Back in the early ’90s, when I was active with the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Chorus, we had some sort of social at a member’s house. Our host and his partner were showing us around, when someone commented on the photos hanging on the wall of an incredibly adorable kid. “Is that your nephew?”
“No,” our host said. “That’s my son. Here he is with his two moms. And here’s one of all of us.”
He proceeded to tell the story of how a friend he had known “since school” had one day asked him if he would donate the sperm so that she and her partner could have a child. “The next thing I knew, I was explaining to my boyfriend at the time about how in a couple months we’d have to go about a week or two without sex to maximum my sperm count.”
They were doing it without the help of a clinic. So, as he said, he had to “produce a sample” at the appointed time, and a friend who had been recruited for the purpose drove the container across town to where the lesbian couple were waiting. It all had to be timed around when she was most likely to be ovulating, of course. Then they had to wait for a number of weeks to see if it worked.
It didn’t.
So they tried again. And again.
“By this point I suspect we were driving all our friends crazy, because we were all paying attention to her menstrual cycle and talking about it in inappropriate places!”
Eventually, they decided that the problem was probably that the drive time was too long for the sperm to remain viable. So, he said, one night he and his boyfriend went over to their house. She and the friend who was assisting with the equipment were in one bedroom, and he and his boyfriend were in another—”He was getting a bit tired of all these bouts of no sex leading up to each try”—and the gal’s partner waited outside the door to take the specimen jar once it was ready.
“It wasn’t romantic for any of us!”
But that time it worked. And ten years later, the lesbian couple were still happily raising their son, with the occasional help of the friend who had donated the sperm.
I was reminded of this story while listening to this story on one of the local NPR stations.
It also made me think about those comments during the Supreme Court hearings a couple weeks back where a couple of the justices kept referring to gay parenting and gay-headed families as a recent development. One justice insisted that the very idea was “newer than cell phones.”
The first analog cellular network went active in 1979, but no one called the large, brick-like phones (some of them were closer to the size of a briefcase) a cellphone. The phones small enough to fit easily in a pocket came out in 1991. About nine years after the birth of the boy whose story I began this post with.
And that wasn’t when gay parenting began. The American Psychological Association published one famous peer-reviewed multi-year study on the outcomes of children raised by gay and lesbian parents in 1970, for goodness sake!
When I was first coming out of the closet, in the late ’80s, a rather large percentage of the lesbians I met had children. Some of my “lesbian aunties*” had children who were older than I was, and those children had children of their own. A slightly smaller percentage of the gay men I met at that time also had children, some of them with children of their own, as well.
Most of those gay and lesbian parents I knew back then had married young while they were still struggling with their sexual identity, and the children were the result of the marriage. Because of various inequities in child custody laws in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the majority of those children were in the physical custody of their mothers. So I knew of a lot more kids who had been raised by lesbian mothers than those who had been raised by their gay fathers.
On the other hand, one of the adults I knew back then had been raised by an actual lesbian aunt and her aunt’s partner after her own parents had died when she was a baby.
Bottom line: gay, lesbian, and bisexual people have been raising children for many generations. It isn’t a recent idea.
And as to whether gay marriage is a recent idea? Well, the Roman Emperor Constantius II issued what was probably the very first legal ban on gay marriage back in the year 324 A.D. If they decided they needed to explicitly ban it, and then later add the death penalty to the punishment, then gay marriages had to have been happening before that, right?
* Not my actual aunts. These were older lesbian women who sort of adopted me when I was coming out.
