Same-sex couples have always had children, but those coming of age now represent a first wave of young people raised by parents who are openly gay, and in many cases these parents are out, proud and organized. Now, these kids are all grown up and setting out into the world. Here’s what they have to say.

The people interviewed here were part of a social experiment. They didn’t know it at the time. At the time of the experiment, they thought they were just growing up in a more or less happy family, leading a more or less normal life. Most importantly, they knew they had parents who loved them and cared for them. The thing that made their lives so special was that these parents were openly gay. These are the children of Stonewall, the first generation to be raised by parents who embraced an alternative sexuality.

People who are open to same-sex relationships have always had children; that is nothing new. This generation of children, however, is – perhaps unfortunately – in the position of being “evidence”. Their lives will “prove” something. If they grow up to be neurotic, maladjusted, unhappy individuals, then the opponents of gay liberation and gay marriage will feel themselves justified in saying, with a barely repressed smile of satisfaction, “See? We told you so.” Their lives will then be taken as proof that gays and lesbians are incapable of parenthood and incapable of fulfilling normal social relationships.

Not even the wildest fan of gay liberation would expect the children of gay parents all to be super children. There is nothing in having a gay parent that guarantees that a child will be bright, charming, poised, outgoing, an above-average student and a successful athlete. The best we can hope for is that these children should on the whole be more or less average and normal, however one defines those terms. That alone is quite an accomplishment when you think about it, considering the social pressures that a family headed by gay parents may have to face. We leave it to the reader’s judgment whether that is the case with the people interviewed here. There was no criteria of selection. As usual, we talked with those people who were willing to talk to us. Their answers seemed forthright and honest. Their experiences in growing up varied widely; there seem to be few grounds for generalizations, but one thing does seem to stand out: they wanted their stories told. They all seem to have faith in the innate good will of other human beings, and to believe that if you can understand something, you are better able to accept it.

Kai Bartollomeo is a 21-year-old student of Politics and History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Gay & Lesbian Times spoke with Kai by phone, from his place in Santa Cruz, where he lives with his girlfriend.

Kai Bartollomeo: I was originally going to go into sciences, but I did one politics class and I liked it and it worked out the same with history. It’s a really good major – or double major. I know I’m going to apply to law school after this fall. Summer after last I did a little internship for the ACLU, and that’s what sparked my interest in the law. I’m really interested in the area of civil liberties and similar issues. I definitely think my upbringing had something to do with that, especially because I found out about the ACLU through my dad’s boyfriend, Tim.

KB: No, he’s a hairdresser, but you meet all kinds of people in that line of work and he knows some lawyers. I’d heard about the ACLU in passing, but he really turned me on to it. They were doing the Boy Scout litigation at that time, and I’m interested in inheritance issues because of my family situation.

KB: Yes. They divorced when I was in fourth grade, and I think it was a year after that my dad told me he was gay.

KB: I’m not sure. We talk about it, but not a lot. I know it had something to do with it. It was pretty rocky before, so I think it was going down that road anyway, but I think that had a lot to do with it.

KB: I was – I think he told me when I was almost 13, but it wasn’t a big surprise because I sort of knew about it before. I suspected, because once I was going to soccer practice and I wanted to get a towel out of the closet. I went to pull down a towel and a lot of magazines fell down with it. I asked my mom and she told me about it and I talked to my dad and he confirmed it.

KB: I don’t think I did at all, which probably helped in the long run. It wasn’t long after that that Tim – my dad’s current boyfriend – came. It was definitely something different when we went out to the movies or something. I don’t think I had a clear idea about it but I think that helped a little because it didn’t seem quite so serious.

KB: I don’ t remember anyone staring or anyone saying anything about it. I think in later years I would be more self-conscious about it. I would try to walk a little bit away and stuff like that, but I don’t remember any extreme reactions or comments about it.

KB: Probably towards junior high. I’d just gone to a new school – SCPA, a school for the performing arts, the one down in National City – and I guess when I went there – it was fifth through 12th grades – a little older crowd and hearing words thrown around like “fag” and stuff – I started worrying about being in a bigger school and other people knowing and I guess I worried about other people knowing and how it would affect what they thought of me.

KB: It was – I mean I guess at that time I really tried my hardest not to let anyone know. Normally, when I had friends over, we went to my mom’s place. There’s only one person I can think of who knew, who came over to my dad’s. And I let another friend know, and it started getting a little more comfortable.

KB: It was pretty much 50-50, joint custody.

KB: No, I think growing up hardly anybody had any idea.

KB: No, I don’t think I was ever bitter. I think I was just kind of frustrated that I had to deal with it.

KB: Not mad at him, but mad at the situation that there was no one I could share with and tell them about it. I didn’t know how people would react. I wasn’t mad at him. I was mad at the situation.

I never thought it was wrong or that it was a bad thing, because Tim and my dad got along so well. It’s probably the healthiest relationship I’ve ever seen. Tim treated me really well, and my brother also. I never thought of it as a bad thing, just maybe something other people wouldn’t understand.

KB: No, I always thought of it as my two dads. It was a very male household in a lot of ways, like everyone farting and walking around in their underwear, even when company’s over.

KB: I think she had a hard time with it. I know at the beginning it was very rocky. At the beginning they were in and out of court all the time. I don’t really know what they were fighting about. Just the way people are after a divorce. I think she had a rough time with it.

KB: I don’t think she knew. It’s the kind of thing that sometimes we’ll talk about it now, and she’ll say “Oh I should have known,” but I don’t think she knew until the marriage was kind of winding down.

KB: No, I think the biggest thing was that – like that there’s my dad and his boyfriend who after all are pulling in a significant amount of money, so they could provide a lot of things like trips and maybe they were buying all these things for us which she couldn’t do, but she never said anything bad about my dad in front of me – which was nice.

KB: Pretty close. I’m not really sure how my dad’s parents feel about it. They ask about my dad and Tim when I go over there and that kind of stuff. I think they feel bad for my mom, and my dad’s side call my mom and keep in contact. I think for the most part they’ve accepted it and they all like Tim, so they’ve dealt with it pretty well.

KB: I think he’s definitely another member of the immediate family. He’s like a second dad. It’s really easy to talk to him and I don’t think there’s any kind of barrier between us. I actually think he calls me more often than my dad does.

KB: I always felt I was hiding something. Simple things like open house were always an issue, you know, because as much as the school is showcasing you, you are showcasing your parents also. I always made a point of Tim not coming. I think Tim was hurt by that, but at the same time I was really scared about people finding out. I guess more than anything the difficult stuff was trivial or simple, but our life made it more complicated.

KB: I think it definitely made me more open to other people and to any kind of situation they might have. I’m not so quick to judge other people. I’m more sensitive not to offend them. I appreciate that my own friends are very considerate of me. They’d never say anything like “Oh, that’s so gay,” or anything they think might offend me. Maybe it’s not about having a gay parent in particular, but having Tim is an advantage in itself because he meshed with our family really well and it would be difficult to imagine growing up without him now. Plus free haircuts, I guess.

KB: No, I’m not. I actually live with my girlfriend and it’s actually kind of funny but when all this was happening and I went to therapy for the first time, they asked me that and that was the first time I ever even thought about it, but no, I’m not.

KB: No, they don’t. I mean, they’re for it for people who want to get married, but for themselves – I don’t think so, only because we went to a wedding about a year ago – it was between a man and a woman, done by a local priest, and after the ceremony he came up to my dad and Tim and said, “I’m a very liberal priest and we can have you two guys married before this afternoon is over,” but they said no.

KB: It’s something that should be available.

KB: Yeah, but I don’t think anytime soon. I’m only 21.

KB: I’d like to go somewhere in L.A. so UCLA and USC are at the top of my list.

KB: I do. It’s a little bit too cold – well, after growing up in San Diego, but the scenery is beautiful.

KB: No sports. I’m doing a research assistant thing for a professor and I work. That’s pretty much it.

Aubrey-Rose Roach is a 21-year-old student and mother of a 2-year-old. She is attending Cuyamaca College, and also works part time. She has two younger brothers and lives with her mother. She spoke to the Gay & Lesbian Times by phone in San Diego.

Aubrey-Rose Roach: Right now I’m just taking general … classes. I’d like to own my own business in interior designing. That’s my ultimate goal.

AR: My parents are divorced. They’ve been divorced for seven years. Actually, it wasn’t my real father. My real father – they’ve been separated forever. I don’t even remember him. This was my step-father, and I didn’t really have that good a relationship with him. We moved down from Washington about seven years ago. That’s when they divorced, and that’s when our life here began.

AR: I found out maybe in the ’97-’98 area. I believe I was 12 years old. No, I’m sorry, I was 13 years old. I sort of had an idea before. She told me but I kind of already knew. It wasn’t anything big. At the time that she told, it made some things a whole lot worse. I was going through a lot of stuff – high school and my parents’ divorce, but the fact that she told me and that she loved me made it a whole lot better. It sounds kind of crazy but the fact that she’s with women and not with men made it a whole lot better. It just feels right.

AR: Yes.

AR: No, I knew.

AR: Oh no, not at all. My mom was pretty open with all of my friends and they all said “Oh yeah, you have a cool mom,” and they always wanted to come around. We all hung out at my house. They had a lot of respect for my mom so I never felt that I had to hide it at all.

AR: No. If there was a teacher I knew, I told them, but if I didn’t really know them that well, I didn’t feel the need to go into it.

AR: Kind of. We went when it was important. We weren’t that involved with PTA, but I was involved with ASB [Associated Student Body] and my mom supported it. She was definitely there.

AR: Disadvantage? No, as I said before: it just felt normal because when I was growing up with my step-father, as I said, it wasn’t that comfortable. It wasn’t a good relationship, so when my mom told me she was with women, it just seemed right.

AR: No, it was nothing like that. Nothing much one way or the other. It was pretty much just normal.

AR: No. It was kind of the San Diego dating scene. She had three or four longer relationships when I was growing up.

AR: Yes I knew them all. Her first girlfriend had two children and I called them brothers and sisters. We don’t see each other that much anymore, but that’s still the kind of relationship we have. My mom was completely open about her girlfriends to us and to her girlfriends about her family, so they were coming knowing my mom had a family.

AR: No, it wasn’t like that. It was like, even though they came in knowing my mom had a family, there was still a separation. They were her girlfriends and they were there, but disciplinary actions were my mom – everything else they weren’t involved in.

AR: Could I be a lesbian?

AR: Yeah, I am. No, it had no influence on me at all.

Kyra: My mom just told me about [being a lesbian], and I read about your article and I thought it was pretty cool so I just wanted to talk to you about all this stuff.

Kyra: That she would be happier with girls instead of guys.

Kyra: Yeah, as long as it makes you happy.

Kyra: Um, I don’t know. Not really.

Kyra: Actually, no. I don’t know. I don’t know because like – I don’t know a lot of other kids that have lesbian or gay parents.

Kyra: Maybe, but some people – a lot of people like to keep it to themselves at home.

Kyra: Some people think they wouldn’t be your friends or like them or stuff. Because most kids – like all their other friends – have like a mom and dad, but some people have like two dads or two moms and they think their friends will make fun of them.

Kyra: I think it will be in middle school and stuff.

Kyra: Um, sometimes I do. Like sometimes they talk about their parents and stuff, but I don’t really worry about them making fun of me, but they might think of me as different.

Kyra: Maybe as like someone … I don’t know. ’Cause I don’t think like that.

Kyra: I know that some gay people are getting married, but I don’t know much more about it.

Kyra: Um, yeah, probably, because right now it’s pretty common, actually, that people have two moms and two dads, but people just don’t talk about it.

Kyra: Last year I had someone when I was in fourth grade. I knew a guy that had two moms. Everybody thought of him the same and he was cool with it, but some people at school who were against him made fun of him, but not a lot because he had a lot of friends.

Kyra: My mom has a couple of friends. I don’t know if any of them have kids, but she does have a lot of gay and lesbian friends, and they’re all super nice.

Kyra: I think I want to marry a guy.

Kyra: I don’t know, but, like, right now I like guys.

Obviously, there is nothing scientific or compelling about the evidence we have assembled in the interviews here. They are merely snapshots, taken in San Diego and Santa Cruz, that give us an empirical idea of how children raised by openly gay parents are faring. Nonetheless, these random comments show a surprising degree of agreement with the little that has been written in scientific literature about the children of gay parents.

It should be stressed that little reliable work has been done in this area, but an article published in the American Sociological Review in 2001 by professors Timothy J. Biblarz and Judith Stacey reviewed about 21 research articles that the authors considered reliable. They came to the conclusion that the children raised by gay parents could not be considered “just like” the offspring of enduring heterosexual unions. Most of these children, like our examples here, were born into a heterosexual marriage that ended in divorce, so children raised by gay parents are much more likely to have endured a serious trauma in their childhoods. Stacey and Biblarz also point out the problems of comparing the children raised in gay unions with their heterosexually raised peers caused by differences in education, location and earning power. As Kai Bartollomeo’s example shows us, children raised in a household where two dads are each earning a good income would be difficult to compare to an average middle-class family, where, even if the mother is working, she is not likely to earn as much as a man.

Furthermore, most studies done on children raised by a lesbian or a lesbian couple have favored white, educated females living in liberal areas such as California or the Northeast, and who enjoy a high earning power. The sad fact is that the majority of women in the United States earn on average only two-thirds of what their male counterparts earn. Any child raised by a lesbian or in a lesbian union will most likely be facing a childhood limited by financial constraints, although this fact has not often been reflected in the research.

The young people we interviewed here considered themselves to be heterosexual, and this, also, agrees with the scientific research. The studies cited by Stacey and Biblarz found that the majority of children raised by homosexual parents became heterosexuals. No evidence has ever been found that homosexual families necessarily produce homosexual children, which is in no way surprising, given that heterosexual families do not necessarily produce heterosexual children. The research does, however, show a significant difference in the sexual behavior of children raised by gay or lesbian parents. Not surprisingly, these children are more open to same-sex experimentation than the children of straight parents. In addition, daughters raised by lesbians tend to have more sexual partners between puberty and adulthood than children raised in straight families, whereas boys raised in lesbian families tend to have fewer sexual encounters during the same period than boys raised in heterosexual families.

Some of what science has found is merely what anyone would expect from consulting their common sense. Sometimes science seems to go astray when it ascribes to gay people effects that are not the result of anything that gays and lesbians do or say, but are the result of society’s homophobia. Abigail Garner, author of Families Like Mine, recently published by Harper Collins, is especially sensitive to this confounding of cause and effect. Garner herself was raised by a gay father, and suffered all her life from the scrutiny this aroused among people who studied her like a strange species, trying to determine how “normal” she was.

“For so long, the anti-gay rhetoric has been saying that children of gay parents will turn out confused and damaged, so the knee-jerk response from LGBT communities has been to say, ‘No, they won’t be damaged, they’re going to be just fine’ and then they show children as examples for how these children are not damaged or confused,” Garner says. “But under the pressure to disprove that stereotype, they end up putting children on display that are beyond normal – they’re exceptional children. And, of course, any community wants to put their best image forward, but it creates this counter-myth that any child of gay parents, if they’re going to be visible, they are going to be perfect; they’re going to be the head of the class; they’re going to be incredibly gifted; and what I want parents to know is that children in these families cover a whole spectrum of experience, and they’re not damaged and confused as a result of having gay parents, but they’re also not guaranteed to be superstars.”

Garner would agree with Stacey and Biblarz that the children of gay parents grow up to be in some degree different, but the difference is caused by society’s treatment of gays and lesbians, not by anything inherent in being gay or lesbian. One of the major differences Garner sees is well illustrated by Kai’s comments; the children of gay parents usually grow up in the constant fear that others will find out, and with the constant insecurity of not knowing how others may react. Eleven-year-old Kyra is well aware that to have a gay or lesbian parent is to risk being labeled as different, with unforeseeable consequences.

Garner is also aware of how virulent homophobia is. She knows from experience the effect an announcement such as the Vatican’s can have, that “allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such [same-sex] unions would actually mean doing violence to these children.”

“What I remember growing up was the way that my father’s parenting was constantly judged based on whatever happened in my life,” Garner says. “So if I did something well, if I was successful in say, playing the flute, or on the soccer team, or in a musical, it felt like my success was then put on my Dad, of people saying, ‘Because she’s turning out okay, that, then, is a testament to gay parents.’ And it wasn’t necessarily said that often, but it was implied, in my mind, because so many of my peers would say, ‘Well, I guess you turned out okay; I guess gay parents do an okay job.’ My peers would say that, so I assumed that’s how adults were thinking, too.”

Garner sees the children of gay parents as being caught in a paradox. To have their differences accepted, they first have to demonstrate that they are “just like” everyone else. They have to prove that they are “normal”, although society imposes an upbringing on them that is full of abnormal stress and suspicion.

“The fear was that if I did something that was perceived to be unsuccessful – whether that be skipping a class, or failing a class, or having a bad day, feeling depressed that day – whatever it was, it was a sense that people would then say, ‘That’s part of the tragedy of having a gay parent,’” Garner says. “So I never wanted to show anything other than a really upbeat, perfect persona as a way to honor my father.”

The solution, as Garner sees it, is for gay families to be as visible as possible. That is the only way that prejudice can be overcome, and the fallacies of the arguments against gay parents can be exposed.

“I have hope that parents will be more cognizant of how the politics are affecting their children,” Garner adds about the current media frenzy surrounding gay families. “If they do not take conscious steps to alleviate that burden that many children feel, it will actually get worse. And I say that because our families are so much more visible now than when my father came out in 1978. So, a lot of times, my family could operate below radar and we weren’t ‘the gay family in the neighborhood,’ because we weren’t out as gay. So in a lot of situations, I didn’t feel like I had to represent millions because people still, believe it or not, thought that my father had a roommate. So with the increased visibility comes increased pressure upon these children.”

She argues that, as same-sex unions become more acceptable and common, more children will be raised in these unions, thus demonstrating the errors of the anti-gay-parenting camp. Interestingly, Stacey and Biblarz do not expect a similar development. They argue that as same-sex unions become more acceptable, fewer and fewer gay men will try heterosexual relationships, with the result that fewer children will be born to gay men. Since they believe, although they do not say on what authority, that there are fewer lesbians in the population than gay men, they expect that in future, many fewer children will be born to gay or lesbian parents than is now the case.

Whatever the future holds, we may be sure that children will continue to be born to lesbian and gay parents, just as they have always been. No doubt these children will have challenges to face, as every child does. Hopefully, these challenges will not be the result of ignorance and prejudice, but even if they are, we can take heart in the reactions shown by the young people interviewed for this article. Had it not been for the circumstances of their upbringing, would Kyra show her mature understanding of human nature, or would Aubrey-Rose Roach show the same quiet confidence that she will succeed, or would Kai Bartollomeo show the same tolerance for the situations of others?

To some degree, their special qualities must be the result of the parenting they received – and these are not qualities anyone would want to miss. Garner adds some parting advice for GLBT parents:

“First, I think gay parents in general – and I understand that this is easier said than done – but I would like gay parents to start acknowledging that their kids are going to be kids, and with that, there are going to be moments where their children are not thrilled to be in their family,” she says. “That’s family dynamics. Sometimes that has to do with sexual orientation, sometimes it doesn’t, and the expectation of presenting these children as always being thrilled of being a part of gay and lesbian families, that is what creates this myth and puts pressure on the children to never be anything but smiling into the camera and ready to go onto whatever television show they’re expected to be on to represent millions. What needs to happen in individual families is that children have to have a safe environment within their own home to speak honestly about their own experience. And unless it’s explicitly spoken to them by their parents – that they can come to them when they have problems, that it’s okay to tell their parents if they’re getting teased – unless children hear that, they’re absorbing another message, which is: ‘My parents care so much about this not affecting me, that I’m not going to tell them the truth when it does affect me.’”