Way Out Parenting: The Dark Ages

Do you ever wonder what it must have been like to become a gay parent twenty years ago? Sometimes I stop to consider…and I’m glad we’re not there anymore.

Back in the Dark Ages of Gay Parenting, any gay person who aspired to start a family faced one inquisitorial question, and it reverberated from all fronts: “What in God’s name gives you the audacity to think that you could possibly be parenting material?”

In the eyes of the vast majority of straight people, you ranked only slightly higher than Child Molester or Mass Murderer. It didn’t seem to matter to anyone that homosexuality as a disease category had been excised from the DSM back in the second edition (most people didn’t even know what the DSM was) or that no scientifically based research studies had ever proven the rampant prejudice that gay men and lesbians made worse parents than their straight counterparts.

Your rabidly evangelical parents warned that if you gave birth to a child you would single-handedly trigger the Apocalypse and graves all over earth would open up so that deserving souls could soar to heaven while you remained behind in the clutches of Satan and the Antichrist. Your neoconservative relatives told you that having children distracted from the war on terrorism and the security of Israel. Your fiscal republican father told you that your one and only responsibility as a gay person was to channel all of your disposable income into the retail, travel and entertainment sectors so the U.S. economy wouldn’t implode. Your liberal, hippie parents told you they supported your decision in theory but that if you tried to be a parent, all the right-wing crazies would rise up and assassinate you.

On some level, conscious or unconscious, all of these relatives believed that no gay person could possibly provide a stable and healthy home. Children of Gays (COGs) were bound to suffer irreparable gender confusion. Lesbian-raised daughters would strut around like truck drivers, and sons with gay fathers would be candidates for Project Runway by the age of ten. All of your children would be social pariahs. And ultimately, your gay families would be a huge embarrassment to your “real” families.

During these Dark Ages, most parents fully supported your desire to move to the melting pots of New York, Miami, L.A., or San Francisco where you would blend in and be less of an embarrassment to them. There, you were supposed to join a weight lifting gym (if you were a gay man) or the local vegetarian food coop (if you were a lesbian) and start working on your disco and Sunday brunch skills. Your relieved parents were supposed to explain your perpetual single and childless status by telling family, friends and neighbors back home that you were one of those career-minded women or one of those men who was always dating someone new and never settling down (which usually engendered an appreciative chuckle).

But some of you did settle down, and instead of disco dancing to “We Are Family,” you started one instead. The apocalypse didn’t happen. National Security wasn’t breached. The stock market only suffered the usual fluctuations. And you weren’t assassinated.

Fortunately the Dark Ages are over, and we’ve entered the Age of Enlightenment—which is probably more familiar to you. Check back. I’ll describe it in my next blog entry.