straight parents

In Part I, we answered a few burning questions straight parents have about gay ones. But if straight parents could sit down with a live set of gay parents, their questions could go on for hours. What else would they ask? What would you say? Let’s listen in for a while.

You’re a straight parent, and all of a sudden everywhere you turn, you’re hearing about gay parents. They’re on the talk shows. They’re in your magazines. They’re even at your school. You have so many burning questions. Let’s try to answer a few…

Gays becoming parents really shouldn’t surprise anyone. Gay people, after all, are the product of straight people. It’s the twenty-first century, and by now we realize that virtually everything we do, everything we say, and everything that happens to us is in someway related to genes—even if the genes in questions haven’t been identified and tagged quite yet. Someday, in human genome laboratories, scientists will confirm what common sense already tells us: Gay people have some straight genes. That is to say, gays have inner straightness. Even the “gayest” person you can think of has straight genes. (By the same token, even white supremacists, evangelical Christians, army generals, Hell’s Angels, Pennsylvania Dutch dairy farmers, and Catholic bishops have gay genes—okay that last one is no surprise.)

It’s hard for gay parents to imagine that straight parents could possibly envy them. And yet, strangely enough, they sometimes do. At some point during your many encounters in the Mostly Straight World, you’ll be with a straight couple—having dinner, drinking a glass of wine while your collective children play or fight in the next room—and one or both of the parents will let down their guard and utter comments like this:

Your child keeps begging you to set up a play date with his new “best friend” at school. But when you pick up the phone or approach the friend’s parent at pick-up, this is what you hear:

“Oh, we never do play dates.”

“He’d love to, but he’s booked literally seven days a week: tennis, acting, karate, piano, softball, robotics, and soccer.”

“She’s funny about play dates. I think she gets too tired.”

“He’s deathly allergic to the synthetic fibers found in most people’s homes.”

Receiving a one-on-one invitation from a set of straight parents is an indication you have really worked hard to gain acceptance in your school community. You are going on a double date. Congratulations! Now comes the real test of your assimilation. Can you successfully observe straight couples’ socializing conventions?