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DOING FAMILIES Gay and Lesbian Family Practices Edited by Judit Takács & Roman Kuhar


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DOING FAMILIES Gay and Lesbian Family Practices Edited by Judit Takács and Roman Kuhar Reviewers: David Paternotte, Université libre de Bruxelles Alenka Švab, University of Ljubljana Proof-reading: Chris Swart Design: Irena Wölle Print: Stane Peklaj Print run: 300 copies, first edition

© Mirovni inštitut, 2011 The publishing of this book was made possible by the Open Society Foundations Book series: Politike Symposion Editor: Mojca Pajnik Publisher: Peace Institute Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies Metelkova 6 SI-1000 Ljubljana E: [email protected] www.mirovni-institut.si

Cover photo: Irena Wölle

CIP - Kataložni zapis o publikaciji Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica, Ljubljana 316.36:613.885-055.34(082) DOING families : gay and lesbian family practices / edited by Judit Takács & Roman Kuhar. - 1st ed. - Ljubljana : Peace Institute, Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies, 2011. - (Book series Politike symposion) ISBN 978-961-6455-71-8 1. Takács, Judit 259600384


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Contents 7 Éric Fassin Foreword: When Parallels Meet: The Family of Sex and the Sexualisation of the Family 11 Roman Kuhar & Judit Takács Gays and Lesbians (un)Doing family – An introduction 17 José Ignacio Pichardo Galán Sex and the Family: Intersections between Family, Gender, Reproduction and Same-Sex Sexuality in Spain 37 Elke Jansen Parenting of the Fittest? Lesbian and Gay Family Planning in Germany 59 Maria Carbin, Hannele Harjunen, Elin Kvist (In)Appropriate Mothers – Policy Discourses on Fertility Treatment for Lesbians in Denmark, Finland and Sweden 79 Guillaume Marche LGBT Families, Youth, and Sexuality in the United States 95 Daniela Danna Homoparentality in Italy: Myth of Stigmatisation? 117 Martine Gross Grandparenting in French Lesbian and Gay Families 135 Roman Kuhar & Judit Takács Do Families Have Sexual Orientation? An Interview with Judith Stacey 151 Contributors 157 Index


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Foreword

When Parallels Meet: The Family of Sex and the Sexualisation of the Family Not so long ago, in the social sciences, there were two fields of research that never seemed to intersect: on the one hand, family studies; on the other, sexuality studies. As if to eschew some kind of incestuous peril, sex and family then belonged in parallel worlds. Think of Claude LéviStrauss’ 1949 Elementary Structures of Kinship: strangely enough, the structuralist exploration of matrimonial rules in no way encountered the reality of sexuality. Indeed, the prohibition of incest, which was the foundation of the anthropologist’s argument, had nothing to do, as far as he was concerned, with sex itself. It only affected kinship: the exchange of women only mattered in so far as it defined marriage. It might be tempting to interpret such sexual blindness as a reflection of the child’s anxious paradox: “My parents don’t have sex, do they? They can’t, since they’re my parents!” But the denial also served to reinforce a sexual, and thus a social order: on the one hand, families were implicitly defined by heterosexuality; on the other, sexuality studies tended to focus not on the heterosexual norm, but on those who had been cast aside, outside the norm – i.e. queers. The history of sexuality is a case in point: especially in English-language research, it has often proved to be a history of homosexuality. Such was the division of the world that prevailed until recently: queers have sex, while straight folks have families. At first, AIDS just seemed to reinforce this partition. What was first perceived as a “gay disease” not only identified sexuality with homosexuality; it also reduced gays to their sexuality. However, the epidemic was soon to undermine such a division in two distinct ways. First, while the virulent reaction of some parents who rejected their sons afflicted with the disease only proved that homophobia excludes gays from the family (not that lesbians fare much better, though), the everyday realities of care in dire times also revealed the vital importance of an alternative kinship – not the family of origin, but the family of destination, defined by choice.


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This was made visible in the wake of the early years of the epidemic by Kath Weston in her 1991 ethnographic study of Families we choose – i.e. Bay Area families that comprised not only lovers, but also former lovers, and simply friends (girlfriends as well as boyfriends): the boundary between kith and kin was erased to mix all those who proved their love by being there when they were needed. Children were included of course; but they were not necessarily the cornerstones of these families of choice. Instead, sexuality played a central role in creating ties. This was not, however, the old reduction of gays (more than lesbians) to their sexual lives, as pure (hedonistic) individuals. On the contrary: sex turned out to be the foundation of queer social lives – precisely when it seemed to desert some of these men’s lives. Sexuality was thus the paradigm that helped think how new, alternative families are created – premised on choice, not blood. But AIDS not only revealed the obvious importance of what might be called “the family of sex”; it also raised the question of the surviving partner whose very existence was all too often denied – from visiting rights in the hospital to inheritance rights in case of death. This is the second way in which the epidemic eventually did undermine the division between sexualised gay individuals and desexualised straight families. The end of the 1980s is the time when the issue of same-sex marriage came to the surface – in particular in Scandinavia, but also simultaneously in the United States and in France. Thus, the point was not only kinship norms, but also family laws. The reality that ensued was quite different from that of families of choice, which provided an alternative to traditional kinship based on blood ties. In fact, in the same way that same-sex marriage simply meant opening (implicitly heterosexual) marriage to gays and lesbians, the lesbian (and gay) baby-boom seemed to offer a mere variation to be included in the norm – i.e. the “normal” family with a slight difference. French anthropologist Anne Cadoret’s 2002 monograph about gay and lesbian families is significantly entitled: Des parents comme les autres. At a time when traditional family norms seem to belong to the past, lesbian moms, first studied in 1993 by American anthropologist Ellen Lewin, before shifting to gay fathers in 2009, are truly parents like all other parents. Indeed, they too discover the dirty secret of parenthood: sex is not what their lives or even their couples are about any longer… Does this imply the normalisation, not only of gays and lesbians, but even of queer families? The fear expressed by those who nostalgically mourn the heyday of countercultural sex may be exaggerated after all.


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F o re w o r d

First, it is worth bearing in mind that homophobia has certainly not vanished – even around San Francisco or New York. Queer families still look queer to many. But there is more to this. Or rather: even homophobia needs explaining. The problem with gay and lesbian families is that, regardless of the intentions of the individuals at stake, they question the norm. Quite simply, they threaten the barrier that separates straight families from gay individuals. A personal anecdote will illustrate this. When in 1997 I first intervened in the French public debate in support not only of equal marriage and family rights (including access to adoption and reproductive technologies), I immediately received a long letter from a colleague whose irritation was summarised in a colloquial phrase: “Les homosexuels veulent le beurre et l’argent du beurre” – which could translate roughly (though at the cost of ignoring some of the connotations involved): “they want to have their cake and eat it too.” What this meant was that queers want to enjoy sex and still benefit from the recognition of the State through marriage. Or, to put it bluntly: they want to have (asocial) fun, and they still want to reap (social) rewards. Of course, what becomes apparent in this instance is that homophobia signals an anxiety that pertains less to homosexuality itself than to heterosexuality. What would become of the straight norm if it were not the norm any longer – i.e. would heterosexuality fall apart if society stopped to institutionalise heterosexuality through marriage laws and norms? Or to put it differently: is heterosexuality going to lose its seduction if and when it loses its State privilege? Worse: why should anyone desire to be straight if heterosexuality is not compulsory any longer? And, in response to such anxiety, what is it that could still hold together both straight and gay worlds? Thus, lesbian and gay families still make many uncomfortable – and actually, they themselves may also feel some sort of “trouble”. The reason is rather obvious: they do not correspond to the heterosexual norm. Not that “same-sex” families necessarily undermine gender roles (Maureen Sullivan’s Family of Woman), nor conversely inevitably reiterate them (Christopher Carrington’s No Place Like Home). More fundamentally still, queer families are confronted with the experience of questioning obvious norms – the obviousness of norms: they reveal that the world of family has been naturalised; they contribute to its denaturalisation. Family life is supposed to be obvious, i.e. natural; queer families cannot quite feel like that.


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This could be described in negative terms: they are an object of discrimination. But this new minority can also be apprehended in positive terms. Gay and lesbian families cannot ignore the democratic condition in which we all live: social norms are not given, once and for all. We define them, and redefine them. To put it simply – and in sexual terms: we make our own beds. For this is ultimately what queer families teach all of us: sexuality and family do not exist in separate worlds; the parallels finally meet. Families are never just asexual; queer families make us rethink other families as straight. In that sense, while the “family of sex” may have lost some of its visibility in current discussions, the new importance of queer families as a minority can be understood as a signal, at a time when some lament (while others celebrate) the desexualisation of homosexuality, of a paradoxical sexualisation of the family. The normalisation of homosexuality and the queering of the family may thus go hand in hand. Strange bedfellows, indeed. Éric Fassin École normale supérieure / Iris (CNRS/EHESS)

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Gays and Lesbians (un)Doing Family – An Introduction This book is about lesbian and gay families – or more precisely: about specific frameworks within or without which family practices of gays and lesbians can be lived and interpreted in Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the United States. Following an active and practical approach that sees family “less of a noun and more of an adjective or, possibly, a verb” (Morgan 1999:16), the focus is on how lesbians and gays are ‘doing family’ in certain parts of the world, besides doing class, gender and a lot of other things all at the same time. However, the scope of our book is also telling in regard to how gays and lesbians are excluded from doing their own families in most parts of the world as well as in Europe. At the international conference LGBT Families: The New Minority?, which took place in Ljubljana, the capital city of Slovenia in the autumn of 2009, where the idea of this book was originally conceived, for instance, Eastern European experiences to be shared were quite scarce. The participant from Ukraine, for example, could report only on the quite limited possibilities and not at all widespread practices of same-sex partners to live together and share a household. In this presentation the proportion of those was also given who would wish to enter into same-sex registered partnership arrangements – given that registration of same-sex partnerships would be allowed, which it is not; and given that one could establish and maintain an enduring same-sex relationship, which is not very likely in the highly homophobic Ukrainian social environment. Thus the outlook for same-sex partners in Ukraine towards doing their families appears quite hopeless for the time being.

Ponomaryov, S. 2009. An investigation into the status and needs of same-sex partnerships in Ukraine. Paper presented at the international conference “LGBT Families: The New Minority?” Ljubljana, October 16–17, 2009.

According to European Social Survey (ESS) data from 2008, among 26 examined European countries Ukraine manifested the most homophobic views (Takács – Szalma 2011). 11


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Or let’s take a Slovenian example (while keeping in mind that Slovenia is one of the most Western style non-Western-European country): in 2009 just a few days before the LGBT Families Conference, the Slovenian Ministry of Labour, Family and Social Affairs publicly announced the presentation of the new Family Code, which would put heterosexual and homosexual couples on an equal legal footing, including the right to second parent and joint adoptions for same-sex couples. Furthermore, the new Family Code would have introduced a new, inclusive family definition, which extends to all types of families and goes beyond the classical biological ties, which used to be the constitutive element of a family. The Secretary General of the Ministry actually joined the conference and gave a very promising speech, where she explained that “it is important to stress that the new Family Code does not take away any rights from those families and partnerships which have already been recognised by the law. The new Family Code only gives the rights to those who have been deprived of these rights”. However, during the more than two years that have passed since this announcement, these promises have not been kept. Those who have participated in the Slovenian public debate, defending the new Family Code, became tired, hurt and saddened. On the opposition side the “Civil initiative for the family and the rights of children” – being in fact organised and manoeuvred by the Catholic Church, at least according to some – managed to create a moral panic about homosexuals who would adopt “our” children and corrupt “our” institution of marriage. This way they also succeeded in bringing to the surface the downtrodden homophobia, bubbling underneath the Slovenian culture of political correctness, and it seems that, similarly to many other countries, the homophobic incitement based moral panic has worked again. The Government eventually decided to come up with a “compromised” version of the bill, according to which same-sex couples would not be allowed to marry, but they would be granted the right to “civil partnership”, having the same legal consequences as marriage; and joint adoption by same-sex couples is not an option any longer, only second parent adoption would be allowed. To be sure, however, the “Civil initiative for the family and the rights of children” made an application for a public referendum, which might lead to the annulment of the Family Code,

Welcome speech by dr. Anja Kopač Mrak given at the international conference “LGBT Families: The New Minority?” Ljubljana, October 16–17, 2009.

On the history of the debate on and adoption of same-sex legislation in the region (Slovenia and Croatia) see Kuhar 2011. 12


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G ay

and

L e s b i a n ( u n ) D o i n g F a m i ly – A n I n t r o d u c t i o n

which has now already been adopted in its moral-panic-beaten, slightly shredded, present form. The Slovenian episode in the 21st century history of the debates on samesex marriage and families is not a unique one. Homophobic public debates almost always include an essentialising element of moral expertise on the family: the one real family, as ‘we’ know it, based on the union of a man and a woman. Here we can certainly refer to one of the many recent changes introduced in and by the new Hungarian Constitution: the adoption of such restrictive definition of marriage, which “clearly shows that Hungary wants to institutionalise homophobia in its supreme law”. According to the centuries old strategy of “define and conquer”, the power is always with those who make the definitions in the first place (Weinrich 1987), and in a legal universe it works even more so. The definition of family has been changing over time, and there has been ongoing contention over who has the power to define whether ‘we are family’ or not. However, the family as a main social institution has managed to preserve its value for the majority of people precisely because it has been flexible enough to suit a variety of lifestyles. The main problem with essentialist family definitions is therefore their static denial of the freedom to change – however, these definitions can perfectly fit family policies that are governed by rigid social norms. Thus the practical question remains: how to frame the issue of LGBT families in policy debates to gain legal and social space for them to bud and bloom. At present politically strategic framing of the issue seems to be too often dictated by the opponents of LGBT families. This is well-reflected in a sarcastic short advertisement produced by ILGA to promote same-sex adoptions, where a young man is shown having dinner with his parents. During the dinner he comes out as straight – and only at this

The New Hungarian Constitution will be in force from January 1st, 2012.

New Hungarian Constitution: ILGA-Europe urges Hungarian parliamentarians to uphold European human rights standards – ILGA-Europe Media Release of 2011 April 14. ILGA-Europe also pointed out that “[w]hile Hungary already has registered partnership legislation for same-sex partners, such constitutional provision, if adopted, will mean that same-sex partners will be deprived from enjoying full legal equality as different sex partners. Additionally, such restrictive definition of marriage would create serious restrictions in terms of the implementation of the EU free movement directive as same-sex partners married in other EU countries would not be recognised as married in Hungary”. See: (8 November 2011).

Adoption for same-sex couples (ILGA’s TV advertisement, 2005). See: (8 November 2011). 13


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point can we see that he has been raised by a same-sex couple, and the narrator says: “Children raised by homosexuals do not necessarily become homosexuals”. It is clear that this advertisement is successful in targeting the popular fear that homosexuals will raise new generations of homosexuals. While it is important and politically strategic to reject such ideas, it is also important to be sensitive to the unwanted messages that might be communicated when fighting for LGBT rights. Emphasising that same-sex families (most probably) will not raise new generations of homosexuals can easily contribute to the reproduction of heteronormative assumptions, including that there must be something wrong if a child, raised by gay parents, turns out to be gay. Strategic framing of the issue in mainstream discourse can in this way implicitly push the LGBT community into the reproduction of a normalising discourse with the ultimate unacceptability of homosexuality. These dilemmas can also characterise local political arenas, especially in countries with limited LGBT rights legislation, when the interests of gay and lesbian families are sacrificed in order to gain at least some rights for same-sex couples. In these contexts it is often believed that the claims for same-sex adoption rights and legal recognition of gay and lesbian families would result in the overall rejection of any proposed ‘progay’ bill, aiming to provide at least some rights for same-sex couples. This discreet charm of opportunism can create a new minority within a minority, when LGBT family issues are swept aside by saying that there is no need to rush, society is not ready for this, not yet ... In other countries, where same-sex families can exist as legal entities, other problematic aspects of heteronormative social functioning may emerge. American filmmaker, Johnny Symons, a gay dad himself, said in an interview that one of the most important differences between straight and gay families is that straight parents get much more reinforcement as parents for being parents from society. Streams of approval and validation come not only from family and friends but also from strangers in public space, from accidental people looking at them, while smiling and commenting: “Oh, your child looks so much like you!” – But what if your child does not look like you? And what if there is no female role model present in a gay family? Being perceived as different, being a queer fish, can create curiosity, which can also feel oppressive, and lead to labelling or stigmatisation. While we can see that legal changes are slowly, or

Kuhar, R. 2008. Ati in oči: intervju z Johnnyjem Symonsom (Daddy and Papa: An interview with Johnny Symons). Narobe 5, 6–9. (8 November 2011). 14


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sometimes surprisingly swiftly taking place, we cannot expect that social change will follow automatically – not to mention the possibility of legal and social setbacks … We hope that this book, by bringing together a variety of academic accounts from mostly European countries on factors inciting, restricting, straining, training, discouraging and encouraging gay and lesbian family practices, and presenting research findings previously not available for English speaking audiences, can contribute to the still ongoing epistemological and moral debates about the meaning(s) of family life. Our hope is that such debates can contribute to the development of a more inclusive society – by worrying less about socially (non-)desired family types and concentrating more on everyday family practices and the lived, sometimes indeed fluid, reality of family relations to be not only legally but also socially recognised, supported and respected. During at least the last two decades one of the main questions of family sociology has been whether, borrowing Judith Stacey’s (1991) term, we are brave enough for doing brave new families. The authors of this book certainly believe so. Roman Kuhar and Judit Takács Ljubljana – Budapest, November 2011

References Kuhar, R. 2011. Resisting change: Same-sex partnership policy debates in Croatia and Slovenia. Südosteuropa. Zeitschrift für Politik und Gesellschaft 59(1): 25–49. Morgan, D. H. J. 1999. Risk and family practices: Accounting for change and fluidity in family life. In The New Family?, eds. E. B. Silva and C. Smart, 13–30. London: Sage. Silva, E. B., and C. Smart. 1999. The ‘new’ practices and politics of family life. In The New Family?, eds. E. B. Silva and C. Smart, 1–12. London: Sage. Stacey, J. 1991. Brave New Families. New York: Basic Book. Takács, J., and I. Szalma. 2011. Homophobia and same-sex partnership legislation in Europe. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal 30(5): 356–378. Weinrich, J. 1987. Sexual landscapes: Why we are what we are, why we love who we love. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

In 1999 Elizabeth B. Silva and Carol Smart noted that “[t]here is ongoing both an epistemological and a moral debate about what the family is and what the family ought to be” (Silva and Smart 1999:1). 15


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Sex and the family: intersections between family, gender, reproduction and same-sex sexuality in Spain José Ignacio Pichardo Galán

Introduction and methodology Since the transition to democracy began in the second half of the seventies there have been many important legislative changes regarding familial and sexual relations in Spain. The approval of the Spanish Constitution of 1978 brought with it a battery of legislative reforms seeking to create more democratic and egalitarian concepts of the family in legislation: new divorce (1981), abortion (1985), adoption (1987) and assisted reproduction (1988) laws. Beginning in the late 1990s, and even more so during the years 2000, Spain has seen a second wave of legal reforms seeking to, once again, adjust the legal apparatus to the changes in familial, sexual, and gender relationships over the last decades of the twentieth century. Included in these reforms were the recognition of registered partnerships in different regions (1998–2005) and the legalisation of same-sex marriage nationally (2005). This article reports the results of a qualitative research study, conducted from June 2004 to August 2005, the objective of which was to assess how the issues faced by and practices of queer people affect social conceptions of the family (Pichardo 2009). By “queer people” I mean homosexuals, non-heterosexual people or gays, lesbians and bisexuals. I will use these terms interchangeably throughout the text. This qualitative study consisted of an ethnographic approach based on the use of the following research methods: - Review of printed and audiovisual materials (Bibliography, legal texts, media, and LGBTQ associations’ publications). - Participatory observation in different activities, gatherings and family rituals (weddings and funerals, for example) in which the informants of this study were participating. I also attended gay and lesbian meeting places (clubs, associations, demonstrations, reunions, seminars and so on), including virtual meeting places on the internet (web pages, web fora, distribution lists, profiles pages ...). 17


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- Analysis of statistical data from diverse sources, including the 2001 Census or the National Institute of Statistics database on marriages. Several reports published by the Spanish National Centre for Sociological Research (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas - CIS) on the question of family in general and sexuality in particular were studied, too. - Nonetheless, the main input for this research was the rich material gathered through 63 in-depth interviews with non-heterosexual participants. These interviews were made with 33 men and 30 women ranging from 19 to 78 years old. I have tried to cover as great a socio-demographic and geographic background as possible, having interviewed people throughout Spain who were living in villages, small towns, and large cities. These people were recruited for the study through distributions lists, emails, ads and reports on both LGBT oriented and general public media, posters at associations, bars, clubs and other LGBT gathering places and, ultimately, with the use of snowball sampling. More than 264 people who had same-sex sexual relations or defined themselves as homosexual, bisexual, gay, lesbian or queer responded to a questionnaire offering themselves to participate in an in-depth interview. During the interview a range of topics were covered, including identity, homophobia, family, kinship, sexuality, parenting, love, partners, friendship, economy, rights, gender and care among others. The article begins by addressing the questioning of heteronormativity as the main novelty evoked by queer people within conceptions of family. When in June 2005 same-sex marriage was legalised, the idea of heterosexuality as the sole foundation of filiation was effectually debunked, thereby raising important issues and questions. Then some of the ways in which non-heterosexual people are taking advantage of this new legislation will be presented, followed by a section with an overview of the resulting changes that have been introduced by gays and lesbians in the sphere of familial relations, especially on issues of parenting, sexuality, and the division of domestic chores. The penultimate section reflects upon aspects in which there are continuities with the traditionally dominant conceptions of family and therein, the elements that reproduce the prevailing notions regarding the social institution of family: cohabitation, love, caretaking, and coupling. The article concludes by delving into some of the questions that remain open to reflection.

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Sex

and the

F a m i ly . . .

Questioning Heteronormativity When in the 1970s Gayle Rubin presented what she then called the sex/ gender system she pointed out that “the social organization of sex rests upon gender, obligatory heterosexuality, and the constraint of female sexuality” (1975, 179). The social construction of gender differences between men and women is then inextricably tied to compulsory heterosexuality (Rich 1980). Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan (2001, 41) used the term “heterosexual assumption” to refer to the all-embracing institutional invalidation of same-sex sexualities and identities and the constant reinforcement of heterosexuality as a norm, privileging and shoring up the heterosexual model. The participants of this study, all of whom either had been, or were actively, in same-sex relationships, clearly seemed to recognise this heterosexual assumption, as they were forced to face it their whole lives, whether by reproducing it, questioning it, or avoiding it. This model, whether challenged or followed, is ever-present and was even defined by some participants as “the path” that must be followed. This “path” includes having sexual and emotional heterosexual relationships, falling in love with a person of the opposite sex, marrying him/her, living together, maintaining sexual relations with that partner, being faithful to him/her, getting a good job, buying a house or a car, having children, raising them, and having the woman take care of the children (whether she works outside of the house or not). It is interesting to observe that this life timeline does not solely include aspects related to partnering, sexuality, or reproduction, but that it also includes material aspects, like gender-based division of labour, and consumerism. Some of the participants of the study reported having followed this family model by getting married or maintaining a stable heterosexual relationship, despite being attracted to members of the same sex. In some cases they simply repressed this desire, while in others they maintained sporadic or stable same-sex relationships at the same time as their heterosexual families. Other participants reported having opted for a life of religious service as a means of avoiding the social pressure to maintain a heterosexual relationship. Remaining single was also mentioned as another alternative to escape the socio-cultural pressure to form a heterosexual couple. Nevertheless, the majority of the participants did report feeling like they should not continue on the path of this heterosexual assumption, at some moment in their lives. Some said that the same-sex desire they felt precluded them from meeting the expectations of heterosexuality. Others thought that they would never be happy if they could not pursue their 19


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true feelings and attractions, and that acting otherwise would require them to deceive the person with whom they entered into a heterosexual relationship. When they reached this moment of truth, so to speak, many said that, although at first they saw no alternatives, eventually they discovered the existence of other possibilities. As a result homosexuality, as a lifestyle, became one of the viable options. However, deviating from heteronormativity certainly came at a price in the form of homophobia and persecution. As one 38 years old male participant from Madrid stated: “I thought that I would be heterosexual and get married to stop being discriminated against and oppressed by society, friends, neighbours, or by schoolmates. (…) When I compared myself with a heterosexual, I realised that a heterosexual person was allowed to live in peace”. Although some may think that these feelings and situations are no longer relevant currently in Spain, recent research affirms that homophobia is not only still present, but as strong as ever in certain contexts, such as schools (Pichardo, Molinuevo and Riley 2009). Queers have developed both individual and collective strategies to overcome this homophobia, and by extension heteronormativity. Additionally, the efforts of feminism in challenging the gender division of labour allowed for the socially constructed “complementary nature” of the masculine and feminine to be overcome, and the sex/gender system to be dismantled. One of the main tools that allowed for the cultural denial of the heterosexual assumption is the creation of identities based on same-sex relationships. However, since these identities tend to be problematic, fluid, changing, and strategic, the individuals seem to assume them in diverse ways. Oftentimes, especially in the case of women, they report not always feeling the need to identify themselves as lesbians, gays, or bisexuals at all (Pichardo 2008). Once these identities based on same-sex practices are created and spread, those who assume them become more visible and recognisable by society. Queer people first face the challenge of turning their practices into an identity, and then making this identity public: “There is an extra challenge for us: the fight to either hide, or come out. In both cases you need to fight” (Julián, male 37 years old). In this sense, coming out, with its associated risks, can even be seen as an activist effort, a sentiment expressed by one participant when she said: “I think of visibility as a political act” (Laia, female, 30 years old). The creation and visibility of interpersonal networks made up of people who share these queer identities helped found the lesbian, gay, bisexual, 20


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Sex

and the

F a m i ly . . .

and transgender (LGBT) liberation movement in the last part of the 20th Century, which ultimately achieved the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Spain. The next section will analyse how same-sex couples are utilising this legal institution.

Same-sex Marriage The legalisation of same-sex marriage provides some insight into the reality of same-sex couples in the form of official statistics, collected yearly through civil registries. However, obviously not all couples marry, whether hetero- or homosexual. The next census, in 2011 will provide statistics on the number of unmarried couples living together. The National Institute of Statistics reports that in the first four and a half years since the law was passed 15,381 same-sex couples have married. Of these marriages, 10,318 were between two men and 5,063 were between two women. Table 1: Number of same-sex marriages by year Year

Man+man marriages

Woman+woman marriages

Total same-sex marriages

Percentage of total marriages

2005

914

355

1,269

0.61 %

2006

3,000

1,313

4,313

2.08 %

2007

2,141

1,052

3,193

1.56 %

2008

2,051

1,143

3,194

1.62 %

2009

2,212

1,200

3,412

1.94 %

TOTAL

10,318

5,063

15,381

1.55 %

Source: Author’s calculations based on data published on the National Statistics Institute’s website (http://www.ine.es/inebmenu/mnu_mnp.htm).

The percentage of same-sex marriages between two women has increased slightly to just over 35% of the total number of same-sex marriages in 2008 and 2009, from 28% in 2005. This means that, although they remain only a third of the total, the percentage increase has been sustained. Table 1 shows that in 2007 there was a slight decrease in the number of same-sex couples who married. This could be explained by the fact that most of the people who had been waiting their whole lives to be able to marry probably did so immediately after the law was passed, thereby causing the initial figures to be unrepresentatively high. In 2009 the number of same-sex marriages increased slightly, reaching 3,412 couples and in that year same-sex marriages accounted for 2% of the total. The Ministry of Justice reported 382 divorces of same-sex couples in the first five 21


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years of same-sex marriage, but as this figure is only from computerised civil registries, it can be expected to represent incomplete data. According to the statistics only 0.064% (approximately 30,000 people) of the Spanish population is in a same-sex marriage, which suggests a minimum impact of the law in quantitative terms. On the other hand, the legalisation of same-sex marriage has certainly had a huge impact in cultural, legal, and political terms. Access to rights and marriage are two intertwined ideas, the latter of which is often associated with the assurance of full rights to minorities. Paternotte (2008) summarises marriage’s role for gays and lesbian in Belgium as such, while recalling the following paradox: the institution which had been considered as one of the pillars of oppression has been converted into a battlefield, and a potential way to gain access to citizenship, meaning inclusion. The idea of marriage as a question of citizenship and equality was constantly repeated by the participants of the study as well. Vita, a 41 years old female, from a small town in the Mediterranean said: “It’s a right which any citizen, queer or not, should have. Once they deny it to you, you are discriminated against”. Despite these sentiments the majority of gays and lesbians in the general population have not gotten married, which was also true of the participants of the study. The common trends among those participants who had gotten married were: - being in a long-term relationship with common possessions; - couples in which one of the members was sick or near death, so as to secure rights of succession for the other partner and widow/widower pension; - having children, so that one member of the couple could adopt the children of the other, since in most of the Spanish regions a couple must be married in order to adopt together; also because the child is less protected in many cases when the other member of the couple is not legally recognised as a parent; - couples in which one of the partners was an immigrant and needed to obtain a visa, a residence- or work permit, or Spanish citizenship; - couples who married as an activist effort (Arancha, 35 years old from a small village on the Mediterranean coast, for example, commented that she never considered marriage with her heterosexual partner, but now that she is with a woman, she is considering it in order to vindicate their relationship); - couples who wanted to get the social recognition they don’t get as a same-sex couple due to homophobic prejudices (Monica, 30 years old from Valencia, planned to marry her girlfriend hoping it would garner 22


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them recognition as a couple, because even though they are open about their relationship, their family and friends still insist on treating them as if they were “friends”). Though the first motives listed could be common to any heterosexual couple, the last two are certainly particular to same-sex couples. In addition to the legal consequences of marriage, it also has a ritual and symbolic value. The commitment of a couple and the public presentation of it to the community imply recognition and social acceptance that is often lacking otherwise for same-sex couples. On the other hand, the participants hardly ever mentioned love as one of the motivations to marry. Instead they named and explained various practical and material issues, for example, one participant said: “After 29 years together, my wedding just slipped by. I mean, we didn’t do it for the wedding; we just did it for the papers. Nothing else” (Esteban, male, 60 years old). Abel, male, 29 years old, married his partner, an immigrant, in order to resolve his legal situation in Spain. He asserted that without that necessity, they would not have gotten married, or at least not when they did. However, at the same time he was sure to say: “I married him because I love him, if I didn’t love him, even if he needed a visa, I wouldn’t marry him”. The distribution of the nationalities of the members of couples married in 2009 is shown in the following figure: Figure 1: Percentage spouses.

of marriages performed in

2009

by sex and nationality of the

Source: Author’s calculations based on data published on the National Statistics Institute’s website.

Revealingly, and similar to the numbers from preceding years, the percentage of marriages between a Spaniard and a foreigner in 2009 was much higher within same-sex marriages, especially between men, com23


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pared with the figures for heterosexual marriages. The number of samesex marriages between one Spanish man and one foreigner was equal to the number of same-sex marriages between two Spanish men. These statistics could represent a necessity to resolve visa or residential issues, or perhaps reflect a lowered sense of xenophobia among queers. Additionally, one in ten same-sex marriages between men took place between two non-Spaniards, which would only make sense if they both lived in Spain, unless they did it for symbolic reasons, as these marriages would not be recognised in the majority of their native countries. Homophobia reportedly acts as a virulent force when it comes to samesex couples deciding whether or not to marry. In that vein, numerous same-sex weddings were celebrated without the presence of family members, like Javier and Gerardo’s, (both males from Madrid) where the only guests were two friends who served as the witnesses and four neighbours. Esteban reported that although there were over 200 guests at his wedding, including many members of both families, he was very hurt that neither his father-in-law nor one of his brothers came, despite being invited. Another participant, Abel, said that absolutely none of his husband’s family members attended their wedding because none of them know he is gay. The very public nature of marriage makes the same-sex relationship visible in many less obvious contexts, like for example, on legal documents. This increased visibility causes a lot of couples to decide not to marry, since they do not want to or cannot assume the costs of universally and uniformly coming out. An example of how costly this procedure can in fact be is the case of those who come from countries where homosexuality is avidly persecuted. If these individuals marry a person of the same sex, and that is indicated on their visas or passports, they are put at risk when crossing the border into their home countries. Also some couples who were planning to adopt children in foreign nations reported postponing their decision to wed until after doing so because the majority of the countries that allow adoption by single individuals would not give a child to a same-sex couple. Finally there are same-sex couples who reported preferring not to marry because, just like some heterosexual couples, they simply do not share the values, or the legal rights, and duties that accompany marriage. Ultimately the individual and collective actions of gays and lesbians and their demands for both legal and social recognition have brought about new models for organising coupling, reproduction and intimate 24


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life. With these models come new meanings of family and marriage, which may result in the questioning of heteronormativity. These changes have allowed homosexuals to challenge the heterosexual assumption, and have effectually spawned even more transformations, which will be analysed in the next section.

Changes After the questioning of the heterosexual foundation of marriage and family, other specific challenges to these institutions follow. These new possibilities, although not particular to gays and lesbians, have found an opportune field for development in same-sex couples. The breaking of the coitus/alliance/filiation continuum becomes official when the filiation of children with same-sex parents is legalised. In Spain, the heterosexual married couple is no longer the privileged locus for the reproduction of persons, and more precisely of citizens (Graham 2004, 27). Individuals and same-sex couples are now also recognised as agents of biological and social reproduction of citizens as a result of more inclusive laws of adoption and the development of assisted reproduction methods (Pichardo 2011). One result of the social debate over same-sex marriage is that it is now common knowledge that gays and lesbians can have children, and that they already do in fact have them. This revelation allows all non-heterosexual people to envision a future with children if they so desire. Being queer no longer means being excluded from the possibility of being a mother or father. The statistics from the Spanish census of 2001 show that one in four female couples (28%) and one in ten male couples (9%) had children. Also in 2001, long before the discussion of filiation by same-sex couples had really taken seed in either the public arena or in Parliament, more than 2,785 children were already living with same-sex couples. Although ultimately access to maternity and paternity is a right afforded to both hetero- and homosexual people (see Figure 2), a large disparity still exists in that the process of becoming a parent proves to be rather meditated for same-sex couples (except for individuals with children from a previous heterosexual relationship). Since these couples cannot have children through sexual intercourse within the couple, they must invariably seek the assistance of an outside party.

See: (15 September 2011). 25


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Figure 2: Modes of access to maternity and paternity PROCEDURE*

Heterosexual genital sexual intercourse (coitus)

Insemination

Clinically Assisted Reproductive Techniques Home insemination

WOMEN MEN Previous heterosexual relation Agreement with someone of the opposite sex Getting pregnant from a sexual partner without his consent or knowledge Anonymous sperm donaPregnancy with a known tion woman. Egg donor and surrogaKnown sperm donation cy (same woman)** Surrogate pregnancy Egg donor and surrogawith couple*** cy (different women)** Known sperm donation

Donate sperm

Individual or joint adoption Step adoption Fostering Fostering individually or jointly *These options can be explored individually, in couples, or within the framework of parenting by more than two individuals. Adoption

**Illegal in Spain, but people travel abroad to access it. ***As a result of a legal loophole, performed in Spain only within married, lesbian couples.

There is a whole array of options for non-heterosexual people who decide to pursue reproduction. They have to face a series of important decisions: if they will seek reproduction individually or as a couple; if the child will be biological or adopted; if it is biological, will it be conceived through coitus, insemination in a clinic, or self-insemination (“home-insemination”); whether the donor will be anonymous or someone the would-be parents know and, in either case, if the legal and social paternity of the third person will be recognised or not. Herein, arises the possibility of participating in a co-parenting project between more than two people, which highlights the glaring distinctions between biological, legal, and social maternity or paternity (Descoutures 2010). The social aspect of parenting is thereby acknowledged, despite the fact that the biological nature of the topic never completely disappears, even in many queer people’s conceptions of family. Accordingly, the participants of the study consistently made reference to the question of biology within reproduction and parenting. Some of them reported overwhelming interest in having biogenetic connections 26


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with their children and were often completely willing to dedicate considerable economic and personal efforts to creating them. For example, Marlén, a 40 years old female from Galicia, remarked one of the huge advantages of using self-insemination to conceive her two children. In case the children ever fall sick and they need to know their genetic lineage, the situation could be easily resolved, as the donor was her wife’s brother. Same-sex couples are also expected to contribute certain innovations to the field of sexuality. For the majority of gays and lesbians, reproduction has to be achieved without sex. Therefore, sex is here inextricably no longer linked to reproduction but rather to pleasure, love, and communication. Rubin (1984) places non-heterosexual people down near the bottom of the hierarchies of sexuality. As they are already marginalised in terms of sexual norms, this position could enable them to potentially overcome the constraints of a normative sexuality centred on procreation and restricted by characterisations like coitus-centrality, ageism, coupling, monogamy, and others. Nevertheless, same-sex relationships do not necessarily escape the social pressures to imitate the more prevalent norms of sex: heterosexual, coital, in partner relationships, monogamous, performed at home, non-commercial, for love, and between members of the same generation (Rubin 1984). However, some new patterns can be found among the participants of the study. For example, there appears to be a greater age difference between homosexual partners than between heterosexual ones (see Figure 3). This variation could be explained by the fact that the main aim of sexual relations within homosexual relationships is not reproduction. Therefore the age constrictions related to fertility that are placed on heterosexual relationships are not relevant to non-heterosexual pairs. Figure 3: Age difference between members of a couple by sex of the members

Source: Graphic based on the data of the 2001 Census published on the website of the National Institute of Statistics 27


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Cea, a Spanish sociologist, asserts that sexual monogamy continues characterising the life of Spanish heterosexual couples, married or not, young or old, and that sexual relationships outside the couple remains the most censured sexual practice, as it is only accepted by 5% of the population (2007, 55–57). Faithfulness, on the other hand, is not mandatory in coupling among the majority of queer people who participated in the study. This condition is usually agreed upon in the establishment or development of the relationship. That, however, does not mean that all gays and lesbians have sexual relationships outside the couple, just that, for the majority, it is a topic open to negotiation. Some couples establish a promise of sexual fidelity, while others opt for a whole array of possibilities that range from tolerance of occasional instances of sexual infidelity to so-called “open relationships”, in which each partner maintains sexual relations with other people. Sexuality has appeared in a veiled form within the discussions of the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Spain because sex is still thought of as an aspect of private life, not an issue that should be reflected in debates and public life. However, opposition to the recognition of non-normative sexualities fuelled most of the arguments against the legalisation of gay marriage. “What infuriates the opponents of same-sex marriage is the state’s (and by implication, the nation’s) approval, among other things, of fellatio and anal intercourse between males, and of cunnilingus and use of dildos by women” (Graham 2004, 25). In order to avoid references to same-sex sexuality that could generate resistance, the concept of love was often used to legitimise same-sex relationships and queer families. It was meant to counterbalance the image of queer people as exclusively and insatiably sexual, and as a strategy to establish equivalencies between hetero- and homosexuals (Villaamil 2004, 69). Although never mentioned in the legal texts, love has been one of the main supports of the legalisation of gay marriage, as it is much less controversial to think of two men or two women loving each other, rather than two men or two women having sex (Graham 2004, 26). The legalisation of same-sex marriage and filiation not only questions the heteronormativity of family, but also gender differences, the complementariness of the sexes, and the sexual division of labour. On a symbolic level it shakes the very foundations of the main system of discrimination and subordination in our society: the sex/gender system. Since gay marriage has been legalised, the idea that every family should be made up of a man and a woman is obviously being negated, along with the radical division of all of society into two genders. 28


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In a same-sex couple, the enactment of gender roles are being reshaped, as either two men or two women are responsible for nurturing, showing affection and all of the domestic duties like, working out of the house, cleaning, cooking, and shopping. This trend debunks cultural constructs such as the idea that women are more apt to caretaking. In these non-heterosexual couples, gender is not relevant to the question of who should stop working temporarily in order to take charge of raising a child. For example, Marlén gave birth to her first daughter, but it was her wife, Manoli, who left work afterwards to care for the child so that Marlén could continue her professional career, which she says “is a less likely outcome with a man”. However, just because there are no power struggles based on gender, it does not imply that there is complete equality within same-sex couples. Instead these disparities are based on other elements such as age, economic power, symbolic capital, and shared possession of the house, amongst others: “I was 36 years old, but she was 22. Therefore we were not very equal. Let’s just say she did what I said, because I was older” (Valentina, female, 65 years old). In any case, none of these changes are lineal or unidirectional. Since they seem to bypass the structural, metaphorical, symbolic, and ideological elements that have historically maintained the hegemonic models, they also serve to maintain the systems of inequality. Gays and lesbians do not escape gender socialisation; therefore they too reproduce it. Although within the same-sex couple there can hardly be gender-based division of household duties and chores, outside of it, they tend to replicate the same gender roles as in the rest of society. For instance, within their families usually the women, like grandmothers or sometimes hired help, take on the role of caregivers and are responsible for many domestic chores. The main elements of change that have occurred in the sexual and familial relationships of the participants of the study have been reviewed. However, within these changes there are certain continuities that will be discussed in the following section.

Continuities Kinship reflects the need of human groups to guarantee their own survival. The different systems of kinship result from the various manners in which each culture structures biological and social reproduction, sexual division of labour, and the organisation of residence, amongst other 29


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aspects. Therefore, analysing the material conditions in which people find themselves becomes one of the crucial elements for studying the changes and continuities that gays and lesbians are producing in relation to the family. It is precisely within these conditions that even more continuities with the pre-existing conceptions of family can be found. The family remains a basic residential, financial and consumer unit, and above all, the foundation of biological reproduction, the nucleus of enduring material solidarity, that is, care giving and receiving. That is to say that the family remains the locus of reproduction of the material conditions essential to the survival of individuals and social life. According to Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan (2001, 43), marginalised individuals, in this case, non-heterosexual people, try to create viable ways of living, feasible in their specific circumstances. Everyday practical concerns, like sharing a house, the expenses, travels or rituals, define familial relationships to such a degree that they can sometimes even be responsible for the dissolution of the couple or family. In order to detect emerging life experiments and new familial practices, diverse ways of reproducing domestic life were analysed. Commonplace problems such as “Should we live together?”; “Should we get married?”; “Should we register ourselves as a couple?”; “How do we deal with the issue of property ownership?” were closely examined. The participants of the study did not report intentionally living or re-organising their lives to “redefine the family” or to question “the heteronormativity of marriage”. However, they did remark that the heterosexual nuclear family model (“the path”) has some practical aspects that inherently exclude most queers, therefore forcing them to seek out their own alternatives to organise their everyday lives. Nevertheless, this sentiment did not prevent these dominant conceptions of the family from influencing the way they actually arranged and interpreted their own lives in the end. Living together has been, and continues to be one of the basic elements of the Western definition of familial relationships. It appears to be expressly linked to marriage, as it remains a prevailing condition of the Mediterranean socio-cultural tradition and is even a requirement under Spanish law (Bestard 1998, 180–182; Alberdi 1999, 60–61). Cohabitation is also required for the legal recognition of registered partnerships, either as a pre-existing condition before registration or as a stipulation they are expected to comply with after registering. However, emerging changes have been noted in the Basque Country’s registered partnership law (Law 2/2003, May 7th) where a shared residence is no longer required in order to register. 30


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The participants of the study also assigned living together a leading role in determining what is and is not a family: “I understand a family to be a couple. […] You should still be considered a family whether you do or don’t have children, or if you are the same or opposite sex. We live under the same roof, we share. I mean, we are a family” (Arancha, female, 35 years old). Living together, however, does not become a requirement sine qua non to be considered a family. Marina considers herself, her girlfriend, and her girlfriend’s daughter to be a family because, even though the daughter does not live with them, they share a lot of expenses related to her. Similarly, Julián and José, despite not living together, do consider themselves not only a couple, but also a family: “José, my sister, my father and my mother are my family. They are the people I live with, in distinct spaces and times” (Julián). In fact, Julián lives in three different cities and spaces, depending on the proximity to his work. Some days he sleeps and eats in his hometown at his parent’s house, other days he spends at his own apartment in the capital city of his region, and then he spends weekends or short periods of time at his boyfriend’s house in Madrid. This arrangement allows him to maintain his partner relationship without their living together, and while living in multiple houses and cities. Some of the participants chose, in spite of material conditions or maybe even because of them, to maintain stable partner relationships living in different spaces. Various couples who participated in the study did not live together despite having been in a long-term relationship for years. Some of them lived in different cities and expressed no intentions of living together in the near future. They fall into the category of those who consider partnership or family to be independent of a shared dwelling, also known as “living apart together”. A similar, yet different situation is that of Juantxo (38 years old) and his daughter Eleuteria, who have never lived in the same house, but maintain a parent-child relationship in which he even has the keys to the house where Eleuteria lives with her mother in Madrid. These types of situations are common in reconstructed families, both homosexual and heterosexual, and highlight the symbolic importance of the home and cohabitation as the spaces in which family relations are built. People in same-sex relationships usually prefer to live together, make a single consumer unit, and above all, form units of enduring solidarity in which mutual care is one of the main expressions not just of love, but also of the existence of a familial bond. Participants consistently reported in their interviews and during participant observations that they thought 31


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of their family as the people who “are there” when you need them and for whom you are always available when they need you. By examining the economical organisation of these families, again both continuity and change can be found. Not all same-sex couples form a single financial unit where the two members have a single, common economy with joint income and expenses, as is more commonly the case with heterosexual couples in Spain (Cea 2007, 312–313). Instead, they manage personal and shared expenses in a variety of different ways. Some partners maintain entirely separate accounts; others share some expenses, like rent; others prefer to have both shared and separate accounts; and still others share all expenses and accounts. On the other hand, as time passes queer couples and family units seem to move towards a common economy, especially when joint possessions are acquired or there are underage members of the family. The participants put a high premium on coupling and expressed very little doubt or issue with coupling. Most of them considered having a partner to be a vital objective. Being single was identified with loneliness, which appeared to be one of the greatest fears of the participants. Similarly, there is no general discourse among queer individuals or LGBTQ associations as to the ways in which single life could be seen positively or as an enriching or positive way of living. Finding participants who were in a stable sexual and affective relationship comprised of more than two people proved to be a challenge. In several ethnographic spaces, various people commented that they knew three males or three females living together or in a threesome relationship, but when these people were asked to join the study, most of them not only refused to, but also became upset with the person who had shared the information about their relationship. Eventually three people in such a relationship were interviewed, and they made it abundantly clear that relationships such as theirs remain, in their own words, “in the closet”. Overall, both the couple and the family, continue to be a reference point for the organisation of sexuality, biological reproduction, and the everyday life of many queers. The concept of family remains steadfast, as reflected in the fact that many ritualistic and family events and celebrations have become spaces for confrontation and discussion of the familial status of non-heterosexual relationships. Christmas, first communions, baptisms, weddings, funerals, and hospitalisations were very often mentioned throughout the study as such spaces. When the recognition of a queer family was a point of contention, these situations tended to become tense. The question of who is and is not considered family often is 32


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at the helm of these situations. For example, one of the participating couples reported fighting every Christmas, sometimes even almost reaching the point of breaking up because, while one of the two wanted to spend the holidays with his biological family, the other did not since he was not recognised as his partner’s boyfriend by them. For him, Christmas is meant to be spent with family, and since they were each other’s family, they would have been better off spending it alone together. Within Spanish culture a radical rupture from the biological family is generally uncommon, as is the dichotomy between biological and chosen family that is portrayed in Anglo-Saxon literature on kinship of gays and lesbians (Weston 1991). The participants of this study reported attempting to integrate into the biological family, while seeking recognition of their homosexual identities and relationships. In a society like Spain’s, where the family has such an important role in the economical, material, and affective support networks, most queers cannot afford to be ostracised from their families, just as these families cannot afford to exclude them. This is likely one of the main factors in the acceptance of same-sex relationships within families in Spain. The debate over “new families” or the existence of “rainbow families” in Spain is certainly relevant in this nation. There, LGBTQ people and associations were able to appropriate the concept of family, which enabled the legalisation of gay marriage. However, challenges certainly remain for these “rainbow families”, which are addressed in the concluding epigraph.

Conclusion Although LGBT organisations constantly assert that same-sex marriage assures legal equality between homosexual and heterosexual people, this is often not completely true, especially in the context of kinship. For instance, if a baby is born to a married, lesbian couple, the wife of the biological mother is not automatically recognised as a parent, as is the case in heterosexual marriages. Instead, the non-biological mother has to file paperwork before the baby is born, or adopt him/her afterwards. Similarly, gay couples who use surrogate pregnancy outside of Spain (since it is not legally permitted in the country) eventually must face the obstacle of registering their children in the civil registry with two male parents. Some of these legal problems would disappear if the presumption of paternity were eliminated and if the voluntary registration of the filial 33


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relationship of both parents were always mandatory in the case of all married or unmarried couples, heterosexuals included. This would imply that if a baby were born to a married couple, both the biological mother and her spouse would have to legally recognise that child as their own. The ideology that filiation relies on the existence of biogenetic link would be broken down, effectively highlighting the social and voluntary nature of this bond. However, all of these issues are clearly based on the prevailing symbolic connection between filiation, heterosexual intercourse, and marriage, which, although disputed, remains a popular tenet upheld, not just by society at large, but also in the legal and judicial systems. Despite the changes that have taken place recently in the sexual and familial relationships of LGBT people, heterosexism still exists at both a legal and a social level. Ultimately the legalisation of gay marriage has opened up new possibilities, serving as an example of the way historically dominant ideologies can be successfully overthrown by the action of social actors. However, these social changes show certain continuities with the prevailing hegemonic models and also run the risk of discriminating those who prefer not to become a couple or marry. Although no change is ever complete and continuities are always to be expected, the transformations created by the social and legal recognition of queer families in Spain that have been explored here have certainly proven to be very significant in the socio-cultural landscape of that nation.

References Alberdi, I. 1999. La nueva familia española (The new Spanish family). Madrid: Taurus. Bestard, J. 1998. Parentesco y Modernidad (Kinship and modernity). Barcelona: Paidós. Cea, M. Á. 2007. La deriva del cambio familiar. Hacia formas de convivencia más abiertas y democráticas (The direction of family changes. Towards new, more open and democratic ways of living together). Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas – S. XXI. Descoutures, V. 2010. Les mères lesbiennes (Lesbian Mothers). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Graham, M. 2004. Gay Marriage: Whiter Sex? Some Thoughts from Europe. Sexuality Research and Social Policy 1(3): 24–31. 34


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Paternotte, D. 2008. Sociologie politique comparée de l’ouverture du mariage civil aux couples de même sexe en Belgique, en France et en Espagne: des spécificités nationales aux convergences transnationales (Comparative political sociology of the opening-up of civil marriage to same-sex couples in Belgium, France and Spain: from national peculiarities to transnational convergences). PhD thesis, Université libre de Bruxelles. Pichardo, J. I. 2008. Lesbianas o no. In Lesbianas. Discursos y representaciones (Lesbians: Discourses and Representations), ed. R. Platero, 119–138. Barcelona: Melusina. ———. 2009. Entender la diversidad familiar. Relaciones homosexuales y nuevos modelos de familia (Understanding familial diversity. Same-sex relations and new models of family). Barcelona: Bellaterra. ———. 2011. We are family (or not). Social and legal recognition of same-sex relationships and lesbian and gay families in Spain. Sexualities 14(5): 544–561. Pichardo, J. I., B. Molinuevo, and R. Riley. 2009. Achieving real equality: A work in progress for LGBT youth in Spain. Journal of LGBT Youth 6(2–3): 272–287. Rich, A. 1980. Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5(4): 631–660. Rubin, G. 1975. The traffic in women. In Toward an anthropology of women, ed. R. Rapp Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press. ———. 1984. Thinking sex: Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In Pleasure and Danger, ed. C. Vance, 267–319. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Villaamil, F. 2004. La transformación de la identidad gay en España (The transformation of gay identity in Spain). Madrid: Catarata. Weeks, J., B. Heaphy, and C. Donovan. 2001. Same Sex Intimacies. Families of choice and other life experiments. London: Routledge. Weston, K. 1991. Families we choose: Lesbians, gays, kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Parenting of the Fittest? Lesbian and Gay Family Planning in Germany Elke Jansen

For a long time parenthood and homosexuality seemed not to go well together even for lesbians and gay men themselves. Today this idea is still reflected in discussions concerning equal rights for homosexual and heterosexual couples. For example, in October 2010 the German Minister of Family Affairs, Kristina Schröder, stated in an interview: “There is only one thing they (lesbian mothers or gay fathers) cannot offer by nature: the opposite gender. We know that it is important for the development of a child to grow up with both genders.” In Germany marriage is still not open to same-sex partners. Since 2001 there is an institution of “registered partnership” for same-sex couples with a lot of duties but lacking in equal rights. Same-sex couples have fewer rights in areas like taxation and – especially importantly for families – adoption and child custody. Conservative politicians in Parliament always try to block or at least slow down legal processes which would provide equal rights for same-sex couples by arguing that marriage between a man and a woman is directed towards bringing up children, whereas same-sex couples cannot become parents. Such argumentation does not seem to have a lot in common with social reality in Germany, where fewer than 50% of mar-

The European, 20. November 2010, Moderne Familienpolitik, Gespräch mit Kristina Schröder, , author’s translation.

In Germany registered same-sex partners are responsible for each other and have to support their partner in case of unemployment or disability. This burden, however, cannot be deducted from the income tax. In the area of income tax registered same-sex partners are treated like strangers, which means that the registered same-sex partners have to pay a lot more income tax than heterosexual married couples.

In the German constitution “marriage and family” is put under special protection (article 6 paragraph 1, special protection of marriage and family) 37


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ried couples become parents and, as reported by the “BMJ study”, the first representative study on same sex-parents living in a registered partnership in Germany, at least 7,000 children grow up in LGBT families (Rupp 2009). In the autumn of 2009 the German Federal Constitutional Court also rejected the well-known conservative argument: Unequal treatment cannot be justified (…). There are no children in every marriage, and not every marriage is aimed at having children. (…) There are children living in many registered partnerships, especially in those formed by two women. (…) According to the study by the State Research Institute for Family Studies at the University of Bamberg 2,200 children are growing up in the current 13,000 registered partnerships in Germany (…). So the child rate in registered partnerships, although well below those of married couples, is by no means negligible.

The BMJ study played an important role not only in verifying the existence of LGBT families in Germany but also in proving that children grow up well when reared by same-sex couples. Although this has already been shown by mostly Anglo-American research in the past two decades, the conservatives in political debates in Germany often chal

Statistisches Bundesamt, ed. 2006. Leben in Deutschland. Haushalte, Familien und Gesundheit – Ergebnisse des Mikrozensus 2005. Wiesbaden.

The study is referred to as the “BMJ study” because it was commissioned by the “Bundes Ministerium der Justiz”, the German Federal Ministry of Justice.

The study includes data of 1,059 same-sex oriented parents. In some cases both partners were interviewed, so the data represents a total of 767 families and 852 children. 625 of the 866 individuals or couples lived in a registered partnership, and 142 couples or 193 individuals lived together without registration. The sub-sample of couples in a registered partnership should be seen as broadly representative for Germany, since almost all target individuals could be addressed directly–via letter or phone. The researchers contacted a total of 14,000 same-sex couples living in a registered partnership. The contacts were committed to the research institute by appropriate authorities in the German federal states. In contrast, the comparison group of non-registered samesex parents was recruited by voluntary reporting, that includes a higher level of selectivity. However, the two groups showed neither statistically significant differences nor differences with regard to contents, therefore the respondents were included in the overall analysis without segregation.

Author’s translation of Line 112-113: BVerfG, 1 BvR 1164/07 vom 07.07.2009, Absatz-Nr. 1 – 127, published 22th of October 2009. (15.09.2010) The Federal Constitutional Court published its decision referring to the “Retirement Fund of the Federation and the Provinces (VBL)” and ruling that the Fund must provide the same survivor’s pension to a surviving domestic partner (i.e. same-sex partner) as to a surviving spouse.

See, for example: Anderssen et al. 2002, Patterson 2006, Perrin 2002, Stacey and Biblarz 2001, Biblarz and Stacey 2010. 38


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lenged the transferability of those results. In this chapter we will present the main findings of the BMJ study concerning child development as well as the political and juridical reactions to the findings of the study.

The First Representative Study of Lesbian and Gay Family Life in Germany In 2006 the German Minister of Justice, Brigitte Zypries, a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), decided to generate reliable data on LGBT families in Germany. She commissioned the first representative study (BMJ study) on the development and living conditions of children raised in same-sex families in Germany. To resolve all possible doubts about the results of the research, the research was conducted by two state-run research institutes from Bavaria, a province of Germany, which has been governed by the German Conservative Coalition (CDU/ CSU) for the past 60 years. Furthermore, Bavaria is one of those German states, which have tried several times to stop legal progress on LGBT rights by filing lawsuits at the German Federal Constitutional Court. The BMJ study’s results thus made a real difference in the political and public discussions of same-sex family issues in Germany. Within the BMJ research 1,059 homosexual parents were interviewed by the State Institute for Family Research of the University of Bamberg (IFB), including 93% of lesbian mothers and 7% of gay fathers.10 They participated in the so called “parental study”. 866 parents lived in a registered partnership and provided information about 693 children (Rupp and Dürnberger 2009).11 The parent interviews focussed on many themes, including family development, division of housework, parental care, second parent adoptions and contacts with parents living outside of the LGBT family, family outing, social discrimination and how the children

State Institute for Family Research at the University of Bamberg (IFB) and State Institute of Early Childhood Research (IFPI) in Munich.

10

The interviews were conducted via CATI (computer assisted phone interviewing). The low percentage of gay fathers is due to the fact that most children of gay fathers in Germany today originate from a former heterosexual context, and usually live with their mothers. In the study, however, only those LGBT-families were included, which share daily life together.

11

32% of the actual 2,200 children being raised in registered partnerships in Germany were “included” through their parents in the parental survey. The number of male and female children living in registered partnerships are nearly equal: 52% daughters and 45% sons. 43% of the children were less than 6 years old and 57% were between 6 and 18 years old (Rupp and Bergold 2009, 282). 39


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deal with it, etc. Parents were also asked to assess their children’s development using a standardised behaviour-related questionnaire (Dürnberger et al. 2009). Additionally 95 children, aged 10–18, were also interviewed within a developmental children study.12 Using standardised questionnaires these children were assessed according to their psychological adjustment and well-being (e.g. self-esteem, depression or psychosomatic complaints), dealing with developmental tasks of adolescents, their relationship to their parents (e.g. concerning autonomy, closeness and conflicts), as well as the appearance of social discrimination and how they dealt with it (Dürnberger, Rupp and Bergold 2009).13 The results were compared with available data on heterosexual nuclear families, single mother families and reconstituted or patchwork families. The data from the developmental children study proved to be of high quality, as children’s answers showed high scores on the overall consistency of linguistic representation and low idealising tendencies (Becker-Stoll and Beckh 2009). The results from both parental and children development studies show that children who grow up with lesbian or gay parents develop as well in emotional and social functioning as children whose parents are heterosexual (Jansen 2010; Rupp 2010; Rupp et al. 2009). There were no signs of “increased vulnerability”, such as a higher tendency to depression or psychosomatic complaints. They are successful in individuation and most of them share a warm and supportive relationship with their parents in and outside the LGBT family. They deal very well with the key challenges of adolescence, the developmental tasks like adjusting to a new physical sense of self, building up first intimate relationships, developing stable and productive peer relationships as well as achieving emotional independence from parents and other adults – and in some as12

Just like the interviews conducted with parents, the interviews with children were also conducted via CATI (computer assisted phone interview). In order to be able to participate in the research children had to be at least 10 years old. In Germany only a few children born or adopted into a LGBT family are of that age. Consequently 78% of children in the children’s study were born in former heterosexual relationships, while 44% of the children in the parental study were of such origin (Dürnberger, Rupp and Bergold 2009, 31).

13

According to the age of children two different interview manuals were used: For children younger than 13 years the IFP worked with the BISK, the attachment interview for late childhood (“Bindungsinterview für die späte Kindheit” in German). With children older than 13 the EAI, the developmental task interview was used (“Entwicklungsaufgaben-Interviews” in German). For children of all ages the AAI, the adult attachment interview was used to measure elements of attachment. See more details on the interviewing in Rupp 2009 and Dürnberger, Rupp and Bergold 2009. 40


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pects they do even better than their peers growing up in heterosexual nuclear families, single mother families or patchwork families: for example, they plan and organise school and their professional career more in advance and take it much more seriously (Becker-Stoll and Beckh 2009). This is partly the result of the generally higher average education level and professional qualifications among the LGBT families compared to the general population. The BMJ study showed that 60% of the homosexual parents had medium (“Gymnasium”) level education, compared to 30% of general population; and nearly every second (45%) had a university degree, compared to 19% in the general population (Rupp 2009). The parents’ higher educational background was also reflected in their children’s school career: while in Germany on average 17% of children attend a high school (secondary school), among LGBT families it is more than twice as much (38%). The most outstanding results from the survey concerned children’s self development. Children from LGBT families showed a significantly higher level of self-esteem and autonomy in the relationship with their parents than children living in heterosexual nuclear families, single mother families or patchwork families (Rupp 2009). From a health and especially resilience research point of view they can be assumed to be better off and less vulnerable to stressful environmental conditions than other peers (van Gelderen et al. 2009; Greve and Staudinger 2006; Elle 2009). One of the most often recurring concerns about gay and lesbian parenthood is the idea that children in LGBT families are discriminated and therefore sustain serious damages concerning their development (Rauchfleisch 2005). The BMJ study showed that less than 50% of the respondents in the children developmental study reported discriminatory incidents (Dürnberger et al. 2009; Rupp and Bergold 2009). Those children, who reported on having experienced discrimination, were asked via open ended questions in which way and by whom they have been discriminated. In the majority of these cases children reported on verbal discrimination coming from their peers. For example, nearly 13% of the children surveyed reported that they have been verbally attacked, teased, had to listen to “stupid comments” or were laughed at (17% rarely experienced such attacks and 67% never). Children who had personal experiences of discrimination did not suffer any harm, not even in the few isolated cases of multiple discriminatory incidents. However, children who had suffered discrimination did not rate as splendid in self-esteem as the other kids in the study, but they still showed values comparable to peers 41


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raised up in heterosexual nuclear families. The researchers assume that the trusting relationship between the children and their parents works against any negative impact. A regression analysis showed that adjustments in terms of depression, self-esteem, psychosomatic complaints or aggression, are only negatively affected by experiences of discrimination when the relationship with parents is simultaneously characterised by high uncertainty (Becker-Stoll and Beckh 2009). During the press conference, where the study’s results were presented, the former German Minister of Justice, Brigitte Zypries, said: Today is a good day for those who focus on facts rather than rely on stereotypes – especially in ideologically charged topics. The investigation confirmed: where kids are loved, they will grow up well. The parent’s sexual orientation is not essential for a good relationship between children and parents ... Children living together with two mothers or two fathers develop as well as those in other family structures.14

One of the immediate practical consequences of presenting these study results was that the conservative Bavarian government decided to withdraw a complaint of unconstitutionality against the second parent’s adoption law that was introduced for same-sex couples in 2005. One month after the study presentation the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that homosexual couples should have the right to adopt their partner’s biological children and that this right is not unconstitutional.15 The court overturned a lower court ruling. They argued that social parenthood16 has to be treated like biological parenthood and that this ruling had to be applied to same-sex couples as well. The court used this opportunity to point out that parenthood – as it is specifically protected by the German state – does not only stand for biological but also for so14

Bundesministerium der Justiz (23 July 2009). Pressemitteilung “Familie ist dort, wo Kinder sind. Zypries �� stellt Forschungsprojekt“. (15 September 2010), author’s translation.

15

BVerfG, 1 BvL 15/09 vom 10.08.2009, Absatz-Nr. �� (1 - 16), (15 September 2010).

16

Beyond “legal” or “judicial parenthood”, where parents and children are bound by law, two types of parenting can be distinguished: biological and social parenthood. While “biological parenthood” is founded on procreation and birth (principle of filiation), “social parenthood” is based on the de facto taking of parental duties. Social mothers and fathers give care to non-biological children and take long-term responsibility for them. Social parenthood is specific to adoptive families as well as to blended families and to families in which children were conceived by donor insemination. 42


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cial or legal parenthood. It is not a matter of being a biological mother or father but rather of parental care that makes a person a parent. Minister Zypries was obviously right when she assessed the study as an “important step on the path to full social and legal recognition of gay couples”. She closed the press conference with the following demand: “We should therefore not stop half-way and should now set up the legal requirement for a ‘joint adoption’ by same-sex partners”.17 The idea of joint adoption was not perceived without controversy even within the Social Democratic Party (SPD) itself. In September 2009 a new government was elected in Germany. The Social Democratic Party failed to be a coallition party, and thus the first definite step to facilitate lesbian and gay family planning in Germany does seem to have stopped half-way. Although the liberal party (FDP – Free Democratic Party) had argued for a joint adoption right for registered partners for many years it did not find its way into the coalition agreement of the Liberal and Conservative party. In November 2010 the Justice Ministers of all German States argued for a joint adoption right for same-sex couples.18 They appealed to the Federal Government to allow registered partners to adopt children. This initiative had no political impact, but what was remarkable was the unanimity of the appeal. It was the first time that ministers from the Conservatives Party had advocated for equality of same-sex couples and heterosexual couples concerning family planning.

Lesbian and gay family planning: how to become a parent after coming out? Increasing social acceptance of diversity in sexual orientation allows more gay men and lesbians to come out before forming intimate relationships or becoming parents.19 According to the result of a survey conducted in 1998 with 955 gay, lesbian and bisexual respondents in Ger17

Bundesministerium der Justiz (23 July 2009). Pressemitteilung “Familie ist dort, wo Kinder sind. Zypries �� stellt Forschungsprojekt“. (15 September 2010), author’s translation.

18

See: http://www.jurablogs.com/de/justizminister-fordern-adoptionsrecht-schwule-lesben

19

According to the “Eurobarometer 66” 42% of the German population agreed in 2006 that “adoption of children should be authorized for homosexual couples throughout Europe”. In a representative on-line survey in 2010 61% of people surveyed agreed with the “common adoption right” for registered partners in Germany (Mingle-Trend-Respondi 2010). 43


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many, every second young lesbian and third young gay man would like to live with children later on in their lives (Anhamm 1998).20 Over the years an increasing number of lesbians and gay men are choosing to start families after coming out. This dynamic is already reflected in the BMJ study. Out of the 2,200 children growing up in registered partnerships, only half were born in previous heterosexual relationships of their parents (Rupp 2009). After their coming-out lesbian women and gay men in Germany currently have four ways to build a “rainbow family”.21 Most lesbians become mothers by donor insemination (Rupp 2009) or – in the last years more often – they start “queer families” together with gay men.22 Some lesbian women and gay men offer foster children a new home, and very few are choosing to adopt children mostly from foreign countries formally as a single person because joint adoption is not a legal option for same-sex couples. There are only a few known cases where gay men became biological fathers via surrogacy – mostly through surrogacy agencies in the US (cf. Katzorke 2010). 23 If lesbians and gays choose one of these ways to start a family, they will generally have to face many more constraints and challenges than heterosexual couples in Germany or even same-sex couples in some other European countries such as the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries or Spain, where same-sex couples have been able to marry since 2005. 20

The adjusted data base included 955 respondents (77.3% homosexual men, 15.8% homosexual women and 6.9% bisexual people). See also Haag 2010.

21

In Germany a LGBT-family is called “Regenbogenfamilie” (rainbow family). The term is used both in scientific as well as in media and everyday life language. “Rainbow family“ means a lesbian- or gay-headed family with a single mother or father or two fathers or mothers; the same-sex parents may live in a registered partnership or not. According to the BMJ study at least 7,000 children are growing up in rainbow families in Germany.

22

The term “queer family” is used here for families where lesbian women and gay men start a family together: a lesbian woman gives birth to the child and a gay man donates the sperm. In contrast to a lesbian-headed family created by donor insemination, the gay man is not just seen as a sperm donor but rather as a father. He takes part in family life after the child is born. The counselling experiences of last 10 years in the German “Rainbow family project” show that the children in queer families mostly live with the lesbian mother/mothers. Sometimes the gay and lesbian couples create a living arrangement with two flats next door to each other or in two semi-detached houses. The child rarely grows up primarily in the gay household.

23

In Germany surrogacy is not illegal – it is neither actionable to act as a surrogate mother nor to appoint a surrogate mother – but all kind of mediation is illegal. As a consequence there is a lack of laws and provisions or agencies to make surrogacy agreements safe for all involved parties. 44


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Lesbian Mothers by Donor Insemination During the last few years an increasing number of lesbian women in Germany have opted for donor insemination.24 The resulting children are usually born and raised in same-sex relationships, which means that most often lesbians who opt for donor insemination are in a same-sex relationship. The BMJ study showed that 48% of the children in registered partnerships are born in a same-sex partnership and most of the LGBT families, who wish for more children (54%), are looking forward to accomplish it by donor insemination.25 Lesbian women will have to overcome three main difficulties, if they chose to go to a domestic or foreign fertility centre or look for a private donor. These include problems deriving from a lack of legal support for using fertility treatment, the German alimony law, and the regulations of the Federal Medical Association. There is no legal support for using fertility treatments for non-married couples or singles in Germany. All legal regulations concerning fertility treatment focus on marriage. Only married heterosexual women have the guaranty to get a fertility treatment, while registered partners cannot be sure, if a fertility centre will cooperate with them – it is neither prohibited nor legally regulated. In some European countries the legal situation is much better for female singles, including lesbians: since 2007 medically assisted insemination is available to every woman in Belgium, as well as to lesbian couples in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom (Dethloff 2010). Alimony and filiation law in Germany makes donor insemination a lot more difficult for lesbians. Lesbian mothers cannot exempt a donor from child support. If a lesbian mother, for example, finds herself in financial difficulties and asks for special financial support for the child, provided by the state,26 the sperm donor would theoretically be liable for this mon24

This assumption is based on the author’s counselling experience in the LSVD project Rainbow family (www.family.lsvd.de). Furthermore it is reflected in BMJ study’s age structure of children in registered partnerships: the children in the developmental subsample interviewed by the IFB had to be at least 10 years old according to the survey method. 78% of these children came from previous heterosexual relationships of their lesbian mothers or gay fathers. In the IFB parent survey, however, 50% of the children are younger than 6 years, and 49% of the sons and daughters were born in the same-sex partnership.

25

70% of the gay men and 80% of the lesbian mothers in the study think about enlarging the family by getting more biological children (see: Rupp 2009, 105–107).

26

The Germany state provides a financial support for single parents - usually single mothers – to “replace” the second biological parent or the one who caused the pregnancy (usually the father). It is considered as an “in advance” child support, in cases where 45


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ey (ibid.). Even a physician of a sperm bank could legally be seen as the one who “caused” a pregnancy by donor insemination and be held to account for alimony, if the mother were to take him to court. For married heterosexual couples the alimony law does not cause any trouble concerning donor insemination: A husband is recognised as the child’s legal father from birth on, even if donor sperm was used.27 German law does not address similar situations (donor insemination) for lesbian couples living in a registered partnership. These lesbian-headed families where the child was born via donor insemination are treated like “blended families”, in which one or both women are understood to have children from a previous relationship, and not like parents, who realise a shared desire to have a child. The non-biological mother has to take a detour via a second parent adoption in order to become the child’s legal parent, which is a long and sometimes problematic procedure. A second parent adoption (or the step-child adoption) is a complex process which generally takes at least six months to one year to be completed. Then there are 12 further months, the so-called “adoption care period”,28 which means that the adoption process usually takes at least 1.5 to 2 years, during which time the child is legally protected only by a biological parent. During this process, the mothers will be “assessed” by youth welfare officers as well as judges. If these people have positive views on adoption by same-sex couples in general, all might run without problems, even if it takes a while for the adoption to be completed, but if at least one professional is opposed to it, the mothers may have to face delays, discriminatory treatment or even unsustainable refusals, which make opposition proceedings necessary (ibid.).29 All these would be rendered unnecessary, if registered partners were treated like married couples conthe father is not yet known or is not yet able to pay. The German state expects to get this money back from the second parent, when he is made known or is able to pay. 27

In Germany children conceived by donor insemination, who are born into a marriage, are legally considered as the husband’s children (§ 1592 sec 1 No 1 BGB – BGB means Civil Code), even if they were conceived with the sperm of another man (heterologous insemination). The husband is not even allowed to contest the paternity, once he agreed to the heterologous insemination (§ 1600 sec 5 BGB). See also Dethloff 2010.

28

The “adoption care time” originates from step-child adoption in heterosexual blended families. It is the period of time when the potential step-parent has to live together with the child, who will be adopted, to assess whether a viable social relationship between them has developed and to establish that the adoption serves the best interests of the child.

29

In the last years the LSVD project “Rainbow family” counselled and supported various complaints, administrative appeals and opposition proceedings against discriminatory treatment of lesbian mothers in the context of step-child adoptions. 46


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cerning filiation law. The non-biological mother would be the child’s legal parent right from the moment of birth. Unfortunately the claim for equal treatment of social mothers with married couples was rejected by the German Federal Constitutional Court in the summer of 2010.30 Although the detour via second-parent adoption for lesbian-headed families created by donor insemination has its drawbacks explained above, the legislation itself meant a tremendous step forward for the recognition of lesbian and gay parenthood when it was provided in January 2005. For the first time in Germany a child legally could have two fathers or two mothers. Furthermore the co-mothers and co-fathers were allowed by law to adopt the biological child of their registered partners and became legal mothers or fathers of the child including all rights – e.g. the right of custody – and duties – e.g. the duty to pay alimony for the child. This also means that lesbian headed families created by donor insemination receive bigger support for private donors as well as fertility centres: when a mother co-adopts the child of her registered partner, no one else can be forced to pay alimony. The second parent adoption therefore seemed to be a suitable answer to the problems caused by German alimony and filiation law. Whereas until 2005 lesbians, who wanted to have a baby, mostly had to choose foreign fertility centres, for example in the Netherlands, Belgium or Denmark, from 2005 on a lot of German fertility centres began to cooperate with lesbian couples – if they were living in a registered partnership and had signed a paper which said that the co-mother will adopt the child as soon as possible.31 All went well until the German Federal Medical Association (the “Bundesärztekammer”) hindered this progress by professional regula30

31

BVerfG, 1 BvR 666/10 vom 2.7.2010, http://www.bverfg.de/entscheidungen/rk20100702_ 1bvr066610.html (15.09.2010). Reasoning: A woman – living together with a child’s biological mother in a registered partnership – cannot be the child’s father purely for biological reasons provided she has not applied to be a woman under § 10 transgender law. Accordingly the statutory presumption on biological parenthood as it is set in 1592 sec. 1 BGB (see footnote 15) cannot take effect. This regulation is based on the assumption, that the husband is usually the biological father of any child born during a marriage. In the LSVD project “Rainbow family” 70% of the counselling requests by phone or via emails focus on family planning issues and 80% of these family planning requests deal with biological parenthood. The project does not only give advice and share information. It also collects information, experiences and best or worst practice examples. ILSE (Initiative Lesbischer und Schwuler Eltern im LSVD), the lesbian and gay family network within the LSVD, is one of the main sources concerning this “information exchange”. After January 2005 the field reports about fertility centres in Germany increased immediately. 47


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tions. In 2006 the Association prohibited the medical support concerning donor insemination for lesbian couples in their “guidelines for assisted reproduction”. The prohibition did not occur because of the “ethical concerns” or the “best interest of the child”, as formally claimed by the Association. The actual guidelines prohibit the medical support in order to protect the doctors from potentially paying alimony. Due to the fact that the second parent adoption process usually takes at least one year to be completed, in the meantime there is still a “remaining risk” for a doctor to be held to account for alimony as the one who “caused” the pregnancy by donor insemination, if a lesbian couple were to take him/her to court. It should be noted, however, that the Federal Medical Association has confirmed that such a law suit has never occurred. The “guidelines for assisted reproduction“ are binding only for gynaecologists in those states of Germany, where the guidelines were adopted by the corresponding State Medical Boards, which is in all German states except from Berlin and Hamburg.32 Consequently during the last four years a lot of physicians as well as fertility centres stopped supporting lesbians again and very few sustained the cooperation – maybe because of the State Medical Boards they belong to, perhaps because of “courage” and also because of economic interests. Nevertheless it is not surprising that a lot of lesbians in Germany, who opt for donor insemination, still choose foreign fertility centres or look for a private donor (Jansen 2007).

Queer families – lesbian mothers and gay fathers together Since 2002 the Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany (LSVD) runs a project named “Rainbow Family”, which provides among others a counselling service for LGBT families, lesbians and gay men, who want to build up a family, as well as for professionals.33 During the last nine years 32

In October 2011 the research conducted by the LSVD, showed that – contrary to the common conviction – none of the State Medical Boards included the restriction in the binding “guidelines for assisted reproduction“. At the most the restriction was assumed only in the non-binding comments to the guidelines. Information in detail (in German): www.lsvd.de/1677.0.html.

33

The project “Rainbow Family” aims at enhancing the personal, social and legal status of LGBT-families in Germany via counselling and networking. The project activities focus on family planning as well as difficulties of everyday life in LGBT-families. The range of the services includes a counselling hotline, online and personal counselling for rainbow families and specialists, publishing, lectures, seminars and conferences. 48


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the counselling team gave information and advice to about 5,000 clients via the “family hotline” or by email. This counselling experience shows that since the millennium more and more lesbians and gay men have chosen to build up a family together and create a so called “queer family” (cf. Rupp, Bergold and Dürnberger 2009). In contrast to the lesbianheaded families created by donor insemination, the gay men in queer families are not seen as sperm donors but rather as fathers. Consequently in queer families the “parental dyad” extends to a “multi-parent model”. Children from queer families mostly live together with their mothers. The father participation can range from playing a “role” only in case of emergency, e.g. if something happens to both mothers, to arrangements known from separated families with father-child-days each week and every second weekend up to living arrangements with two flats up- and downstairs or adjoining semi-detached houses. Queer families are faced with one major legal obstacle concerning their family arrangements: German law allows only two persons for child custody. It fails to support the needs of multi-parent models, which are not typical only for queer families but also for most blended or patchwork families (cf. Dethloff 2004).34 Accordingly it is difficult to find a legal agreement, which supports the needs of all biological and social parents as well as the child’s needs. For example, if the co-mother adopts the child, the gay father has no parental rights any more. In that case the parents usually make a private contract concerning visiting rights and in addition give a “written authority” on special custody issues. However such private contracts can be cancelled at any time. Often queer families choose this model, when the child primarily lives with her or his lesbian mothers. On the other hand, if the biological parents decide to remain legal parents, the co-parents have no parental rights. Under the present German legal conditions there is no ideal way to solve the probConcerning the counselling requests one out of ten comes from a professional, e.g. staff members of family information centres or youth welfare offices, medical staff, family counsellors or therapists, teachers, politicians and journalists. See: www.family. lsvd.de 34

A blended family, also known as a patchwork or reconstituted family, is a family in which one or both members of the couple have children from a previous relationship. The member of the couple to whom the child is not biologically related is a social parent until the child is co-adopted by him/her. Usually there is a biological mother or father of this child, who does not belong to this new family. In the case of a second-parentadoption, the legal bond between the child and this parent will be cut. Mostly this solution is neither in the interest of all parents nor the children. The most appreciated solution would allow more than two parents to take official and equal care of the children. 49


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lem – there will always be at least one social or biological parent who will have to give up his/her rights. While building a queer family includes great psychological challenges it also offers a lot of innovation potential. In these families fathers and mothers usually do not share sexual or “partnership” intimacy, the biological father and mother have not even been a couple before. Mostly that makes the (co-)parents more aware of the fact that they might not know each other “well enough” to start the “family project” – which is something heterosexual couples who share intimacy might not consider. Furthermore queer parents cannot assume the constellation of their family will last for life. The counselling experiences in the project “rainbow family” show that women and men who are starting a queer family usually need to talk about a lot of relevant issues concerning their parenthood, such as values, education ideas, personal limits and strengths, conceptions of family life and visiting arrangements. It is not only the content of the communication which is important, but also the process: how they can talk to each other, especially when things are not so comfortable. In the counselling process at the “rainbow family” project the “parents in progress” are invited to exchange their views open-mindedly – i.e. to talk about their fears, hopes and ideas as well as uncertainties in order to see if they can find an arrangement that seems to be suitable for all.

Building a “Rainbow Family” by adopting children In Germany only very few lesbians and gay men choose to build up a family by adopting children as adoption is often not available for samesex couples. The BMJ study showed that only 2% of the children in LGBT families in Germany have been adopted. Furthermore only 5% of the mothers and more than 30% of the fathers in LGBT families, who wish for more children, consider adoption as the way to enlarge their family (Rupp 2009). This is certainly due to the fact that it is still very difficult for gay men in Germany to become biological fathers. In Europe in Belgium and the Netherlands, Iceland, Norway and Sweden as well as in Andorra, Spain and the United Kingdom same-sex couples are not only eligible to adopt each other’s biological children but also to jointly apply for a child adoption (Dethloff 2011).35 However in 35

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled for the second time in January 2008 against discrimination in adoption because of sexual orientation. They stated that all relevant laws and regulations that exclude people from adoption because of their sexual orientation violate articles 14 and 8 of the European Human Rights Convention. 50


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Germany lesbian women and gay men are entitled to adopt children only individually, but joined adoption is not permitted for registered partners. In Germany – like in many other European countries – there are many more people who are interested in adopting, than children who are available for adoption. As the child gets two parents only in the case of joint adoption and both parents are legally required to take care of this child, the German youth welfare offices usually prefer married couples as adoptive parents. Being allowed to adopt a child (only) individually, German gay and lesbians, who are going for adoption, appear to be singles. Looking like a single provides pros as well as cons. If LGBT parents want to adopt a child, they usually have to turn to foreign countries, where single parent adoption by foreigners is allowed, and – because they adopt as a single parent – their homosexual orientation might not necessarily be obvious. Unlike a joined adoption, only one of the two partners appears in the institution as well as on the papers. Therefore they do not need to adopt in foreign countries, which formally allow lesbians and gays to adopt children. On the other hand, countries which allow lesbians and gays to adopt children – like South Africa, Uruguay or Brazil, usually prefer joint adoption because of the child’s “safety benefits”. There are only few countries in the world, which allow single parent adoptions by foreigners. For example, some years ago a few German lesbians and gays adopted children in Vietnam and – until 2009 – in the USA as well. That stopped, because Vietnam as well as the USA signed the “Hague Adoption Convention”.36 The countries, which signed it, obligate themselves to look first for a suitable adoptive family in the child’s

36

See: E.B. v. France, Court’s Judgment, 22 January 2008 and Philippe FRETTÉ v. France, Court’s Judgment, 26 February 2002, http://www.ilga-europe.org/home/what_we_do/ litigation/european_court_of_human_rights_and_lgbt (15.09.2010). ILGA-Europe, the European region of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), provides information about parental rights of LGBTI in each European country on their homepage. See: http://www.ilga-europe.org/home/guide/country_by_ country See also: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. Rechtliche Stellung von gleichgeschlechtlichen Eltern. (15 September 2010). The Hague Adoption Convention (“Hague convention on protection of children and cooperation in respect of inter-country adoption”) is an international convention dealing with international adoption, child laundering, and child trafficking. The convention is important even though it causes some trouble for lesbians and gays going for adoptions, because it establishes safeguards to ensure that inter-country adoptions take place in the best interests of the child. It was concluded on 29 May 1993, (15 September 2010). 51


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state of origin. There are some Eastern European countries, for example, Bulgaria and Romania, where adoption by single people is allowed, but they only cooperate with women and not with single men (Riedle and Gillig-Riedle 2006). Single men, who want to adopt a child, easily raise the suspicion of “paedophilia”.37 Additionally, if a same-sex couple lives in a registered partnership, it makes it more difficult for one of them to go for adoption, because most of the few adoption agencies in Germany do not support registered partners according to their own information. Often they are afraid that the information on registration will find its way into the “home story”,38 which has to be handed to the relevant authorities in the child’s country of origin and that this will cause problems. For example, in 2010 a German agency answered an email request from a lesbian couple as follows: “... the adoption of a Bulgarian child is carried out in Bulgaria. There it is not possible for same-sex couples to adopt a child. Do you live in a registered partnership? For an adoption, you need a positive social report. If you live in a registered partnership the social report, which would present you as a single, will not be possible.”39

Lesbian women and gay men providing foster care While “joint adoption” is not permitted for registered partners, same-sex couples are increasingly welcome as foster parents at the same time. That might be because of the fact that gay or lesbian parents are legally treated as a couple in the context of fostering, or because of the actual lack of foster parents in Germany in general (Greib 2007). The BMJ 37

A social worker of the Vienna Counselling Centre “Courage” stated in a newspaper interview in 2009 that men still fall out of the socially acceptable “role models”, when they take an active father role. “While a pair of women’s ‘double role’ as mothers would be rather assessed positively, gay fathers often have to face the stigma of paedophilia in the minds.” �� See: Die presse.com (21 November 2009) “Adoption: Zwei Mütter für Janis”, (21 November 2009)

38

The “home story” is a social report, which is written by the German welfare workers, who assess an adoption request.

39

In the spring of 2010 a lesbian couple asked adoption agencies in Germany if they were willing to support them in the process of adoption. 14 agencies answered, only two sent a positive answer – but only if the couple would not live in a registered partnership. Most argued that the countries they work with do not accept applications from samesex couples. Some even said that they will not support such an application, because their “experiences” show, that “adopted children grow up better with a mother and a father”. Author’s translation. 52


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study showed that in LGBT families there are about 6% of foster children (140 children nationwide). There are 8% of the mothers and again many more fathers (about 40%), who wish to enlarge their families by fostering (Rupp 2009). There is only one, but fairly important obstacle in the way: not all child– welfare workers in Germany, who deal with foster children, are “yet” open to or familiar with the idea of same-sex foster parenting. They may, for example, remain of the conviction that children need a mother and a father to grow up well (e.g. to learn adequate gender roles), or maybe they are afraid that the parents of origin will have a problem with the idea of giving their child to two fathers or two mothers.40 It means that more awareness should be raised of the benefit of same-sex parenthood especially among the staff of German youth welfare offices. As some youth welfare offices report, parents of origin often react very positively. For example, mothers appreciate that they continue to be the “only mother”, if their child will be fostered by two gay fathers. Alternatively if it is a “foster girl” especially the mothers often think that two lesbian women will be more able to make their daughters strong and self-confident and protect them against, for example, sexual abuse (Greib 2007). There are well researched psychological benefits associated with foster parenting provided by gays and lesbians (Greib 2007; Brooks and Goldberg 2001; Mallon 2006). Lesbians and gays have their own experiences in dealing with challenging circumstances such as being different from others and coming out of the closet. It might be easier for them to empathise with foster children and explain the specifics of the “unusual” life circumstances. Lesbian and gay couples are mostly highly motivated to give the child a new home, because same-sex couples do not decide “easily” to share their life with children – it is not a short term decision, as it includes issues such as coming out as a rainbow family, possible negative reactions in society and similar – something heterosexual couples do not have to consider as their parenthood is socially acceptable and expected.41

40

In April 2010 the youth welfare offices in Cologne received a training concerning LGBT families. During the lecture and discussions on possible concerns about the inclusion of same-sex couples as foster parents such arguments appeared.

41

In 2006 the city of Vienna (Austria) set a really good example with a campaign to gain new foster parents. They posted adverts and posters with same-sex couples and children themed “we bring it together.” See: http://wien.orf.at/stories/148030/. 53


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Conclusion The results of the first representative study about LGBT families in Germany could suggest that gay and lesbian parents are better parents compared to others. However such a conclusion would be very biased. Previous family research findings indicate that structural elements, like family size or the parents’ sexual orientation, do not matter too much for the children’s development. What is important are the processes within the family, such as the quality of relationships and the continuity of close caregivers (Farr et al. 2010; Golombok 2000; Jansen and Steffens 2006; Jungbauer and Göttgens 2009; Kershaw 2000). Strictly speaking it is not a “bias” but, as I assume, it might be a positive selection effect not concerning the sample but the gay and lesbian parents in general: only gays and lesbians with the strongest will are able to form their families. In Germany lesbians and gays who want to start a family after their coming out, have to face many more constraints and challenges than heterosexuals. My own counselling experience also shows that the gay and lesbian would-be parents have to be very well organised, quite intelligent and determined to find a way through the jungle of lesbian and gay family planning, which was previously described in this chapter. It is not really a surprise that the BMJ study showed an above-average education level and professional qualifications among LGBT families. Maybe it is a kind of “parenting of the fittest” that takes place in Germany at the moment, caused by the lack of parental rights for lesbians and gays. This lack of rights does not actually prevent lesbians and gays from starting a family, if they really want to, but it might act as a kind of selection process promoting only the “best” samesex parent candidates. If conservatives in Germany do not want to help a myth to be born about the “gifted gay fathers and lesbian mothers”, they might ease lesbian and gay family planning in the way to be in line with at least no. 24 of the Yogyakarta Principles:42 The right to found a family.43 42

In Yogyakarta in 2006 a group of well known international human rights experts developed the “Yogyakarta Principles”. It is a set of 29 principles that reflect the application of international human rights law to issues of sexual orientation and gender identity, http://www.yogyakartaprinciples.org/ (15 September 2010).

43

“Everyone has the right to found a family, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. Families exist in diverse forms. No family may be subjected to discrimination on the basis of the sexual orientation or gender identity of any of its members.” Principle 24: “The Yogyakarta Principles. Principles on the application of international human rights law in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity”. 2007, Page 28, (15 September 2010). 54


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Until then we cannot repeat these findings frequently enough: Children who grow up with lesbian or gay parents develop as well in emotional and social functioning as children within heterosexual families. They are successful in individuation and share a warm and supportive relationship with most of their gay and lesbian parents in and outside the LGBT family. They deal very well with the key challenges of adolescence, while they are even better off in contexts such as school and professional career. Additionally, children in German “rainbow families” show significantly higher self-esteem and more autonomy in the relationship with their parents than children who grow up in any other family type. Accordingly we can assume them to be well appointed and less vulnerable to daily hassles as well as critical life events.

References Anderssen, N., C. Amlie, and E. A. Ytteroy. 2002. Outcomes for children with lesbian or gay parents. A review of studies from 1978 to 2000. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 43(5): 335–351. Anhamm, U. 1998. Lesbische und schwule Familien. Ergebnisse einer Befragung unter. Lesben und Schwulen in NRW (Lesbian and gay families. Results of a survey of lesbian women and gay men in Northrine-Westfalia). Reihe: Alltagswelten – Expertenwelten. Köln: Schwules Netzwerk NRW. Becker-Stoll, F., and K. Beckh. 2009. Die Entwicklung der Kinder – Ergebnisse der entwicklungspsychologischen Teilstudie (The children’s development – results of the developmental-psychological substudy). In Die Lebenssituation von Kindern in gleichgeschlechtlichen Lebensgemeinschaften (The living life situation of children in same-sex unions), ed. M. Rupp, 233–280. Köln: Bundesanzeiger�� VerlagsGesesellschaft. Biblarz, T. J., and J. Stacey. 2010. How Does the Gender of Parents Matter? Journal of Marriage and Family 72(1): 3–22. Brooks, D., and S. Goldberg. 2001. Gay and lesbian adoptive and foster care placements: Can they meet the needs of waiting children? Families in Society 46(2): 147–157. Dethloff, N. 2010. Assistierte Reproduktion und rechtliche Elternschaft in gleichgeschlechtlichen Partnerschaften. Ein rechtsvergleichender Überblick (Assisted reproduction and legal parenthood in same-sex unions. A review on comparative law). In Die gleichgeschlechtliche Familie mit Kindern. �� Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zu einer neuen Lebensform (The same-sex family with children. In55


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terdisciplinary contributions to a new way of life), eds. D. Funke and P. Thorn, 161–194. Bielefeld: transscript Verlag. Dethloff, N. 2011. Rechtliche Rahmenbedingungen für Regenbogenfamilien in Europa. (Legal frameworks for same-sex families in Europe). Zeitschrift für Familienforschung, Sonderheft 7, 41–51. Dethloff, N. 2004. Adoption durch gleichgeschlechtliche Paare (Adoption by same-sex couples). Zeitschrift für Rechtspolitik 6, 195–200. Dürnberger, A., M. Rupp and P. Bergold. 2009. Zielsetzung, Studienaufbau und Mengengerüst (Objectives, study design and statistical framework). In Die Lebenssituation von Kindern in gleichgeschlechtlichen Lebensgemeinschaften (The living life situation of children in same-sex unions), ed. M. Rupp, 11–49. Köln: Bundesanzeiger-VerlagsGesesellschaft. �� Elle, M. 2009. Die Synthese von Resilienz und Gesundheit (The synthesis of resilience and health). Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag. Farr, R., S. Forssell and C. Patterson. 2010. Parenting and child development in adoptive families: Does parental sexual orientation matter? Applied Developmental Science 14(3): 164–178. Golombok, S. 2000. Parenting. What really counts. New York: Routledge. Greib, A. 2007. Unser Leben mit Kindern teilen – Pflegefamilien. Von Dienstleistern und Vertragspartner(inne)n (To share our lives with children – foster families. About service providers and contractual partner). In Regenbogenfamilien – alltäglich und doch anders. Beratungsführer für lesbische Mütter, schwule Väter und familienbezogenes Fachpersonal (Same-sex families – common and yet different. Advice guide for lesbian mothers, gay fathers and family-related professionals), 1�� 02–112. Köln: Familien�� und Sozialverein des LSVD. Greve, W., and U. M. Staudinger. 2006. Resilience in later adulthood and old age: Ressources and potentials for successful aging. In Developmental psychopathology (2nd edition, volume 3), eds. D. Cichetti and D. J. Cohen, 796–840. New York: Wiley. Haag, C. 2010. Kinderwunsch und Vaterschaftspläne homosexueller Männer. Erste Ergebnisse der ifb-Studie ‘Gleichgeschlechtliche Lebensweisen in Deutschland’ (Fertility and paternity plans of homosexual men. Initial results of the ifb study about ‘same-sex lifestyles in Germany’). Diplomarbeit (MA thesis) im Fach Soziologie. Bamberg: Otto-Friedrich-Universität. (28 February 2011). Jansen, E. 2007. In einer Regenbogenfamilie geboren – Heterologe Insemination & Queerfamily (Born in a same-sex families – Heterologous insemination & 56


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Queerfamily). In Regenbogenfamilien – alltäglich und doch anders. �� Beratungsführer für lesbische Mütter, schwule Väter und familienbezogenes Fachpersonal (Same-sex families – common and yet different. Advice guide for lesbian mothers, gay fathers and family-related professionals), 3�� 2–64. Köln: �� Familien- und Sozialverein des LSVD. ———. 2010. Wie geht es den Kindern? Die entwicklungspsychologische Teilstudie (How are the kids? The developmental-psychological substudy). respekt! Zeitschrift für Lesben- und Schwulenpolitk, 10(1): 11. Jansen, E., and M. Steffens. 2006. Lesbische Mütter, schwule Väter und ihre Kinder im Spiegel psychosozialer Forschung (Lesbian mothers, gay fathers and their children as to be seen in psychosocial research). Verhaltenstherapie & Psychosoziale Praxis 38(3): 643–656. Jungbauer, J., and C. Göttgens. 2009. Regenbogenfamilien (Rainbow families). In Familienpsychologie kompakt (Family psychology compact), ed. J. Jungbauer, 84–97. Weinheim: Beltz Psychologie Verlags Union. Katzorke, T. 2010. Medizinisch-technische �� Behandlungsmöglichkeiten für gleichgeschlechtliche Paare (Medical-technical treatment options for same-sex couples). In Die gleichgeschlechtliche Familie mit Kindern. Interdisziplinäre �� Beiträge zu einer neuen Lebensform (The same-sex family with children. Interdisciplinary contributions to a new way of life), eds. D. Funke and P. Thorn, 101–111. Bielefeld: transscript Verlag. Kershaw, S. 2000. Living in a lesbian household: The effects on children. Child and Family Social Work 5(4): 365–371. Mallon, G. 2006. Lesbian and gay foster and adoptive parents: Recruiting, assessing, and supporting an untapped resource for children and youth. Washington: Child Welfare League of America. Patterson, C. 2006. Children of Lesbian and Gay Parents. Current Directions in Psychological Science 15(5): 241–244. Perrin, E., and Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Children and Family Health. 2002. Technical Report: Coparent or second-parent adoption by samesex parents. Pediatrics 109(2): 341–344. Rauchfleisch, U. 2005. Regenbogenfamilien – ganz normal anders (�� Same-sex families – quite different from normal). In Regenbogenfamilien – Eine Familie ist eine Familie ist eine Familie. Dokumentation der LSVD-Vortragsreihe (Samesex families – A family is a family is a family. Documentation of a series of lectures by the LSVD), 77–99. Köln: Familien- und Sozialverein des Lesben- und Schwulenverbandes in Deutschland. 57


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Riedle, H., and B. Gillig-Riedle. 2006. Ratgeber “Auslandsadoption” (Guide “Intercountry adoption”). Würzburg: TiVan Verlag. Rupp, M., ed. 2009. Die Lebenssituation von Kindern in gleichgeschlechtlichen Lebensgemeinschaften (The living life situation of children in same-sex unions). Köln: Bundesanzeiger-VerlagsGesesellschaft. �� ———. 2010. Regenbogenfamilien in Deutschland. Ergebnisse der ersten repräsentativen Studie (Same-sex families in Germany. Results of the first representative study). respekt! Zeitschrift für Lesben- und Schwulenpolitk, 10(1): 10. Rupp, M. and P. Bergold. �� 2009. Zusammenfassung (Summary). In Die Lebenssituation von Kindern in gleichgeschlechtlichen Lebensgemeinschaften (The living life situation of children in same-sex unions), ed. M. Rupp, �� 281–311. �� Köln: Bundesanzeiger-VerlagsGesesellschaft. Rupp, M., P. Bergold, and A. Dürnberger. 2009. Kinder �� in gleichgeschlechtlichen Paarbeziehungen (Children in same-sex relationships). In Familien in Deutschland: Beiträge aus familienpsychologischer Sicht (Families in Germany: contributions from a family-psychological perspective), eds. BDP and K. Schneewind, 36–40. Berlin: Deutscher Psychologen Verlag. Rupp, M. and A. Dürnberger. 2009. Regenbogenfamilien in Eingetragenen Lebenspartnerschaften (Same-sex families in registered civil partnerships). In Die Lebenssituation von Kindern in gleichgeschlechtlichen Lebensgemeinschaften (The living life situation of children in same-sex unions), ed. M. Rupp, 51– 177. Köln: Bundesanzeiger-VerlagsGesesellschaft. Stacey, J. and T. J. Biblarz. 2001. (How) Does the Sexual Orientation of Parents Matter? American Sociological Review 66(2): 159–183. van Gelderen L., N. Gartrell, H. Bos and J. Hermanns. 2009. Stigmatization and resilience in adolescent children of lesbian mothers. Journal of GLBT Family Studies 5(3): 268–279.

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(In)Appropriate Mothers: Policy discourses on Fertility Treatment for Lesbians in Denmark, Finland and Sweden M a r i a C a r b i n , H a n n ele H a rj u n e n

and

Elin Kvist

Introduction The Nordic countries were among the first to legally recognise and regulate intimate relations between people of same sex. In 1989, the Danish parliament was the first in the world to pass an Act that gave same sex partners the right to register their relationship. Norway followed with a similar Act on registered partnership in 1993, Sweden in 1995, Iceland in 1996, and Finland in 2001 in what has been called “the Danish domino effect” (Rydström 2008, 199). With the registered partnership acts, a separate and very exclusive category of civil status was introduced (Rydström 2005). Though, despite state intentions to liberalise and legitimise other family forms and cohabiting forms than the heterosexual marriage, striking gaps have appeared in relation to the registered partnership acts leaving many family forms unprotected by law. In essence, it

This chapter is based on the work done and materials collected for the European Union-funded research project “Quality in Gender+ Equality Policies” (QUING). Twentyseven EU countries as well as two applicant countries participated in the project, which aimed at producing comparative analyses of gender+ equality policies. This article examines policies in the three Nordic EU member states Denmark, Finland and Sweden. �� The reason for making a comparison with these three Nordic countries (and not Norway and Iceland) is that they abolished the bans on assisted insemination for lesbians at about the same time, although the arguments behind these decisions were slightly different, as will be shown in the analysis.

The term “Scandinavia” refers to the region that consists of Denmark, Sweden and Norway. However, in common usage in English language, “Scandinavia” is sometimes used interchangably with the term the” Nordic countries”. The term Nordic refers to Denmark, Norway and Sweden as well as Finland and Iceland, and associated islands. In this article we are not using the term “Scandinavia”, but talking about the “Nordic countries” in general when we are discussing the similarities in welfare regimes. The article is devoted to the three Nordic countries that are part of the EU. Thus, debates in Norway and Iceland are not included in this chapter.

In Denmark the Registered Partnership Act includes the right to step-child adoption. A proposal to allow international adoption was passed recently (B 36/2009 Proposal to 59


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could be said that by excluding registered partners from rights relating to reproduction and parenthood, Nordic countries deemed certain type of parents unfit and some families unsuitable, and simultaneously enforced the heteronormative family model as the norm. Danish Scholar Christel Stormhøj goes as far as calling this restricted form of citizenship “second rate” citizenship (Stormhøj 2002). One of these obvious restrictions in citizenship status concerned the access to fertility treatment for lesbian couples. In Sweden and Denmark access to fertility treatment was prohibited up until recently for lesbians, whereas for quite a long time Finland was the only Nordic country to grant non-heterosexual women access to fertility treatment (only due to the lack of regulation). Thus, for a long time, in the three Nordic countries Denmark, Sweden and Finland, ‘the lesbian’ was either non-existing in policy discourses on fertility treatment or articulated as an inappropriate or unthinkable mother (Bryld 2001). Today, in all three countries, fertility treatment for lesbian couples is allowed as part of the free healthcare system. The respective laws were passed in 2005 in Sweden and a year later in 2006 in Denmark and Finland. In this chapter we examine the political struggles and the arguments leading to the introduction of new rights for lesbian couples and single women in Denmark, Sweden and Finland. The laws were passed after heated parliamentary debates that in some cases, as for example in Denmark, divided both the Liberal-Conservative government as well as some of the political parties. Our intention is to analyse the arguments and discursive struggles behind the laws and the debates leading to the passing of these laws. However, the aim is not only to point out the possibilities of the newly won rights to access to fertility treatment for lesbians and women who do not live in heterosexual relationships. We are interested in the ambiguity of the policies – how the policies both recognise lesbian families, but at the same time restrict the appropriate ways to become pregnant for lesbians. The laws and debates on fertility treataccess to the right to apply for international adoption for couples in registered partnerships/Forslag til folketingsbeslutning om adgang til at ansöge om fremmedadoption for par i registreret partnerskab). In Sweden both step-child- and international adoption is possible. In Finland, same-sex partners do not yet have right to international adoption. However, so-called “internal adoption” became possible in the autumn of 2009. (Government Bill HE �� 198/2008 vp).

In Denmark, however, as part of a general financial reduction plan by the liberal-conservative government together with the right-wing party, the free access to assisted reproduction technology is abolished for all groups and from 2011 childless people have to pay for treatment. 60


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( I n ) A ppr o pr i a t e M o t h er s . . .

ment exclude gay couples as well as four-parent constellations, which are seen as even less legitimate as parents. The newly won rights can thus be seen as both enabling and restricting; How do political debates on fertility treatment in the three Nordic countries both contest and re-inforce norms regarding the relationship of sexuality, gender and parenthood? How are “appropriate” and “inappropriate mothers” constructed? Thus, the analysis highlights how norms regarding sexuality and gender are both contested and confirmed in policy debates in the respective countries. Over the past twenty years equal access to fertility treatment for lesbian couples and single women has been a greatly debated issue in Denmark, Finland and Sweden. In Denmark, in 1996, a Government Bill on fertility treatment caused major controversy and raised moral concerns regarding the prospect that children would be born and raised without a father (Stormhøj 2002, 45). Originally the bill would have allowed fertility treatment regardless of sexuality and marital status, but an amendment to prohibit treatment of lesbians and single women was submitted and passed. The law from 1996 therefore stated that fertility treatment by doctors would only be allowed for married women or women living in a “marriage-like” situation. Due to a loophole in the legislation midwives could still provide treatment for lesbians and single women. Ten years later, in 2006 the ban for doctors was lifted after an intense parliamentary debate, and both single women and lesbian couples were given equal access to the treatment. Fertility treatment has also caused controversy in Sweden and it has been a highly debated issue in the parliament. The Swedish Insemination Act that entered into force in 1985 only allowed women living in marriage-like circumstances with a man to be treated. Debated at the time was the unique provision in the Act that gave a donor-conceived child the right to obtain identifying information on the donor. The possibility of identifying the donor would emphasise the legal protection of the child, but also give the child the right to know his or her origin. The abolishment of donor anonymity caused intense debate; many, infertility doctors in particular, feared an imminent and irreversible decline in the number of sperm donors. After the Act was introduced there was a decrease in sperm donations, but that might partly have been due to infertility doctors recommending that their patients travel to Denmark for treatment in order to avoid known donors (Burrell 2006).

Governmental Bill 1984/85:2 On artificial inseminations/Om artificiella inseminationer. 61


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In Finland, contrary to the examples of Denmark and Sweden, fertility treatment for lesbians or single women was never prohibited. This was due to the lack of legislation: until 2006 there was no regulative legislation concerning fertility treatment in Finland. This lack of regulation meant that doctors and healthcare personnel providing the treatment were responsible for the decisions involved, and in effect, self-regulated the availability of treatment. The unregulated situation however gave rise to some problems: the legal position and rights of children born via fertility treatment was unclear. In a sense, the lack of legislation meant that lesbian mothers did not exist either. The first proposal for legislation on fertility treatment was made already in 1984, but the proposed bill was not passed at that time. Since the mid 1980s, the issue emerged every few years. The possibility of legislation for fertility treatment was also examined in the late 1980s and early 90s, but the legislation process did not proceed further at the time due to lack of support. There are also clear differences in how policies concerning fertility treatment have been constructed in the three countries: in Sweden only lesbian couples are allowed to get treatment, which means that all single women whether they are homo- or heterosexual are excluded, whereas in Denmark and Finland single women have equal access to treatment. The age of the woman to be treated is yet another issue that has been of concern in policy debates on fertility treatment. In Denmark and Sweden the age limit is not regulated in law, but is left for physicians and other healthcare workers to decide upon. This means that, for example, in Sweden in some counties the maximum age for a woman to be treated is 37, whereas in other counties it is 40. In Finland, after the woman has turned 39, the state does not subsidise the cost of the treatment any longer, women over 39 thus have to pay for subsequent treatment themselves. In debates concerning fertility treatment the issue of surrogacy has been mostly absent up until recently.

In later years this issue has been debated in the Swedish parliament on many occasions, the argument against allowing fertility treatment for single women has been “that children have the right to have two parents”.

During 2009–2010 several of the political parties and MPs in the Swedish parliament (MPs from the Green Party; Gunvor G Ericson, Helena Leander, Ulf Holm, Mats Pertoft, Thomas Nihlén, Jan Lindholm, MPs from the Left party Birgitta Ohlsson and Barbro Westerholm, MP social democrats Carina Hägg, MP Centre party Fredrick Federley, MP Left party Tasso Stafilidis) have urged that a governmental report should be commissioned to investigate the issue of surrogacy but so far these proposals have been rejected by the Parliament. �� In Finland surrogacy was allowed for heterosexual couples until the new legislation concerning fertility treatments came into effect in 2007. In the spring of 2011 the Minister of Justice Tuija Brax announced that the Minis62


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Another important issue in debates on fertility treatment for lesbians concerns how to regulate and recognise the status of the donor. As mentioned above, the Swedish law stipulates that a child who is conceived through assisted insemination has the right as a young adult to find out the identity of the donor. In Denmark, as opposed to Sweden, the law that was in place before the debates in 2006 stipulated full anonymity of the donor and this was not amended in the new legislation. In Finland, the anonymity of the donor was lifted by the Act on Fertility treatments. There is also significant variation in the legislation that regulates the position of the lesbian social mother in the fertility treatment process and after it. In Sweden the legislation of 2005 allows lesbian couples to be inseminated and recognises social mothers as legal parents if insemination takes place at a state clinic. The provision of the Act was put into place to satisfy and safeguard the needs and interests of the child (Burrell 2005). In Denmark and Finland the position of the social mother is more ambivalent. In Finland, registered lesbian partners still do not automatically become parents of the child as a couple. In Denmark, the legal position of the social mother in a lesbian relationship, and the interest of the child was not included in the first amendment of the law, which led to new parliamentary debates. These debates regarding the position of the social mother are analysed and described further below.

Methodological points of departure The question we want to broach in this chapter concerns how meaning is negotiated within debates on fertility treatments. We conduct a discourse analysis of the processes by which the acts regulating fertility treatments were passed in Denmark, Finland and Sweden. The intent is to pinpoint problem representations and discursive strategies underlying the policy arguments. In order to conduct the analysis we have used the so-called “what’s the problem approach” (Bacchi 1999). In other words, it is an inquiry into the articulation processes of significations try of Justice is looking into the possibility of allowing surrogacy again. Whether surrogacy will be allowed for both heterosexual and same-sex couples remains an issue for debate.

The Act on fertility treatments (1237/2006). ��

There is variation in terminology that is used to refer to fertility treatment among the three national discourses. In Sweden and Denmark the term ‘assisted insemination’ is used. In Denmark the concept of artificial fertilisation ‘kunstig befrugtning’ is also used. In this article, we speak generally of fertility treatment, but in cases when we refer to a specific national law, national terminology is used. 63


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such as: how the problem of- as well as the solution to fertility treatment are represented; how different identity categories are constructed in policies on fertility treatment; what norms or discourses can be found underneath the problem representations and what the effects of these representations are. The concept of policy discourse is similar to that of “policy frame” that derives from Critical Frame Analysis (Verloo and Lombardo 2007). The concept of policy frame is defined by Mieke Verloo as an “organizing principle that transforms fragmentary or incidental information into a structured and meaningful problem, in which a solution is implicitly or explicitly included” (Verloo 2005, 20). In this chapter however, the concept “policy discourse” is used since we want to indicate that policies contribute to constitute subjects in particular ways. A discourse can be defined as a network of utterances which provide a language for talking about or a way of representing a topic that at the same time forms the objects of which it speaks (Hall 1992). Given this approach, we intend to analyse how (in)appropriate mothers are constructed within debates on fertility treatment in Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Contrasting the three policy debates can shed light on the problems and loopholes of both current and preceding legislation in the three countries. This kind of comparative approach furthermore enables us to trace out what is absent in specific policy processes and consider discourses that are dominant in one context and not in another (Kantola 2006). This article has sprung out of the European project Quing (Quality in gender+ equality policies) and draws from material collected and analysed in the project. The material sampled consists of parliamentary debates leading to the passing of the laws in 2005 and 2006 respectively, government bills, laws, and texts produced by civil society actors concerning fertility treatment for lesbians and single (heterosexual) women. Added to these documents we have also included more recent debates regarding the lack of legal recognition of social mothers.10 10

In the Danish case, we have analysed parliamentary debates and civil society comments in relation to Government Bill L 151/2006 Proposal to amendments of law on artifical reproduction/Forslag til lov om aendring af lov om kunstig befrugtning i forbindelse med laegelig behandling, diagnostic og forskning and Parliamentary proposal L 67/2008 Proposal to amend Marriage Act and abolish Act on registered partnership/Forlsag til lov om aendring af lov om aegteskabs indgpelse of oplosning of forskellige andre love samt ophaevelse af lov om registreret parnetskab. In Finland the material consists of parliamentary debates related to the passing of the bill �� (HE 3/2006) on Act on Fertility treatment. In Sweden the government bill 2004/05:137 Assisted fertilisation and parenthood/Assisterad befruktning och föräldraskap. and corresponding 64


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In the Quing project a particular textual analysis was developed with the help of a software program developed within the project. Documents were entered into an online database containing full texts of the documents as well as codes describing various aspects of the document. The content of the documents was recorded through the help of qualitative coding following a coding scheme. The coding scheme included questions regarding how the problem is defined as well as what type of solutions are offered. Furthermore, the software allowed for answering questions regarding the argumentation used in the document such as the list of objectives and policy actions, the way problem descriptions refer to social groups creating and suffering from the given problem.11 From the codes we could find some major ways of representing the problem, which we have called policy discourses.12 In the following the main policy discourses that are found in debates leading to passing the laws on equal access to fertility treatment for lesbians are described and analysed.

Main policy discourses In examining the political debates, two major policy discourses have been identified that are important in relation to constructions of problems with fertility treatments. These are, “the well-being of the child” and “the rights of the individual”. “The best interest of the child” or “the wellbeing of the child” is a central discourse drawn upon in all three countries – and by both sides for and against fertility treatment for lesbians in the polarised debates. It is frequently emphasised that children’s interests must come before the rights of adults. The well-being of the child is however defined in very different ways, and can be seen as an empty concept the content of which is open to political debate. For example, some of those opposed to allowing equal access to fertility treatment to all women (regardless of marital status or sexuality) use “the well-being of the child” to argue that children need “parents of both sexes”, whereas others use “the well-being of the child” to argue that already existing family forms (such as lesbian couples with children) need to be recognised and protected by law. Another problem representation that is relatively comments and parliamentary debates, Riksdagens protokoll �� 2004/05:133,�� are analysed. 11

See www.quing.eu for more information on the exact methodologies used in the project.

12

We want to thank Tamás Dombos, Martin Jaígma and Roman Kuhar for their work on developing frames from the codes in the software. 65


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common is the “lacking father”. This representation of the “lacking father” is here seen as part of a larger discourse named as “the importance of the father” and it is linked both to the discourse of the well-being of the child, as well as to the individual rights of biological fathers to their offspring. In the following we are going to discuss how these three policy discourses – the well-being of the child, the rights of the individual, as well as the importance of the father are drawn upon and filled with meaning in the three countries respectively. The focus is on how these discourses were used in order to argue for and against the right to fertility treatment for women who do not live in heterosexual relationships.

The Well-being of the Child Over the past 20 years the argument of the well-being of the child has been strong and it has primarily been used to exclude lesbians and single women from equal access to fertility treatment in medical clinics. In all three countries adversaries have proclaimed heterosexual family ideals and at the same time constructing the lesbian as an “unnatural mother” (Bryld 2001, 301). The opponents, mainly from the conservative-, right-winged and the Christian democrat parties argued along these lines.13 The argument of the well-being of the child has however proved to be relatively strong also in the debates that lead to the new laws allowing for lesbians access to fertility treatments, especially in Sweden and Finland. In Finland, opponents of the bill that passed in 2006 stated that fertility treatments should be limited to heterosexual couples, because children’s best interests require an involvement of a father. The opponents argued that fatherlessness as well as two-mother families create problems for the psychological development of the child. Helena Hirvonen (2006), who studied the previous government bill of 2002, which has not been passed yet, notes that the argument of the best interest of the child was primarily used to support biologist and heteronormative values to the point of idealisation of the heterosexual family unit. Hirvonen concludes that this did not ultimately promote children’s best interests in the sense that it 13

In Nordic countries there are many small parties represented in parliaments, which means that there are several different bourgeois parties. Conservative parties include in Denmark “Det konservative folkeparti”, in Sweden “Moderaterna” and in Finland “Kokoomus”. The Christian Democrats include in Denmark “Kristendemokraterne”, in Sweden “Kristdemokraterna” and in Finland “Kristillisdemokraatit”. Added to this, Denmark has a populist right-wing party called “Dansk Folkeparti”. 66


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failed to promote equal rights for all children. In the Danish debates likewise some MPs argued in the interest of the child within a discourse claiming that children need a mother and a father. This discourse was especially strong during the parliamentary debate of 1996 when the ban on assisted insemination was introduced (Stormhøj 2002). In Sweden opponents of the bill, primarily the Christian Democrats, constructed the problem to be that children will be denied their “natural right” to a father:14 The most natural right in the world to a little child is to grow up with both their parents, with their father and mother, to have a male and a female role model to identify with. This natural right will be denied to some children, those children conceived through artificial insemination of lesbian women. (Ingemar Vänerlöv (Christian Democratic Party)).15

In this quote from a Christian Democrat MP, “the natural right” of children is said to be two parents of different sexes. Thus, in all three countries, those who opposed granting access to fertility treatment to lesbian couples and single women interpreted the best interest of the child as the heterosexual nuclear family. It is however noteworthy that the discourse of the well-being of the child is also drawn upon by the proponents of these bills. The best interest of the child is then understood to be achieved through granting all children equal legal rights independently of what their family looks like. Within this discourse it is also argued that the state should recognise the already existing diversity of family forms, and that the laws should follow this reality. The goal of the left party is a legislation that gives all children equal rights independently of whether their parents are homo-, bi-, or heterosexual.(Tasso Stafilidis (Left party)).16

This discourse of the well-being of the child proved to be especially strong in Sweden. The best interest of the child proved to be a strategic argument leading to legal changes; the problem was claimed to be that existing family laws did not reflect the actual diversity of family forms, and this leaves already existing children without legal protection. One Swedish MP from the Conservative party argued in the debate: 14

Parliamentary debate on Governmental Bill 2004/05:137 Assisted insemination and parenthood.

15

P�� arliamentary debate on assisted insemination and parenthood, 2004/05:133, 20050603.

16

Parliamentary debate on assisted insemination and parenthood, 2004/05:133; 20050603. 67


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Through the laws we are about to legislate we give these children (children born in homosexual relationships) a juridical safety with the focus on the best interest of the child. The child is entitled to information about their biological origin, as I said before. The child has the right to two parents, and the conception of the child is performed under medical and psychological control (Inger René (the Moderate party)).17

As is evident in the quote above, one of the reasons for the Bill to pass in the Swedish parliament was that it was constructed as a matter of “the best interest of the child” as opposed to a matter of rights for lesbian and single women. In the Finnish discussion, proponents of the passing of the 2006 bill in the parliament and particularly NGOs promoting GLBT rights also brought up the question of security of those children who already live in so-called “rainbow families”. In the Finnish context the term “rainbow families” refers to families with same-sex parents.18 All in all, the proponents – both the governmental and civil society actors – drew from research that shows that children in same-sex families are not harmed by it.19 It proved to be strategic to show that the well-being of children can be safeguarded in same-sex families, despite the fact that this could be seen as a relatively defensive argument.

The rights of the individual In all three countries rights for lesbians and single women to equal access to medical treatment are articulated by the proponents (primarily the National GLBT organisations, the left parties, the Social Democrats and the Social Liberals) in the debates. In the Danish parliamentary debate in 2006 when the parliament voted for equal access to fertility treatment equality between groups of women and individual rights was a major argument. The argument of rights was put forward by the parliamentary opposition – the Social Democrats, the left parties and the Social Liberals. One of the Social Democrat MPs argued: No one should doubt that the Social Democrat group finds that there should be equality among women, no matter marital status or sexual orientation …(Karen J. Klint (S), First debate on Proposal L 151/Forste behandling af lovforslag L 151). 17

Parliamentary debate on assisted insemination and parenthood, 2004/05:133; 20050603.

18

Statement of Finnish NGO Sateenkaariperheet-Regnbågnfamiljer ry on the Committee on special issues related to registered relationships Report. 20.11.2003. See also the chapter by Elke Jensen in this collection.

19

E.g. Swedish government Governmental �� Bill 2004/2005:137 and the Danish National Association of Gays & Lesbians comments on the proposal L151/2006 in LBL: Vedr. 2005–2006 – L151. 68


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The discourse of rights not only involves norms of anti-discrimination, as in the quote above, but is also combined with a narrative of modernisation and progressiveness. In this case arguments of individual rights are linked with Danish self-perception: the Danish national identity is said to be built upon an idea of being progressive and tolerant towards sexual minorities (Lüttichau 2004; Stormhøj 2007).20 The participant from the Liberal Party Jorgen Winter puts it like this: There are many different opinions in Venstre – Denmark’s Liberal Party – on the issue of artificial fertilisation. In such an apparently ethical area, we don’t want to press one another. That is our tradition in Venstre. Let me now try to explain the current situation in Venstre. Some members are still of the opinion that only couples consisting of a man and a woman should be allowed to get medical treatment. But it is also my firm conviction that a large majority in the parliamentary group is supportive of my idea that a doctor in a private hospital is welcome to assist lesbians and single women. The Danish liberal party is namely a modern party. We don’t need to have the same opinion in a hundred years. 21

Those who wanted to keep the ban on assisted fertilisation were indirectly understood as being backwards and not modern individuals. In the Danish parliamentary debates in 2006 this discourse of individual rights and modernisation thus appeared as essential and had effect in the sense that several members of the Liberal Party voted for lifting the ban on assisted insemination for single women and lesbians (see also Nebeling Petersen 2009). The Swedish minister for Justice also claimed in the parliamentary debate that “times have changed” and that: “We have got a more open, more liberal and more modern view of homosexuals.” (Parliamentary debate/Lagutskottets betänkande 2004/05: LU25). Since the Nordic welfare states usually aim at providing universal rights for their citizens, the argument is a forceful one. However, the significance of the rights discourse varies and seems to be most important in Denmark and less significant in Sweden. In the Swedish debate access to fertility treatment for lesbians was as already pointed out primarily discussed within a discourse of the best interests of the child. In the government bill On Assisted Insemination and Parenthood the right to fertility treatment was proposed for lesbian women, but single women’s right to fertility treatment was denied with 20

For example, Social �� Liberals argue that Denmark has to regain its position as international leader in�� B 76/2007 (as proposed): Proposal to introduce Marriage for homosexuals/Forslag til folketingsbeslutning om at indføre en ægteskabslovgivning, som ligestiller homoseksuelle med heteroseksuelle�.

21

See the liberal participant Jørgen Winther in the second debate on L 151/2006. �� 69


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reference to the argument that children need two parents.22 After the bill was passed single women’s right to fertility treatment was articulated as a matter of equal rights also in Swedish debates. As late as in February 2009 fertility treatment for single women was on the agenda in the Swedish parliament. However, it was decided that single women’s fertility treatment needed further investigation. This decision compels single Swedish women who want to become pregnant through fertility treatment to travel to Finland or Denmark or to other countries where fertility treatment for single women is allowed. In Finland especially those who wanted to allow fertility treatment for lesbian couples and single women referred to equal rights and to nondiscrimination legislation. Added to this, in Finland it has been a longstanding practice to refer to the example of other Nordic countries when arguing for legislative reforms or changes. Sweden in particular is often used as a normative example in Finnish policy- and law-making, especially in the fields of social and family law (Bradley 1998).

The importance of the father In the policy debates analysed concerning fertility treatment the position of the father – whether biological or social – is emphasised in all three countries. This is here named as the importance of the father discourse. The importance of the father is closely related to the discourse of the best interest of the child since it is argued that the well-being of the child is dependent on the child having a father. Especially Conservatives, right-wing parties and Christian Democrats, who opposed giving access to fertility treatment to lesbians and single women, considered fatherless families as a “threat” to the heterosexual nuclear family (See also Stormhøj 2002). One Swedish Christian Democrat articulated the threat in the following way: I feel deeply concerned over the decision that will be made today which will force even more children to grow up without their biological father. We just have to take a look at all our prisons in this country. We can do interviews. We can talk to the staff and psychologist and others. Many times it becomes clear that a lack of a father figure during childhood have caused these wrong behaviours. I don´t say that it is the only reason, but it is an important reason. Experiences show that it will have negative effects if a child doesn’t grow up with their biological parents. As a Christian democrat I don´t want to experience that. (Chatrine Pålsson (Christian Democratic Party)).23 22

Government Bill 2004/05: 137 Assisted Insemination and Parenthood.

23

Parliamentary debate on assisted insemination and parenthood, 2004/05:133, 20050603. 70


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The importance of the father is articulated both in debates on equal access to fertility treatment, but also in the following debates on the recognition of the social mother. With the new laws, the issue of how to legally recognise the non-biological mother emerged both in Finland and in Denmark since the already existing laws proved to be insufficient. In Denmark a lesbian social mother was not automatically recognised as parent, and thus, could not take the two weeks “paternal” leave together with the mother giving birth. This is due to the fact that the two weeks paternal leave are earmarked for fathers and can only be used within the first three months of the child’s life. As it happened non-biological mothers could only apply for adoption three months after the birth. In 2008 it was proposed that the “co-mother”, as she is called in Denmark, would be legally recognised as a parent directly at birth.24 The only party against recognising co-mothers in 2008 when the issue was taken up in the parliament was the right-wing Danish People’s party. The LiberalConservative government admitted that the legal situation for newborn babies in lesbian relationships had to be regulated better. Nevertheless, the Minister of Justice argued that if there was a known biological father, he should have a chance to acknowledge the child. The minister of justice argued in parliament that: I am still certain that as a starting point, the best for the child is to have both a mother and a father. If it happens that there is a biological father to the child, who knows that he has contributed to create a new life, then I think that it is reasonable, that this father has the opportunity to say: I actually wish to acknowledge that the child is mine. (Minister for Justice Lene Espersen. 1. behandling af lovforslag nr. L 67: Forlsag til lov om aendring af lov om aegteskabs indgpelse of oplosning of forskellige andre love samt ophaevelse af lov om registreret parnetskab. (1. Debate on Law Proposal L67))

The government then put forward a proposal that promised to give the non-biological mother a possibility to adopt the child directly at birth, if the child was conceived via assisted fertilisation with an anonymous donor. This formulation guaranteed that the rights of the biological father were not threatened.25 The underlying idea being that there can only be two legally recognised parents. However, lesbian social mothers still have 24

It was a proposal to abolish the registered partnership act and introduce same sex marriage. Same sex couples would then also be granted the right to international adoption. The Government did not support the proposal as a whole (First debate on Proposal L 67/2008).

25

2008–09 - L 105 (overview): Proposal to amend the Adoption Act/Forslag til lov om ændring af adoptionsloven og forskellige andre love. 71


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to adopt the child, which means that parenthood is not automatically established as is the case for heterosexual couples. If the donor is known, the legal situation of confirmation of parenthood is still unclear. Several MPs were uneasy about the legal recognition of social mothers. This is reflected in another comment in the parliamentary debate by the Liberal chair: The law proposal has the consequence that a child who is born to a woman married to another woman will get a co-mother instead of a father, despite the fact that the fertilisation was the result of a sexual relationship. This means that the right of the biological father disappears like magic. From my point of view, that is a very far-reaching change. (Karen Elleman (V): 1. behandliing af lovforslag nr. L 67: Forlsag til lov om aendring af lov om aegteskabs indgpelse of oplosning of forskellige andre love samt ophaevelse af lov om registreret parnetskab. p.6)

In the quote above it is evident that the importance of the father is also connected to the discourse of individual rights and the norm of two parents of different sex is indirectly expressed. The Finnish law on fertility treatment also provides an example of how the importance of a biological father sometimes overrides that of the social mother. In Finland lesbian registered partners (and single women) had the right to get fertility treatment before the co-mother had legal rights to the child she was having together with the birth mother. The rights of parents have on a number of occasions been understood differently in the cases of heterosexual and lesbian couples and single women. Firstly, if a child is born via fertility treatment to a married heterosexual couple, s/he automatically becomes the child of the couple and there is no question about the paternity even if donor cells were used. In the case of co-habiting heterosexual couples, the father has to officially recognise his paternity. However, in the eyes of the law, registered lesbian partners still do not automatically become parents of the child as a couple. Only the biological parent of the child is considered a legal parent. Up until 2009 all forms of adoption were prohibited, which meant that the comother did not have the possibility to adopt her partner’s (and in effect her own) child. Problems arising from this complex situation were recognised26 and raised in the Parliament on a number of occasions,27 but the 26

Committee on special issues related to registered relationships 2003:10/Lapset ja rekisteröity parisuhde. �� Rekisteröityihin parisuhteisiin liittyviä erityiskysymyksiä selvittäneen toimikunnan mietintö. Sosiaalija terveysministeriön 2003:10.

27

For example: Written Question KK 253/2004 vp - �� Rosa Meriläinen/Green party and others. Inter-family �� adoption in same-sex families. Kirjallinen kysymys 253/2004 vp Sisäinen adoptio-oikeus samaa sukupuolta olevien parien perheissä. 72


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social mothers’ legal right to the child remained for a long time unrecognised. The situation improved after the amendment of the Finnish Adoption Act that took place in September 2009. According to the amended Adoption Act, the co-mother can now adopt her registered partner’s biological child. This is referred to in the Finnish debate as “internal adoption”. Adoption of a child who is not already part of the family remains prohibited. This includes both domestic and international adoption. In Finland, the debate concerning legislation on fertility treatment, included extensive discussion of the rights of the donor. Before the Act on fertility treatments of 2006, it was possible to use anonymous donors. This is not the case any longer. The Act on fertility treatments stipulates that the anonymity of the donor can be lifted and the donor’s identity revealed upon request of the child when s/he has turned eighteen. The Finnish GLBT organisation SETA ry. was against the lifting of the anonymity of the donor, since it would have put the co-mother’s and the donor’s rights into opposition.28 Especially before the Adoption Act was amended, the lifting of the anonymity of the donor could have meant that the co-mother’s rights were less than those of the donor’s, i.e. the socalled biological father. In a sense, the backdoor was left open for a hypothetical biological father, even when the child already had two parents. In Sweden, the position of the social mother was determined in the law on fertility treatment of 2005. If the birth mother is a registered partner, her partner will automatically be regarded as the mother of the child and in the case of cohabiting partners, the cohabiting partner will be given the possibility to confirm parenthood. But this legislation only applies to children that are conceived through Swedish fertility clinics, not if the child is conceived in another country or at home. Even though there is a legislative acceptance of two mother families the regulations on known donars puts an interesting twist on the parenthood discussion. As pointed out above Swedish law stipulates that every “donor-conceived child” has the right to know his/her biological origin. Even if a child already has two legally confirmed parents, the day the child turns eighteen, if the child so chooses, a father can re-enter the scene (Zetterqvist Nelson 2007). The extensive emphasis on the social father’s role and participatory fatherhood in Sweden has come to influence and permeate most Swedish speech about family, children and parenthood and is re28

See: �� Seta ry. statement 22.2.2006. Government Bill on fertility treatments and changing the paternity Law/Hallituksen esitys hedelmöityshoidoista ja isyyslain muuttamisesta. 73


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flected even on lesbian couples (Ryan-Flood 2005). One reason behind the decision to allow giving fertility treatment to lesbian women was that it was feared that they otherwise would go to Denmark for instance to get treated and the donor would then be anonymous and the conceived child would be denied its right to know its biological heritage.29 With the current legislation the donor will be known and the state has a “better control” of lesbian women’s reproduction.30 But even after the latest changes in the regulations on assisted fertilisation, some women still choose to go to other countries that have anonymous donors for assisted fertilisation to avoid known donors (Eriksson 2008).

Conclusions: (In)Appropriate Mothers Policy discourses concerning fertility treatments have recently shifted in Denmark, Sweden and Finland. New policies that allow fertility treatment for lesbians mark a discursive change that recognises and approves lesbians as mothers and parents. However, there is a certain duality present in Nordic policies on fertility treatment and parenthood; these newly-won rights were not accompanied by changes in overall family policies. Added to this, in order to be recognised politically, the subject has to transform and adapt to demands from authorities. In this case the lesbian biological mother, who used to be defined as an abject woman or a monstrosity (Bryld 2001), is now seen as a potentially good and caring mother. At the same time she is also re-inscribed into heteronormative discourses: instead of being deemed as inappropriate or being nonexistent, lesbians today have to conform to the particular state approved type of motherhood. Thus, policy discourses on fertility treatment in Denmark, Finland and Sweden can be interpreted as attempts to weed out the “non-normative mothers”. However, in debates on equal access to fertility treatment, the lesbian social mother is particularly in danger of being constructed as an “unthinkable parent” to the point that she was not recognised as a parent in the Danish and the Finnish first amendments to the laws. In the case of Sweden, the single woman is clearly constructed as an unwanted parent since she is not entitled equal access to fertility treatment. Thus, in Sweden 29

Governmental Bill 2004/2005:137 Assisted insemination and parenthood.

30

Swedish lesbian couples have continued to go to Denmark for treatment. This is due to long queues caused by shortage of donated sperm after anonymity of the donor was lifted (Eriksson 2008). 74


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there is no discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, but instead the law clearly discriminates against single women. When contrasting Swedish policies with Finnish and Danish, it is evident that the dominant discourse of the well-being of the child with its corresponding arguments of “recognising existing family forms” has led to a legal situation where children born to lesbian couples with the state approved fertility treatments is now regulated. At the same time single women are excluded from the right to fertility treatment and children born outside the state approved fertility treatment are denied their legal rights in Sweden. The proper family in Swedish policy debates on fertility treatment for lesbians is thus constructed as a unit of two parents. Paradoxically the well-being of all children is not guaranteed with this legal situation since the legal status of children born to lesbians who chose to have children outside of state approved fertility clinics is unclear. If one contrasts Danish policy debates with Finnish and Swedish ones, it is apparent that the discourse of individual rights is more dominant in Denmark. Arguing for equal access to fertility treatment proved to be strategically wise since this articulation led to the lifting of the ban on giving fertility treatment to lesbians and single women. Now the same rules (with anonymous donor) apply for lesbians, single women and heterosexual women in a relationship. However, even though lesbian couples can now get treated, the lesbian partner is not automatically acknowledged as a mother (as is the case for heterosexual couples) but has to apply for so-called step-child adoption. Furthermore, if a lesbian couple chooses a known donor (and do not follow the legal prescriptions with an anonymous donor) it is not yet decided whether the social mother has the possibility of step-child adoption or not. These cases are falling in-between, which means that social mothers are thereby denied legal rights to parental leave. Queer identities that do not conform to normative family ideals are excluded in a discourse of rights (Nebeling Petersen 2009). The importance of the father and the threat of the fatherless family were perhaps most clearly articulated in the Finnish policy debates – and are reflected in legislation that differentiates between lesbian and heterosexual couples. Also, the meaning of fatherhood is understood differently in the case of heterosexual as opposed to lesbian couples. Heterosexual couples can be trusted in that the social father is considered the father, even if donated sperm is used. In the case of lesbian couples, the identity of the biological father can be revealed later on, even when the child has got two parents already. This clearly reveals the norm of 75


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the heterosexual family and the precariousness of the position of the social mother in Finnish policy discourses. The position of the lesbian social mother remains ambiguous. The position of the social mother is negotiated within and in between the discourses on the importance of the father and the well-being of the child. In Denmark and Sweden if there is a known father (who has contributed to the birth outside of the state regulated system) the status of the social mother is unclear. It seems that the acknowledgement of the social mother is possible only when her rights do not clash with the rights of a biological father. In Finland, the social mother has been only recently legally recognised and internal adoption within the family has become possible. There is thus a risk that the rights of the lesbian co-mother are overridden by those of the “hypothetical” fathers. In addition, the focus on the “couple”, which is at present especially strong in Sweden, leads to marginalisation of single-parent families and same-sex families with more than one set of parents. Legislative solutions concerning parental rights of people that do not conform to the norm of the heterosexual nuclear family are often somewhat ad-hoc in nature (Rydström 2008). This also proved to be the case with the right to access to fertility treatment for lesbians in Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Since there is no overall policy approach in any of the three countries to same-sex families, gaps and loopholes appear in the legislation, leaving some children unprotected by family laws and some parents without official recognition of their parenthood and therefore with limited access to family policies. Thus, in general, in policy discourses in all three countries, and despite new legislation, parenthood of heterosexual couples is unquestioned whereas parenthood of lesbians is still under negotiation.

References Bacchi, C. 1999. Women, policy and politics. The construction of policy problems. London and New York: Sage publications. Bradley, D. 1998. Politics, culture and family law in Finland: Comparative approaches to the institution of marriage. International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family 12(3): 288–306. Bryld, M. 2001. The infertility clinic and the birth of the lesbian: The political debate on assisted reproduction in Denmark. European Journal of Women’s Studies 8(3): 299–312. 76


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Burrell, R. 2006. Assisted reproduction in the Nordic countries – a comparative study of policies and regulation. TemaNord 2006:505. Norden: Nordic Committee on Bioethics. Committee on special issues related to registered relationships. 2003. Children in registered relationships: Committee Reports of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health 2003:10. Tempere: Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. Eriksson, A. 2008. Lesbiska väljer bort svensk insemination (Lesbians chose not to inseminate in Sweden). (18 January 2011). Hall, S. 1992. The question of cultural identity. In Modernity and its futures, eds. H. D. Hall and T. McGrew, 274–316. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hirvonen, H. 2006. Hedelmöityshoitolaki ja sosiaalinen kansalaisuus -inkluusion ja ekskluusion politiikat (The Act on fertility treatment and social citizenship: the politics of inclusion and exclusion). Unpublished Master’s thesis in Social Policy. University of Jyväskylä: Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy. Kaarto, H. 2007. Homo- ja lesbopareille valmistellaan perheen sisäistä adoptiooikeutta (Internal adoption right in preparation for gay and lesbian couples). Helsingin Sanomat, 28 November 2007. (30 November 2011). Kantola, J. 2006. Feminists theorize the state. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Liljestrand, P. 1995. Legitimate state and illegitimate parents: Donor insemination politics in Sweden. Social Politics 2(3): 270–304. Lüttichau, I. 2004. “We are family”: The regulation of ‘female only’ reproduction. Social & legal studies 13(1): 81–101. Moring, A. 2007. Kolmen kerroksen vanhempia? Hetero- ja parisuhdenormatiivisuuksia Suomen ja Ruotsin hedelmöityshoitolaeissa (Parents of three different grades? Hetero- and couple normativities in the fertility treatment legislation in Finland and Sweden) SQS 1/7: 15–34. (15 January 2011). Nebeling Petersen, M. 2009. Fra barnets tarv til ligestilling – en queerteoretisk undersøgelse af Folketingets forhandlinger om kunstig befrugtning (From the best interest of the child to equality – a Queer-theoretical analysis of parliamentary debates on artificial fertilisation) Kvinder, køn og forskning (2): 30– 42. Ryan-Flood, R. 2005. Contested heteronormativities: Discourses of fatherhood among lesbian parents in Sweden and Ireland. Sexualities 8(2): 189–204. 77


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Rydström, J. 2005. Tvåsamhetens brunn (In the pond of couplehood). In Queersverige, (QueerSweden), ed. D. Kulick, 308–335. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur. ———. 2008. Legalising love in a cold climate: The history, consequences and recent developments of registered partnerships in Scandinavia. Sexualities 11(1– 2): 193–226. Sijaissynnytys tulossa uuteen harkintaan (Surrogacy to be reconsidered). Editorial in Helsingin sanomat. 2011. Helsingin sanomat, May 22. (19 August 2011). Stormhøj, C. 2002. Queering the family. Critical reflections on state-regulated heteronormativity in the Scandinavian countries. Lambda Nordica 9(3–4): 38– 56. ———. 2007. Homosexuelles medborgerskab i et retfaerdighedsperspektiv (Citizenship of homosexuals from a rights perspective). Kvinder, køn og forskning 16(4): 33–41. Vaahtera, E. 2007. Naisparit ja itselliset naiset yhteiskuntajärjestyksen ylläpitäjinä – hedelmöityslakikeskustelusta vuosina 2005–2006 (Female couples and independent women as supporters of social order-on the fertility treatment debate between 2005–2006). SQS 1/7: 78–84. (15 October 2011). Verloo, M., and E. Lombardo. 2007. Contested gender equality and policy variety in Europe: Introducing a critical frame analysis approach. In Multiple meanings of gender equality. A critical frame analysis of gender policies in Europe, ed. M. Verloo, 21–50. Budapest: CEU. Zetterqvist Nelson, K. 2007. Mot alla odds – regnbågsföräldrars berättelser om att bilda familj och få barn (Against all odds – stories from rainbow families on forming family and getting children). Malmö: Liber

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LGBT Families, Youth, and Sexuality in the United States G u i ll a u m e M a r c h e

Approaches to LGBT rights and LGBT families in the United States and in Europe differ greatly. Whereas issues of sexual orientation and gender expression in general are often the focus of acrimonious public debates in the United States, LGBT rights enjoy some degree of protection in many European countries and they are guaranteed in Article 21 of the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights. On the other hand, the US federal system affords LGBT families in certain states or localities better recognition than in most EU countries. The United States may thus serve as a useful vantage point for comparisons with Europe. In particular, do the differences between the experiences of LGBT families on either side of the Atlantic cast the American model as an example for Europeans to follow, a cautionary tale, or a foil which enhances European achievements? We suggest that the answer is mitigated, insofar as differences owe to a complex mixture of political tradition, institutional framework, and social state of affairs. We propose to examine the matter by exploring the interplay between issues of LGBT families and youth sexuality in the United States. The recognition of LGBT families in the United States has been evolving rapidly since the 1990s. The “gay marriage” theme in particular has become a prominent topic in both national and state politics. Same-sex marriage, however, is not all there is to LGBT families in the United States, as LGBT people have in fact invented a wide variety of family configurations, which – though often informally – have reshuffled definitions of the American family. As a result the LGBT community can less and less be assumed to solely consist of unattached adult individuals, or couples without offspring. The issue of generations has thus become extremely important for the American LGBT movement, insofar as it concerns not simply procreation and adoption, but the whole set of processes whereby culture and values are transmitted from one generation to the following, so that each LGBT generation can symbolically outlive itself (Marche 2003, 99–100; Whisman 1996, 123–124). Consequently the po79


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litical questions raised by LGBT families in the United States potentially hold interesting lessons for the politics of LGBT families in Europe. Our claim is that the development of alternative families has made youth sexuality a vital issue for the American LGBT movement, and that it is instructive to examine how this question is dealt with in a context where, since the 1990s in particular, sex panics – i.e. irrational public fears growing out of isolated cases of sexual abuse or misdemeanour – have increasingly tended to cast youth as an asexual sanctuary. We suggest that there is a paradox in that, on the one hand, the overall political context puts a premium on desexualising LGBT politics, while, on the other hand, LGBT families challenge the movement to find appropriate ways of dealing with the issue of youth and sexuality. We explore this question through the lens of social-movement sociology by considering the way movement organisations do, or fail to, reconcile their discussions of families, and of youth and sexuality. We begin by showing that, given the current state of the political debate in the United States, and whether LGBT advocates like it or not, the issue of youth sexuality is of the foremost importance in the LGBT families debate. We then go on to argue that the non-youth movement has got increasingly desexualised, whereas the main issues of significance for LGBT youth are more straightforwardly related to sexuality. However, even as the questions of LGBT families and youths do expose the LGBT movement to attacks that primarily stigmatise homosexuality as a sexual conduct and a choice, the movement tends to react by claiming that sexual orientation is primarily an identity and it is not a choice. As a result, the LGBT movement’s current approach to youth issues is a sign of its growing essentialism, whereas this movement used to deal with such questions in ways that proposed alternative social definitions of gender and sexuality. The challenge for the LGBT movement is therefore to find effective ways to confront the strong counter-movement mounted by religious right-wing organisations31 in reaction to the emergence of alternative LGBT families. We end by showing that this very aggressive countermovement questions the LGBT movement’s relation to youth sexuality, but at the same time puts it in a position to propose innovative approaches to youth and sexuality. As a consequence, the LGBT movement is ultimately challenged to approach youth sexuality as a matter of rights and empowerment. 31

Among these organizations are for example �� Focus on the Family, the American Family Association, or Concerned Women for America. 80


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LGBT Families and the LGBT Movement Same-sex marriage has undeniably become the most visible aspect of the politics of LGBT families in the US, in part because it has been used as a high-profile issue in national and state politics. Access to marriage is indeed important to LGBT families because official recognition facilitates making families through adoption or artificial insemination, for example. But the legal situation of same-sex marriage is constantly evolving. A recent high-profile issue results from Proposition 8 in California, where in 2008 voters approved a constitutional amendment restricting marriage to the union of one man and one woman – after the state’s Supreme Court in May 2008 had mandated that the right to marry be extended to same-sex couples. Although the amendment’s constitutionality was upheld by California’s Supreme Court in May 2009, it was since struck down by a federal court in August 2010 and will in all likelihood be eventually reviewed by the United States Supreme Court (Schwartz 2009; Dolan 2010).32 Six other states – Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont33 – and the federal capital Washington, DC, do allow same-sex marriage but most states’ statutes and/or constitutions ban same-sex marriage,34 and eighteen states also ban domestic partnership or civil unions.35 On the contrary, even before they legalised same-sex marriage, New York and the District of Columbia – i.e. the federal capital, Washington – did recognise those legally entered into in other states. Finally, five states allow civil unions, whether in addition to marriage – e.g. Vermont –, instead of marriage – e.g. New Jersey –, or in spite of a marriage ban – e.g. California.36 As a result the map of the recognition and prohibition of same-sex marriage or unions is both unstable and very complex.37 But 32

Proposition 8 may also ultimately be challenged with a ballot measure to reverse it.

33

Maine did legislate to allow same-sex marriage in 2009, but the law was repealed through a ballot measure in the polls in November 2009.

34

Twenty one state constitutions prohibit same-sex marriage, and twelve states have a statutory ban.

35

These are: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin.

36

These five states are: Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey and Rhode Island.

37

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) posts regularly updated maps of the recognition of same-sex couples in the United States at (9 August 2011). 81


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what is striking is that the issue has become so prominent as to all but subsume the political debate on LGBT families in the United States: indeed, hardly any other LGBT rights issue enjoys equivalent political visibility.38 But in fact, LGBT people have invented a wide variety of family configurations, and because of the same-sex marriage debate these various family types have lost visibility. There are, for example, couples who do not particularly want to get married, but demand access to adoption. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia authorise joint adoption by same-sex parents, and nine states, plus again the District of Columbia, authorise second-parent adoption by same-sex partners.39 In addition, local – i.e. city or county – governments in several states also allow adoption. So the United States is relatively tolerant in this respect, as only one state, Florida, bars all homosexual people – whether as individuals or couples – from adopting, and a mere three other states, Utah, Mississippi and Arkansas, forbid adoption by unmarried or same-sex couples.40 Elsewhere same-sex couples and LGBT persons can take advantage of legal loopholes to seek an authorisation to adopt. It is noteworthy though that adoption by same-sex couples or by a biological parent’s same-sex partner is never recognised as a fully-fledged right, but granted as a matter of derogation. It is also remarkable that access to adoption is surprisingly easier than marriage – the reverse of Europe – as a result of the country’s federalism: marriage is a state-wide competence, whereas adoption can be addressed more locally; as a result same-sex marriage has much more political visibility than adoption, because its presence in state politics has a repercussion in, and is an 38

One such high-profile LGBT rights issue is the integration of openly homosexual soldiers in the US army, but its visibility has been more sporadic – essentially linked to attempted integration by individual presidents: Bill Clinton unsuccessfully in 1993 and Barack Obama successfully in 2010 – and, although highly symbolical, it is of direct concern to much fewer people than same-sex marriage.

39

The former are: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia; the latter are: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont and the District of Columbia; eight states and the District of Columbia allow both.

40

The Arkansas law was struck down by a state court in 2010, but the decision is not final until it has been affirmed or reversed by the state’s Supreme Court. Additionally, in Michigan state jurisprudence effectively bars unmarried individuals and same-sex couples married in other states from joint adoption; in Nebraska the state’s Department of Social Services’ policy prohibiting adoption by homosexual or unmarried couples has been sanctioned by the state’s Supreme Court, which has also ruled against second-parent adoption. 82


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echo of, the national political debate. But same-sex couples’ recognition can be worked out at the local level, too, through domestic partnership in particular. And since counties or municipalities are more likely to be politically homogeneous than whole states, it can prove easier – under favourable political circumstances – to garner pro-LGBT support locally than state-wide. These characteristics of US federalism may in a sense prefigure developments in Europe as its integration moves forward, in that pioneering nation-states may pave the way for progress in more reluctant ones when political issues get debated at the continental level. But the main difference between American politics and Europe’s prospective federalism is that the supra-national level in Europe seems readier than most member states to recognise LGBT families – almost the reverse of the imbalance between the local and state/national levels in the United States (Agius 2009; Banens 2010). But LGBT families are not necessarily centred on a couple with or without children. Some LGBT organisations offer “safe homes” for LGBT youths who have fled abusive families, while others provide them with “foster grand-parents” – i.e. elderly couples or individuals without offspring with whom to pair up (Marche 2003). Other “families of choice” – as the anthropologist Kath Weston calls them (Weston 1991; 1993) – are simply made up of friends, including sometimes former sexual or romantic partners. All these configurations are alternatives to the monogamous, couple-centred model of the family, and they are often informal arrangements. So they make up de facto families which never seek de jure recognition, but they are none the less significant, for they make LGBT families a laboratory for the evolution of the family as a civil and cultural institution. They also encourage the LGBT movement to deal with the prominent issue of intergenerational permanence, transmission and renewal – which is particularly important in a context where AIDS has decimated the generation that created LGBT communities in American cities and launched the age of gay rights in the post-gay-liberation period of the early 1970s. Even though, thirty years into the AIDS era, the archetype of the unattached, middle-aged promiscuous gay male no longer subsumes the image of the LGBT community, it is noteworthy that conservative campaigns do place the issue of sexuality at the heart of the LGBT families debate. For example, two major aspects of the Bush administration’s “values” battle were its opposition to same-sex marriage and the promotion of abstinence-only-until-marriage sexual education (Greslé-Favier 2009). The two are clearly linked in the conservative right wing’s agen83


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da.41 In fact, abstinence-only sexual education does not have to exclude same-sex attraction. But because it is explicitly geared toward promoting marriage it is likely to do so, and in effect does most of the time (Fischer 2009, 63). Conservative anti-LGBT discourse is indeed prone to such shortcuts, as the following example of the organisation Concerned Women for America illustrates. One article from the “Culture and Family Issues” section of its website entitled “What’s Best for the Children” reads: In the popular film Sleepless in Seattle, a desperate little boy goes on the radio to seek a wife for his single father. He’s already got a great dad, played by Tom Hanks. The boy does not want another dad; he wants a mom. Yet, we’re told that public policy should be indifferent to that boy’s needs. To put it another way, do we really think the boy would not notice if, instead of getting new mom Meg Ryan, he wound up with a guy from Queer as Folk as his ‘second dad?’ (Knight 2005)

In this segment, “a guy from Queer as Folk” is used as shorthand for an effeminate freak and is made synonymous for “another dad.” Striking therefore is that this extract contrasts with the dominant tendency in conservative anti-LGBT discourses nowadays to present homosexuality as a choice – hence something morally wrong, which can be avoided, for example thanks to “reparative therapy”, but which can also be imposed on others, especially children (Brookey 2002). On the contrary, the author, Robert Knight, essentialises homosexuality in order to stigmatise it by casting the male homosexual as abnormal. This is confirmed by another extract from the same article: “Who among us could say that our father could be replaced by a lesbian, and this would not have made any difference in our lives? Or that our mother could just as easily have been a male homosexual?” (Knight 2005; emphasis ours) The language here conflates sex and gender with sexual orientation, because the author does not simply emphasise a child’s alleged need to have parents of both sexes and genders – one female and one male –, he also labels the putative second mother or father as a homosexual, thus raising the fear of a sexually deviant adult warping the child’s morality. The essentialism is most obvious in that Knight gives pride of place to his opposition between the mother and the male homosexual, thus conjointly invoking the contrary mythic representations of motherly instinct and of the degenerate male pederast. 41

Abstinence-only until marriage was not launched by the Bush administration, but by the Clinton administration as of 1996; it was however the Bush administration which endowed it with massive funding (Cooper and Cates 2006, 64). 84


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But the article goes further and claims: yes, studies show that [when brought up by homosexual parents] girls are more likely to ‘be sexually adventurous and less chaste,’ including being more likely to try lesbianism, and that boys are more likely to have ‘fluid’ conceptions of gender roles, and that researchers should stop trying to cover this up in the hopes of pursuing a pro-homosexual agenda. The researchers said, in effect: Some of the kids are more likely to turn out gay or bisexual, but so what? (Knight 2005; italics in original)

Not only does this segment conflate parents’ sex and gender with their sexual orientation, it also lumps together parents’ sexual orientation with children’s sexual orientation, degree of sexual activity, and gender identification. What is more, far from impeding the piece’s capacity to convince, these conceptual flaws enhance it by addressing its readers’ deeper-seated, less rational anxieties, while at the same time cloaking them in pseudo-scientific language.42 These examples provide a fairly representative illustration of the current state of the debate on the moral conservative side, which lead us to conclude that, regardless of LGBT advocates’ strategic options, the issue of youth sexuality is of the foremost importance in the LGBT families debate.

Youth Sexuality: A Political Catch 22 But youth sexuality is such a risky topic that the LGBT movement deals with the LGBT families debate in an increasingly desexualised way. We analyse this strategy to argue that it is somewhat paradoxical, insofar as, at the same time, many issues of importance for LGBT youth are directly related to sexuality. In the gay-marriage debate for instance, whereas anti-LGBT opponents frame their argument in terms of sexual behaviour,43 proponents endeavour to skirt this obstacle by carrying the debate onto another plane, as the following two examples demonstrate. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has produced a series of half-hour documentaries entitled “Freedom Files,” which are based on the real-life experience of interviewees. These include a “gay and lesbian rights” episode and a “same-sex couples” episode, both of which focus on child-rearing, health insurance, and hospital visitation issues (ACLU [a]; [b]). The ACLU has 42

Interestingly Knight’s assertions distort the findings of the studies in question, which show less gender conformity – i.e. criticism towards patriarchal gender roles – in lesbian families (Stacey and Biblarz 2001). See also Biblarz and Stacey 2010.

43

e.g. Knight 2009. 85


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also co-produced with Public Interest television a series of ten stories, entitled “10 Couples”, which is also based on real-life testimonies and additionally focuses on inheritance rights and adoption (ACLU and Public Interest). The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) in July 2006 ran a full-page newspaper advertisement in fifty publications nationwide, in which sixty civic, religious, trade-union and civil-rights leaders and organisations took a stand in favour of legalising same-sex marriage. The fact is that forty of the sixty leaders and organisations in question were specifically non-LGBT, and their arguments were framed strictly in terms on non-discrimination – including a comparison with the prohibition of mixed-race marriages in Southern US states until 1967 (NGLTF 2006). These examples, taken from two of the leading national organisations defending LGBT rights in the US,44 provide an apt illustration of how hard these advocates strive to relegate sexuality-related issues outside the scope of the gay-marriage debate, by focussing on bread-and-butter issues or by articulating the case for legalisation strictly in terms of formal rights.45 Such a strategy is sensible insofar as it aims to deflect opponents’ harshest assaults, but it fails to address the symbolic dimension of opening marriage to same-sex couples other than by resorting to normification (Marche 2009; Hunter 1995).46 The problem however is that sexuality-related issues are central to the public debate on youth in general. Thus anti-gay rights opponents insist on protecting the sexuality of non-LGBT youth by claiming that LGBT families represent a risk of homosexual “contamination” and that the struggle for their recognition is in fact an activist ploy for recruiting youths into the homosexual lifestyle – what radical moral conservatives call the “gay agenda”. Furthermore, we argue, the well-being of LGBT youth is more particularly affected by sexuality, since their sexual experience for instance disproportionately involves risky behaviour, such as unsafe sex, exposing them to HIV infection. Besides, many LGBT youth engage in heterosexual sex, so that, whether male or female, they are actually more liable to be exposed to unwanted pregnancies (Gilliam 2001; Saewyc et al. 2008). 44

The ACLU is a general civil liberties defense organisation which does not exclusively or even primarily stand for LGBT rights, yet that is one of its key issues, so that the organisation’s great visibility and reputable record enable it to be a key player in the LGBT movement.

45

For a definition of formal rights – as opposed to substantive rights – see Bottomore 1992.

46

On the distinction between normification and normalization see Goffman 1990, 31–44. 86


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So how is one to explain why the LGBT movement tends to desexualise its discussion of LGBT youths? Part of the explanation is linked to the current overall political context. Since the 1990s there has been a revival of sex panics used by conservatives in order to construct youth in general as an asexual sanctuary, thus manufacturing and manipulating public emotions in order to advance their political agenda (Irvine 2006). In addition to the publicising of scare stories involving alleged “predators” and young, innocent victims, there have been highly visible cases of child abuse by priests and politicians’ affairs with minors. Teenagers have even been indicted with child pornography for “sexting” – i.e. sending each other crude pictures of themselves on their mobile phones (Wypijewski 2009). Linking youth with sex in such a context clearly involves political danger. But the desexualisation of LGBT youth by the LGBT movement began long before the 1990s sex panics. As far back as the gay-rights turn of the gay liberation movement in the early 1970s, when community building replaced sexual liberation at the top of the movement’s agenda (Armstrong 2002, 97–110), gay youths were provided with counselling, protection and advocacy because the plight of their disproportionate harassment and victimisation had become evident (Cohen 2005, 75–77). The 1970s movement thus laid the emphasis on sexual identity, as opposed to conduct, and by desexualising its approach to gay youths essentialised them into a reified identity group. Likewise, in the 1980s and 1990s, the LGBT movement sought to serve youth by advocating for the creation of gay-straight alliance in schools (Woog 1995, 268–279; Miceli 2005; Mayberry 2007). On the contrary, a recurrent trait of LGBT youths’ experience of sexuality is that it escapes, rather than follows, fixed identity categories, so that focussing on actual sexual desires, attraction and behaviour among them implies dealing with fluid identity categories and boundaries (Cohen 2002, 77–80). These remarks suggest that the desexualisation of LGBT youth issues is but one side of the LGBT movement’s essentialist leaning, and conversely that its approach to LGBT youth in general, and their sexuality in particular, is an index of how offensive and daring that movement is prepared to be. In the late 1960s, for instance, the emergence of the gay liberation movement was triggered by LGBT youths who had grown impatient with the homophile movement’s conformity (Armstrong 2002, 62–68; D’Emilio 1998, 223–239). In other words, it was a youth-led initiative to celebrate homosexuality as a provocative form of sexual expression that spearheaded the homophile movement’s transformation into the gay lib87


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eration movement (Cohen 2005, 72–74). In the early twenty-first century, on the contrary, LGBT youths’ advocates insist on the dangers they face – suicide, HIV infection, substance use, violence and harassment, dropping out of school – and treat them as a fragile category in need of protection, rather than as a disenfranchised category in need of rights and recognition (Cohen 2005; Lehr 2008). At this point in our discussion it is evident that the questions of LGBT families and LGBT youths expose the movement to attacks that primarily stigmatise homosexuality as a sexual conduct and as a choice. The movement however tends to react by claiming sexual orientation is primarily an identity and it is not a choice, and its current approach to youth issues is a sign of its growing essentialism – whereas it used to be a key aspect of its capacity for innovation. Considering that this state of affairs is at least partially driven by the overall political context, the question remains how the LGBT movement can get out of this political conundrum.

LGBT Youth Sexuality: A Creative Challenge for the LGBT Movement Despite the end of the Bush era and the relative tolerance or progressivism in some states or localities, US national politics is still a hostile political environment for the LGBT movement. After the lost hopes of the early 1990s – when a sympathetic new president failed to keep his strong campaign promise of symbolic integration in the armed forces – it is confronted with a counter-movement which has gained strength from the moral conservative climate of the 1980s, the “culture wars” of the 1990s, and the ideologically driven neo-conservatism of the 2000s. In this sense, LGBT youth in European countries enjoy somewhat better protection, since the more developed European welfare states put them in the care of social services and education systems which are more administrative – hence more secure from populist political morality campaigning than in the United States, where school boards are not only local, but elected. Though it may thus appear as a horrible foil to European countries, the United States should perhaps serve as a cautionary tale, since no country has foolproof indemnity from ignorance and intolerance – as the early-twenty-first century resurgence of bigoted ultra-nationalism in central and eastern, but also western and south-western, Europe shows. The answer to such a challenge lies in collective action, and so the question is how LGBT advocates in the US are to find ways of efficiently opposing their political foes (Miceli 2005, 592). 88


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In arguing for abstinence-only-until-marriage sexual education, Concerned Women for America claims: “We don’t tell children not to do drugs and then give them clean syringes in case they do. We don’t tell them not to smoke and then give them low-tar cigarettes because those are the least harmful. We don’t do those things because they undermine the point we are trying to make.” (CWA 2006) When faced with such arguments, it is politically tempting for advocates for youth in general, and LGBT youth in particular, to resort to disclaimers and – be it tacitly – endorse the view that having sex at a young age jeopardises one’s well-being. An alternative, offensive posture would be not to make excuses for the fact that youths do have sex, and to expose attempts to curb youth sexuality as not simply ineffective, but also wrong. Especially in the case of LGBT youth, abstinence-only education indeed denies rights that are already abridged: whereas LGBT youths’ right to sexual and gender expression is consistently denied, the enforcement of abstinence-only programs further violates their right to free information about safer sex and birth control, a right deriving in particular from the First Amendment to the US Constitution, as well as from the United Nations’ 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child.47 In other words, LGBT youth sexuality issues both represent a symptom of the problem and offer insights into worthwhile solutions. The LGBT movement’s political goal, from this perspective, is to stand for youths’ empowerment, in the sense of enhancing their capacity to negotiate sexual relations and to make informed decisions. In addition to affirming a set of rights, this posture has a strategic justification: it avoids being trapped in a discussion of what is good or bad about youth sexuality, or what is the right time for young people to be sexually active, instead taking the issue onto the political plane of the actual, social contexts in which youths make decisions about sexuality (Waites 2005, 29–30). At stake then is no longer whether, or how much, youths ought to be disciplined, but how to keep them out of unfair treatment and to empower them by “challeng[ing] the unequal social contexts in which [youths’ moral agency] is embedded” (ibid., 30).

47

“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” (US Constitution, Amendment I); “The child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.” (UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 13) 89


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The question then remains to what extent the movement is equipped to address these questions. As a matter of fact the resources do exist in the LGBT social movement field for addressing youths as leaders and agents producing empowerment – instead of clients receiving services (Cohen 2005, 77–78). An organisation that is neither led by, nor specifically meant for, LGBT youth, Advocates for Youth, does stand for their rights, for example by producing sex-positive sexual education material, but also campaign material such as talking points on youth sexuality issues (Advocates for Youth 2006). The organisation thus does not simply engage in lobbying and advocacy on youths’ behalf, it also fosters grassroots campaigning (Azrak et al. 2005). Another example is the National Youth Advocacy Coalition (NYAC), an organisation for and of LGBT youth. It participates in the Coalition for Positive Sexuality (CPS), producing positive material about youth sexuality which presents sex as a fulfilling experience and offers resources for activism as well as for services (CPS 2008). Additionally, many sex-positive, online LGBT youth forums provide peerproduced information, safe space for debate, and resources for grassroots organising (Cohen 2005, 80). These are but a few examples of existing organisations and initiatives which foster empowerment through agency by giving voice to LGBT youth’s experience of sexuality.

Conclusion As in Europe, the recognition of same-sex unions is a high-profile aspect of the LGBT families debate in the United States. But perhaps more than in Europe, the LGBT movement there has made possible the emergence of alternative LGBT “families of choice”, facilitated in part by legal loopholes and political opportunities resulting from the structure of American federalism, which distributes power among three levels of government – federal, state, and local – and sometimes allows local issues to remain below the radar of national politics, thus making room for discreet, yet effective and significant policy innovations. This prominent issue however confronts the LGBT movement with a very fierce opposition, which challenges it to take stock of the connection between issues of LGBT families and of youth sexuality, on which the LGBT movement must consequently take a stance. The more often chosen, longer established strategy however consists in deflecting accusations of trying to “convert” youths to the “homosexual lifestyle” by desexualising the approach to issues concerning LGBT youth, which in turn tends to essentialise them as a fixed identity category. On the contrary it was LGBT 90


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youths’ offensiveness about sexuality and their refusal of essentialism which historically drove the LGBT movement forward in various periods of growth. But unlike Europe, issues regarding youth, sexual orientation, and sexuality are subjected in the United States to the political sanction of public debates and elections where radical moral conservatives have great sway. As a result, the LGBT movement there is subjected to heightened vulnerability. At the same time, however, the politicisation of youth sexuality implies that the issue is up for deliberation in the contentious, democratic political arena, which offers the LGBT social movement a political opportunity to jump into the fray, shed caution, and take the offensive by framing sexuality issues in terms of LGBT youths’ rights. This can be done by empowering LGBT youths to speak on the basis of their experience. As we have suggested, the movement has both organisational and grassroots resources to do so. Moreover, given that moral conservatives’ religious fundamentalist ideology provides their discourse with a built-in advantage for a discussion of moral values, framing the debate on LGBT youth in terms of rights is a reasonable strategy. It allows the LGBT movement to address, rather than dodge, the issue of youth sexuality which is embedded in the LGBT families debate, and hence allows it to be less defensively poised in confronting its opponents. While this political situation is to some extent specific to the American LGBT movement, the conclusions to which it leads may serve as an inspiration for European advocates of LGBT families.

References Newspapers and Magazines Dolan, M. 2010. Judge Strikes down Prop. 8, Allows Gay Marriage in California. Los Angeles Times, 4 August. Schwartz, J. 2009. California High Court Upholds Gay Marriage Ban. New York Times, 26 May. Wypijewski, J. 2009. Through a Lens Starkly. The Nation, 18 May: 6–8.

Primary Sources Advocates for Youth. 2006. Effective Sex Education. Washington, DC: Advocates for Youth, (24 August 2010). 91


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American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). [a] [no date provided]. Freedom to Marry. The Freedom Files – Second Season (30 minutes). New York: American Civil Liberties Union, (24 August 2010). ———. [b] [no date provided]. Gay and Lesbian Rights. The Freedom Files – First Season (30 minutes). New York: American Civil Liberties Union, (24 August 2010). American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Public Interest. [no date provided]. Ten Couples (10 films; 3’09’’ to 4’47’’) (15 September 2010) Azrak, S., N. Kaur Dhingra, and J. Stacks. 2005. My Voice Counts! Campaigns for Youth’s Reproductive and Sexual Health. Advocacy and Organizing Toolkit. Washington, DC: Advocates for Youth, (25 August 2010). Coalition for Positive Sexuality (CPS). 2008. Just Say Yes. Washington, DC: Coalition for Positive Sexuality, (24 August 2010). Concerned Women for America (CWA). 2006. What Your Teacher Didn’t Tell You about Abstinence. Washington, DC: Concerned Women for America, (24 August 2010). Cooper, L., and P. Cates. 2006. Too High a Price: The Case against Restricting Gay Parenting. New York: American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, (24 August 2010). Crouse, J. S. 2005 (16 March). How to Talk to Your Child about Sex: The Sex Pyramid. Beverly LaHaye Institute. Washington, DC: Concerned Women for America, (24 August 2010). Gilliam, J. 2001. Young Women Who Have Sex with Women: Falling through Cracks for Sexual Health Care. Washington, DC: Advocates for Youth, (23 August 2010). Harvey, L. 2006 (2 February). Fairy Tales Don’t Come True. Culture and Family Issues. Washington, DC: Concerned Women for America, (15 October 2009). Knight, R. H. 2005 (17 February). What’s Best for the Children. Culture and Family Issues. Washington, DC: Concerned Women for America, (24 August 2010). ———. 2009 (22 June). ‘Gay Marriage’ Is Not Only Wrong; It’s Socially Destructive. Culture and Family Issues. Washington, DC: Concerned Women for America, 92


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and

S e x ua l i t y

in the

United States

(24 August 2010). National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF). 2006. Civic, Religious, Civil Rights Leaders Join to Declare ‘Marriage Matters’. Washington, DC: National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, (24 August 2010). Woog, D. 1995. School’s Out: The Impact of Gay and Lesbian Issues on America’s Schools. Boston: Alyson.

Academic Sources Agius, S. 2009 (16 October). Different Families, Same Love: Knocking at the Door of the European Institutions. Paper presented at the conference, LGBT Families: The New Minority? Ljubljana, Slovenia: Peace Institute (16–17 October 2009). Armstrong, E. A. 2002. Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950–1994. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Banens, M. 2010. Mariage et partenariat de même sexe en Europe. 20 ans d’expérience. Politiques sociales et familiales 99: 73–84. Biblarz, T. J., and J. Stacey. 2010. How Does the Gender of Parents Matter? Journal of Marriage and Family 72(1): 3–22. Bottomore, T. 1995. Citizenship and Social Class, Forty Years on. In Citizenship and Social Class, ed. T. Bottomore, 53–93. London: Pluto Press. Brookey, R. A. 2002. Reinventing the Male Homosexual: The Rhetoric and Power of the Gay Gene. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cohen, S. 2005. Liberationists, Clients, Activists: Queer Youth Organizing, 1966– 2003. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Issues in Education 2(3): 67–86. D’Emilio, J. 1998. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities. The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States: 1940–1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press [1983]. Fisher, C. M. 2009. Queer Youth Experiences with Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Sexuality Education: ‘I can’t get married so where does that leave me?’ Journal of LGBT Youth 6(1): 61–79. Goffman, E. 1990. Stigma. Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. London: Penguin [1963]. Greslé-Favier, C. 2009. ‘Raising Sexually Pure Kids.’ Sexual Abstinence, Conservative Christians and American Politics. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 93


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Hunter, N. 1995. Marriage, Law and Gender: A Feminist Inquiry. In Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture, eds. L. Duggan and N. Hunter, 107–122. New York: Routledge. Irvine, J. M. 2006. Emotional Scripts of Sex Panics. Sexuality Research and Social Policy 3(3): 82–94. Lehr, V. 2008. Developing Sexual Agency: Rethinking Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Theories for the Twenty-First Century. Sexuality & Culture 12(4): 204–220. Marche, G. 2003. Les �� familles homosexuelles aux Etats-Unis: conformisme ou conflit social? Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines 97: 99–117. ———. 2009. Groupe dominant et minorités sexuelles aux Etats–Unis: quelle définition de la citoyenneté? In Citoyenneté et diversité, eds. �� M. Spensky and J. Cohen, 151–170. Clermont-Ferrand, France: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal. Mayberry, M. 2007. The Story of a Salt Lake City Gay-Straight Alliance: Identity Work and LGBT Youth. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Issues in Education 4(1): 13– 31. Miceli, M. S. 2005. Morality Politics vs. Identity Politics: Framing Processes and Competition among Christian Right and Gay Social Movement Organizations. Sociological Forum 20(4): 589–612. Saewyc, E. M., C. S. Poon, Y. Homma, and C. L. Skay. 2008. Stigma Management? The Links between Enacted Stigma and Teen Pregnancy Trends among Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Students in British Columbia. Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality 17(3): 123–139. Santelli, J., M. A. Ott, M. Lyon, J. Rogers, and D. Summers. 2006. Abstinence-Only Education Policies and Programs: A Position Paper of the Society for Adolescent Medicine. Journal of Adolescent Health 38: 72–81. Stacey, J. and T. J. Biblarz. 2001. (How) Does the Sexual Orientation of Parents Matter? American Sociological Review 66(2): 159–183. Waites, M. 2005. The Age of Consent: Young People, Sexuality and Citizenship, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Weston, K. 1991. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1993. Parenting in the Age of AIDS. In Sisters, Sexperts, Queers: Beyond the Lesbian Nation, ed. A. Stein, 156–186. New York: Penguin. Whisman, V. 1996. Queer by Choice: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Politics of Identity. New York: Routledge.

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Homoparentality in Italy: Myth of Stigmatisation D a n i el a D a n n a

This article addresses a widespread argument about “homoparental families” in public discussions in Italy, according to which homosexuals should not be allowed to have children, not just because it is plainly immoral, but also because their offsprings will be subjected to stigmatisation. The argument “for the good of the children” is captious: a possible discrimination due to the parents’ sexual orientation (a diversity comparable to being non-white, fat, near-sighted or gender-nonconforming) is used to motivate further discrimination. The same argumentation has found its way also into Italian law; since 2004 it prohibits assisted insemination outside of cohabiting heterosexual couples (l. 40/2004 on artificial procreation). The law was adopted in a social environment with growingly positive attitudes towards open expressions of homosexuality – which is an important change in comparison to the pre-LGBT movement years before the eighties.

Legal issues From the nineties onwards the surveys in Italy show an oscillating trend regarding the approval of homosexual marriage and a declining one regarding the right of same-sex couples to adopt children. Unfortunately there are no older data available, which would enable long-term comparison of attitudes, and that is because issues such as gay and lesbian families and same-sex marriage were absolutely unthinkable before the contemporary LGBT movement. In the following tables results from various research measuring attitudes towards different aspects of the legal recognition of same-sex couples and families are presented and, if available, compared with the average result for EU countries. Italy is constantly under the European mean, and has a rather mixed trend in acceptance of same-sex marriage and other forms of legal recognition for same-sex couples, although ultimately the acceptance is growing, except for the right of same-sex cou95


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ples to adopt, which is not even on the agenda of the LGBT movement in Italy. At first the support for such adoptions was growing and it is now declining. Table 1: Support 2009).

for the legal recognition of same-sex partnerships in Italy

(1993–

Item

Percent in favour

Source and year

Marriage for persons of the same sex

47% (57% EU-15)

Gallup 1993(1)

Resolution of E.U. Parliament asking for marriage or an analogous form for persons of the same sex

37%

Doxa 1994(2)

Civil marriage for same-sex partners

51.6%

Eurispes 2003(3)

Homosexual marriage (total)

31.6%

Demos-Eurisko 2004(4)

Homosexual marriage (18 to 24 years)

40.2%

Demos-Eurisko 2004

Homosexual marriage (55 to 64 years)

17%

Demos-Eurisko 2004

Marriage for persons of the same sex

37%

Ipsos 2005 (July)(5)

Registered unions for same-sex partners

31%

Marriage for same-sex partners

29%

Marriage for same-sex partners

31% (44% EU-25)

Eurobarometer 2006

Any form of recognition of same-sex partners

58.9%

Eurispes 2009(7)

Civil marriage for same-sex partners

40.4%

Eurispes 2009

Eurisko 2005(6) (September) Eurisko 2005 (September)

Source: (1) See (8 August 2011). (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)

See (8 August 2011). See (8 August 2011). See (8 August 2011). See (8 August 2011). See (8 August 2011). See (8 August 2011).

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Table 2: Social 2009).

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support for the right of same-sex partners to adopt jointly

(1993–

Item

Percent in favour

Source and year

Adoption for same-sex partners

25% (42% EU-15)

Gallup 1993

37%

Doxa 1994

23%

Doxa 1994


36.6%

Eurispes 2003


21.2%

Demos-Eurisko 2004


26%

Ipsos 2005 (July)


24% (35% EU-25)

Eurobarometer 2006


19%

Eurispes 2009

Adoption for same-sex partners (female respondents) Adoption for same-sex partners (male respondents)

The Gallup poll about gay marriage and adoption by homosexuals in 2003 was surprisingly positive, given that the question of gay marriage was not on the political floor at that time, not in Italy nor anywhere else in Europe, except for the Netherlands and Belgium, where same-sex marriage was introduced in 2001 and 2003 respectively. In other European countries where same-sex partnerships were recognised by that time, gays and lesbians were not granted the same rights as heterosexual married couples. Furthermore the institution was not called “marriage”. The positive response in 2003 was thus most probably related primarily to the heated debate in the United States. In this survey, women turned out to be more in favour of the rights of homosexuals than men, and so were the more educated, the leftists and the young in comparison with the opposite categories. The positive result was replicated in the poll conducted by the institute Eurispes in 2003 (N=2000), when the percent in favour of marriage and adoption grew to an absolute majority. It confirmed the trend of growing acceptance of homosexuality among the young traced by the surveys of the Iard institute (Buzzi, Cavalli and De Lillo 2002, 2007).

See (8 August 2011). 97


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Social acceptance A study on moral attitudes towards homosexuality, conducted among 4500 Italians aged 18–74 by the Catholic University in Milan (Cesareo 1995), showed these results: Table 3: Answers

to the question:

“We

will present you a series of behaviours that

some people consider morally unacceptable.

How

much do you condemn them?”

(Source: Cesareo 1995, 314–316) 4

To have homosexual experiences

Degree of condemnation (%) None or little Fairly Much

Mean 38.2 14.8 46.9

Female 40.8 13.9 45.3

Male 35.6 15.8 48.6

The Iard study on (15–24 years old) youth has gathered data from 1983 to 2007 in six waves, with quota samples. The questions were threefold: if homosexual experiences were thought to be criticised by society, if the respondent criticises them, and if they could think of having a homosexual experience themselves. The acceptance of homosexual relations by the youth reached the lowest point in the first half of the nineties, probably due to the Aids crisis, and it now has a positive trend, with the highest level of acceptance expressed in 2007 though with an older sample (15–34 year old). The most recent Iard study was actually conducted in 2007 with a sample not comparable with the others. The results showed that 46% of the respondents found homosexuality morally admissible, and nearly 12% could think of having such an experience themselves (Buzzi, Cavalli and De Lillo 2007). Table 4: Positive 2002)

answers by

15–24

years old.

(Source: Buzzi, Cavalli

and

De Lillo

1983

1987

1992

1996

2000

88.2%

91.6%

91.5%

89.9%

82.7%

36.7%

30.9%

40.8%

49.5%

47.3%

10.8%

5.2%

4.4%

7.4%

9.5%

Do you think homosexual experiences are criticised by society? Do you criticise homosexual experiences? Could you think of having a homosexual experience?

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Previous results: minority stress Despite of changes in the social environment, stigmatisation and discrimination towards children of openly homosexual couples is one of the most quoted arguments in public discourses in Italy about families called “homoparental”. In fact there is a declining trend in support for samesex adoptions, which remain illegal in Italy. Existing homoparental families are constituted by singles and couples where one person is a biological parent of the child. These children were often born in a previous heterosexual union. The politicians and some “experts”, cited by media, claimed that these families are isolated and emarginated from society, and children in a “homoparental” family suffer, so much so that legislators have both the obligation to prevent the establishment of new such families and the right not to recognise the existing ones (for a detailed discussion on media representations of homoparentality see Trappolin 2009). There are some critical points showed by previous research about the relationships of homoparental families with their social environment. These families were exposed to stress, which was also found at workplace and is associated with one’s disclosure of sexual orientation and problems with the extended families (Hequembourg and Farrell 1999), though, on the other hand, in the Netherlands Bos et al. (2004a) did not find different use of formal and informal social support in child rearing among two groups of lesbian-planned families and heterosexual families. Anderssen et al. (2002) in a review of nine studies, conducted between 1978 and 2000 on outcomes for children having lesbian or gay parents, concluded that children of lesbian mothers show low levels of stigmatisation and are generally not more stigmatised than other children, even if children fear they could be, and act in order to prevent teasing. The review includes the comparative study by Golombok et al. (1983) and its follow up (Tasker and Golombok 1997), where some difference was assessed: male offsprings of lesbian mothers were teased more often than offsprings of heterosexuals, with the motive of being gay themselves. A review of 18 research studies on the health and other outcomes for children born through assisted reproduction into various types of families concluded that: “Despite the significant level of bullying, children in lesbian and gay families develop effective peer relationships. It is also surprising that these children have the same levels of emotional functioning as other children and appear to be in some way resisting the 99


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common negative mental health consequences of being bullied and discriminated against. One possible explanation for this level of resilience is that the bullying is not directly about the children’s own identity, but rather about their parents’ identity. […] A more global explanation is that lesbian and gay parents are very effectively assisting their children to deal with bullying at school” (McNair 2004, 63). A more recent study showed equal levels of peer stigmatisation and victimisation in matching groups of 18 children of lesbian and heterosexual couples (not belonging to ethnic minorities) (Rivers et al. 2007). The critical points found in previous research can be conceptualised as deriving from minority stress (Meyer 1995). In sociological and psychological literature (Bos et al. 2004b) minority stress is defined with these dimensions: (1) rejection, social isolation; (2) stigmatisation; (3) internalised homophobia (or racism, anti-Semitism). In this article I will present qualitative results about the first two, the social dimensions of the minority stress: (1) rejection and social isolation and (2) stigmatisation. I will put aside the internalised homophobia dimension, which can be more properly explored by psychological research tools. Moreover, the social dimensions are the test variables for the amount of the minority stress which can be allocated to internalised homophobia. In a study of 256 gay and lesbian families in the US, for example, Johnson and O’Connor (2001) found that lesbians and gays becoming parents expect more negative reactions (even in a very high measure) from families of origin and employers than what effectively happens when they become parents.

Composition of the sample In our research the sample consists of 25 homosexuals, 23 women and 2 men living in a total of 17 families in Central-Northern Italy. They were interviewed with semi-structured interviews. All the respondents are ethnic Italian and were born in Italy.

In the research interviews there were n�� o specific questions asked about the self-definition of respondents’ identity. I use the term “homosexual” to include both, gay men and lesbian women.

Just one woman lived abroad, but was born in Central Italy.

Excerpts from interviews, thematically presented, can be read in Italian on www.danieladanna.it, under the title Fonti della ricerca sulle famiglie omogenitoriali, edited by Daniela Danna. 100


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The sample is a self-selected sample of people answering to an ad for a research on the experiences of “homoparental” families with the external world. The ad was published in a gay magazine in 2006, it appeared on various web sites and was distributed in mailing lists. In the interviews the respondents were asked about their experiences and the relationship with their families of origin, with their neighbours, their friends, with the health system, schools, and workplace. Women and men, who replied to the ad, were in a relationship with a person of the same sex at the time of the interviewing (autumn 2006) or they had such a relationship before they became single. Thus the composition of the families, included in the research, varied very much. Within the sample there are singles and people who have a same-sex relationship, ranging from “just started” to ten years of living together. Some couples wanted their own children, some women raised children on their own, or decided to separate from the biological father of their children at different ages. The age range goes from the very early stage of pregnancy to the child’s 14th year. Most children of the lesbian mothers interviewed have a known father. Six families had children that were born in a previous marriage, among which there is the gay couple interviewed, with a daughter growing up with the father’s partner as the “third parent”. Nine families have children born to a lesbian couple, and three of them have since separated, among which are the mothers of a child who had been adopted abroad by her foreign partner. A child has been conceived in a heterosexual union but has grown up with the mother and her partner (in this case the father is the “third parent”), and another child has grown up without the full participation in parenting by the mother’s partner. The women with planned families are younger and more urban than those with reconstructed families. We distinguish between “reconstructed families”, where the different-sex parents separated and one of them entered into a same-sex family, and “planned families”, where the mother(s) were in a lesbian relationship. The geographic composition of the sample was the following: four families lived in big cities (in Rome or Milan); three in middle-sized cities, seven in small towns, two in the countryside, and one abroad. In previous research, a decade ago, I interviewed 52 lesbian mothers from all over Italy (Danna 1998). The sample was composed in a very different way. Women were older, in many cases born in the South and having migrated to the North of Italy. Nearly all women decided to be in a relationship with another woman after having had children within a het101


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erosexual union, while in the present research this group has become a minority. The time of “arrival” into a lesbian relationship has shortened compared to ten years ago. Nowadays women living even in small places, or growing up and living in a very traditionalist environment, are able to discover their homosexuality in the context of a more positive light due to mass media reporting on homosexuality and due to the internet. The latter gives the possibility of immediate contact with other homosexuals, as Immacolata (45) pointed out: “The thing [homosexuality] did not have the terrible aspect that my environment and culture had instilled me, so I had the possibility of trying to make contacts with people who could share this kind of experience.” The age of children living with these families varied from 9 months to 18 years, with a mean age of about 7 years. Children born into a lesbian relationship were much younger than those born in a previous heterosexual relationship, and their age varied between 9 months and 7 years. There has been one formal interview and some informal exchanges of opinions with the children themselves. In the interviews we touched upon issues such as the relationship of each parent with their families of origin, neighbors, medical staff, schools, work and friends. We have also discussed how the parents talk to their children about homosexuality, and if the children are aware that their parents are homosexual. According to previous (foreign) research findings lesbian mothers feel more at ease than heterosexual mothers to talk with their children about sex and are more tolerant towards manifestations of their children’s sexual orientation, whatever it be (Tasker, Golombok 1997; Golombok 2000). As the number of gay fathers in the sample is very small no gender comparison is possible. The small number of gay fathers reflects the low number of fathers that ask for shared or exclusive custody. The two men interviewed were a couple, one had shared custody of his daughter. In most thematic sections I have not analysed the results according to the different ways of having become a parent: self-insemination, medically assisted insemination, previous marriages, adoption. The reason for this is that these aspects are not particularly important for the object of this study, which explores stigmatisation and discrimination.

All the names of the respondents are changed. 102


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Results Self-presentation strategies Homosexuals belong to a minority that is not always immediately visible and recognisable. The possibility of “passing” as a heterosexual is always open: the decision of becoming visible as a gay or a lesbian (parent) is taken in very conscious way, and in many situations invisibility can be judged as a better strategy, even for women who are otherwise known as lesbians. It is easy to accept the presumption of heterosexuality that people have. Do the respondents introduce their family in its real composition, as lesbian and gay parents, especially in the reconstructed families where the same-sex partner is a “third parent”? Does a true self-presentation happen in every circumstance? Answers to these questions are important in order to examine the reactions of various environments to the diversity of the homoparental families. The research showed that the distinction between the nine “planned families” and the six “reconstructed families” (including the family with the gay fathers) is important as it influences the strategies of self-presentation. Furthermore this distinction also reflects the age differences and the urban/rural differences in the place of birth. Only very few respondents never talk about their homosexuality to anyone. However, the research showed that the mothers and their partners in reconstructed families are more reticent in introducing their family as “homoparental”. In planned families the visibility is bigger, especially with the extended family and at the workplace. In casual social interactions, both groups do not generally care about presenting their true family composition, and do not correct the “heterosexuality presumption”. The effectiveness of this strategy is nevertheless doubted by a couple of new mothers who still practice it, but intend to come out more frequently. They do not want their kids to have a “double life”: “Now that we have kids we must be more courageous” (Filippa, 37). But they do not plan to be out in every circumstance: “There are some people with whom I am not sure that this kind of communication could be helpful, so I am embarrassed, torn between the feeling that I need to come out and the need to protect my kids” (Marta, 44). Most respondents expressed a strong rejection of a self-presentation as “lesbica” (lesbian): “I certainly do not introduce myself like: ‘Good

Of course, multiple diversities are possible, but they were not present in my sample. 103


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morning, I am a lesbian.’” (Assunta, 37); “I am not going around putting it on a flag, but I do not hide it either” (Veronica, 42). On the other hand, they reported talking with ease about the relationship with their partner. The solution they have employed was not to use the word “lesbica”, which reflects a social stigma (though it is also used in the lesbian community), but rather to correct the presumption of heterosexuality by saying “la mia compagna” (“my partner”, feminine in Italian): “It always comes naturally, when you speak you say la mia compagna instead of il mio compagno, there is no further need to declare it” (Gina, 40). Others talked about some kind of a training that one needs in order to get used to presenting the same-sex relationship as something natural. The training is needed in order to unlearn the internalised homophobia. “What I present as natural, is accepted as such also by the others” (Renzo, 36).

Reactions to coming out Positive reactions to coming out were prevalent. Respondents are conscious that people can show a façade of social convenience, under which they do not truly accept homoparental families: Probably there is an answer which is collective, cultural, ideological, then there is an answer based on the personal relationship, which is different. I would not be surprised if the same people who attend our centre, our friends, if asked by a journalist about what they think about homosexual families, would doubt our capacity to be good parents, or they would say that this is not a good thing. Because the levels are different: on one level there is the relationship, the contact, and the certainty that this person is a friend, and you know that she is behaving well. This is something different from the abstract ‘homosexual family’ (Angelica, 38).

This diffused façade of social acceptance is nevertheless enough to guarantee a quiet life: no respondents reported serious episodes of discrimination. The worst thing reported in our research was one case of aggression (which will be discussed in detail later) and a couple of incidents which included mocking by peers during early adolescence: “He was targeted by his cousins because the story of the mother together with another woman had come out, and he was mocked” (Immacolata, 45). Discomfort was expressed about two children: a boy in primary school is at unease because he does not know his father, and a teenage girl (personally interviewed) felt isolated because she could not freely talk about her family with her peers, judging them too prejudiced and aggressive against all forms of diversity. 104


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What is homosexuality? Nearly all the respondents talked about homosexuality to their children, but not everyone talked about homophobia, probably since it is difficult to talk about dangers and bad experiences. Contrary to expectations, all the respondents – not only those with a longer history of same-sex relationships – felt at ease with answering the questions about homosexuality that children sooner or later ask in different forms, such as: what is the meaning of the word that they have heard for the first time (lesbian, gay, homosexual …), why are there gender-non-conforming people (for example, the singer Elton John dressing as a woman), whether only a man and a woman can get married or two women or two men can get married, too, and so on. Nearly all respondents reported having presented homosexuality in a positive light. Especially in the reconstructed families, where children are older, the positive consideration of homosexuality sometimes clashed with the prejudice, expressed by, for example, the separated father. In the interviews the respondents expressed a strongly felt dilemma how to convey to children the reality of homophobia: We were aware that the only way to help her was to show her our homosexuality in a positive way. Sooner or later, there will be somebody who’ll call her the daughter of a rotto in culo [an offensive Italian term for gay man], and we wanted to come to that moment knowing that she would have all the elements to face the thing. We did not say anything to her, because to talk about it was to mark it as an abnormality. We lived the thing in front of her without hiding, and leaving her the time to absorb it (Carmelo, 36).

In the case of a woman having a “long coming out” in the place where she lived as a heterosexual married woman, the dilemma was especially difficult, as it was connected with what the couple would say or hide to the outside world: “How can my son introduce my partner to the outside world, if I don’t do it? He lives not really like a double life … but he has two realities” (Immacolata, 45). Some of these children became defenders of homosexuality, fighters against homophobia: three of them defended schoolmates from accusations of being effeminate, and six had a positive stance towards homosexuals. Only one boy, growing up with two women and recognised by the father when he was three years old, had a negative stance about homosexuality at the time of the interview (10 years old, more details later). In five families children were too small to have a proper judgment on the question. 105


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The family of origin The respondents reported a great variety of experiences – from very problematic to idyllic – about their relationship with the family of origin. However this issue is neither particularly meaningful nor important, since the respondents do not depend on the family of origin any longer, and in cases of conflicts a certain modus vivendi can be established over time. Relationships with the family of origin can be modified by births of grandchildren/nephews both in a positive and in a negative way. The positive stories were prevalent: the grandfathers and grandmothers helped out with the children, who also spent holidays and other memorable moments with their grandparents. Eight families had a good relationship with their families of origin: the parents of the mothers recognised the family as such. Three families were in a somewhat good relationship with them; in one case the relationship was bad, and the birth of a child had worsened it; in three cases the respondents could not answer the question (in one the parents had passed away). In two cases relationships were different depending on the particular member of the family of origin; in one case the relationship improved with the birth of a child.

The neighbours The reported reactions from neighbours were positive or indifferent. As written above, the strategies of self-presentation varied: many left it to the imagination and intelligence of their neighbours to figure out that they are lesbians with children. The neighbours’ children are generally positively impressed by seeing a family of two mothers. Also heterosexual mothers befriended with the respondents expressed positive judgments, noticing the advantages of a situation where two women share the care work: “They envy us, and they tell us: ‘My husband, that coglione [Italian derogatory word for a stupid person], is always stuck to the sofa’” (Giannina, 50); “We are receiving all the vents of the heterosexual mothers” (Elena, 48). Interestingly enough the most frequently reported atmosphere in small villages was a welcoming one, despite the presumption that people in rural areas hold more negative attitudes towards homosexuals than in the anonymity of big cities: The three of us, we always went out and many times we took our daughters by the hand. The province can give you these unexpected gifts … I am convinced that it is like 106


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that because these small centres have a centuries-long habit of self-protection, and they encompass everything that comes from the outside (Carmelo, 36).

The sense of common belonging to the local dimension, the reciprocal acknowledgement among inhabitants of the same small place, often with family ties, seems stronger than homophobia. Other interviewed women, living in a working class neighborhood of a big town, had a painful notion of their diversity, and how dangerous it was to express it: Yes, you live in freedom, but some times you are very restrained, there are many consequences, you cannot be free as you like. We are free at home, even in front of him [the son] if we want to hug, we do not hide (respecting our intimacy). At the campsite [which was attended by members of the extended family and neighbours] I must always pay attention to how I position myself: not to close to her… I do not feel free (Nicoletta, 30).

On the other hand, a working class neighborhood of another big city positively surprised one of the women interviewed, who was also one of the very first to have made recourse to artificial insemination: I remember how anxious I was going out of our apartment the day when the belly began to show. We lived in a housing project with 120 apartments and were befriended with one or two people, and did not get along very well with the others, and nobody knew it, maybe just this friend of ours. I was in anguish about what would happen, because it was not just a thing between us anymore, it was becoming a social thing, and I must say that everything went very well, they welcomed us (Carola, 39).

Doctors and other medical personnel Examining the relationships in this area is more pertinent to couples who decided to have kids together. The response of medical staff to the self-presentation of two mothers has always been positive. Apart from the refusal of a gynecologist to follow the pregnancy of a couple obtained with artificial insemination abroad, all the other gynecologists and nurses, obstetricians, pediatricians that the respondents have professionally met, in most cases did not raise an eyebrow at the self-presentation of the two mothers. One nurse was sincerely sorry for not being able to put both names on the birth certificate of the child. Among families with children born into the lesbian couple, nearly all were treated as couples, with the partner of the woman in labour reportedly treated the same way as fathers would be – except from one episode, which occurred also due to the fact that the same-sex relationship had 107


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not been presented to the medical staff: “I was hurt by the fact that the obstetricians came out with the twins, and asked: ‘Who is the father? We are giving them to the father’, and I told them ‘You can give them to me’. ‘No.’ And they kept them, they only showed them to all the members of the family” (Marta, 37).

Psychologists Maybe it is just a coincidence, but the only two occasions in the interviews when meetings with psychologists were mentioned were both problematic. The children involved were from two different families – both were teenagers born into previous marriage. A school psychologist was contacted by a 16 year old girl herself for a problem not related to her family situation: “Among all the things he asked me, there was the composition of my family, and I saw he was struck. After an hour of counselling he said that my family was sick, that I was a monster, no surprise I was in an existential crisis” (Teresa, 18). The same psychologist also talked in this girl’s class about the supposed bad sides of homoparental families. In another case, a girl, who is, according to her parents, somewhat shy, was labelled as problematic, just at the time when the school psychologist and teachers were informed about her family situation.

Schools The distinction between the reconstructed and planned families turned out to be very meaningful in the context of schools: all the co-mothers in planned families have presented themselves as members of homoparental families, starting with day nursery and at all other levels of schooling attended by their children – except for one woman who presents herself in public as a friend of the mother, with whom she has been raising up a son since he was born (but the child was conceived in a previous heterosexual union). In contrast, none of the women from the reconstructed families presented themselves as members of homoparental families to the school authorities. Lesbian mothers in planned families want to “enlighten” the teachers, whom they do not expect to have previous experience with this kind of situation: “It is important that in the moment when my child says something like ‘My friend has two mothers’, the teacher doesn’t get embarrassed. He knows perfectly well that he is right, he knows many children with two mothers” (Mimma, 37). 108


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Reactions were not bad in this area either, even if the good intentions of the teachers to include in their teaching different family situations, clashed with the school programmes of the Ministry of Education, presenting “the family” in a very normative way: there are always two parents, male and female, four grandparents, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters – who can or cannot be present in the daily experiences of the children.

Working places At work, the great majority of mothers and fathers were open on the subject of their family situation. The majority of people at work knew about their same-sex relationship and about their children, except for the three cases where not everybody at work knew it, and five cases where no colleague knew about it. Among these are two women who have spent together twenty years of parenting, and two who have shared four years of parenting. In the context of workplace those who have talked about their homosexuality did not encounter negative reactions: “I told my colleagues: ‘Look, I am like that’. One confessed to me that he suspected it” (Grazia, 47). Sometimes the issue was not openly talked about: “I knew that everyone knew, but nobody ever asked. It is a situation that I am a bit sorry about, you dodge somehow. You do not ask, I do not tell. They knew, when I had a partner they talked in the plural voi [“you”, having no gender], and after the kid was born, even more so” (Mimma, 37). The condition of work precariousness pushes towards reticence: In my working place, they do not know it. I have a temporary contract, I change workplace often. I tend to be open, I talk about this other person in my life. It is the person I am living with, she is my partner for 10 years. You talk, but you limit yourself. (Marta, 44)

Friends People we befriend are generally supportive of our choices. Sometimes in the friends’ group subtly discriminatory stances can be discovered: Nearly always we have had positive stuff [reactions], but I am very cautious, there are many levels where you can say that you are more or less satisfied. This couple of our friends, husband and wife, both very kind, they adore us, love us, defend us and all, told us that the fact that we had a daughter did not give them any problem, absolutely zero, if we just did not make her become a lesbian!” (Carmelo, 36) 109


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Even on the gay and lesbian scene, it must not be taken for granted that the choice to become parents would be met favourably: Lesbians are getting used to parenthood. Ten years ago if you got into a lesbian bar with kids, they’d take a hard look. (Simona, 41) Sometimes I find more openness in some heterosexual couples than in homosexuals. I don’t know, sometimes there is an interior fear… I bring my experience of suffering and I think that you are carrying the same thing and that you’ll pass it on… (Renzo, 36) We are still stuck with objections of this kind ‘if the son of two lesbians must learn how to shave himself, how can he learn?’. Sometimes I have to go back to the abc with gay people, not with heterosexuals. (Carmelo, 36)

Discrimination of children Only for a few children the parents reported problems, which included the sense of being different for not having a father, being mocked by peers about the family situation, and the sense of isolation for not being able to openly talk about their family (the latter occurred in the context of a reconstructed family). The serious discriminatory episode that we have briefly mentioned earlier, was a physical attack on the son of a separated mother. However, the child soon got over this violent episode. Moreover, he did not surrender to the attack, as the kid himself proudly affirmed. His mother recalls: Many people whom I thought to be my friends turned away [when I got separated from my husband]. Well, you expect it for yourself, you are prepared. But my son, too, has been pointed at by cousins, mocked because people knew the story of the mother together with another woman. This story did not come out at school, nor here where he lives. It came out in a campsite where we had been going for years when I was together with his father. In this campsite there are members of my ex-husband’s family, and when the story came out, they thought of telling it to most people on the campsite, not thinking about possible consequences for him. I did not worry about me, because if somebody came to say: ‘You left your husband because you are a lesbian’ I would have answered that this is my private life and, moreover, it is true. The bad consequences came for him, and he still has some, because the first year this story came out, some children who had learnt from their parents that his mother was a lesbian put him in a circle and threw stones at him, calling him names, telling him ‘son of a lesbian’. I saw him coming back to the camper all dirty and crying. ‘What did you do?’, and he told me about these ‘friends’ who insulted him. I scolded those kids: don’t you ever dare anymore! (I just talked with the kids, not with the parents.) Then I told him: ‘We do as you please. If you don’t want, we do not come here anymore’, even if I thought that it was like fleeing. But I would have done it for him. 110


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Unexpectedly he told me: ‘I want to stay, I want to stay on’. He did not have many friends there, he thought that he did not want to run away. This has happened 2-3 years ago, and with all this he keeps on going to the campsite and some people are still telling him… and he answers: ‘Mind your own business, think about your mother and your father, maybe he is a cuckold’. He wanted to come back. This surprised me because you expect that a kid would go away, that he would choose the easy path, but he decided to stay. […] This year someone attacked him again. I think it is not as easy as living on a happy island … (Immacolata, 45).

The other very problematic case that emerged from the interviews is the negative stance towards homosexuality of a 10-year-old child. This is how his biological mother describes the problem: It has come out that [he believes] we are not together, and if we were this would disturb him. I never told him this openly, but I never denied it either, I left open the possibility of things being in this way, and told him that, if it were so, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. Yes, I did talk to him about homosexuality, but he evades the issue. He says: ‘You are married with dad’ ‘No, I have never been married to your dad, I was with Gigliola. I love Gigliola, I told you already’. And at this point, he shuts up (Lucia, 40).

In general, as well as in defining parenting roles, reconstructed families encounter more problems than planned families. In reconstructed families the partner of the mother or father acts as a ”third parent”, and tends to hide her/his parenting role – in this case probably conveying a negative judgment of homosexuality onto the child. Another important problem parents encounter is how to explain clearly what homophobia is, in order to prepare the child for eventual negative reactions. Sometimes this preparation is not made, and the risk is an emotive impact which is seriously negative at the moment of discovering that the same relationship which at home is lived as normal and laden with positive values, can be a reason for mocking in the outside world.

Conclusion According to the experiences of parents surveyed in our research the argument that children coming from homoparental families, and the homoparental families themselves, suffer stigmatisation everyday proves to be a myth. Even the lighter concept of discrimination does not really seem to apply to the everyday life of homoparental families in terms of social interactions. The legal framework for them remains nevertheless nonexistent: in Italy there is still no possibility for legal recognition of two 111


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mothers or fathers, as necessary as it is for the well-being of the children – but the discrimination is institutional, not social, because in daily life they do get recognised and respected. Taken into account the different degree of openness about being homosexual, the environment in which the respondents live has shown itself to be either favourable or indifferent to their choices, both in rural and urban contexts. This confirms the earlier research findings by Danna (1998) about the climate of tolerance for lesbians with children. Since procreation is seen as normal in heterosexual environments, it probably helps homoparental families in building social ties. In fact many respondents felt the homosexual environment, where procreation is not normal, to be less supportive than the heterosexual (consistent with findings of Hare 1994, Gartrell et al. 1999). The most problematic areas of social interaction of the homoparental families interviewed were the relationship with psychologists working in schools and those with peers, mainly in the teenage years. However, given the very low number (two) of such cases in our sample this can only be a provisional conclusion. This is consistent with research in other countries (see Speziale and Gopalakrishna 2004 for mental health professionals, and, among others, Ray and Gregory 2001, Clarke et al. 2004 for peer relationships), showing also the resilience of these children, who exhibit no more internalising and externalising behavioural problems than children of heterosexual couples (Flaks et al. 1995, Wainright and Patterson 2006), though some studies report lower self-esteem (Gershon et al.1999) and some do not (see Jansen in this volume). In relation to minority stress my qualitative data correspond with the low level of minority stress measured with quantitative research by Bos, van Balen and van den Boom in the Netherlands. They have interviewed a sample of one hundred lesbian families and one hundred heterosexual families, both groups having had children with artificial insemination. The exploration of the Dutch researchers of minority stress in lesbian families gave the following results: The lesbian mothers in this sample generally reported low levels of rejection, perceived stigma, and internalized homophobia. In spite of the low levels of minority stress, higher levels of rejection were, as expected, associated with more sense of parental stress and more sense to justify the quality of the parent–child relationship. Having negative assumptions about straight people’s attitudes toward homosexuality, and having higher levels of internalized homophobia, were also associated with more parental justification. Levels of rejection were associated with more emotional/behavioural problems in children (Bos et al. 2004b, 10). 112


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In the present study, conducted with qualitative methods, I could not establish precise correlations, but the experiences gathered bring us to the analogous conclusion that the level of minority stress, as defined only by the social variables of rejection/social isolation and stigmatisation (taking aside the psychological variable of internalised homophobia) is low. This result allows us to define the stigmatisation of homoparental families as a social “myth”. In the respondents’ experience there is a high level of acceptance of diversity from those people who have personal acquaintance with gays and lesbians. We must bear in mind though, that not all the respondents lived in a situation of complete openness about their homoparental family, but mostly they selected the people in whom to confide about their family situation, generally avoiding to do so in casual social contacts, taking into account the Italian cultural climate tinged with homophobia.

References Anderssen, N., C. Amilie, and E. A. Ytteroy. 2002. Outcomes for children with lesbian or gay parents: A review of studies from 1978–2000. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 43(4): 335–351. Bos, H. M. W., F. van Balen, and D. C. van den Boom. 2004a. Experience of parenthood, couple relationship, social support, and child-rearing goals in planned lesbian mother families. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 45(4): 755–764. ———. 2004b. Minority stress, experience of parenthood and child adjustment in lesbian families. Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology 22(4): 1–14. Buzzi, C., A. Cavalli, and A. de Lillo, eds. 2002. Giovani del nuovo secolo. Quinto rapporto IARD sulla condizione giovanile in Italia. Bologna: Il Mulino. ———. 2007. Rapporto giovani. Sesta indagine dell’Istituto IARD sulla condizione giovanile in Italia. Bologna: Il Mulino. Cesareo, V. 1995. La religiosità degli italiani. Bologna: Il Mulino. Clarke, V., C. Kitzinger, and J. Potter. 2004. Kids Are Just Cruel Anyway: Lesbian and Gay Parents’ Talk about Homophobic Bullying. British Journal of Social Psychology 43(4): 531–550. Danna, D. 1998. Io ho una bella figlia: Le madri lesbiche raccontano. Forlì: Zoe. Eurobarometer 66. 2006. Public Opinion in The European Union. (29 October 2011). 113


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Flaks, D. K., I. Ficher, F. Masterpasqua, and G. Joseph. 1995. Lesbians choosing motherhood: A comparative study of lesbian and heterosexual parents and their children. Developmental Psychology 31(1):104–114. Gallup. 2003. Homosexual marriages and child adoption by homosexual couples: Is the public ready? Survey on homosexuality across Europe. (29 October 2011). Gartrell, N., A. Banks, J. Hamilton, N. Reed, H. Bishop, and C. Rodas. 1999. The national lesbian family study: 2. Interviews with mothers of toddlers. American Journal of American Orthopsychiatric Association 69(3): 362–369. Gershon, T. D., J. M. Tschann, and J. M. Jemerin. 1999. Stigmatization, self-esteem, and coping among adolescent children of lesbian mothers. Journal of Adolescent Health 24(6): 437–445. Golombok, S., A. Spencer, and M. Rutter. 1983. Children in lesbian and single-parent households: Psychosexual and psychiatric appraisal. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 24(4): 551–572. Golombok, S. 2000. Parenting: What really counts? London: Routledge. Graglia, M. 2002. Le rappresentazioni dell’identità gay e lesbica negli psicoterapeuti. Rivista di Sessuologia 26(1–2): 145–154. Hare, J. 1994. Concerns and issues faced by families headed by lesbian couples. Families in Society. The Journal of Contemporary Human Services 75(1): 27– 35. Hequembourg, A. L., and M. P. Farrell. 1999. Lesbian motherhood: Negotiating marginal-mainstream identities. Gender & Society 13(4): 540–557. Johnson, S. M., and E. O’Connor. 2001. The National Gay and Lesbian Family Study. APA Workshop 2: Lesbian and Gay Parents. (15 September 2011). McNair, R. 2004. Outcomes for children born of A.R.T. in a diverse range of families. Melbourne: Victorian Law Reforms Commission. (30 November 2010). Meyer, I. H. 1995. Minority stress and mental health in gay men. Journal of health and social behaviour. 36(1): 38–56. (30 November 2010). Patterson, C. J. 1995. Summary of research findings. (20 September 2010). Ray, V., and R. Gregory. 2001. School experiences of the children of lesbian and gay parents. Family matters. (59): 28–34. 114


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Rivers, I., V. P. Poteat, and N. Noret. 2007. Victimization, social support, and psychosocial functioning among children of same-sex and opposite-sex couples in the United Kingdom. (30 November 2011). Speziale, B. and V. Gopalakrishna. 2004. Social support and functioning of nuclear families headed by lesbian couples. Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work 19(2): 174–184. Tasker F. L., and S. Golombok. 1997. Growing Up in a Lesbian Family. London: Guilford Press. Trappolin, L. 2009. Quanto e come si parla oggi di omogenitorialità in Italia? In Crescere in famiglie omogenitoriali, eds. C. Cavina and D. Danna, 117–128. Milano: Franco Angeli. Wainright, J. L., and C. J. Patterson. 2006. Brief report: Delinquency, victimization and substance use among adolescents with female same-sex parents. Journal of Family Psychology, 20(3): 526–530.

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Grandparenting in French lesbian and gay families Martine Gross

Since November 1999 the “Pacte civil de solidarité” (PACS) has given legal recognition to same-sex couples in France. The law was drafted sometimes in reference, sometimes in opposition to the institution of marriage. It is a contract between two persons, regardless of their gender, for managing their community life. In 2007 the PACS was amended in order to grant the same economic rights and obligations as marriage, except the widow’s pension. However PACS does not address any issues related to children and family (Rault 2005; Courduries 2008). In France same-sex partners are not allowed to marry and cannot jointly adopt children – a right, which is granted only to married heterosexual couples. A person, however, may adopt a child as a single parent, but coming out as a gay or lesbian single parent would most probably demolish any chance of adoption despite the fact that the law does not explicitly exclude single gays and lesbians from adoption. Furthermore access to medically assisted reproduction is limited only to heterosexual couples who cannot conceive, and can produce proof which shows that they have been living together for at least two years. Single women and same-sex couples, who have no access to reproductive technology in France, have to travel abroad. Surrogacy is also strictly forbidden by French law, which forces both heterosexual and same-sex couples to go abroad where surrogacy is legal. Despite all these restrictions, a legal parent (biological or adoptive) may ask a court to share parental responsibility with another person (regardless of gender). The court has to decide in the best interest of the child. If the judge believes that lesbian or gay families are not good for the child, (s)he can refuse the application from the couple to share parental responsibilities. Furthermore if parental responsibility is granted, the right lasts only until the child’s 18th birthday. Afterwards the legal

This text is to a large extent based on a previous article published in French: Gross, M. 2009. Grandparentalité en contexte homoparental (Grandparenting in a gay or lesbian parenting context). Revue des sciences sociales 37(41): 120–129. 117


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parent can cancel sharing at any time, which means that the child has no legal way to enter into his “not legal” parent lineage. Regardless of all the legal barriers for a growing number of people in France, being gay or lesbian is no longer incompatible with raising children – but how do (future) grandparents react to these parental projects? When parents are told about their child’s homosexuality, they often take it for granted that they will never have grandchildren, especially if they have only one child. The belief that the lineage, or at least one of its branches, is to come to an end, is challenged when a homosexual child announces that he or she is on the way to start a family. When future grandparents find themselves in this unexpected situation, the parents of a lesbian daughter or of a gay son are led to reconsider their previous views of a childless homosexuality. In this paper focussing on grandparenting in same-sex families I will explore the following questions: (1) Do the parents of a gay son react in the same way to the new same-sex family as the parents of a lesbian daughter? (2) Does the method chosen to start a gay or lesbian family, i.e. adoption, artificial insemination, surrogacy or a co-parenting arrangement have an influence on grandparents’ understanding of their new role as grandparents? (3) Is the grandparental position weakened by the absence of legal recognition of the parental status of a son or a daughter?

Grandparents between biology and gender In the context of the social and psychological roles of the grandparents in families, research in developmental psychology and family sociology has been primarily focusing on inter-generational bonds of heterosexual families. Developmental psychology addresses issues such as the influence of grandparents on the development and the socialisation of children, the interactions of grandparents with their children, the three generations’ perceptions of the role and place of grandparents, the factors determining the frequency of contacts etc. (Leblond de Brumath and Julien, 2001). Family sociology, on the other hand, considered issues such as their place and role in the family, the role of grandparents in the context of divorce etc. Family sociology has also highlighted that the diversity of family models in contemporary Western societies, the processes of indi

According to recent French public opinion findings about homosexuality, 60% of female and 49% of male respondents believed that homosexuality is a sexual orientation just like any other (Bajos and Beltzer 2008). 118


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vidualisation and secularisation and the erosion of the normative heterosexual marriage as the only context in which children can be raised contributed to the emergence of new functions of grandparents (Schneider et al. 2005; Attias-Donfut and Segalen 2007). Research in developmental psychology and family sociology outlined the biological bond and the gender of the parent as two important parameters of the intergenerational relationships: in step-families non-biological grandparents often offer their grandchildren less support than biological grandparents (Johnson 1992; Attias-Donfut and Segalen 2007; Schneider 2005). Step-families share some common points with gay and lesbian families. In these families the step-parent is actually a social parent, who is not related biologically and often also not legally linked with the children in the family. In step-families as well as in lesbian and gay families, “additional grandparents” come into the grandchildren’s world (Neyrand 2005). In such family structures the emotional, biological and legal ties do not necessarily coincide; or in other words: the emotional, biological and legal bonds are not incarnated into the same two persons. Similarly to research on step-families, the studies on the intergenerational bonds in lesbian families found the importance of the biological bond. A study comparing extended family and friendship relations of children conceived by donor insemination, including 55 families headed by lesbian parents and 25 headed by heterosexual parents, showed that the frequency of contacts between children and grandparents was similar both in same-sex and heterosexual families, however children had a stronger relationship with biological grandparents regardless of the parental sexual orientation (Fulcher et al. 2002). One possible explanation for this lays in the cultural function of the biological bond; it could be that grandparents put less effort into spending time with their non-biological grandchildren as they do not see them as fully their own. It seems that biological relatedness plays a crucial role in constructing family relationships. Social representations grant more “legitimacy” to biological bonds than to elective ones. In this sense the heterosexual nuclear family, consisting of two biological parents, remains a “reference point” for grandparents. Their feeling of “legitimacy” (that is, I am the true grandparent of the child) depends on how close they are to the bio-conjugal model of the family. Besides the role of the “biological bond”, gender also proved to be an important factor in grandparenting. According to previous research findings maternal grandparents offer more care for their grandchildren 119


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compared with paternal grandparents even if they are biologically connected to their grandchildren (Julien et al. 2005). Women more often establish close relationships with their parents, and consequently try to invest more in creating a “lineal bridge” between their children and children’s grandparents, potentially leading to a “matrilineal advantage” in the grandchild-grandparent relations (Chan and Elder 2000). Furthermore, if parents separate, paternal grandparents are more frequently isolated from their grandchildren. In families with a son and a daughter where both separated from their respective spouses, grandparents are more likely to keep in touch with children born to their daughter than with those born to their son (Attias-Donfut and Segalen 2007). Research also shows that the parents of the non custodian relative (generally paternal grandparents) meet their grandchildren less often than the parents of the custodian parent (maternal grandparents). The fact that grandchildren see maternal grandparents more frequently than paternal grandparents is also true in nuclear families where parents have not divorced (Schneider 2005). Besides the biological bond and the role of the gender, the quality of the relationship between parents and their children can also significantly influence the relationship between grandparents and their grandchildren (Patterson 1998). As homosexuality can sometimes cause rejection or conflicts between parents and children, consequently a smaller grandparental investment can also be expected in a lesbian and gay parenting context.

Sample and methodology The empirical base of this chapter consists of two studies conducted in 2005 and 2007–2008. In 2005 I surveyed 336 members of the French Association of the Gay and Lesbian parents (APGL): 270 women and 66 men. 66% of women and 55% of men in the sample were parents, the rest of the respondents wanted to become parents. 93% of all respondents were in a same-sex relationship. They were for the most part well-educated. 88% had reached a university level. 31% were living in a rural area or in small towns (fewer than 60 000 inhabitants), 20% in middle-sized towns (from 60 000 to 160 000 inhabitants), 9% in a big city (more than 400 000), 41% were living in Paris. Most participants (46%) were 35 to 41 years old, 28% were younger than 35, 26% were 42 to 55 years old. One part of a broader questionnaire included questions about parents’ reactions to respondents’ coming out as gay or lesbian, the announcement of the pa120


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rental project and the actual birth of a child. Parents of respondents were also invited to participate in the research. This parental sub-sample consisted of nine fathers (eight of whom were fathers of lesbian mothers, and one the father of a gay father), and 21 mothers (16 mothers of lesbian mothers and five mothers of gay fathers). From September 2007 to February 2008 a second, qualitative part of the research followed. Semi-structured interviews with gay and lesbian parents were carried out in 31 families, all but one were living in Paris or its suburbs. The sample consists of 12 paternal families (eight cases of surrogacy, three cases of co-parentality and a divorced father) and 19 maternal families (13 cases of artificial insemination with donor, three identified donors, three cases of co-parentality). In 15 families I met both the parents and the grandparents. The interviews intended to explore the following issues: reactions to the child’s coming out, grandparents’ “coming out” (having a gay son or a lesbian daughter), level of the acceptance of the same-sex couple, reactions to a PACS (i.e. decision to get “married”), reactions to the announcement of a parental project, reactions to the newly born, and what it is like to be a grandparent (naming, frequency of contacts, baby-sitting, visits, etc.).

Accepting homosexuality and homoparenting In a homoparenting context, there are several stages to go through for one’s parents to become grandparents: first, parents discover sexual orientation of their child and accept it. Secondly, they share the news with relatives and acquaintances. Thirdly, they might be introduced to the same-sex partner of their child. Finally they are told about the parental project, which is sometimes announced by their child’s mentioning the desire to become a parent. According to the 2005 survey results the acceptance of the parental project depends on the level of acceptance of each previous stage. The acceptance of the coming-out has a significant influence on the acceptance of the same-sex partner of the child and the same-sex couple as such. The stage of the acceptance of the same-sex couple seems to be decisive. It turned out to be a crucial point for the eventual approval of the homo-parental family. The research showed that 87% of mothers and 77% of fathers approve of their child’s homo-parental family. Grandparent participants pointed out that for them it was easier to accept their own child’s homosexuality once they saw that their child is in a loving and stable same-sex relationship. Furthermore the birth of a grandchild 121


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also helped them in recognising and accepting the same-sex family, regardless of the possible reservations they might have had beforehand. In fact, the only grandparents in our sample who still found homosexuality disturbing after their grandchild was born were grandfathers whose son was single or entered the parental project as an individual (for example, co-parenting with two lesbians) although he was not single at the time. Grandfathers’ reservations about homosexuality reflected in the present research are in accordance with a previous French study (de Busscher 2004) on gays and lesbians aged 29 or younger, indicating that between 1997 and 2004 the number of parents who knew about their child’s homosexuality increased as well as the level of acceptance towards their child’s homosexuality. However, as shown in the table I, fathers tend to have more difficulties in accepting their child’s homosexuality than mothers. Table 1: The level of knowledge and acceptance of child’s homosexuality by parents (de Busscher 2004). 1997

2004

(N=1383)

(N=1195)

Mothers knowing about their child’s homosexuality

61.6%

69.7%

Fathers knowing about their child’s homosexuality

45.2%

54.1%

Acceptance of own child’s homosexuality by the mother

75.2%

88.4%

Acceptance of own child’s homosexuality by the father

60.5%

81.9%

In the interviews grandparents reported about a variety of feelings and emotions they experienced when their own child came out as gay or lesbian. Some, mainly parents of gay sons, talked about the feelings of pain, suffering, sadness, guilt and disappointment, while others, mainly parents of lesbian daughters, talked about the fear of social stigma and difficulties their daughter will have to go through due to her sexual orientation. The small sample size, of course, does not allow for any broader generalisations, but the majority of the examined grandparents gave up the idea of becoming grandparents once their child came out to them as lesbian or gay. Furthermore, as is reflected by the following examples, they accepted their child’s sexuality primarily in order to keep the child happy and satisfied: She was 14 or 15 when she told me about that. She said: ‘Mom, I am attracted to women.’ She was disoriented. I was very close to her and I thought: ‘Well, as long as she is happy …’. I am tolerant. It was the happiness of my children that mattered. [Monique (58); mother of a lesbian daughter Amélie (38)] 122


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That [homosexuality] floored me. It was something I refused. Physically I still cannot manage to bear it. I took a 180° turn when I saw the relief, the joy on my son’s lighted face when he told us. I said to myself: ‘It is necessary for you to go his way because he needs it’. It took me time. [Etienne (70), father of a gay son Pierre (45)] When my son told me about his homosexuality I almost got sick, my husband violently rejected him. At the beginning the couple [the son and his partner] could not come to our house. But after several years, my husband said ‘my sons’ when talking about [the son and his partner]. Things got better with time. [Elisabeth (62), mother of a gay son Charles (38)]

Especially men’s homosexuality as a problematic and unacceptable notion is somehow assuaged in the context of a more acceptable loving and stable same-sex couple. The couple therefore concentrates on other references (for example, happiness, safety, care) rather than just on homosexual orientation. As parents reported about the importance of their child’s happiness, such a couple could be seen as a “materialisation” of such happiness. That is why some male respondents came out to their parents only after they had found a stable partner and could reassure their parents that they are happily in love. Parents then have a representation of their child living as a couple: even though the partner is of the same sex, and even though the couple might have no desire to have a child, it still complies with the conjugal model, which seems to be an important reference point for parents in accepting their child’s homosexuality. Jonas, for example, kept his homosexuality a secret because he first wanted to find “the right one” before coming out to his parents. He wanted to show them his happiness. When I met François I immediately knew that he was the one I had been waiting for, so the only thing I had to do was to share this good news with my parents. But I knew that I was going to cause them a great pain as they will probably never be grandparents. [Jonas (28)]

As already mentioned the acceptance of child’s homosexuality positively affects the attitudes towards grandchildren and homoparenting. In our sample there were few grandparents who did not approve of a “homosexual lifestyle” and consequently had no relationship with their grandchildren. They liked Madeleine, but when they learned about our relationship, they threw me out and we have never made up. We moved and when I gave birth to Alice, they did not show up.; Alice only met them when she turned 18 and the request to meet them was hers. [Bénédicte (52)] 123


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My father does not want me to come [to their house] with my partner. Then, inevitably, I don’t see my father very often. The twins are 18 months old and they have practically never seen their grandparents. [Henri (37)]

When the same-sex couple announces the parental project to their own parents, the news is not always well received. In some cases the parental project is the ultimate sign that the couple is stable, which affects parents’ potential hopes that their child’s homosexuality might just be a passing phase. In these cases the parents never fully accepted their child’s homosexuality, but the birth of a grandchild might nevertheless have a positive effect. The grandmother of a lesbian daughter, for example, thought at first that her daughter’s homosexuality would disappear in time. When she heard about the parental project, she reacted badly: You want to play with a doll? You are insane! […] When they announced that they were going to the Netherlands to try and have Elsa, they phoned me to say: ‘That’s it, we are leaving, we are going to see the stork’. I cried. I cried every time [I thought of that], because I was sad. I did not want this to happen, I had always refused it. […] And then Elsa was born. My husband and I visited her. When I went back to work, I shone. Everything was changed. I had seen the little one. A young colleague asked me what had happened to me. I said it all just like that: ‘I am a granny, my daughter is homosexual and her girlfriend gave birth’. [Micheline (57), mother of a lesbian daughter Sophie (36)]

In some other cases the parental project might come as shocking news as it destroys the heteronormative representation of what a family is. A father of Iranian origin, for example, reacted to such news by saying that it was the worst news he had ever heard. In another case parents reacted similarly when they heard that their daughter’s partner was pregnant. They said she has done something monstrous and that the grandchild will seek a father forever. Nevertheless, on the basis of our sample we can say that these two examples are an exception rather than the rule. The more common reaction of future grandparents is worries. They worry about the position of the grandchild in a same-sex family configuration: they worry about the absence of a father, or, in the case of co-parenting arrangements (a gay father and a lesbian mother), because of the unusual family configuration, in which the child has two homes, or because of society’s opinion, homophobia and the issues the child will have to face. The birth of a child modifies the position of everyone in the family: children become parents, and parents become grandparents. However, 124


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as psychoanalysts Ducousso-Lacaze and Gadechoit (2006) claim, the places’ symbolic permutation system is not always immediate when a place is vacant. It can also be pointed out that when there is only one parent, temptation is strong for a grandparent to replace the absent father or the mother. In same-sex families, the absence of an opposite-sex parent can thus potentially cause a sort of generational confusion. Some lesbian daughters from our sample, for example, reported their fathers’ failing to occupy the right place as grandfathers. They disqualified the social mother’s educational role and appeared as if they were the “right man for the job”. This way social mothers could easily find themselves in competition with the father of their partner. Her father invests himself more than he should because there is no father. I find it hard to feel legitimate as a social parent. [Micheline (33)]

Grandparents’ coming out With the parental project and the arrival of a child, it is no longer possible for grandparents to hide the fact that their child is a homosexual and is involved in a same-sex relationship. In fact some grandparents reported that they found it easier to talk about their child’s homosexuality after they became grandparents. Some reported announcing the news to all their friends and relatives, so that all family members were informed about it and there were no surprises at the next family gathering. Others organised big family reunions with every single cousin to introduce the couple and the child to the whole family. A christening of the child can also be the occasion to officially introduce the couple and the homoparental family. The arrival of this little girl especially increased the circle of people we informed. From the moment when there is a baby, and that people know your daughter is not married, one has to … give explanations to friends, to give more information about what the reality is. [Philippe (68), father of a lesbian daughter Elisa (32)]

For some parents it is hard to explain the “unusual” family situation. A father of a gay son who got a child together with his partner through surrogacy explained that it was hard for him to explain this situation as he was faced with double “transgression”: homosexuality and surrogacy. The father wanted to share his happiness with others, but he had to be careful in giving out this information. 125


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One has to try and explain this … there is a grandson, who, in addition, was not born in France, all that … Our friends already have grandchildren. When it happened to us, we were crying all over the place and they were asking us: “But are you going to have it? And the mom, why didn’t she stay?” It is perhaps for that reason that my wife says that the birth of our grandson was … really, it was necessary for us to make the Roman tortoise go ahead afterwards. [Etienne (70), father of a gay son Pierre (45)]

In our sample there were two sets of religious grandparents who were faced with the opposing views from the Church. As they needed to reconcile the love for their child and their faith, they started a dialogue with church authorities to protest and to defend their child. I even wrote a letter to a bishop who had said some unfortunate words on homoparenting. I wrote to him that I was scandalised. You have two young women who chose a generous way and you condemn them. From a materialist point of view, these two young women’s lives would be more comfortable if they had had no child. [Paul (71), father of a lesbian daughter Jeanne (37)]

When a child is born in a same-sex family, the grandparents are forced to come out if they wish to publicly assume the role of a grandparent. The fact that such family situations are new can be seen also in the lack of appropriate terms. Our respondents reported that grandparents are struggling with the issue how to address their child’s partner. Some refer to their child’s partner as “daughter-in-law” or “son-in-law”. The majority, however, tend to use less explicit terms such as “friend” (“here is my daughter and her friend”), which makes it possible not to reveal the nature of the homosexual relationship. Sometimes, when they are at ease with the homosexual couple, parents literally adopt the partner of their child and they called them “my sons” or “my daughters”. It is a way of eluding the question of conjugality while at the same time integrating the partner into the family.

Social parenting Previous studies have shown that sometimes step-grandparents do not feel authorised to designate themselves as grandparents or to let their grandchild call them grandpa and grandma: the higher the number of parents, the less step-grandparents feel legitimate as grandparents (Schneider 2005). Our research showed a similar situation in same-sex families. The “conjugal dimension” of the parental project turned out to be a crucial point. Grandparents who were biologically (and therefore legally) linked to the grandchild had closer relationships with the child 126


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compared to “social grandparents”. Other factors which might have had effects on such relationships included the level of acceptance of homosexuality by parents, how important the grandparents found the biological bonds, and the position of their child in homoparenting. If the (grand)parents’ child helped another same-sex couple to get a child (for example, a gay son being a donor for a lesbian couple, without being recognized as a legal father), the parents of the gay son were less likely to assume the role of the grandparents for the child to be born to the lesbian couple. In order words: the closer the same-sex family composition is to the heterosexual nuclear family, the more likely the grandparents are to take on their roles as grandparents. The “conjugal dimension” of the parental project turned out to be a crucial point. A good example of this is the case of Philippe and Fabien. They are a same-sex couple, but Philippe conceived his daughter and raises her in a co-parenting arrangement with a lesbian woman. He carried out his parental project individually and believes that the biological father and mother are the unique parents of this child. Moreover Philippe’s homosexuality is not accepted by his father. In this kind of family structure Fabien’s parents are not at all likely to be regarded as (social) grandparents to Philippe’s child. In contrast, when the parental project emanates from the couple, when the couple is perceived as a parental unit and both partners consider themselves parents, grandparents – regardless of their biological or social link to the grandchild – are more likely to position themselves in respect to how the same-sex couple sees itself. If the couple designate themselves as two mothers or two fathers, the grandparents will have to position themselves by taking these terms into account, despite the fact that they might find such a designation transgressive. On the other hand, if the same-sex couple conforms to the traditional representations according to which one cannot have two mums or two dads, grandparents will not adopt a more “transgressive” position than that of their own children. Consequently they will not refer to the grandchild’s biological and social parent as “two mums” or “two dads” – only one partner (the biological one) will be seen as a parent. These patterns were also present in the findings of the 2005 survey. It was shown that all grandparents who were biologically or legally linked to their grandchild used the term “our grandson” or “our granddaughter” in front of outsiders. On the other hand, only 30% of the parents of the legal mother’s partner and 10% of the parents of the legal father’s partner did so. 127


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Additionally, the number of parents also has an influence on how grandparents understand and call their biological or social grandchildren. The 2005 survey showed that when children are born in a bi-parental context via donor insemination, surogacy or adoption, more social grandparents name them as a grandson or a granddaughter than when children are born in a more-than-two-parents context, such as co-parenting. In some cases of co-parenting biological grandparents do not renounce to traditional representations and regard the biological father and the biological mother as a couple, ignoring their respective same-sex partners. This also implies that co-parenting arrangements make it possible for grandparents to minimise homo-conjugality in favour of heteroparentality and conformity with the traditional bio-conjugal model. Françoise and Irène, for example, have a little girl by Irène conceived in a co-parenting arrangement. The lesbian couple feels that they are both parents and they say that the child has three parents: both of them and the father. Nevertheless, Françoise’s mother is not really sure whether she has the right to be called granny, not only because of the absence of the biological bond, but also because she appears to be some kind of ‘extra’ character – the third grandparent: It is not my real granddaughter. I do not want to usurp a place which is not mine. There are already Irène’s parents and those of the dad. If there was no dad, perhaps I could be a grandma, too. Three people, it is too complicated. [Jeannette (71), mother of a lesbian daughter Francoise (38)]

The grandparent respondents claimed that for grandparents to feel completely “legitimate” in a social grandparent position depends on how the same-sex parents of the child position themselves with regard to the heteronormative expectations of the nuclear family. If parents do not position themselves as parents, grandparents cannot assume their role. Marie’s mother, for example, is not certain whether she is a grandmother or not. She has a photograph of her lesbian daughter and her partner and their child displayed on a table. She refers to this child as “like a granddaughter”, but she wonders whether she has the right to be called Granny since her daughter does not want to be called Mum. As parents and grandparents need names to refer to each other, they come up with different solutions. The social parent is often called “the second mother” or “the second father” as is the case with Pierre and Didier, who have been together for 15 years and have had a child via surrogacy. Didier’s parents regard Pierre as a second father and Pierre’s mother as a grandmother. 128


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I regard my son’s companion as a second father. Before the child’s birth, he was rather like another son. I have much affection for him. I think that he looks after him [my son] very well… From time to time I even happen to say that the child resembles him, although I know very well that it cannot be. […] With the mother of our son’s companion, we have a very close relationship. I wondered how things would go when he [Pierre and Didier’s child] meets her as he is not her real grandson, but on the contrary she goes mad when the little one comes and visits her […]The mother of our son’s companion is definitely the grandmother of our grandson. [Elisa (68), mother of a gay son Didier (42)]

For Didier’s father, a sexual relationship with a mother brings a greater legitimacy for that person to be called a father. However, as Didier’s child was born via surrogacy and there was no sexual relationship with that woman, the absence of such a relation enables him to define Pierre as a father as much as Didier. For my grandson, I give my son’s companion the title of the second father, yes. Since my son had it without sexual intercourse … so to speak … with this woman, I do not see him as a more genuine father than his companion who did not have such a relationship. In fact, to me they have equal responsibilities in terms of paternity. If something happened to our son, I’d put my head on the block: this child would remain with my son’s companion. [George (70), father of a gay son Didier (42)]

In some cases grandparents have difficulties in accepting the idea that their son’s or daughter’s companion is a (social) relative. This is especially the case in contexts where parents cannot accept their child’s same-sex partner: when parents generally ignore the partner and some are even in competition with them. One such example from our survey is the case of a grandmother who competed with her daughter’s partner during the pregnancy as well as just after the birth. She thought that since her daughter was the mother, her partner could be assigned only as some kind of a father. That is why it came as a shock to her when she was told that the couple is planning a second child, except that this time the child would be carried by the daughter’s partner. Some social grandparents expressed their fear that they might lose contact with their grandchild, if something happened to the grandchild’s parents (for example, in case they separate). Such fear is closely related to the lack of legal protection of the social bonds. In other words if there is no biological connection a question how to define a parent and a grandparent can be raised. It seems that the law is too often based only on the biological connection and disregards the quality of relations. A social parent or grandparent can have a good quality relation with a 129


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child and they can be important figures in child’s life, however, in legal terms these parents and grandparents remain invisible. Such invisibility was also reflected in some of the concerns expressed by social grandparents in our research: My selfish side told me this little one will be Corinne’s child [the partner of my daughter]. If something happens, I will perhaps never see this child again. Ones love a baby automatically and I was afraid. Well, finally he is here and I am his granny. There are photographs of this little one as there are of my other grandchildren […]I thought about my three grandsons on my son’s side. It is my son, it is our blood. Apart from sharing the love one can give to a baby … well, he [Corinne’s child] is a foreigner to us … How many grandchildren do I have? At first I said three, but now I can say four without hesitation. He is my grandson in my heart. [Social grandmother Marianne (64), mother of Danielle (36), Corinne’s partner].

Conclusion Our findings indicated that in the interviews conducted with social grandparents similar issues were raised as in the case of step-families (Schneider 2005). In step-families being a step-grandparent primarily depends on the nature of the bonds that parents and grandparents maintain, while other factors, such as personal availability and geographical proximity, seem to be less important. Nevertheless grandchildren in step-families only rarely call their step-grandparents grandpa and granny. The relationship between children and their step-grandparents intensifies in situations where other (biological) grandparents are absent and there is a possibility for step-grandparents to play a symbolic part in the family. Another element which introduces step-grandparents into the child’s life is the reintroduction of the “institutionalising” stages: marriage for the couple, and the adoption of the grandchild. Although there are many similarities between step-families and same-sex families, the option of marriage as an “institutionalising” step is not available for same-sex families in France. These families undoubtedly use PACS to build a legitimacy (Rault 2005), but there is not enough empirical evidence available to say that PACS plays the same symbolic role as marriage and therefore enables social grandparents to enter into the context of co-parentality. Our research showed that the roles played by social grandparents in the life of a same-sex family depend on the bonds between parents and grandparents, and particularly on the grandparents’ degree of acceptance towards the same-sex couple. If grandparents are able to redefine 130


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the same-sex family for themselves as just an ordinary family that raises children, such redefinition usually facilitates the introduction of grandparental bonds. However, the acceptance of the couple as parents also depends on the way the couple apprehends their own parental status. Co-parenting arrangements can increase the number of parents involved, and consequently can also weaken the intensity and the legitimacy of the elective bonds of those who are not biologically connected to the child. If one member of the same-sex couple is not convinced that he or she is a “true parent”, his or her own parents will probably also have some difficulties entering into a grandparental role. In order words, the research showed the power of the heteronormative matrix, which grandparents, and sometimes also parents, in same-sex families have to deal with. The cultural as well as legal and political pervasiveness of the exclusively heteronormative nuclear family model makes it difficult to register the legitimacy of the “extra grandparents”, when there is no biological bond, or when there are already grandparents from the two lines of biological parents of the child. Nevertheless, parents and grandparents tend to find their own innovative ways to interpret, understand and live such family situations. The latter can be best illustrated by the grandmother who claimed that her grandson is not hers biologically, but “he is my grandson in my heart”.

References Attias-Donfut, C., and M. Segalen. 2007. Grands-parents : La famille à travers les générations (Grandparents: The family through the generations). Paris: �� Odile Jacob. Bajos, N., and N. Beltzer. 2008. Les sexualités homo-bisexuelles: d’une acceptation de principe aux vulnérabilités sociales et preventives (Homo-bisexual Sexualities: From acceptance in principle to social and preventive vulnerabilities). In Enquête sur la sexualité en France (Survey on sexuality in France), eds. N. Bajos and M. Bozon, 243–271. �� Paris: La �� découverte. Chan, C. G., and G. H. Elder Jr. 2000. Matrilineal advantage in grandchild-grandparent relations. Gerontologist 40(2): 179�� –�� 190. Courduries, J. 2008. Usages et représentations du Pacs chez les couples gays (Usages and representations of the PACS among gay couples). In Identités et Genres de vie (Identities and gender-style life), ed. D. Le Gall, 217–240. Paris : L’harmattan. 131


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De Busscher, P. O. 2004. Les �� modes de vie gay (Gay ways of life). In Enquête presse gay 2004 (Press gay survey 2004). (21 July 2011). Ducousso-Lacaze, A. and P. Gadechoit. 2006. Homosexualité et parentalité: une approche psychanalytique (Homosexuality and parenthood: a psychoanalytic approach). In Homoparentalités: Approches scientifiques et politiques (Homoparenting: Scientific and political approaches), eds. A. �� Cadoret, M. Gross, C. Macary and B. Perreau�� , 261�� –�� 272. Paris : PUF. Fulcher, M., R. W. Chan, B. Raboy, and C. Patterson. 2002. Contacts with grandparents among children conceived via donor insemination by lesbian and heterosexual mothers. Parenting: Science and Practice 2(1): 61–76. Gross, M.�� 2009. Grandparentalité en contexte homoparental (Grandparenting in homoparenting context). Revue des sciences sociales 37(41):120�� –�� 129. Johnson, C. L. 1992. Divorced and reconstituted families: Effects on the older generation. Generations 16: 17–20. Julien, D., M. F. Bureau, and A. Leblond de Brumath. 2005. Grandparentalité et homoparentalité au Québec (Grandparenting and homoparenting in Quebec). In Grands-parents et grands-parentalités (Grand-parents and grandparenting), eds. B. �� Schneider, M. C. Mietkiewics, and S. Bouyer�� , 199�� –217.�� Ramonville Saint-Agne: Eres. Leblond de Brumath, A., and D. Julien. 2001. État des recherches empiriques sur les liens entre les enfants de parents homosexuels et leurs grands-parents (State of the empirical research about the bonds between homosexual parents, children and their grandparents). In Parentalité gaie et lesbienne: familles en marge? (Gay and lesbian families in the margin?), ed. D. Julien, 113�� –121. Mon�� tréal: Association canadienne pour la santé mentale et Alliance de recherche IREF/Relais-femmes. Neyrand, G. 2005. L’impact grandparental des mutations sociales (Grandparenting impact of social changes). In Grands-parents et grands-parentalités (Grandparents and grandparenting), eds. B. Schneider, M. C. Mietkiewics and S. Bouyer, 247�� –254. Ramonville �� Saint-Agne: Eres. Patterson, C. J. 1998. Families of the lesbian baby boom: Children’s contact with grandparents and other adults. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 68(3): 390–399. Rault, W. 2005. Construire une légitimité. L’appropriation du pacte civil de solidarité par les familles homoparentales (Building a legitimacy. Ownership of the civil solidarity pact by gay and lesbian families). In Homoparentalités, Etat des lieux (Gay and lesbian parenting, state of art), ed. M. Gross, 319�� –�� 328. Ramonville Saint-Agne: Eres. 132


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Schneider, B. 2005. Les belles grands-mères (Step grandmothers). In Grands-parents et grands-parentalités (Grandparents and grandparenting), eds. B. Schneider, M. C. Mietkiewics, and S. Bouyer S., 185�� –198. �� Ramonville Saint-Agne: Eres. Schneider, B., M. C. Mietkiewics, and S. Bouyer, eds. 2005. Grands-parents et grands-parentalités (Grandparents and grandparenting). Ramonville SaintAgne: Eres.

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Do families have a sexual orientation? Interview with professor Judith Stacey Roman Kuhar & Judit Takács

Judith Stacey is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and Sociology at New York University. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including Unhitched: Love, Marriage, and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China (2011), In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age (1996), Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth-Century America (1990, reissued in 1998) and Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China (1983). She is one of the leading experts on family and its diversities.

In your article “(How) Does the Sexual Orientation of Parents Matter?” from 2001, you and your colleague Tim Biblarz point out that findings from the studies on same-sex families are often used and abused in political debates. Furthermore some researchers claim that there isn’t even any point in comparing same-sex families with heterosexual families as that would be like comparing apples with oranges: both are fruits but cannot be compared. What is your opinion about that? I think you could compare an apple with an orange if you knew what it was you wanted to compare about them. You could make comparative statements about how much juice you could get from either one (laughs). In my view, the whole notion of a gay or a lesbian family is kind of ridiculous: it implies that a family has a sexual orientation, which is not the case. I think that if you want to compare same-sex parents with differentsex parents who are relatively similar in other aspects, that is a reasonable enough comparison, and there are reasons to want to do that at this stage of history. I think the goal should be eventually to not to need to do that. I don’t think the emphasis ultimately should be on which of these two types of families is best for children because that is where you get beyond apples and oranges into an area where you really cannot make any kinds of judgements that make a lot of sense. That is like asking 135


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whether it is better for children to have black parents or white parents. Obviously in a racist society where blacks are subordinate, children will gain many social privileges from having white parents, but that does not mean that white folks perform a better kind of parenting. I belong to the school of social scientists who believe that there is no such thing as purely objective social science research. In this view, all social science research inescapably employs perspectives and values. The very concepts we use contain ideas and ideologies embedded in them. A social scientist has a responsibility to become as aware of her values and presumptions as possible and to make these transparent to readers. I think that a topic like same-sex marriage or gay and lesbian parenting, which in many societies, certainly in mine, is very controversial, is not more subjective than others, but it raises more difficult challenges for how to formulate the research questions and later for how to present findings and analysis … … and it is exactly this political context, the fear of results being abused for political goals, which “forced” some researchers of same-sex families to tone down any differences they might have found in their comparison between the families formed by different-sex and same-sex partners. Well, that cuts both ways. Some researchers exaggerate the differences because they are hostile to gay and lesbian parenting, and they assume that a difference is a disadvantage. Those who are sympathetic to gay and lesbian parenting often tend to minimize the differences and to bury findings of difference in their reporting. Too often, I think, they tried to insist that the children are exactly the same. The problem is therefore in the automatic interpretation of “difference” as “deficit”? Exactly. What my co-author Tim Biblarz and I set out to do was to not presume that a difference is a disadvantage or a deficit and to look at what differences were reported and how you might be able to understand them, and in some cases just see them as benign or insignificant. As Freud famously said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Which are these differences and how can they be evaluated? There are no huge differences reported between gay and straight parents or their children. We wanted to caution against the idea that every136


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D o F a m i l i e s H av e S e x u a l O r i e n t a t i o n ? . . .

thing has to be identical, but the most important thing to say is that there are far more similarities than differences. The differences reported include such things as children in homosexual-parent families tend to be more tolerant of differences than children in heterosexual-parent families. There are pretty obvious reasons for that. It is not due to the sexuality of their parents, but to the way that the children develop sensitivity to discrimination and stigma, and how they become more aware of difference as a result. In addition, I do think that there is some evidence, and expect that future research will find more, that children with gay and lesbian parents will be more comfortable with whatever sexual attractions they experience rather than feeling a need to conform to heterosexuality if that is not what they desire. I think too that research hints that they are more accepting of certain levels of gender variation than is generally true of children with heterosexual parents, and again that indicates their greater tolerance of social diversity overall. But these findings of differences are pretty small. There are not any huge differences in research findings about child outcomes. There are also some research findings of differences in the parenting. It seems that on average two women who have chosen to parent together are likely to want to share the economic and childcare responsibilities more equally than heterosexual married couples do. They are more likely to both cut back on work hours and less likely to have just one parent staying at home full-time with the children. It looks as if gay male parents are more likely to have one parent choose to stay at home with the children than among lesbian couples but we don’t have a lot of data on that yet. Furthermore several studies showed that lesbian couples are less likely to use corporal punishment than heterosexual married couples do. (We don’t have much data yet about gay male couples, but one study suggests this finding too.) Again we don’t know if this difference would hold up in wide-scale studies but if so, I think it may be explained partly by the gender difference of two women parenting, but also by the fact that planned lesbian couple families tend to have a higher level of education, and they are older parents. And of course, these are all intentional parents: you don’t have any unwanted children in planned lesbian or gay parent families and that gives a certain advantage to their parenting skills and behaviours. I think we actually see slightly better levels of parenting among lesbian couples and gay male couples on average than with heterosexual married-couple parents, because there are many more accidental pregnancies, more youthful parenting and less planning among the latter. 137


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Your meta-research on how sexual orientation of parents matters from 2001 has been quoted a lot. Has it also been abused? It has been used and abused, and I imagine that our newer article on how the gender of parents matters published in 2010 will be used and abused in similar ways. Ironically, the way the study came to be used constructively is in part a product of the way it was abused. The article was published during the climactic period when the same-sex marriage cases in Canada and in Massachusetts were before the highest courts. Many opponents of same-sex marriage cited our study in their legal briefs and in their media releases. They misrepresented our study as if it offered evidence that supported an argument against giving equal rights to same-sex couples or to gay and lesbian parents. They drew on some of our careful discussion of what the problems were with some of the prior research in order to argue that the research was not strong enough to support the claims that gay and lesbian parenting was safe enough for children. They used our critique of prior research to suggest that we were saying that the research was worthless, which was not the case. They also selected a couple of interpretations we made that from their point of view represented deficits that were dangerous. One was about our conclusion that there was not enough evidence yet to say that children with gay and lesbian parents were no more likely than children with heterosexual parents to turn out to be gay or lesbian. We said that there were very little data – and surprisingly, there still are very little data – on that question. However, we also said that a couple of studies did report slim data on this, and we thought that all logic and all plausible theories about the development of sexual orientation would point in the direction of at least a small difference here. A larger minority of children who have gay and lesbian parents should not turn out to be exclusively heterosexual. However, this should not be regarded as a problem or a deficit. Although we didn’t have much evidence yet, we thought it was a mistake for sympathetic researchers to claim that there were no differences in the area of the way children’s ultimate sexual identity or sexual behaviour would develop. And you can imagine that people opposed to gay and lesbian parenting seized on that as an example of how having a gay parent would make a child turn out to be gay … But we were just trying to say that we simply don’t know if more of them will turn out to be gay or lesbian, and we still don’t know. The research is very thin on this subject, and it is not easy research to conduct, but I have a strong hunch that this will turn out to 138


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be true. We don’t understand very much about how sexual orientations develop, but our reasoning was that at least a higher percentage of children with gay and lesbian parents would feel freer than other children to express homoerotic desires if they experienced them. Opponents misconstrued this to claim that gay parents would intentionally socialize their children to become gay. Does this imply that when children raised in heterosexual-couple families face homosexual desires and feelings, they just tend to push these feelings away because of their heteronormative environment? Exactly, depending obviously on the attitudes of their parents. But one would assume that a young person with straight parents and homoerotic desires would find it harder to come out or to acknowledge and explore those feelings than children with gay or lesbian parents. Our presumption was, and some research supports this, that gay and lesbian parents are more apt to be tolerant and supportive of their children’s sexual identity and orientation no matter what these are. You mentioned that we still don’t have enough research on same-sex families. This is the very argument which is often used by the opponents of same-sex families who claim that such families are a very new social phenomenon and thus we cannot really tell whether same-sex families provide safe environments for children or not. That is not what I said. We do now have enough research to say that these families form a perfectly safe environment for children to grow up in. What we don’t have is much data on how children’s sexuality will turn out as adults. But I do not believe that this qualifies as an issue of child safety or well-being. There are now about three decades’ worth of studies in different nations, and some of them of very high quality, that make it very clear that children with same-sex parents turn out to be just as healthy, emotionally developed, socially and cognitively successful as comparable children with heterosexual parents. At least we know that about children with lesbian parents. We don’t have that data for gay male parents yet, because the research hasn’t been done. But the evidence is uniform that there is no reason to have any concerns about same-sex parent-families being safe places for children other than those issues stemming from the way society treats these parents and their children. There are issues around social stigma and bullying, but denying 139


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equal rights to gay parents simply reinforces the existing problems rather than improving the circumstances for their children. That would be like saying that in an anti-Semitic society Jewish parents shouldn’t have children, or in a racist society, black parents shouldn’t have children, because their children are going to suffer stigma and discrimination. Following this line of argument, why would one allow joint adoptions by same-sex couples knowing that the children might be more likely to suffer stigma and discrimination than others? I have two answers to that question, and the US Supreme Court perhaps answered it best. First, denying same-sex couples the right to adopt children reinforces the very social problem of stigma and discrimination that it pretends to protect children from experiencing. Because this is a social problem, rather than one caused by attributes of the parents, that is exactly the wrong way to address the issue. The second thing I would say is that there is a debate among researchers about whether children who have gay and lesbian parents actually do experience more teasing and social hostility than children with heterosexual parents. Certainly they do face homophobic teasing about their parents, but social scientists still debate whether they are teased more than children from other families, or whether this is just the issue that they are teased about. I think it depends a lot on where they are growing up. If they are growing up in a progressive community, then the odds are that they are not suffering very much from this. Of course, in certain areas of our country, and I am sure yours too, the teasing and the discrimination can be intense and impose a serious burden on the children. But usually same-sex adoptive parents choose not to live in such hostile communities. Although the hazard of homophobic harassment is a real concern, the notion of the best interest of the child has to be placed within a broader social frame. Personally, I don’t consider it to be in the interest of any child to reinforce the level of homophobia and social stigma and inequality in any society. It isn’t very healthy for the children doing the teasing not to learn how to live peacefully with social differences. Finally, research finds that children who learn to cope with social hostility often develop resilience and strength. While it is not enjoyable or desirable, it is not necessarily harmful to them either. As someone who grew up Jewish in a moderately anti-Semitic, primarily non-Jewish small town in the 1950s I can testify from personal experience, that it was not always fun to feel different and “other,” but it also taught me a great deal and probably 140


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had something to do with my becoming a sociologist. I developed my interest in social differences from an early stage (laughs). But, as I said, the US Supreme Court gave the best answer to your question in the famous Palmore versus Sidotti ruling in 1984. This was an interracial child custody case. After a white couple divorced, the mother had custody of the children for several years, without any contest from the father. However, after she married a black man, her former husband sued to take custody away from her on the grounds that it was unfair to subject their children to living with the prejudice against an inter-racial marriage household. The case went all the way to the US Supreme Court which ruled in favour of the mother. The Court said that in a democratic society, the proper object of the law is to combat discrimination and stigma rather than to reinforce the undemocratic aspects of society by capitulating to them. In the long run, you want to build a society that grants equal respect and rights without insisting that everyone has to be the same or be kept apart. Isn’t it logical that gay and lesbian parents, who have probably experienced homophobia themselves, are well-equipped to discuss these issues with their children, or as Susan Golombok suggests, to prepare their children for the homophobic society? Yes, on average that is true. Obviously there are some lousy gay and lesbian parents just as there are lousy heterosexual parents. We should not romanticize same-sex parenting. However, on average, I think that gay and lesbian parents are prepared to deal with this issue; they think about it a lot, there are many support groups and community resources and advice, and most do their best to prepare their children for social prejudice. And, on average, their kids seem to cope pretty well with homophobia. This is the same kind of an argument that comes up about trans-racial adoption in the US, which also provokes a lot of controversy. Will it be good for a black child to be adopted by a white parent? And what about international adoptions which remove children from their cultural origins? These are real issues. However, the idea that you would bar an entire category of capable, sincere, loving and eager potential parents from taking on children to whom they would be dedicated, is not a child-friendly policy, and certainly not a democratic policy. Nearly ten years after publishing the very influential article on whether the sexual orientation of parents matters, you published a similar article 141


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in 2010. Except that this time Tim Biblarz and you wondered whether the gender of parents matters; does it? Well, the 2010 article is similar to our original study of parental sexual orientation, but it was a more ambitious project. Over the past decade, opponents of lesbian and gay parenting generally replaced the argument that the problem was the homosexual orientation of parents with the claim that children need both a mother and a father, and that it was unfair to children to deprive them of one of those two genders. Not only do politicians from both main political parties in the US make this argument, but they claim that research overwhelmingly supports this very popular view. For example, this argument was written into the preamble of the 1996 Welfare Reform Bill in the United States, and it has been cited in many court decisions around issues like same-sex marriage and child custody. Consequently, Tim and I decided to investigate whether there were really studies that spoke to this question. We quickly discovered that the research that was being cited to support the idea that children do best if they have a mother and a father was not research that ever looked at this issue at all. The research cited compared children with a married mother and father to children whose mothers had never married or whose parents had divorced. In other words, most of the research compared two-parent families with single-parent families or with jointcustody, divorced parent-families, or step families, and those clearly are not legitimate comparisons nor ones that can tell anything about whether children do best if they grow up with both a mother and a father. Consequently, Tim and I decided to look at studies that could come closer to being able to answer this question. We identified two bodies of research that we thought could shed some light on this issue. One compares two women parenting versus a man and a woman parenting together. This time we were looking at the newer research since 2001, which mainly compares planned lesbian co-parenting through donor insemination or adoption with heterosexual parenting, sometimes also through donor insemination due to infertility. The second body of research we examined compares single (presumptively straight) fathers with single mothers who are raising children. The results were interesting. When you look at the lesbian co-parents and the heterosexual co-parents the findings were very similar to what we concluded in 2001, only now we have a much stronger body of research. However, when it came to the single heterosexual dads versus the single heterosexual moms, there were some surprises. This is not an ide142


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al body of research, because it is not typical for men to be the primary parent in the case of a divorce. Therefore, we can presume that unusual circumstances lead to this family pattern. That makes the comparison difficult to interpret, and perhaps unfair to the fathers. Keeping this in mind, we did find some interesting differences, again relatively small. It turned out that the single mothers were a bit better at setting controls, and they were more aware and involved in their children’s lives than the single fathers were. Studies also reported that children of single mothers were somewhat less likely to abuse substances, drop out of schools, etc. than children with single fathers. That was surprising because of stereotypes about how the dad is a better disciplinarian and things of that sort. In general we concluded that the gender of the parents is a trivial factor compared to the quality of the parent. It appears that on average two parents who get along and are decent parents are better than one, but that it is the quality of the parenting not the gender of the parents or even the number of the parents that is the most important factor. So can we say that it is not important after all that children are “exposed” to “female roles” and “male roles”, to femininity and masculinity, repeating again the arguments of those who oppose same-sex families? I wouldn’t put it that way, because all children are exposed to various versions of femininity and masculinity, no matter what sort of family they experience. The important point is that children do not have to have one male and one female parent to develop a comfortable gender identity. First of all, it is virtually impossible to bring up children hermetically in their individual families. Secondly, the gender identity of children seems to have no relationship at all to the gender of their parents, whether they have male or female parents. Gender identity is established very early irrespective of the gender mix or wishes of the parents. Few transgender people would develop if this were not the case. Western cultures tend to have very simplistic ideas about what constitutes male and female parenting. It is a mistake to suppose that there are two mutually exclusive categories of parents – one male and the other female. There are average differences between the way women parent and men parent, just as there are average differences in height between men and women. Lots and lots of women are a lot taller than a lot of men, and the same is true for all the kinds of differences you find in parenting. There are so many different traits in parenting that do not reduce to feminine or masculine. Some parental traits that we tend to identify as 143


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more masculine or feminine can be performed by men or by women, and usually in complicated packages. In the lesbian co-parent families that I know, or in the gay male co-parent families, I would say that, yes on average, one of the two tends to parent in a slightly more stereotypically “feminine,” and the other one a little more “masculine” way in areas like discipline, communication, and play. But these are very small differences, and there is more overlap than difference. You cannot confidently predict which of the two parents will do what, not by their gender, not by who is the biological parent, or by other simple factors. In some cases the person who is the breadwinner is also the more permissive parent; in other cases the person who stays home full-time with the child is more permissive, and sometimes more of a disciplinarian. You really cannot predict which. We also know that when heterosexual married couples parent together, they often tend to be more like each other in their attitudes and values and styles of parenting than the mother is like all other women or the father is like all other men. There are significant class differences and educational differences, and regional and religious differences in parenting, and so it’s really simplistic to assume that there is a masculine way to parent and a feminine way to parent, that children just need one of each, and that the only way they can get it is by having one male and one female parent in their homes. In your 2010 article on How Does the Gender of Parents Matter? ‘transgender’ is listed among the keywords, however, there is hardly any information provided on transgender parents or parenting. Does this reflect the general social invisibility of transgender issues or that there is not enough research yet focussing on this field (on how children can be affected by their parents’ gender re-assignment, for example)? In general, how do you see the social relevance of these issues (related to trans-parenting)? That is an accurate observation, a fair criticism of our article, and an insightful analysis of the state of research on trans-parenting. To the best of my knowledge, there are no studies yet that address the question of the impact of a parent’s gender reassignment on their children. There are personal accounts by such parents and some of their adult children, a good documentary film, and some sensitive treatments in popular culture, but we do not yet have social science research findings on this aspect of gender and parenting. In fact, we are only beginning to get re144


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search findings on the impact of gay male parents on their children. Tey Meadow, a former doctoral student of mine, recently completed a trailblazing dissertation that illuminates some of the reverse issue – the impact of transgender children on their gender normative parents. It’s a fascinating, important study. When we do begin to have studies of transgender parents, I predict they will reinforce the conclusions Tim Biblarz and I reached in our 2010 article – that the gender of parents does not have much, if any influence, on the gender identity of children or their well-being. Once again, the central factors will be the quality of parenting and the social context. You argue elsewhere that according to previous findings lesbian sexual orientation per se has no negative effect on parenting, or on children’s healthy psychological development and social adjustment. However, can you say the same about gay men? As I mentioned earlier, we do not yet have much research on gay male parents that examines their children’s development, but the early studies, as well as the implications from all of the other research on family structure, leads strongly toward this conclusion. There simply is no evidence that a parent’s sexual orientation or identity has an independent negative (or positive) impact on their children’s well-being. My own ethnographic research on gay male parents led me to believe that gay men are likely to be among the most successful parents. This is not because they desire men, but due to “selection effects”. It is so much more difficult for gay men to become parents outside of heterosexuality, that only those who are deeply motivated are likely to do so. According to your findings lesbian partnerships, despite the fact that they are more egalitarian compared to heterosexual partnerships, tend not to last as long and break up earlier then heterosexual or gay relationships. How can you explain that? I want to say again that we don’t know yet that this is true. There are very little data on this, and the data that are available are not strong, but there are some data that lead to this view. We don’t know if such findings will be replicated over time, nor whether this would still be true if lesbians had full and equal rights as well as equal family and social support. However, I personally think that there are some reasons to imagine that married lesbian co-mothers might have a higher divorce rate than 145


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heterosexual married couples or than married gay male co-parents. In fact, I think that gay male co-parents may turn out to have the lowest rate of divorce, but we have no data on that yet. What seems to be the case for lesbian co-parents is that, on the one hand they tend to have higher standards for their relationships than heterosexual couples do. Precisely because they want more equal and reciprocal relationships, they are more disappointed when relationships do not meet their high standards. And lesbian co-parenting situations make it a lot harder to achieve equality than it is for gay male co-parenting couples. In the U.S., at least, because lesbian couples are having their children primarily through donor sperm, only one of the mothers is the biological mother. In a typical case, one of the women gets pregnant and breast-feeds, and in many states she has the advantage of being the legal mother too. These asymmetries make it very hard to achieve equality. One of the paradoxes is that lesbian co-parents are more likely to fail at their own goals for the relationship than heterosexual couples or gay male couples. They don’t have equal rights with heterosexual parents, and they don’t have equal rights or relationships to the children, and this can exacerbate tensions in the relationships as well. However, at least part of the difficulty derives from social and legal discrimination. Coparents need to have full and equal rights to their children from the very start so that one person doesn’t immediately feel vulnerable and left out of the parenting situation. There seems to be a difference in social acknowledgement of families. For example, if you are a heterosexual family with a small child, people on the streets tend to approve your family by smiling at you and this is some kind of a support you get from strangers, while if you are two men raising a small child, then you constantly have to come out of the closet, you have to explain and defend your family situation and so forth. There seems to be less social support for same-sex families in everyday life. On the basis of your own research into gay families, would you agree with this observation? I don’t entirely agree with that. That’s true for gay men, but it’s much less true for lesbian couples, because gender stereotypes lead most people to presume that a woman is the primary parent. When men are out with children, especially in societies that have become very sensitive and anxious around issues of sexual abuse and paedophilia, they often encounter this anxiety and concern. Single straight men experience this as 146


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well. Heterosexual stay-at-home dads complain a lot about public reactions when they take their children to the playground, for example. This is a real gender issue. Lesbian co-parent families have to cope with the invisibility of the second parent. All kinds of institutional factors come into play, and lesbian and gay parents constantly have to become educators about their families, whether it’s in a doctor’s office or a school or travelling with their children, or whatever. Certainly gay and lesbian parents face many issues that heterosexual parents usually don’t have to face. Personally, however, I also think that same-sex parent families often enjoy certain advantages as well. There is much more organised support by gay and lesbian communities for parenting. There are great organizations for their children, like COLAGE (Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere) and for their straight relatives, like PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). In Los Angeles, where I did research, there is a wonderful group called the Pop Luck Club, which is specifically for gay fathers and “wannabe” gay dads; they hold monthly orientations and picnics and weekly playgroup meetings, and they have established contingents to support single gay dads, stay-at-home dads, etc.. This is something most heterosexual single parents don’t have. I think this is a terrific way to respond to discrimination. Nowadays when most European countries are characterized by low or even “lowest low” fertility rates it should fit a rational demographic policy at a national level to encourage willing same-sex partners to have children, too – and thus let them contribute to the reproduction of the work force, which is often referred to as a sort of “national duty”, especially by conservative politicians, certainly in my country (Hungary). How do you see same-sex couples fitting into this policy environment? Which arguments could be used to support this? Under low fertility conditions, it might be considered a rational demographic policy to encourage lesbians to have children with donor sperm, but the same logic would not apply to gay men. Most gay men who become parents do so through adoption, and this does not increase fertility rates. From a political perspective, I would not employ a “national duty” argument to support lesbian or gay parent rights. I do not believe that parenting should be considered an obligation, nor that arguments for human rights and social justice should rest on instrumental, strategic

McDonald, P. 2008. Very low fertility: Consequences, causes and policy approaches. The Japanese Journal of Population 6(1): 19–23. 147


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arguments. Hardly anyone chooses to be a parent in order to help reproduce the national workforce, nor do I want to live in a world where that was a principal motive for parenthood. Instead, in addition to human rights, I would stress the social benefits society gains from expanding the population of dedicated, responsible parents and from promoting an inclusive society. Can you also see the trend of the increasing feminization of same-sex marriages in the US? This trend was observed in Scandinavian countries and elsewhere in Europe. Can this be connected, in your view, to the fact that it is easier to “get” children within a female same-sex couple than in a male one? I am not up-to-date on the international rates of same-sex marriage by gender, but it is true that in the U.S., lesbians have been marrying at higher rates than gay men in the states where it is legal. I thought it had been somewhat different in the Netherlands after it became the first nation to legalize same-sex marriage. I would expect women to marry at a greater rate than men for two major reasons. Perhaps, most important, a higher percentage of lesbians than gay men are in long-term couple relationships to begin with. In the U.S., there was a popular joke about this gender difference: Question: What does a lesbian bring on a second date? Answer: A U-Haul Truck (a rented truck to move all of her furniture and belongings into her new lover’s home). The second factor for this feminization trend is the one you point out. Women are more likely than men to want children and, of course, they can become parents much more easily than two men. Shared parenthood presents many reasons to encourage marriage, particularly in a country like the U.S. where married couples and their children receive far more benefits, security and status than unmarried people do. In a 2010 European report on family structures and family forms “Rainbow families” were listed under the heading of “new and rare types of families”. Do you also see Rainbow families this way, as being new and rare? Also in this report it is pointed out that the research on rainbow families can have a “high potential for scientifically understanding families in general because all sex or gender related characteristics of both spouses are initially symmetrical in these families”. Do you agree with this view?

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It depends on one’s definition of a “rainbow family.” If this means selfidentified lesbian or gay couples who openly choose to have children together, I guess it would be accurate to describe this family form as a historically recent phenomenon. In the U.S., pioneer lesbian-parent families like this emerged in the 1970s in the wake of feminism. Their numbers have grown exponentially ever since, and this is increasingly a global phenomenon. To call it “rare” also depends on the metric you employ. Because gays and lesbians represent a small minority of the overall population, that could be a fair statement. However, among that minority, this form of family is no longer rare. In fact, it is becoming close to normative in many societies. However I would define “rainbow family” much more broadly to encompass a broader array of family forms that do not centre on heterosexuality or marriage. That’s the approach I take in Unhitched. Ironically, as same-sex marriage becomes normative, the broader definition of rainbow family may be eroding. I do agree with the first part of the claim that studying rainbow families provides a rich laboratory for understanding family life in general. However, as my earlier answers about gender complexity indicate, I do not share the view that two women or two men automatically display symmetrical gender or sexual attributes. In your book In The Name Of The Family you discuss family values in the post-modern age. What should these values be and can we really share the same value system about families considering the protests that are taking place right now against same-sex families? No, we are never going to share the same family values, but I think we have to learn to live in a pluralist society. I think that if one takes seriously the ideas of freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, and equal rights for all citizens, then we have to arrive at a set of social values that will provide a framework for valuing diverse families. In my view, family ethics should promote responsibility, integrity and consent. The goal of society should be to set up the structural conditions that give equal rights and opportunities to individuals and their relationships irrespective of gender, sexual orientation, race or ethnicity, religion, and so on, but not to impose the family forms, the gender norms or the sexual norms that you have to practice. Now, obviously that is utopian, but then democracy is a utopian idea.

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Contributors Maria Carbin holds a Ph.D. in political sciences and is currently employed as a post-doc at the Centre for Gender Studies, Umeå University, Sweden. The post-doc project focuses on neo-liberal governmentality and equality policies within higher education. She teaches courses in gender studies in the areas of feminist theory, post-colonial studies and poststructuralism. Between 2007 and 2010 she participated as a researcher in the research project Quing (Quality in gender+ equality policies in Europe), funded within the European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme. Within the Quing project Maria Carbin analysed equality policies in the Nordic countries, with special attention to Danish policies. Correspondence: Centre for Gender Studies, Umeå University, S-901 87 Umeå, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]

Daniela Danna holds a Ph.D. in sociology and social research and is a researcher at the Department of Social and Political Studies, Università Statale di Milano, where she teaches social policy. She is also the editorial director of XXD, a feminist on-line monthly magazine. Her research has been focused on gender issues, lesbian and gay issues, violence against women, prostitution policy and she is now researching on population theories. Her books in the new millennium are: Il genere spiegato a un paramecio (BFS 2011), Stato di Famiglia. Le donne maltrattate di fronte alle istituzioni (Ediesse 2009), Crescere in famiglie omogenitoriali (co-editor with C. Cavina, Franco Angeli 2009), Ginocidio. La violenza contro le donne nell’era globale (Eleuthera 2007), Prostituzione e vita pubblica in quattro capitali europee (editor, Carocci 2006 – the English translation is published on-line), La gaia famiglia. Omogenitorialità: il dibattito e la ricerca (with M. Bottino, Asterios 2005), Che cos’è la prostituzione? Le quattro visioni del commercio del sesso (Asterios 2004), Donne di mondo. Commercio del sesso e controllo statale (Eleuthera 2004), Amiche, compagne, amanti. Storia dell’amore tra donne (Uniservice 2003) . Correspondence: Facoltà di Scienze Politiche, via Conservatorio 7, I-20122 MIlano, Italia. E-mail: [email protected] Web page: ,

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Éric Fassin is a sociologist, a professeur agrégé in the Social Sciences Department at École normale supérieure in Paris, and a researcher at IRIS (CNRS/ EHESS). His research focuses on contemporary sexual and racial politics, in particular in France and the United States, in a comparative perspective. Recent publications include: Mariages et homosexualités dans le monde. L’arrangement des normes familiales (2008, co-edited with V. Descoutures, M. Digoix and W. Rault), Droit conjugal et unions de même sexe. Mariage, partenariat et concubinage dans neuf pays européens (2008, with K. Waaldijk), Le sexe politique. Genre et sexualité au miroir transatlantique (EHESS 2009), Género, sexualidades y política democratica (Cahiers Simone de Beauvoir, Colegio de México 2009), Hommes, femmes: quelle différence? (Salvator 2011, with V. Margron). Correspondance: École normale supérieure, 48 bd Jourdan, Paris 75014, France. E-mail: [email protected]

Martine Gross is a social sciences research fellow at the Centre d’Études Interdisciplinaires des faits religieux (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). She has published in the area of lesbian and gay Christian and Jewish identities. Her articles have appeared in Archives en Sciences Sociales des Religions and Social Compass. She has widely published in the area of lesbian and gay parenting. She is the editor of Homoparentalités, Etat des lieux (Gay and lesbian parenting, state of art) (Eres, 2005), co-editor (with Anne Cadoret, Caroline Mécary, Bruno Perreau) of Homoparentalités, approches scientifiques et politiques (PUF, 2006) co-author (with Mathieu Peyceré) of Fonder une famille homoparentale (J’ai lu, 2007), author of L’homoparentalité (Le Cavalier bleu, 2009), author of Choisir la paternité gay (Eres, forthcoming 2012), author of Qu’est ce que l’homoparentalité? (Payot, forthcoming 2012). Correspondence: CEIFR 10 rue monsieur le Prince, 75006 Paris, France. E-mail: [email protected] Web:

Hannele Harjunen is a post doctoral research fellow in the unit of Gender studies at the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She holds a Ph.D. in gender studies and is currently working on two research projects: a post doc research project “The construction of neoliberal bodies and fatness” and “Fatty foods and fat bodies: Diversification of ideals and practices in healthy eating”. Her research has focused on 152


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gender and body norms, especially body size, and critical fat studies. She teaches social policy and gender studies at the University of Jyväskylä. Correspondence: Department of social sciences and Philosophy, P.O. Box 35, 40014, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. E-mail: [email protected]

Elke Jansen manages the largest project on LGBT families in Germany – the “Rainbow Family” project in LSVD (Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany). Until 2002 she taught courses in developmental psychology and statistics and did research at the Psychological Institute at the University of Bonn. She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology and has been working as a psychological therapist in private practice for over 20 years. From 2006–2009 she was a member of the advisory board of the first representative study on LGBT families in Germany, commissioned by the German Federal Ministry of Justice. She is the author of the first handbook on LGBT-families in Germany (Regenbogenfamilien – alltäglich und doch anders. Beratungsführer für lesbische Mütter, schwule Väter und familienbezogenes Fachpersonal) and many other publication and presentations about lesbian mothers, gay fathers and their children in Germany. Correspondence: LSVD, Projekt “Regenbogenfamilien”, Pipinstraße 7, 50667 Köln, Germany. E-mail: [email protected] Web page:

Roman Kuhar is a sociologist, an associate professor at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, and a researcher at the Peace Institute, Ljubljana. His research topics include glbt-issues, intolerance and equality, citizenship, and sexuality. He is the author of several books, among others: Media Construction of Homosexuality (2003), The Unbearable Comfort of Privacy: Everyday Life of Gay and Lesbians (with A. Švab, 2005) and At the Crossroads of Discrimination (2009), and the co-editor (with J. Takács) of Beyond The Pink Curtain: Everyday Life of LGBT people in Eastern Europe. He is also the editor of the Slovenian lgbtq magazine Narobe. Correspondence: Mirovni inštitut, Metelkova 6, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia. E-mail: [email protected] Web page:

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Elin Kvist is a researcher and assistant director at the Centre for Gender Studies, Umeå University. She received her PhD in Sociology at Umeå University in 2006. Her research focuses on gender equality, labour market, and welfare state and family issues. E-mail: [email protected] Web page:

Guillaume Marche is a senior lecturer in American studies at the Université Paris-Est Créteil (France) and a member of the Institute for the study of English-, German-, and Romance language-speaking spheres (IMAGER). He teaches courses on 20th- and 21st-century US history, politics, society and culture. His research focuses on contemporary social movements in the US. He wrote his PhD dissertation and several articles on the politicization of sexual identities in the LGBT movement. His recent research also addresses biography and the biographical mode in social science, especially memoirs and biographies as sociological sources; he co-edited with Vincent Broqua a collection of essays entitled L’épuisement du biographique? (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). His current research deals with infrapolitics, especially protest graffiti as an infrapolitical form of mobilization, and he is editing an issue of the French Journal of American Studies (Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines) on infrapolitics (upcoming Spring 2012). Correspondence: Université Paris-Est Créteil – UFR Lettres et Sciences humaines – 61 avenue du Général de Gaulle – 94010 Créteil – France. E-mail: [email protected]

Jose Ignacio Pichardo holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (2008) and is an assistant professor of social anthropology at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His doctoral dissertation dealt with the influence of people with same-sex sexual relations on the social conceptions of family. His research is focused on gender, kinship and sexuality. He has published several books and articles about sexual diversity, rainbow families, LGBT youth, sexual rights and homophobia. Correspondence: Dpto. Antropologia Social, Fac. CC. Politicas y Sociologia (UCM), 28223 Pozuelo de Alarcon, Madrid, Spain. E-mail: [email protected] Web page:

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Judit Takács graduated in History, Hungarian Language and Literature, and Cultural Anthropology at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and completed an MA in Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and currently works as the Scientific Deputy Director of the Institute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (IS-HAS), responsible for leading research teams and conducting independent research on gender issues and family practices, social exclusion/inclusion of LGBT people, HIV/AIDS prevention, anti-discrimination and equal treatment policies. She is the author of the ILGA-Europe – IGLYO report on the Social Exclusion of LGBT Youth in Europe; co-editor (with A. Borgos) of the Voicing Women in Eastern Europe (2011/3) special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies, and (with R. Kuhar) of Beyond the Pink Curtain, the first social scientific anthology on the everyday life of LGBT people in Eastern Europe. Her most recent article (with I. Szalma) on Homophobia and same-sex partnership legislation in Europe was published in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal. Correspondence: J. Takács, IS-HAS (MTA SzKI), H–1250 Budapest, P.O. Box 20. E-mail: [email protected] Web page:

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Index

A

Bergold, P. 40, 49

abortion 17

Bestard, J. 30

abstinence 83, 84, 89

Biblarz, T. 135, 142, 145

adoption 9, 12, 17, 24, 37, 39, 42, 46, 71, 79, 81, 86, 96, 97, 99, 102, 117, 118, 130, 140, 147

blended families 46 Bos, H.M.W. 99, 112 Bradley, D. 70

Agius, S. 83

Brookey, R. A. 84

AIDS 7, 83, 98

Brooks, D. 53

Alberdi, I. 30

Bryld, M. 60, 66, 74

alimony 45

bullying 99, 139

Anderssen, N.C. 99

Burrell, R. 61

Anhamm, U. 44

Bush, G. W. 83, 88

anti-Semitism 100

Buzzi, C. 97

Armstrong, E. A. 87 artificial insemination 67, 81, 107, 112, 118, 121

C

assisted fertilisation 69, 71, 74

Cadoret, A. 8

assisted insemination 45, 59, 63, 67, 69, 95, 102

Carrington, C. 9

assisted reproduction 17, 25, 48, 99, 117

Cea, M. Á. 28, 32

Cavalli, A. 97

Chan, C.G. 120

Attias-Donfut, C. 119

citizenship 22, 60

Azrak, S. 90

Clarke, V. 112

B

co-parenting 26, 118, 122, 124, 127, 131, 142, 146

Banens, M. 83

Cohen, S. 87

Becker-Stoll, F. 40

coming out 20, 24, 44, 53, 105, 117, 120, 125

Beckh, K. 40 157


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consumerism 19

Flaks, D.K. 112

Convention on the Rights of the Child 89

foster child 44, 53

Courduries, J. 117

foster parents 52

custody 37, 47, 49, 102, 141

fostering 52

foster girl 53

Fulcher, M. 119 D D’Emilio, J. 87

G

De Busscher, C.O. 122

Gershon, T.D. 112

De Lillo, A. 98

Gilliam, J. 86

Descoutures, V. 26

Gillig-Riedle, B. 52

Dethloff, N. 45, 49

Goldberg, S. 53

discrimination 10, 28, 39, 69, 75, 86, 95, 99, 102, 104, 111, 112, 137, 140, 146

Golombok, S. 54, 99, 102, 141 Gopalakrishna, V. 112

division of labour 19, 28

Göttgens, C. 54

divorce 17, 21, 118, 141, 146

Graham, M. 25, 28

donor insemination 45, 119, 128, 142

Gregory, R. 112

Donovan, C. 19, 30

Greib, A. 53

Ducousso-Lacaze, A. 125

Greslé-Favier, C. 83

Dürnberger, A. 39, 49

Greve, W. 41

E

H

Elder, G.H. Jr. 120

Hague Adoption Convention 51

Elle, M. 41

Hall, S. 64

Eriksson, A. 74

Heaphy, B. 19, 30

essentialism 80, 84, 88, 91

Hequembourg, A.L. 99

F

heteronormative 14, 60, 66, 74, 124, 128, 131, 139

Farr, R. 54

heteronormativity 20, 25, 28, 30

Farrell, M.P. 99

Hirvonen, H. 66

fertility treatment 45, 60

HIV 86

filiation 18, 25, 28, 34, 45

homoparental 95, 99, 101, 103, 108, 125

Fischer, C.M. 84

homoparenting 126 158


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Index

homophile movement 87

LGBT movement 79, 74, 76, 95

homophobia 7, 12, 18, 24, 100, 104, 111, 124, 140

LGBT youth 80, 83, 85

Hunter, N. 86

Lüttichau, I. 69

I

M

Iard study 98

Mallon, G. 53

ILGA 13

Marche, G. 79, 83, 86

infertility 61, 142

marriage 7, 12, 17, 21, 28, 33, 37, 45, 59, 79, 95, 101, 102, 108, 117, 119, 130, 135, 138, 141, 148

Lombardo, E. 64

intergenerational relationships 119 Irvine, J. M. 87

Mayberry, M. 87 J

McNair, R. 100

Jansen, E 40, 48, 54, 112

Meyer, I.H. 100

Johnson, C.L. 119

Miceli, M. S. 87

Johnson, S.M. 100

Molinuevo, B. 20

Julien, D. 120

Morgan, D. 11

Jungbauer, J. 54 N K

Nebeling Petersen, M. 69, 75

Kantola, J. 64

neo-conservatism 88

Katzorke, T. 44

Neyrand, G. 119

Kershaw, S. 54

nuclear family 30, 67, 70, 76, 119, 127, 131

kinship 7, 18, 29, 33 Knight, R. H. 84

O O’Connor, E. 100

L Leblond de Brumath, A. 118 Lehr, V. 88

P

Lévi-Strauss, C. 7

PACS 117, 121, 130

Lewin, E. 8

Pacte civil de solidarité 117

LGBT families 11, 38, 39, 41, 45, 48, 50, 79, 88, 90

parental leave 75 patchwork families 40, 49 159


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Paternotte, D. 22

S

Patterson, C.J. 112, 120

Saewyc, E.M. 86

Pichardo, J.I. 17, 20, 25

same-sex couples 12, 21, 27, 29, 32, 37, 42, 46, 50, 81, 85, 95, 117, 138, 140, 147

planned families 99, 101, 103, 108, 111

same-sex families 9, 14, 39, 68, 76, 118, 125, 130, 135, 136, 139, 143, 146, 149

Q

same-sex family 39, 101, 118, 122, 124, 126, 131

Queer 7, 14, 17, 20, 22, 25, 28, 30, 32, 44, 48, 75, 84

same-sex marriage 8, 17, 21, 28, 33, 79, 81, 86, 95, 97, 136, 138, 142, 148

queer families 8, 28, 34, 44, 48 queer family 32, 49

Schneider, B. 119, 120, 126

queering 10

Segalen, M. 119, 120

Quing 64, 65

sexual abuse 53, 80, 146 social acceptance 23, 43, 98, 104

R

social grandparents 127, 130

racism 100

social mother 47, 63, 71, 125

rainbow families 33, 55, 68, 148

social parenting 126

rainbow family 44, 48, 53, 149

Speziale, B. 112

Rauchfleisch, U. 41

Stacey, J. 15, 135

Rault, W. 117, 130

Staudinger, U.M. 41

Ray, V. 112

Steffens, M. 54

reconstructed families 31, 101, 103, 105, 108, 111

step-child adoption 46, 75 step-families 119, 130

registered partnership 11, 15, 30, 37, 46, 52, 59

stigma 104, 112, 122, 137, 139

Rich, A. 19

stigmatisation 14, 95, 99, 113

Riedle, H. 52

Stormhøj, C. 60, 67, 69, 70

Riley, R. 20

Sullivan, M. 9

Rivers, I. 100

surrogacy 26, 44, 62, 117, 121, 125, 128

Rubin, G. 19, 27

Symons, J. 14

Rupp, M. 38, 39, 44, 49, 50, 53 Ryan-Flood, R. 74

T

Rydström, J. 59, 76

Tasker, F.L. 99, 102 taxation 37

160


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V van Balen, F. 112 van den Boom, D.C. 112 van Gelderen, L. 41 Verloo, M. 64 Villaamil, F. 28 W Wainright, J.L. 112 Waites, M. 89 Weeks, J. 19, 30 Weinrich, J. 13 Weston, K. 8, 33, 83 Whisman, V. 79 widow’s pension 117 Woog, D. 87 Wypijewski, J. 87 Y Yogyakarta Principles 54 youth sexuality 79, 85, 88 Z Zetterqvist Nelson, K. 73 Zypries, B. 39, 42

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