My truckbuddy Frank has a blog post that mentions, among other things, this essay by Richard Lopez, "Growing Up with Two Moms: The Untold Children's View." In it, Lopez, who is now an English professor at Cal State-Northridge, attributes a great deal of unhappiness and maladjustment in his life to being raised by his now-deceased mom and her lesbian partner. Excerpt:
Between 1973 and 1990, when my beloved mother passed away, she and her female romantic partner raised me. They had separate houses but spent nearly all their weekends together, with me, in a trailer tucked discreetly in an RV park 50 minutes away from the town where we lived. As the youngest of my mother’s biological children, I was the only child who experienced childhood without my father being around.
After my mother’s partner’s children had left for college, she moved into our house in town. I lived with both of them for the brief time before my mother died at the age of 53. I was 19. In other words, I was the only child who experienced life under “gay parenting” as that term is understood today.
Quite simply, growing up with gay parents was very difficult, and not because of prejudice from neighbors. People in our community didn’t really know what was going on in the house. To most outside observers, I was a well-raised, high-achieving child, finishing high school with straight A’s.
Inside, however, I was confused. When your home life is so drastically different from everyone around you, in a fundamental way striking at basic physical relations, you grow up weird. I have no mental health disorders or biological conditions. I just grew up in a house so unusual that I was destined to exist as a social outcast.
You should go read the whole thing; it's not terribly long, but it is an important statement. Lopez, who identifies as bisexual, is now married and raising a family. He is also a conservative who concludes that homosexuality, whether the result of nature or nurture, is a destructive tendency that leads to . . . you know, all the terrible things conservatives say it does.
I realized while I was leaving a comment on Frank's blog that I really wanted to say a lot more than is polite to cram into somebody else's comment box, so here's my own post on this subject, for what it's worth.
As Frank observes, Lopez might have grown up with some problems even if he had been raised by two heterosexuals "in similar circumstances." And I agree: just cast your minds back to the 1970's and imagine growing up in a clandestine arrangement than involved spending every damn weekend 50 miles from home, stuck in some dinky RV park in a little trailer with your mom and her lover. Not only would you probably be pretty damned bored for lack of things to do, or just to have some personal space, but you'd also miss out on all the ordinary things kids do on weekends at home, and with their friends. Plus, it was something you could tell no one about, whether you were happy or unhappy with it.
Yeah, I can clearly see a big problem there. Lopez writes:
My home life was not traditional nor conventional. I suffered because of it, in ways that are difficult for sociologists to index. Both nervous and yet blunt, I would later seem strange even in the eyes of gay and bisexual adults who had little patience for someone like me. I was just as odd to them as I was to straight people.
Life is hard when you are strange. Even now, I have very few friends and often feel as though I do not understand people because of the unspoken gender cues that everyone around me, even gays raised in traditional homes, takes for granted. Though I am hard-working and a quick learner, I have trouble in professional settings because co-workers find me bizarre.
In terms of sexuality, gays who grew up in traditional households benefited from at least seeing some kind of functional courtship rituals around them. I had no clue how to make myself attractive to girls. When I stepped outside of my mothers’ trailer, I was immediately tagged as an outcast because of my girlish mannerisms, funny clothes, lisp, and outlandishness.
Well I can certainly relate to much of that. My own parents were hetero, but they had a tragically unhappy marriage, followed by a very bitter divorce, which meant a lot of moving around and shuttling back and forth for this only child. And then my dad died unexpectedly when I was 15, and for many years thereafter, like Lopez, I too felt very deeply the lack of a male role model. There are some things you just cannot fucking learn from your mom, no matter how wonderful and loving she may be - do you know what I mean, fellas? Unfortunately, lots of women simply don't realize or understand this crucial point about their male children.
Continued after the jump . . .
