What It Feels Like For A Lesbian Household: Recent Studies On Gay Families

As America is slowly coming to learn through carefully timed nuggets of popular culture like The Kids Are Alright and the later-in-life public coming out process of beloved mom figures like Meredith Baxter, lesbian moms exist. Much of the long, hit-and-miss history of the sociology of the American family and the particular brand of pop psychology that goes with it has been devoted to husband-and-wife dynamics – does it drive husbands to cheat if the pot roast you make for dinner is tough? Will your children grow up to be serial killers if you let them climb into your marital bed when they have nightmares? Which parent should do the disciplining, mom or dad? These questions get a lot more interesting when they’re applied to gay families, and that’s what we’re starting to see now. What will we see when we look into the mirror of sociological studies? Well, there’s good and bad news.

The good news is that lesbian couples are more likely to report an equal division of household labor between them. In heterosexual couples, this can be a huge problem – studies have shown time and time again that no matter how progressive and feminist and smart and supportive a husband is, it’s still very statistically likely that he does less than 50% of household chores, regardless of the division of labor outside the home between he and his wife. But the upshot of that is that most American women have developed a pretty insane skill set as far as balancing demanding jobs out of the home as well as the demanding job of doing all the work inside the home, on top of caring for a family. When both heads of the household are women, that’s a lot of skills being brought to bear.

The common thread was that women in lesbian relationships were doing what millions of heterosexual women do everyday – simultaneously managing the competing demands of work and family. Not only was there a more egalitarian sharing of household tasks,lesbian couples were much more likely than heterosexual couples to manage their work and family demands by both working part time.

The article makes a good point about how it can be beneficial to the family as a whole when either by choice or by necessity we abandon the gender-based roles that we’re usually asked to fulfill; unfortunately, there were not enough gay male households involved in the study to compare, but hopefully that’s something for the future.

Then there’s the bad news: intimate partner violence exists in lesbian relationships too! And like all instances of intimate partner violence, the victims often feel like they can’t ask for help or admit to anyone what’s going on.

Of the mothers in the study, 11 sought help openly from police, health providers, and domestic violence professionals. Six mothers sought help without revealing the violence because they felt ashamed of being abused by a woman partner—”I thought a female-female relationship was supposed to be nurturing”— and six others tried to solve the problem alone, mostly because they were closeted and had no support from friends and family.

Even more complicated is the custody issue. In many instances of abuse for heterosexual women, they worry that if they report the abuse, they’ll lose custody of their children, and it will perhaps be given over to the abuser. In cases of IPV between lesbians, the abuser isn’t always the biological parent – but there’s still reason to be concerned that the household in general will be deemed unsafe, and custody of children will be awarded to the biological parent (whom the victim may have cut out of her and her children’s lives) or to the state. It’s extremely possible that, especially in more socially conservative areas, a lesbian mom who reports her own abuse could be rewarded by having her children taken from her, regardless of her own fitness as a parent. The result is women who hide all signs of their abuse when they should be able to reach out to those around them for help.

One woman who sought help had no qualms about calling the police to remove the abuser from her property. At the same time, she hid the abuse from the father of her children. “My children are everything to me. He does make considerably more money than I do, and he’s remarried and . . . it’s like a perfect home life, a perfect situation. I just could not fathom if I lost them [the kids], let alone if I lost them because of the abuse. So I hid a lot from him,” she said.

Lesbian families have more recognition, both legally and culturally, than ever before. This means that we may enjoy more respect and less eye-rolling than we have in the past; but it does not, unfortunately, mean that any of the unique problems of being female, being gay, or being both are gone. But knowledge is power, and every day we’re gaining more. Onward and upward, sociology!

My Two (Lesbian) Mums

The Guardian has a super-cute article with stories from several lesbian couples who have children: “A recent study found that children raised by lesbian couples were often brighter, happier and more confident than kids brought up in more traditional family units. Here, four women-only households describe their experiences of parenthood – and why tolerance and honesty are the key”

All of these ladies live in England, Land of Cute Accents and cherub children! Basically what you learn from this article is that if lesbians had existed in the old days, Oliver Twist would’ve had the best family ever and could’ve gotten as much Kashi as he wanted. More and more and more.

Hey sidenote: are you a homogay with two Dads or two Moms? Because we’re thinking about doing a little roundtable about that. Could have some interesting generational perspectives etc. Let us know in the comments! (Don’t email me, at this point you seriously may as well just throw a Chuckie Cheese token into the wishing well at the mall, I’m at least two years behind).

Zero Percent Of Kids With Lesbian Parents Report Abuse, Gay Moms FTW

LESBIAN MOMS:

Zero per cent of families with lesbian parents report incidents of physical or sexual abuse, according to the recently released results of the 24-year-long USA National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study.

The study, which follows planned lesbian families with children conceived by donor insemination in the 1980s, asked 78 adolescents whether they had ever been abused and (if so) the type of abuse, what they identified as their sexual orientation, and about their sexual history.

There were no reports of sexual or physical violence by a parent or other caregiver, and only one report of verbal abuse. In contrast, 26 per cent of American adolescents report parent or caregiver physical abuse and 8.3 per cent report sexual abuse. According to the authors of the study,

A key finding in the current study was that none of the NLLFS adolescents reported physical or sexual abuse by a parent or other caregiver. This finding contradicts the notion, offered in opposition to parenting by gay and lesbian people, that same-sex parents are likely to abuse their offspring sexually.

It’s possible to argue that this is too small a sample size to be meaningful; it’s also possible to argue that rates of child abuse and child sexual abuse are out of control, and that it’s statistically pretty unlikely to find any group of 78 children in America where not one has ever been abused.

The NLLFS also looked at the sexual orientation of the adolescents in question and found that while zero per cent of the girls and 5.4 per cent of the boys rated themselves as predominantly-to-exclusively gay on the Kinsey scale, 18.9 per cent of the girls and 2.7 per cent of the boys fell into the bisexual spectrum. Additionally, girls were more likely to have engaged in same-sex behaviour, regardless of their reported orientation, than girls without lesbian parents. (@feministing)

SKYPE:

A gay couple in Texas got married over Skype and became the first couple to be married over the Internet. There is, of course, a YouTube video (below).

Mark Reed and Dante Karl flew to Washington, D.C. for a marriage license and then returned to Texas, where they were married by an officiant over Skype. In an interview with the Dallas Voice, Reed said, “The reason we wanted to do it this way is because we wanted to have a wedding here in Dallas with our family and friends. It was very important that all of our family came. It was the first time they actually met, even though we’ve been together 10 years. If we had to go to D.C., there’s no way we could have had the people there who we wanted to be there.” (@dallasvoice)

DAN CHOI:

Remembrance Day (Canada) and Veteran’s Day (US) were yesterday. Did you wear a poppy? You should have. In an article in the Huffington Post, Dan Choi writes,

“Since joining the ranks of gay veterans, I have publicly called this war a battle for equality, integrity, and many other powerful platitudes that resonate well throughout the airspace of a media war-zone. But at the heart of my struggle to end unjust discrimination in the military, these bold moral principles become mere words; the motivation to keep fighting in this war resembles the motivation we realized in Iraq. We did not fight for apple pie, the Constitution, or purple mountains’ majesty. We fought for each other.

As we fight to repeal “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” we know that this fight can easily be more painful than physical combat, as the people we fought to protect subject us to the harsh bigotry of popularity polls and the soft bigotry of political inaction. […] The only treatment that can heal the wounds of betrayal and hatred is a recommitment to fight for each other, to stand up for each other, to love one another.”

I MET AUTOSTRADDLERS AND I LIKED IT:

Remember that time Autostraddle told you how to make gay friends and meet girls? It’s still International Meet an Autostraddler Week and you can still meet queer girls and talk about Tegan and Sara and Bruce Springsteen and a poetry reading that’s happening tomorrow and when you started reading Autostraddle and how everything is less awkward and way more awesome than you thought it’d be. Even if you think you’re awkward in public. Especially if you think you’re awkward in public. Everyone you’re meeting? They’re from the Internet too! Seriously, go. Rachel did last night and so did Laneia I think and they both give it two thumbs up.

Things Laneia’s 5-Year-Old Son Said

Have you read Thought Catalog. Have you seen it. If you do it might make you feel like This Recording or even The Awl made you feel once upon a time, like “oh smart people are writing good things on the internet for free, I should subscribe to this RSS feed” and then one day it becomes really cool, like Green Day.

OK let’s say you’ve never heard of This Recording or The Awl and you’re already rolling your eyes at the above paragraph. Well turn that frown upside down, because my Laneia “Jones” (this is seriously the fourth last name she’s employed since our launch, we have to make new business cards every three minutes) possibly maybe has a thing going on over there, starring her five-year-old son Eli, who is a super-special person. I just want to make sure that you know that if you were a breadman made out of bread, and you got butter on yourself, that would be OK. Seriously. You’re beautiful. Just the way you are.

Editors’ Team Pick of Happy Gay Happiness: Dara & Helena’s Wedding by Robin Roemer

Hey you know how Robin Roemer our amazing photographer/photoblogger is also an esteemed wedding photographer? Of course you do. If you wanna feel a little injection of happiness & hope, we suggest checking out the lesbian wedding Robin shot last weekend with Tanya Salazar, it’ll warm your heart right out of your body. We promise.

Autostraddle Roundtable: Our Fantasy Gay Mommies

Autostraddle Roundtable:
Our Fantasy Gay Mommies

This week’s Autostraddle Roundtable is a little less debate and a little more fantasy. Ostensibly we’re reacting to this somewhat bizarre Parentdish survey currently making the world wide webrounds which found that Ellen DeGeneres and Portia De Rossi are the celebs you’d trust your kids with most. We thought it’d be funny to think about who we’d want for our two celebrity Moms, if we could choose.  It’s totes not about the marriage between the women, but about the gifts potentially bestowed upon us from each lady. Not everyone on the team understood the rules, but that’s okay because we’re No Rules, Just Right, obvs! Who would you pick? Let us know!
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