Announcing the results of his long-term “evolution” on the subject last week, President Obama revived the debate over gay marriage. In the widespread discussion, however, there is one question that’s rarely asked: How interested are gay couples in getting married?

Heretofore at least, the answer seems to be “not really.” Since 1997, when Hawaii became the first state in the union to allow reciprocal-beneficiary registration for same-sex couples, 19 states and the District of Columbia have granted some form of legal recognition to the relationships of same-sex couples. These variants include marriage, civil unions, domestic partnerships, and reciprocal-beneficiary relationships; and the most recent U.S. Census data reveal that, in the last 15 years, only 150,000 same-sex couples have elected to take advantage of them — equivalent to around one in five of the self-identified same-sex couples in the United States. This number does not appear to be low because of the fact that only a few states have allowed full “marriage”; indeed, in the first four years when gay marriage was an option in trailblazing Massachusetts, there were an average of only about 3,000 per year, and that number included many who came from out of state.

This dearth of early adopters is not peculiar to America. Research conducted in 2004 by Gunnar Anderson, a professor of demography at Sweden’s Stockholm University, seems to confirm the trend. ...

Enthusiasm for marriage is somewhat lopsided by gender. Divorces, too.

Labels: culture, domestic partnership, Europe, gay couples, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, gender differences, lesbians, Massachusetts, men, Norway, Sweden, women

VOTE

You think a romantic relationship between two people is hard? Try polyamory.

A panel of experts at the American Psychiatric Association meeting in Philadelphia last week said that open relationships between more than two people can work, but it requires a lot of talk about rules, boundaries, and time spent with various lovers.

William Slaughter, a psychiatrist in Cambridge, Mass., who has been treating polyamorous patients for about five years, said they need to have very good communication skills and be especially good at “mentalizing” or understanding others’ emotional reactions. He and Richard Sprott, a psychologist at California State University East Bay, and Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist who recently left Georgia State University, talked about what to expect from polyamorous patients. Such patients often complain that they have to spend too much time educating their therapists, Slaughter said. ...

Sheff and Sprott believe polyamory is increasing. Sprott said younger generations are less insistent on monogamy than their parents. He cited research that found that 29 percent of lesbian couples, 29 percent of cohabiting straight couples, and 47 percent of gay couples are not monogamous. Among married couples, 23 percent of men and 19 percent of women cheat at some point in the marriage. He said there is no way to know how common polyamory is. ...

Sheff has studied children in polyamorous families. In her small sample, the “kids tend to be in great shape.” These families often aren’t obvious to the mono world. They look like a couple whose good friends come over a lot or people who are good friends with their exes. Most are discreet about sex, so the kids aren’t confronted by it and neither are their friends.

Sheff said the children say they like having extra adults in their lives. There’s always someone to drive them somewhere or help with homework. “A number of them expressed pity for children who only have two parents,” she said.

Labels: adultery, children, cohabitation, gay/straight differences, lesbians, mental health, monogamy, more than two parents, parenting, polyamory, professional associations

VOTE

I proposed to my last girlfriend in Lesvos, Greece, at sunset, overlooking the craggy shores of Skala Eresou. I carried the ring 8,000 miles. I wasn’t eloquent, but she cried and I cried and as we walked back to our rented house, we played a game where we guessed the number of stray cats we’d see along the way. We said the loser had to kiss the winner a million times.

Shortly after that, we moved to San Francisco. Shortly after that, I was on a different shore and she was on a boat drifting farther away from me each day. Shortly after that, we stopped having sex. Words were somewhere in the absence growing between us but I couldn’t find them. My only weapon was repetition. I made us dinner. We watched “Glee.” We went to yoga. Shortly after that, she told me she wanted to date men, that our relationship was over.

My ex-girlfriend now has a boyfriend and lives in Minnesota. My yoga teacher, who announced to her mom at age 8 that she was a lesbian, now exclusively dates men, and has been in a committed relationship with a man for more than a year. My straightest guy friends have all at least made out with other men, while others are now dabbling in full-on dude sex. Whatever norm you came in with, San Francisco eventually takes it and turns it right on its (uncircumcised, pierced) head. It shouldn’t have surprised me that the City wanted to have its way with me too. Still, I was the last person who thought I’d be a lesbian who spent the next year and a half of her life sleeping with men. ...

...I went home with my friend and we had sex for hours. We didn’t discuss anything or stop to wonder if this was a good idea. We just kept moving to the rhythm of each other’s particular hungers. Afterward I felt so relieved. The months of frustration and rejection that led to my breakup were all released during this one marathon night of hetero sex. “I’m OK,” I thought. “I’m going to be OK.” While waiting for the bus outside his house, I burst into tears.

Then there was another friend, a new one. We went to a bar and he told me to tell him my life story, starting from birth. It took 12 hours, and he didn’t once let me ask him any questions in return. We held hands on the way back to his apartment and I remember thinking, “This is so wrong. Our hands don’t fit together. Our hands are just grasping at anything.”

San Francisco’s not an easy city to live in. Everyone is struggling a little, to pay the exorbitant rents, to stand out in a lasting way, to grow up as slowly as possible. I was unemployed the first five months I lived here, then took an internship that paid $6.25 an hour. Without the relationship luxury of shared expenses, I was barely surviving. But I was writing and I was having sex, which somehow made my financial and emotional woes more bearable. After a while, being straight felt more subversive to me than being queer, even more so when I was having queer sex with straight men.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", bisexuality, culture, lesbians, premarital sex, sex

VOTE

Williams Institute demographer Gary Gates begins his new article in National Council of Family Relations [pdf] by indicating that the gay parents in the hilariously funny Modern Family (okay- the hilarious part is my editorializing, not Gary's analysis) are decidedly not the typical same-sex couple raising children.

The most important conclusion from Gates's review of census data and several other large scale surveys is that large numbers of children of same-sex couples almost certainly are the product of previous heterosexual relationships. ...

There is other, fascinating, evidence supporting the likelihood that most lesbians raising children have a child from a previous heterosexual relationship. In the 2009 California Health Survey, which asks respondents to identify their sexual orientation (unlike census data, which can only report numbers of same-sex couples raising children, thus exclusing gay men any lesbians raising children without living with a partner ), 22.4% of heterosexual women reported having a child before age 20, while 37.9% of lesbian and bisexual women reported having a child before age 20. (Does denial about one's sexual orientation lead to riskier behavior? less likelihood of using birth control? The data doesn't give us the "why," only room to speculate...)

In this article, Gates repeats information he has provided elsewhere, for example that the greatest percentage of same-sex couples raising children is in the south. Also, couples with less than a high school education are almost three times as likely to be raising children as couples with a graduate degree. (This discrepancy does not exist for heterosexual couples). Furthermore, African-Americans in same-sex couples are 2.4 times more likely than their White counterparts to be raising children. On the other hand, looking at adopted children only, White same-sex couples are almost twice as likely to have an adopted child when compared with couples where at least one partner is not White, and the couples with adopted children are more likely to have completed higher education.

Nineteen percent of same-sex couples with children have an adopted child, almost double the percentage in 2000. Yet the percentage of all same-sex couples raising children has decreased. It looks like lesbians and gay men are less likely to have children in heterosexual relationships now -- hence the more recent decline, perhaps because they are coming out earlier -- and that for all the attention to the "gayby boom," the actual number of children deliberately born or adopted into gay or lesbian families cannot make up the shortfall.

Labels: adoption, children, class, culture, donor conception, gay couples, gay parenting, gay/straight differences, lesbians, race

VOTE

It works for some people. There has never been a scientific study of the success rate of open marriages, because different couples work out their arrangements in different ways. ...

According to psychologist Lisa Diamond of the University of Utah, gay men are more likely than any other group to practice polyamory. For a forthcoming study, she asked 120 cohabiting couples in the Salt Lake City area whether they had explicitly agreed to have sex outside of their relationships. Almost one-quarter of the gay male couples said they had a polyamorous arrangement. That’s compared with about 7 percent of the heterosexual couples and 3 percent of the lesbians. Previous studies have suggested similar proportions, although none is large enough to state the prevalence of open marriage with any certainty. The character of the arrangement also differs between the groups. Among gay men, polyamory most often involves discrete sexual trysts. (Some of these arrangements are very specific, for example, allowing sexual infidelity only when one of the partners has crossed an ocean.) Lesbians are more likely to have a long-term second partner. The polyamorous couples in Diamond’s study reported the same level of relationship satisfaction as those who were monogamous.

Labels: culture, gay couples, gay/straight differences, heterosexual couples, lesbians, Marriage, men, monogamy, open relationships, polyamory, women

VOTE

The December 2011 peer-reviewed journal Family Relations [pdf] reports the latest findings from the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS) on the well-being of children whose mothers split up before they were 17. The NLLFS has been following 85 children of lesbians born through donor insemination beginnning in the 1980's. Information about the study and its earlier published research is all located on the NLLFS website.

Of the 73 two-mother families in the study, 40 couples had split up by the time their child was 17 (over 90% of these occurred before the child was 13). This is a higher rate of separation than the divorce rate for married heterosexuals. 71% of separated couples reported shared custody of the children, a number considerably higher than the rate of shared custody among divorced heterosexuals. 59% of the couples had completed second-parent adoptions, and parents in that group were more likely to share custody. The children whose mothers had completed second parent adoptions were much more likely to report feeling close to both mothers. In 10 families, the birth mother was primary custodial parent. The study reports no families in which there was one primary custodial parent and that parent was the nonbiological mother.

The study's key finding: there was no difference in psychological health or problem behavior between those children whose mothers had completed second parent adoptions and those who had not, or between those whose mothers shared custody and those who did not. The authors note that this lack of association could reflect the small size of each subgroup. (Previous research from the NLLFS, published in Pediatrics [pdf], reported no difference in the well-being of children whose moms split up and those whose moms were still together.)

Labels: adoption, children, civil unions, custody, gay marriage, gay parenting, lesbians, motherhood, parenting, relationship dissolution

VOTE

Labels: contraception, culture, gay/straight differences, lesbians, men

VOTE

For the child of lesbians, Mother’s Day is never simple. Sunday was no exception.

For starters, how many Mother’s Day cards should my daughter buy? As with everything else in our family, this one is particularly complicated. You may want to jot down a few notes.

My daughter has two moms, one stepmom, one ex-stepmom and one future stepmom, maybe. Every year, she scopes out Mother’s Day cards in multiple configurations, depending on relationship statuses.

My (now ex-) wife gave birth to her via artificial insemination 25 years ago. Some time later, we divorced. We each remarried. More precisely, I remarried and she got into a committed relationship, during which her partner bore a son and daughter. Both were the products of AI, which in this case had nothing to do with Allen Iverson, that we know of.

Many years later, she and her partner broke up. They worked out a time-share for the kids, who were raised with my daughter as her brother and sister. The fact that the (now ex-) partner and her progeny moved across the street streamlined the process considerably.

Labels: children, cohabitation, committed relationships, culture, divorce, donor conception, family structure, lesbians, motherhood, parenting, stepparents

VOTE

Curious what people are up to when it comes to sex?

For some of us, not much, according to a new report issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics which painstakingly details the country’s sexual habits.

Based on in-person interviews with approximately 13,500 men and women between the ages of 15 to 44, the report describes who’s having sex with whom, what kind of sex they’re having, and who has yet to become sexually involved.

Yes, virginity is apparently making a comeback.

Researchers found that between 2006 and 2008, the percentage of 15- to 24-year-old men who had never had any form of sexual contact with another person was 27 percent (up from 22 percent in 2002) while the percentage of 15- to 24-year-old females who had never had any sex whatsoever was 29 percent (up 7 percent points from 22 percent in 2002).

Anjani Chandra, a health scientist at the NCHS and lead author of the study, says 15- to 19-year-olds made up the lion’s share of this category, a finding that seems to counter other reports regarding teen sex trends.

“I think a lot of people misconstrue this as meaning they’ve never had vaginal sex,” she says. “But this is no sexual contact of any kind. They didn’t have oral sex or anal sex. They didn’t have anything.”

Labels: culture, homosexuality, lesbians, sex, virginity

VOTE

We don't discuss it much. It confounds notions of fixed sexuality and fidelity. But sometimes when a lesbian couple wants a child one partner conceives through sexual intercourse. Relatively speaking, it is cheap and reliable. But it alters the legal context of everything that follows. In Quebec, the law explicitly recognizes that assisted reproduction can include reproduction through sexual intercourse if the understanding is that the man will not be a father and is engaging in the sex act to allow the woman (or the woman and her partner) to be the only legal parent/s of the child. The impetus for this unique construct was the desire to make it as easy as possible for lesbians to have children and to shield them from the discrimination and cost of using fertility services. No law like that exists anywhere in the United States (or the rest of the world as far as I know). In a handful of cases here where a man and woman (lesbian or not or unknown) have made an agreement that only the woman would be a parent and that the man was assisting her through "artificial insemination by intercourse," no court has ever upheld the agreement. If it gets to court, the man has legal rights and responsibilities.

Well, a case decided this week in Minnesota [pdf] throws some daylight on this form of conception used by some lesbians. A lesbian couple identified in the court's opinion as J.M.J. and L.A.M. arranged with J.L., J.M.J.'s ex-boyfriend, that he would conceive a child with J.M.J. and then consent to the child's adoption by L.A.M., thereby terminating his parental rights. And that's what he did. L.A.M. became the legal parent of the twin girls born to J.M.J.

First thing to point out is this. Legally speaking, this method of family formation should work out fine any place that allows second-parent adoption. A biological father can consent to his child's adoption by the mother's new husband, thereby terminating his parental rights. All courts are familiar with this practice. The adoption must be in the child's best interests, but where all the parties agree there is not likely to be any difficulty. What the three people in this case did falls squarely in that category. It's the same process used in second-parent adoptions where conception takes place through insemination with a known donor; donor consents to adoption by bio mom's partner and his rights are terminated. The end.

But it wasn't the end for this lesbian couple, whose relationship ended shortly after the adoption. J.M.J. then married a man (not the bio dad), and several years later she filed an action to vacate the adoptions on the ground that Minnesota does not allow second-parent adoption.

Labels: adoption, children, gay parenting, lesbians, sex

VOTE

Research indicates that lesbians tend to make more money than heterosexual women. Over at Big Think, Marina Adshade attempts to demystify the phenomenon:

Sure, lesbian women are better-educated on average, are more likely to be white, live predominantly in cities, have fewer children, and are significantly more likely to be a professional. But even when you control for these differences, the wage premium is still on the order of 6%.

It is fascinating when the data starts looking like the majority is being discriminated against. Is it wage discrimination, though, or is there an economic argument for why lesbians are getting paid more?

Adshade's question has invited a number of responses. How are people accounting for the so-called "lesbian wage premium?"

Labels: culture, economics, heteronormativity, lesbians, parenting, women

VOTE

Carol Pasternak was a married mother of three in her mid-30s when she fell in love with a woman. It took her a while to recognize what she was feeling; to figure out why she missed her female friend so much when she was away.

“I’ve had this feeling before,” she remembers thinking. “Once. I married him. I’m in love. Oh. I’m in love. This is a woman. I must be gay.”

For three years she didn’t talk about it. She would spend a month or two depressed and filled with yearning, then it would pass. Then it would flare up again. Eventually, her husband found out, and so did the kids.

They stayed together for six years before separating. “My husband has always been my best friend and he still is,” says Pasternak, now 56. ...

Late-blooming lesbians have gained some mainstream visibility in recent years thanks to celebrities like Cynthia Nixon and Portia de Rossi. Nixon had two children with her long-time partner Danny Mozes but is now engaged to Christine Marinoni, while de Rossi was married to documentary filmmaker Mel Metcalfe before coming out as a lesbian.

The subject is also starting to garner academic attention, with researchers trying to understand how women’s sexuality — and capacity for same-sex relationships — might be different than men’s.

Labels: culture, gender differences, homosexuality, lesbians, women

VOTE

...When the institution of something once called “fatherhood” falls apart, this is what happens. We leave each child to “define” the relationship of him or herself to the person who is his or her biological father. The children must “decide” what that person “means” to them. They should “think about the parameters” of what they want. They should “speak up.”

Probably some of them can manage this task quite well, at least on the outside. The 11 and 12 year olds quoted in the guide sound eerily mature, like people twice their age. The people in high school or college quoted in the guide sound like they are forty. Their parents make a lot of money (in this sample) and they’re impressively articulate and sound mature. Compared to the thick, complex negotiations of their childhood, the “real world” might not be so hard for them.

But what of the others? Two-thirds of the donor offspring in their sample are girls or women.[liv] Where are the boys? Where are the fumbling young people, the ones who are too confused to log onto a web survey, or too angry at their parents to take a survey their parents tell them to take? Where are the ones who got in trouble at school that day and are the last kids their moms would want to be studied by some researcher? Where are the ones who just aren’t gifted with emotional intelligence, who aren’t skilled at negotiating ambivalence and speaking up about their own needs in the face of their parents’ tender feelings, who have no clue how to explore and accept the limits of undefined relationships? When we ask children and young people to behave like little adults, what happens to the ones who can’t rise to the challenge? And what happens to the ones that do?

Labels: adolescence, children, donor conception, Fathers, gay parenting, lesbians, My Daddy's Name Is Donor, parenting

VOTE

British comedienne and former lesbian Jackie Clune has published an account of how, exhausted by the emotional dysfunction of her lesbian relationships, she discovered in her subsequent relationship with her husband a freedom to "[walk] alongside each other rather than spending life locked in face-to-face intimacy or combat."

"Looking at my four children racing around the garden with their father, it seems almost impossible to believe that only a few years ago I never imagined having a family," writes Clune in a column published in the UK's Daily Mail June 26.

Clune, who is also known as a cabaret performer, actress, and broadcaster, says she was raised in a "very traditional Irish Catholic" home and and fell in love with a man at 17. It was in college that she stumbled upon a pamphlet claiming that heterosexuality is a mere construct to be altered at will, which prompted her to break up with her boyfriend and live the typical lesbian lifestyle for the next 12 years, until she was 34 years old.

"I was excited by the close bond a relationship with another female could bring," she writes.

But the experience was not as she at first envisioned it to be. In an interview with the Times' Penny Wark in October 2005, Clune called lesbian culture "dictatorial and intimidating" and "the opposite of the sapphic fluffy nirvana I expected."

Despite the closeness of her relationships, Clune admits that the hyper-emotional world of a female-to-female sexual bond was "exhausting." "The women I went out with were by and large more inclined to be insecure and to need reassurance and I found myself in the male role of endlessly reassuring my girlfriends," she writes. "The subtle mood changes of everyday life would be picked over inexhaustibly."

Labels: gender, gender differences, heterosexual couples, homosexuality, lesbians, United Kingdom

VOTE

...In the February issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family, Judith Stacey, a professor of sociology at New York University, and Timothy Biblarz, a demographer from the University of Southern California, consolidated the available data on the role of gender in child rearing. ...

Drawing on reliable comparative studies, you could say this: single moms tend to be more involved, set more rules, communicate better, and feel closer to their children than single dads. They have less difficulty monitoring their children’s whereabouts, friendships, and school progress. Their children do better on standardized tests and have higher grades, and teenagers of single moms are actually less likely to engage in delinquent behavior or substance abuse than those of single dads. Go, Murphy Brown.

The quality of parenting, Biblarz and Stacey say, is what really matters, not gender. But the real challenge to our notion of the “essential” father might well be the lesbian mom. On average, lesbian parents spend more time with their children than fathers do. They rate disputes with their children as less frequent than do hetero couples, and describe co-parenting more compatibly and with greater satisfaction. Their kids perceive their parents to be more available and dependable than do the children of heteros. They also discuss more emotional issues with their parents. They have fewer behavioral problems, and show more interest in and try harder at school.

According to Stacey and Biblarz, “Two women who chose to become parents together seemed to provide a double dose of a middle-class ‘feminine’ approach to parenting.” And, they conclude, “based strictly on the published science, one could argue that two women parent better on average than a woman and a man, or at least than a woman and man with a traditional division of family labor.”

Labels: culture, Fathers, gay parenting, gender, gender differences, lesbians, men, parenting, single parenting, women

VOTE

...The caveat (and we say it several times in the report) is this: With 39 persons in the sample, we don’t know how generalizable these findings are to the broader population of sperm donor conceived persons born to lesbian moms. But every other researcher who studies these populations has the same problem.

How do the sperm donor conceived offspring of lesbian moms fare? The answer is, nobody really knows. But some pretty disturbing questions are raised by the study we released last week. Read My Daddy’s Name is Donor to learn more.

Labels: children, donor conception, gay parenting, lesbians, My Daddy's Name Is Donor, parenting

VOTE

TRADITIONAL family supporters raised the alarm yesterday after Government research claimed that lesbians made the best parents.

Campaigners said that research paid for with taxpayers’ money to pander to same-sex couples only succeeded in marginalising fathers to the detriment of society.

The National Academy for Parenting Practitioners struck a blow to the heart of the conventional family after it said the latest research showed that children prospered when raised by two women. ...

But the research showed that children brought up by lesbians had higher aspirations to become ­doctors or lawyers and were more confident to fight for social justice.

Speaking last week, director of the research Stephen Scott said: “Lesbians make better parents than a man and a woman.” Campaigners Fathers4Justice attacked the study for failing to promote the role of fathers and laid blame for a pending “unprecedented social ­crisis” at the Government’s door.

Labels: culture, family structure, Fathers, gay parenting, lesbians, parenting, professional associations, Scotland

VOTE

..."Fluidity is not a fluke," sexologist Lisa Diamond told the Times. Of the women who told Diamond that they were lesbian, only one-third reported attraction solely to women. The other two-thirds felt genuine, periodic attraction to men.

This means that, if we were all honest in our labeling, the majority of women would need to call ourselves "bisexual" or "queer," instead of "straight" or "gay," as we do. The research says that there are far more women attracted to people of both sexes than there are women who are attracted to only one sex. If only one-third of lesbians are completely women-centered when it comes to desire — and only two percent of the country is lesbian — then that is a tiny number, about 2 million.

Of course, being a lesbian is about more than desiring other women. It is also about a female-centered culture, about consensus building, about emotional bonds with other women. That is what we mean, usually, when we talk about a lesbian "community" — and why lesbian communities often have such a different feel than gay male ones.

Labels: desire, gender differences, lesbians, women

VOTE