rest are born to lesbians via artificial insemination; estimates of how many such babies have been born range from a thousand or so to tens of thousands. At Pacific Reproductive Services, a San Francisco clinic that is one of a growing number congenial to lesbian clients, more than 100 lesbians use the sperm bank each month. Says Sherron Mills, a lesbian nurse practitioner who launched Pacific in 1983: "This is a sequel to the gay-rights movement. A lot of gays wanted to have kids and presumed they could not. People started realizing they could live like everyone else." Nongay clinicians are not always so sensitive. Says Debra Samdperil, a Boston photographer who wants a child to raise with her partner, psychologist Laurie Livingston: "The doctors continue to see me as a single woman, not as part of a couple."

There are only a few hundred documented cases of adoption or foster parenting by open gays. But many prospective gay parents conceal their orientation, so the actual number is surely larger. Gary Morin of Silver Spring, Maryland, found it much easier to adopt Jonathon, now 4, as a single parent than he would have as part of a gay couple. "I didn't have to worry about hiding a second person's clothes or pretending that I lived alone." Although exhausted by the demands of single parenthood combined with his job as a sign-language instructor, Morin is eager to adopt more children someday.

If there are millions or even hundreds of thousands of gay parents, why do they seem so invisible? Mostly because they fear harassment and want to shield their children from turmoil. Who are these people, and how are their children faring? In the New York City neighborhood of Greenwich Village, Sandra Russo and Robin Young are rearing Cade, 13, and Ry, 11, their respective biological daughters via artificial insemination. The children's nurturing home life and studied imperviousness to teasing have turned around their peers. Says Ry: "After a while they get it. Some kids are a little slow."

Deb Rodriguez and Evelyn Rivera moved in May from Bend, Oregon, to the lesbian mecca of Northampton, Massachusetts, so they could stop posing as sisters to placate landlords, employers (both are waitresses) and neighbors while bringing up Rivera's son Mark, 13, by a prior marriage, and her nephew Salvatore, 11. "The sister act is over," says Rodriguez. "You have to be honest with kids to produce honest citizens."

In Haydenville, Massachusetts, Barbara Allen and Robin Juris are providing their biological children Hannah, 7, and Cody, 3, with the rural environment lacking in their former home in Oakland, California. They inseminated each other using the sperm of casual friends and took extensive, though not uncommon, legal precautions to avoid facing a custody dispute. "In our hearts we trusted these men," says Allen, "but we also wrote up a contract." The children have met their biological fathers; that word, however, is never used. Says Allen: "They are donors. They don't have a role that would approximate the real role of a father in any way. We have men in their lives in other ways."

The majority of gay parents are women, both because courts are more apt to award custody to mothers and because of the lesbian baby boom. Gay men are increasingly seeking to join them. Tim Fisher lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his longtime lover Scott Davenport and their daughter Kari, 3, and son Fritz, 1. The children, biologically Fisher's, were conceived via surrogate mothers. Fisher is a stay-at-home dad: "I didn't just want to become a parent. I wanted a family. I wanted the hands-on experience." Davenport admits, "I was skeptical. But becoming parents is a very natural outcome of our relationship." Even more than other single parents, gay men with children find it hard to launch new romances. Admits Morin: "Many men are gone pretty quickly when they find out I'm a father. Getting involved with me is a package deal."

Even when family relationships are solid, a parent's unconventional sexuality can complicate life for children, particularly during adolescence. Atlanta bookstore owner Linda Bryant adopted a 10-month-old biracial boy before she came out. He is now 18 and heterosexual. Growing up, he sympathetically compared her situation to the racial prejudice he encountered. When he was 12, she recalls, he said gently, "Mom, you know, it's not an accepted thing." Will Dixon-Gray, who lives in Freeport, New York, with his adopted son Ed, 16, says the boy was uncomfortable for a long time with his father's status: he wouldn't use the word gay and wouldn't tell classmates because he expected them to pick on him. Now 16, Ed says, "If it bothers some people, it's not worth knowing them. I'm very against prejudice." Of his own sexuality, Ed says, "I know I'm straight."

Los Angeles law partners Diane Abbitt and Roberta Bennett went to college together, married fraternity brothers, then fell in love with each other when Abbitt's two boys and Bennett's two girls were ages 2 to 5. The kids were often queasy about their mothers' public displays of affection. When the women held hands on a bus, one son whispered, "Don't do that." Allison, now 23, feared as a teenager that no one would marry her; at 14, she wrote the couple a letter about how awful it was to have two lesbian mothers and how deeply she wished things were different. At the end of the letter, Diane's older son appended the message, "Mom, don't worry. I used to feel this way, but I outgrew it. -- David." Allison has too. The children are all, according to their parents, "flaming heterosexuals."

Gays say that what makes their children uncomfortable is not homosexuality itself but society's intolerant attitude toward it. Conservatives counter that the discomfort comes from learning the useful lesson that a parent's life- style is immoral.

Social science cannot clearly answer whether gay parents produce gay children, and if so, whether the cause is environmental or genetic. University of Virginia professor Patterson, considered a leading researcher in the field, says she has reviewed 22 studies involving offspring of gays ranging from toddlers to adults. She found none convincing that the children had suffered or were more than normally inclined to be gay. Says Patterson: "It's a question of ignorance or fear." Her own research includes studying the sexual identity, social skills and self-image of 37 children (average age: 6) of lesbians in the San Francisco area in 1990 and '91. "The basic finding," she says, "was that children of lesbian parents are developing much like children of heterosexual parents."

Conservatives discredit Patterson by pointing out that she is an acknowledged lesbian, with a presumed ideological interest in the subject she studies. They counter with the Family Research Institute study of 1983 and a further survey in Dallas in 1984. Of 5,162 respondents, only 17 reported having had a homosexual parent. Of those, 11 "explicitly attributed their sexual orientation, in part at least, to parental homosexuality." Even the people who conducted this survey concede that the sample was far too small to be reliable. Moreover, if recent research is right in suggesting a genetic basis for homosexuality, it may be that parental role models have little or no influence. Conservatives retort that common sense suggests children are apt to emulate Mom and Dad -- or Mom and Mom, or Dad and Dad.

Most people agree that a child is best off growing up in an intact family with two loving parents. Most heterosexuals, and even a lot of gays, think it is better if there is one parent of each gender. Rarely is that the choice. Custody battles arise because parents split up. Children available for adoption have already lost their birth parents. Children conceived by artificial insemination would not otherwise have been born. For Tyler Bottoms and countless children like him, abstract assumptions about bettering his future mean far less than the present pain and confusion of having his family at odds over him.

With reporting by Wendy Cole/New York and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles