GROWING UP WITH MOM AND MOM: From the New York Times Magazine

[Big piece, hard to excerpt. Here are a few of the moments that struck me, but there's lots more in there. --Eve]

...Earlier this year, over dinner at a small restaurant in the West Village, a few blocks from where she was raised, Ry was offering me a short lecture that she has been called on to deliver dozens of times, politely solving the puzzle that is her family for other people. She was explaining her name, explaining her mothers' relationship, explaining her older sister, whose name, Cade, also demands clarification. She was explaining how it is that she has no father, and when pressed further -- after all, everyone has a father -- she raised her eyebrows, dark and thick and finely shaped, just a little. ''You mean who's my sperm donor?'' she asked. I apologized -- ''father'' can be a loaded word for children of lesbian mothers -- but she shrugged it off with a small wave of her hand, her dark red nails flashing by. ''It's O.K.,'' she said. ''I'm not fussy about stuff like that.'' ...

If she has volunteered to talk frankly to a stranger about her family life, not to mention her sex life, it's because Ry knows she's one of a relatively limited number of adults who were raised from birth by ''out'' gay parents (as opposed to a parent who revealed he or she was gay after marrying and having kids). As more and more gay men and lesbians feel comfortable coming out earlier in their lives and the possibility of legalized same-sex marriage appears to be gaining ground in select states, Ry's experience may represent the future of gay households. Already, the 2000 Census reported that some 150,000 same-sex couples had children in their homes. If the last three decades of the gay rights movement focused on sexual freedom and acceptance, the next three decades seem destined to continue the current battle for the right to marry and, by extension, the right to be a parent. ...

Lynch emphasized the liberating novelty of his upbringing, its power to pave new routes to a kid's sense of self. ''I'm a nurse,'' he wrote. ''I played competitive tennis and rode my bike across the U.S. Last week I canned five gallons of tomato sauce while crying to stories about the occupation of Iraq on the radio, then flirted with a cute woman at the corner diner.'' He continued: ''Boys raised in gay families can and do reform masculinity so that instead of being simply not feminine, it's positive. There's room for emotions. There's room for affection (even attraction!) for other men. And there's room for women as people, lovers, not a Mysterious Other.'' His e-mail message started out with a pronouncement that he sees as progress, and that conservatives may see as an indictment: ''One of the most powerful parts of growing up in a gay family is the opportunity, which not every child or parent takes, to transcend gender.'' ...

...For Ry, one aspect of being raised by gay mothers is not knowing what to attribute to the travails of being a given age, or a woman, or a feminist, or a New Yorker, and what to attribute to the particular gaps and connections that come with having lesbian mothers.

Ry could find yet another source for her wariness about men by looking to the central drama of her childhood: a legal struggle with the man who donated his sperm to Young. When Ry was 9, her sperm donor, a gay lawyer from California named Thomas Steel, sued for an order of paternity, turning what had been an affectionate, intermittent relationship into a bitter, hostile one. From the beginning, for Russo and Young, it was a given that Steel would have no parental rights, although they made it clear he was welcome to visit the family and to get to know Ry and Cade. ''I mean, it wasn't like a parent at all, but he was affectionate, and I went along,'' said Ry, who saw him a few times a year starting when she was a toddler. ''Here was this really fun, big, tall man picking me up and telling me, 'Oh, you're so cute.' You know, that was fun. But I didn't rely on him for anything -- he was like an uncle you love hanging around with.''

When Ry's mothers refused to let Steel take Ry to California to visit his parents and grandmother, he filed for paternity, which would have granted him certain rights over decisions governing Ry's life. Despite Russo's law degree, she and Young had decided not to ask him to sign a document relinquishing his rights; at the time, they said, they suspected such a document could not have been honored, given the novelty of the issue. As the case made its way through the courts over the course of four years, the family suffered from the stress of the challenge: Young lost 20 pounds, and both women were swamped with legal fees and meetings with lawyers. Cade said she felt the burden of testifying to court psychiatrists about their family's dynamics, fearful that any wrong word would lose her her sister. Ry started having nightmares about the police coming to take her away.

To Russo and Young's dismay, a significant portion of their mutual friends sided with Steel. As groundbreaking as their family was, Russo and Young seemed to be taking an almost conservative view of parenthood, one defined by the number two. In the context of an era when gay men and women were just starting to try to recreate notions of family and community, their structure struck some of their peers as limited: if two parents were good, why wouldn't three be better? Wasn't Steel, indeed, both involved in Ry's life and a biological parent? Shouldn't that give him some rights?

...''I mean, there was a time when I did care a lot about him,'' [Ry] said. ''Not as a father -- more like as an icon of a man.''

Ry's mothers may not have been heterosexual role models for her, but they've always encouraged her in her relationships with men, provided they approved of her choice. When she was 16, she fell in love with her first boyfriend but was unsure of where to take things. Several months into the relationship, there were a couple of weeks, her mothers recall, when she mooned around the house, talking around and about the relationship, seeming stressed out, uncertain, in need of counsel. ''Finally, my mom said, 'You should just go have sex with him,''' Ry recalled. ...

The story has become a favorite family chestnut, partly because of the way it embraces heterosexuality while upholding values Russo and Young pride themselves on, values they see as part of queer culture -- an openness about sexuality, a fearlessness communicated not just from friend to friend, but also, now, from mother to daughter. To Ry, the story signifies something slightly different. ''It was like I needed to ask their permission to have sex with this man,'' she explained to me. The issue for Ry wasn't sex -- it was sex with a man, which meant ''growing up and away from my mothers,'' as she put it. They gave their consent, with love and encouragement, but it seems to pain Ry that she felt, of her own accord, that she had to ask at all: ''I felt a little bit like I was betraying them. Like I was leaving them emotionally. I wasn't sure if it was O.K. with them. But then I got that O.K. and that made me feel relieved, like I could go ahead.''

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posted by Eve at 4:44 PM | link

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