So you finally tell your folks you're gay and after all the tears and what did I do wrong's comes the we'll never be grandparents line.. or does it?

More and more gays and lesbians are deciding to make the big decision to start a family.  It has been a lot easier for lesbians - but gay guys are proving to be just as resourceful.   And why the heck not?  We've been spoiling nephews and nieces and babysitting ankle biters for ever, why shouldn't we be able to have kids.

That's exactly what one lesbian couple asked themselves and came up with more than just a way to start their own family.  They decided we should all be talking about it and making it happen.

Rainbow parents dot com is an on-line forum which encourages gays and lesbians to talk about and plan ways to become parents.

I caught up with one of women behind Rainbow Parents to get a clearer picture of what it's all about.

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 Why the name?

Obvious reasons, it’s a sight designed for gays and lesbians to communicate.  The whole premise is that gay and lesbians need to talk about the situation of raising families but also getting families underway.  And the sight’s been very much designed to allow that communication of how exactly are we going to do this.  What types of roles and responsibilities in going forward and trying to connect to one another to create these families.

So obviously you saw there was a need out there?

Yes, yes from a personal level and from talking to a lot of other people.  There’s a lot of lesbians who want to have children some are going straight down the IVF root, for it’s great but for others they just don’t like it. Similarly there are a lot of gay guys who are wondering how they can have a family and it just seems that for there people, there’s nowhere, no common space that they can go and actually start to communicate with one another and talk through some of the issues.

So the web site is really a forum, an ability to exchange ideas?

Yes, just nothing more, nothing less.  It’s just an open space in cyberspace where people can go and talk.  What we found was that, for instance some lesbians want a lot of involvement with the father as it is.  So for them an IVF program isn’t suitable. For others they want no involvement, they don’t even want to know who the father is. So there’s, you know, this absolute extreme and in-between there are a lot of other stages of differing sorts of involvements.  Talking to gay guys some what to just give the sperm and to know that they’ve had a child and really don’t care to know the details on a daily basis.  But for others, thy want to be there to bath the child  and so that involves hem having to have an ongoing relationship with the lesbian couple. 

So I guess in looking at all these different types of issues we just saw that there was very much a need for somewhere where people could start to communicate and actually talk about these things.  

Very complex issues too, given the dynamics of a three person and in some cases a four person relationship as the basis for bringing up a child. That could be quite challenging – so I assume there is a lot of talking going on before hand, discussing issues, wants and desires.

I agree entirely, but the first point is actually finding those people.  Because that’s the hardest point.  There are gay couples out there today who would dearly love to have some kind of relationship with lesbian couples. Where the four could end up bringing up children so to speak together. But where do they go to find there.  Now in the gay papers – people are placing ads, for people trying to find one another.  It’s just so difficult because there’s no common space.  It’s not like you just go along to a nightclub and find someone like a straight couple and off they go and end up having children. They don’t talk about it, they don’t think about it, it just happens.  But for gay and lesbian couples it’s got to be all this discussion that occurs before hand – you’re right, they’ve got to figure out exactly what their involvements are and there’s so many different levels of involvement people want.

It’s the extra five or six levels of complexity that people just have to try and work through.  So really what we wanted to do is provide some space where people could talk.

Obviously getting the message out that this service is available is now very important.

It’s not going to work unless people actually go and use it.  But for a lot of I guess gay couples it’s becoming more and more apparent that they want to have children.  

It’s been one of those things that has been filtering along under the surface so to speak.  It’s now coming out in the press that having families is something gay couples want to be more and more involved in.  And lesbian couples have been  on the other side. They’ve been quietly working away – I suppose what we are saying is what isn’t everyone getting together in this space and talking.  

It’s all very nice to use IVF programmes but they are very clinical, you don’t get to find out who the father is and for some lesbian couples they do want this fatherly involvement.  Rather than having it as some male friend, they would prefer to have it as the real father of the child.  And that would certainly work for both parties if there was a space that they could start to communicate.

No it’s not that way for everyone, but there are certainly quite a few people that we’ve personally spoken to that would like to find out more about this type of thing.  But even coming back to the IVF programme, there’s so much misinformation out there about what it is, what it involved, who is eligible, who can undertake it, how they go about it, what are state laws – what’s the federal government doing to change laws.  What’s the physical process.  People go out and work through all these problems, but until now there has been no forum to exchange these ideas.

It’s a very large step in your life – it’s a big undertaking.  You don’t just go out one day and say right I’ll just pop along and do that.  So it really is something where the really could be a lot of support for other people going through the process and just general communication that could be offered on a site.

In some ways we thought a web site is a good place because you can communicate without having to be there.  You can go to these groups where you can site and talk about it as a group, but you are very much putting your heart and soul on the line and some people just don’t want to do that.  But they still want to get access to that information.  So a web site provides the perfect forum.

We have seen in recent months that IVF and laws about access to IVF are changing so thee is a lot of information and misinformation out there – can people looking for answers go to Rainbow Parents?

They can, but we’re not looking to set ourselves up as experts – because we’re not.  There’s people out there that have access to the very latest information and that type of thing and we very much see it as not trying to push information out to people we’re just simply creating a space where people can talk about it.

So we’re happy to share what we know about the entire system, or what we’re found in talking to other people.  That type of process, but we believe it should be controlled like some sort of government push of information.  That’s not what we’re all about.  It’s just a place to share and communicate.  For us it’s very much a personal thing, obviously we are looking at the entire process, looking at our options, looking at what we can do there and wanting to talk to other people.  Whether they’re lesbians or gays we want to talk to them because we want to understand where they’re at.  To be able to share in the information that they’ve gained and their experiences and their thoughts.

I guess in doing that it allows us to flow on from there – strengthening the community.  Because you are rather isolated when you start this process.  It’s just you as a little couple.  Whether you’re gays or lesbians you isolated in going off there and undertaking the process, but it would be nice if we could create a little but of unity and a little bit of sharing and caring and support from that point of view.  I believe we have the ability to do that.

At the end of the day it would be nice to know you can go out and share all that information rather than having to go out and learn it all from scratch.

I’m sure not too long ago a lot of gay mean and gay couples would have resolved themselves to not ever having children.

That’s sad.  They make great fathers.  I mean you see them all the time with children and I suppose that’s one of our bug bears in the whole process.  It’s like, why do I just want to go get this man who has no involvement when there’s gay guys who are so loving and caring and friendly and they want to have children just as much as lesbians do.

Now this is happening more in the UK and more in the US and we’ve seen documentaries and we’ve tried to follow up on what’s happening there.  There are living examples of where lesbians and gay couples or just single gay guys are actually working and sharing in the children.  So that the child, instead of just having a mother and a father, it can end up with two mothers and two fathers.  In that way they can get all the male type of things they need. They can go off and see the football and all those male things and they also get all the female things.  They get the best of both worlds, with a little bit extra in some ways in that that they have the extra support.

We just see this as the next evolution of what will happen in this process. No longer will it be just a clinical process we are going to undertake and sorry guys you’re not in the game.  We can actually come together a little bit more and who knows what can happen from that. 

We did talk to a lot of gay guys before we developed the site.  We wanted to check if we were a little bit off the mark, whether we had actually understood what was happening out there and there were as many gay guys as lesbians who actually wanted to have kids.  And our research has certainly indicated that.

In this day and age the traditional view of the family is changing.  The traditional roles of parents and in many cases what constitutes a family.  Single mums are out there raising kids and despite what church groups would have us believe gay families are a real option and children to gay couples are very much wanted, cared for and planned for.

Very much planned for.  I agree entirely.  People can just go out and have babies without any thought or consideration as to what will happen to that child.  When a gay or lesbian couple go out and undertake to have a child, they’ve gone through lots of heartache.  They’ve gone through lots of thought process.   They’ve agonised over what they are actually going to give to this child and how they’re going to raise it. How they’re going to love it, care for it, protect it and do all those types of things.  So I believe that as parents we’ve done a lot more homework than the average people have in terms of being able to look after the child.

I’m sure gay and lesbian couples getting together to start a family would be well prepared.

I suppose going on one stage from that.  I think the model of having the lesbians and gays where they can actually share I the bringing up of the child is actually a stronger bonding there.  Because neither party is just going to suddenly separate leaving all the divorce proceedings or whatever happens in traditional families that break up.  I think that most of the time because there’s been so much discussion it’s an ongoing relationship that’s shared and the child benefits.

In an ideal world where would you like to see the site going, over lets say the next 12 months?  Do you have a vision for the site?

Yes, the vision is that it provides as it was intended to a forum and a place for peope to go and talking about it.  I think that if lesbians had an opportunity to go out and express their concerns about IVF and talk about the issues that they are facing rather than it being so hard to access that information – that it would be a fantastic service.  

On the other side I believe gays need to have the opportunity to have somewhere where they can talk about it.  They need to be able to talk amongst themselves as to what types of issues there are for them.  But both sides need to be able to share and talk a little bit about their expectations.  

That was an eye opener for us.  We made assumptions as to what we thought guys would want in some kind of relationship and in some cases we were wrong.  But that was part of what we wanted to do in terms of researching it to really understand what kind of space.  And we found that was quite a lage variation of involvement that people want to have in these processes.

If all that we can achieve is to provide a forum so that people can actually start to talk to one another, to know that there are other people in the same situation and to share information then we have 100 per cent achieved our goals there.  It’s not something that’s provided by the government or pushed by a community worker.  It’s totally non profit.  It’s just a space in cyberspace.  You know just sitting there to allow people to talk and that’s really what we wanted to achieve. 

Obviously from the talking if there are relationships established, whether its between gays and lesbians or lesbians and lesbians who are supporting and helping one another or likewise gays that are supporting one another in their quest to have children I believe that’s a fantastic thing. That’s a fantastic outcome.

If you want to know more about Rainbow Parents visit www.rainbowparents.com