04/13/2002 "We Are Family"

We Are Family Adopting new meaning for the nuclear unit, two dads (or two moms) at a time -
By Anh Hoang

On a quiet street in Victoria, there is a blue two-story house with a big garage and fruit trees in the backyard. I ring the doorbell. A few seconds later, the door opens and a seven-year old boy says “Hi.” I ask him if his dad is home.

“Both of them are,” he says smiling. The young boy sits down for dinner and across the table is his brother and on either side are his parents. Just your typical family dinner. Except they’re not quite your typical family.

Michael and his brother Mark, 8, were recently adopted by Murray and Duane, a gay couple who have been together for seven years. The boys’ real names cannot be used because the final adoption papers have not yet been signed by the courts.

Murray says that the family doesn’t fit the suburban mom, dad and one-point-five kids model.

“Adoption is non-traditional anyway and gays are already unconventional,” he says.

But looking around the house, it’s hard to pick out what’s unconventional about it. On this particular evening, the dinner menu is pasta and salad. The family says a prayer before dinner and the boys are full of conversation in between bites of Murray’s homemade lasagna. Murray has made another lasagna he will freeze for dinner another night. He’s a working father, after all, so he needs to find quick dinner fixes every chance he gets.

After dinner, Mark helps to clear the table and then he’s off to change into his pajamas before dessert. While the boys are off playing in their rooms, Murray shows off the family photo album. There are pictures of birthday parties, family outings, and of the boys’ baptism—the family are parishioners of St. John the Divine Anglican Church.

There’s a surprising resemblance between the four of them— their looks, their colouring, their hair. Although the boys were adopted, Michael bears a striking resemblance to Murray, while Mark could pass as Duane’s biological son.

Murray, a teacher, and Duane, a computer applications developer, had been talking about becoming parents for several years, but held off because “society wasn’t ready for it yet. Since then social attitudes have changed a little,” says Murray. About a year ago, they took the first steps towards adoption, by contacting the province’s Ministry of Children and Family Development. They wanted to adopt Mark and Michael, who are students at the school where Murray teaches.

The couple have run into very few roadblocks in adopting the boys. The ministry’s adoption office welcomed them with proverbial open arms, glad to find a good home for two of the hundreds of children it deals with each year.

Brendan Elliott, an adoption recruitment social worker with the ministry, says there has been a growing number of gay couples and singles who want to adopt children and he encourages such adoptions. When interviewing potential parents, Elliott says he looks for people who are patient, who have a sense of humour, and who will provide a safe home for the children. The issue of whether they’re gay or straight is irrelevant.

“I’ve never looked at it in that way, but I know society does,” says Elliott. “Our children come with challenges. They’ve been through a lot of challenges in their life already, and I’m sure the gay community have had challenges of their own. This makes them very adaptable to our children.”

The ministry is presently working to place children with five gay families, both singles and couples. The ministry placed 32 children with families, both gay and straight, in the last fiscal year. It currently has about 600 children awaiting adoption.

However, not everyone is as supportive of Duane and Murray’s new role as parents. During their parenting course, a straight couple expressed concern that a gay couple was being allowed to become parents. And Murray’s family has also been less than supportive about his plans to raise children. But much of this doesn’t worry the couple. They’re more worried by how this lack of acceptance might affect their sons as they grow older.

But right now, the boys seem comfortable in their home and with their new parents, whom they’ve lived with full-time since last summer.

After dinner, Michael asks Murray if he can use some paper and pencil crayons to do some writing. He wants to practice his handwriting by copying words from the gay and lesbian directory. And when Mark was asked by his teacher to bring a magnet from home to school, he brought the gay pride magnet off the fridge.

“We have to be more aware with not communicating shame with the kids,” says Murray. “There will be a time when they will be teased for having gay parents. We have to start talking about that. Getting them comfortable about what to do . . . some people will say it’s funny that you have two dads. We want them to be comfortable in situations like that.”

Duane says he hasn’t hit any big challenges yet in his role as a parent. But Murray had some apprehensions. He was nervous about taking the boys to soccer games and community events where there were bound to be straight parents.

“I was nervous being in the mainstream world with the kids,” says Murray. “With other kids who had moms and dads.”

But then there’s also the other side to it, as one boy in Michael’s school put it, “Michael’s lucky, he has two dads.”

Model parents

Parents like Murray and Duane are not as uncommon as they were even a decade ago. More gay couples are adopting children and a growing number of researchers are giving glowing praise to gay and lesbian parents.

Back in 1995, Valory Mitchell, an associate professor at the California School of Professional Psychology, wrote in the Journal of Feminist Family Therapy that “Planned lesbian families present a viable and valuable model of a functional family in contemporary America.” Mitchell said that unlike heterosexual two-career couples, where the mother comes home to a “second shift” of child care and housework, while the father devotes an average of three hours per week to child care, lesbian partners tend to share parenting and household duties fully and equally.

Gay fathers are more nurturing than straight fathers, says psychologist Jerry J. Bigner of Colorado State University, who has written a series of papers and books on gay parenting. In addition, they’re less likely to see their parenting role as limited to that of a provider, Bigner adds. Gay fathers also tend to provide a more structured environment for their children and to set more consistent limits on their children’s behaviour, says Bigner.

And according to psychologist Robert-Jay Green, co-editor of the 1996 book Lesbians and Gays in Couples and Families, heterosexuals, especially straight men, might find that their relationships and parenting skills could improve if they absorbed some lessons from gay couples. Heterosexual men need to become more flexible in their behavior and take on more of the traditional “women’s” chores and roles, Green says, from cooking and changing diapers to listeninClearly, research speaks well for a changing idea of the “typical” family—and that change is being widely noticed. In February, the American Academy of Pediatrics called for an end to laws forbidding couples to adopt, saying children with gay parents have the same advantages of those with heterosexual parents. Not long afterwards, TV star Rosie O’Donnell came out as a lesbian, in the process of challenging a Florida law that prohibits gay adoption.

In Canada, the positive praise for gay parents and the increasing number of court cases upholding the rights of same-sex couples have made it easier for couples like Duane and Murray to jointly adopt children.

According to the Adoption Council of Canada, only six provinces have legislation that gives same-sex couples the right to apply for adoption. But Judy Grove, ACC executive director, says that only B.C.’s and Ontario’s legislations are clear in allowing same-sex couples to adopt.

The other provinces with similar laws—Alberta, Quebec, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland—have particularly vague legislations, which have rarely been used. And in Saskatchewan, the rules are even more vague: “Those who can adopt are married, single or other persons and in brackets it says that the court may allow with the best interest of the child,” explains Grove. “This could mean same-sex couples, but it’s very hazy.” And international adoptions are virtually inaccessible to gay couples. Most countries in Asia, Europe and South America prohibit gay adoption.

Provincial legislations cover both public and private adoptions, but there are some differences between the two processes. For example, the cost for public adoptions, which often occur through government agencies, is minimal. Adoptive parents are required to pay for medical exams and security clearances for themselves. However, in provinces like B.C., most of the children who find homes through public adoptions are older, typically age four to 10. Couples who would rather adopt younger children or infants usually take the private adoption route, which costs anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000. The cost is for legal fees, counselling and home studies, an assessment of the prospective adoptive parents through visits to the home.

Mom and Mom

Francina Kehoe decided to take the more natural approach. She’s having a baby through artificial insemination.

Last summer, Kehoe started seeing a fertility specialist. At about the same time, she met her partner, who helped pick out the sperm donor through an online registry. Kehoe, 34, is expecting in September.

The two are now spending most of their free time getting the nursery ready and reading lots of parenting books.

“One of the things we talked about was what are we going to call ourselves,” says Kehoe. “We said that I’ll be ‘Mom’ and my partner will be ‘Ama’.”

and sharing feelings.
“Ama” means “mom” in Basque, an ancient language spoken by a small group of people in several provinces throughout Spain and France.

If the name game is complicated, their parenting approach so far, is pretty simple.

“We just decided that we’re going to be really open about it,” says Kehoe. “We’re not going to force our sexual views or sway our child in any way. We’ll have to be more out, especially if we want our child to understand what [being gay] means.”

However, the cost of being parents hasn’t been all that cheap for the couple. Even before the cost of baby furniture and pint-size sleepers, Kehoe has had to dish out $300 for fertility drugs, $900 for “three shots” of sperm, $150 for the shipping cost of the frozen sperm and the odd $50 here and there for ovulation and pregnancy tests.

“You can expect to spend $500 a month,” says Kehoe. “We were lucky, we got pregnant the second try.”

Kehoe jokes that she still has another vial of sperm “we’re trying to pawn off.” Then again, she might save it just in case she wants to try again.

When Kehoe’s baby arrives, both she and her partner will have their names on the birth certificate. At least she hopes they will.

Last summer, Vancouver-based lawyer barbara findlay represented two lesbian couples, Karen Popoff and Bren Murray, and Peggy Gill and Michelle Gill, each of whom conceived babies using sperm from anonymous donors. The couples wanted to register both parents’ names on their children’s birth certificates.

But questions arose because birth certificates, at the time, only had space for the name of the mother and the name of the father. Non-birth mothers had to legally adopt a child before being recognized as a parent. Findlay says some non-birth mothers with unisex names would get away with writing in their names in the “father” spot on the birth certificate, while others, like her clients, had their applications rejected.

The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal awarded parental rights to findlay’s clients, setting a precedent for lesbian couples to register both their names on their child’s birth certificate. Following the decision, the Vital Statistics Agency created a new birth registration form, which includes a separate box for “co-parent” in addition to the mother/father boxes.

However, the B.C. Government is currently challenging the tribunal’s decision.

“There’s no reason in principal for them to challenge this . . . except for homophobia,” says findlay.

Got married, had kids, came out

David had always known he was gay, but he denied it, and instead took the expected, mainstream route with his life by getting married and having kids. His marriage broke up after 14 years, and when he decided to come out two years ago, it was the thought of telling his teenaged kids that he was most worried about.

“I was worried how it might affect my ability as a father,” says David, 45. “I was worried my in-laws might disapprove of it and they would start saying bad things about me or that my ex-wife would call social services and say I wasn’t a good father.”

When he finally told his children that he had been in a serious relationship with a man for more than a year, there was nothing but silence in the air. Then the kids started laying down some ground rules—David and his partner couldn’t hold hands or kiss in front of them, and the relationship was going to be a secret from their friends.

“When I heard that, it reminded me that homosexuality is still considered by many to be wrong, to be deviant behaviour, to be judged,” says David. “My daughter said she really didn’t like [my partner] very much. My son was the most accepting, but there was a subtext of anger there. He’d say things like ‘I’m not gay, that doesn’t make me gay.’”

“With my daughter it feels hurtful [for her to say that], but I understand that she loves me so much, she doesn’t want to share me.”

David assured his children that being homosexual didn’t change the fact that he was still their dad.

“I told them ‘I’m not going to start wearing feather boas or mules around the house . . . or get a sex change.’ ”

Having a gay father isn’t going change the lives of his kids, says David. He realizes that the day will come when they might be ridiculed for their father’s sexual preference, but that doesn’t worry him.

“I celebrate that,” says David. “I know they’re open-minded. I know that in some ways they’re proud of me. I don’t think it makes any difference to them at all [that I’m gay]. I don’t think there’s anything different between us. I honestly think now that if anyone said anything derogatory about me to them, they would stick up for me.”

Some parents, like Andre, know that their kids being taunted and teased is inevitable. Not only is Andre gay, but so is his ex-wife, the mother of his six-year-old son, John.

“He’s going to be targeted, that’s for sure,” says Andre. “It’s more likely he’s going to be called ‘fag.’ It’s guilt by association. And there will be a time when he’s dealing with his peers and at some point he’ll try to hide [that his parents are gay] from them.”

Andre doesn’t hide his sexuality, but he knows that being out isn’t always going to be in the best interest of his son.

“Even though I’m out, I will not put my son at risk,” says Andre. “If I have to hide [my sexuality] for his safety, then I will.”

Andre was married for seven years. He and his wife separated soon after John was born, and Andre came out a year later. His former wife came out a year after that, and is now in a serious relationship. Andre’s sister has also come out.

“[John] has it all . . . a dad, a mom and a gay aunt,” says Andre. “I don’t know if he understands that his parents are gay. We haven’t really sat down and talked about it seriously yet. We’re fortunate that way ’cause he’s so young. I think it would be harder if he was older.”

It’s likely that John will just grow up not knowing anything different, says David, so it would be easier for him to accept his father’s sexuality.

“If my kids were older, like out of the house, that would have even been worse,” says David. “They wouldn’t be around for me to see how they were dealing with it.”

And even though Andre is open about his sexual preferences, he would understand if his son reacts much the same way David’s did. Andre adds that it would probably be easier for his son if he had stayed in the closet.

“But you make sure you have a relationship that’s strong so you can talk about any of this when it comes up,” says Andre. “In that way I’m no different than straight parents. I just want to make sure my son is happy and safe. The positive thing is that when he weathers through this, he’ll be stronger for it.”