Timothy J. Biblarz, Megan Carroll and Nathaniel Burke
At this writing, the majority of Americans support same-sex marriage (Powell et al., 2010; King, 2012), and the US Supreme Court has just ruled that a federal law limiting marriage to that between a man and a woman is unconstitutional (United States v. Windsor 2013, No. 12–307; see also Hollingsworth v. Perry 2013, No. 12–144). President Obama’s brief in the same case concluded that gay couples were demonstrably capable of rearing healthy children, and the Court found that denying marriage “humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples.” The best point estimate is that currently 220,000 dependent children are being raised by same-sex couples (Gates, 2013a).
In its movement toward equalizing the distribution of marriage rights, the United States follows forerunner countries like the Netherlands, Spain, and six other European nations along with Argentina, Uruguay, South Africa, Canada, and, pending one final challenge, France. In these same countries and a few others, full joint adoption by same-sex couples is also legal, as it is in almost half of the US states.
Global trends are decidedly in the direction of incorporation. More than 25 of the 31 countries analyzed by Smith (2011) show greater proportions of national samples saying that same-sex sexual behavior is not wrong over the past 20 years. The observed age gap in attitudes has elders more disapproving than young people in every country; trends toward acceptance are expected to gain momentum with cohort replacement. In just the past 10 years, 17 US states, housing 38% of the population, have legalized same-sex marriage, some by popular vote. More states will surely follow as Williams Institute economists, for example, document the boost that marriage expansion brings to state economies (Kastanis, Badgett, and Herman, 2012; Kastanis and Badgett, 2013a, b). Indeed, signaling incorporation are cover stories that are already moving past gay marriage and onto gay divorce (e.g., Green, 2013).
Three decades of steadily improving social science (mostly conducted in the United States) show fairly robustly that sexual orientation per se is not an important predictor of quality parenting, although research claiming to have found the damning evidence of putative ill effects of gay parenting continues to make its way into the public square (for a critique, see Perrin, Cohen, and Caren, 2013). Longitudinal research projects in the United Kingdom (e.g., MacCallum and Golombok, 2004), Belgium (e.g., Vanfraussen, Ponjaert-Kristoffersen, and Brewaeys, 2003), and the Netherlands (e.g., Bos, van Balen, and van den Boom, 2007) have reached similar conclusions on the benign outcomes of same-sex families. While from a very small sample of countries, the core findings have, with reasonable caution, been applied to different national circumstances. The general theories of parental genetic, behavioral, environmental, and attitudinal effects on child development offer no compelling reason to believe that parental sexual orientation per se bears an important influence on children’s developmental health one way or another. In fact, becoming a parent after asserting a gay or lesbian identity often signals a heightened degree of child wantedness and child centeredness because of the great effort typically involved along less conventional paths to parenthood. Scholars have achieved a rare degree of consensus that unmarried lesbian parents are raising children who develop at least as well as their counterparts with married heterosexual parents (e.g., Stacey and Biblarz, 2001; American Academy of Pediatrics, 2002; Tasker, 2005). Others raise the question of whether they and gay fathers might even be doing a better job (Johnson and O’Connor, 2002; Goldberg, 2012; Pappas, 2012).
Even while marginalized from equitable legal protection, lesbian- and gay-male-headed families look like the mainstream in many ways; yet this chapter would tend toward dull if we wrote mostly about how same-sex families are like everybody else. At the risk of being accused of a bit of cherry picking, we focus on potentially interesting terrains of difference that may not be wholly owed to marginalization or as likely to soon disappear into the historical dustbin of a sexually pluralist society (Stacey and Biblarz, 2001). We try to accent scholarly gains made by research that is unbridled from the harm or differences are deficits framework. While (disproportionately white middle-class) working-age gay couples and parents, in relation to institutions like law and marriage, occupy the headlines, we give a bit more attention to other groups along the life course – for example, queer youth and gay elders – that are often overlooked. Finally, where possible, we consider the implications of findings emerging from Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) family studies for core questions in family sociology more generally.
The gay male or lesbian parents in same-sex families began life as youth who experienced some degree of same-sex desire. For utility, we refer to these individuals as queer youth to indicate that they may engage in sex acts with persons of the same sex, experience same-sex attraction, or claim a nonheterosexual identity.
Research on queer youth often focuses on the most visible: those who self-identify as nonheterosexual. Respondents who meet this definition are usually older teens or adults reflecting on their adolescence. Those who experience same-sex desire or engage in same-sex sexual acts during adolescence but do not assert a nonheterosexual identity are underrepresented in research (Savin-Williams, 2001a), as are the voices of queer youth themselves (Mustanski, 2011). The youth in the study of Friedman et al. (2004) felt that sexual and romantic attraction were as salient a part of their sexual orientation as self-labeling and sexual behavior.
Most of the research on queer youth falls under one of two umbrellas – risk models and coming-out models. We discuss each in turn.
Unfortunately, much of what we know is shaped by applied studies of pathologized, visible, victimized youth, and parents who seek support in understanding their child’s sexual identity (Savin-Williams, 2001b). This literature explores average risks of suicide, sexually transmitted diseases, homelessness, and substance abuse (Rivers and D’Augelli, 2001; Russell, 2003, 2006; Marshal et al., 2008) as concomitants of heterosexism and homophobia but less so their dispersion across class, race, gender, and place. Rasmussen et al. (2004) note how a partial narrative can become the entire view of a complex population.
The voices of queer youth and their strategies of resistance to victimization and abuse are limited in the literature. The minority of queer youth who attempt suicide, for example, could be served well by more scholarship on queer youth that are empowered, resilient, sexual, and exerting agency (Unks, 2003). Queer youth themselves may find the pathological narrative to be homophobic and not representative of the majority of their lives (Rofes, 2004). For example, Pachankis and Hatzenbuehler found that gay youth will frequently overachieve in domains like academics in an “adaptive shifting of domains in which one stakes his self-worth” (2013, 186). This may carry its own psychological costs but does not fit neatly into the conventional risk framework.
The problematic heterosexual versus homosexual framework (Savin-Williams, 2001a) which propels a great deal of the research on queer youth mutes within-group diversity and ignores the many places of overlap between queer youth and heterosexual youth. For these reasons, many scholars have begun building a new literature that explores resilience, incorporation, adaptation, and diversity among gay youth. Battle (2012), for example, deliberately moved away from risk-based models in designing the new Social Justice Sexuality Survey for LGBT people of color, which focuses in part on youth. Riggle et al. (2008, p. 210) also argue for more informed psychological approaches that can “help sexual minorities and their families envision and claim the positive aspects of their lives.” Whether these efforts represent a lasting change in the frameworks applied to queer youth remains to be seen.
While the majority of literature on queer youth focuses on risk, fewer studies focus on risk reduction. Eisenberg and Resnick (2006), in a study of youth protective factors, indicate that reducing risk for queer youth lies in creating and strengthening resources that speak to family connectedness. They acknowledge that few studies have explored the significance of protective factors and how they can be strengthened for and by queer youth and their families. Girls may be better protected from suicide risk than boys as they generally identify their nonheterosexual identity later than boys, and gender nonconformance is typically more accepted by the families of girls than boys (van Wormer and McKinney, 2003). Future research must be carefully done to separate gender from sexuality and not assume that queer youth are gender nonconforming.
The average age at which children experience sexual attraction, regardless of orientation, varies from study to study, though boys tend to experience first same-sex sexual attraction earlier than girls. Noteworthy is the tremendous variability in age (many youth do not begin disclosing to others until they are in their 20s and older) and in the meaning and experience of coming out itself. Like sexuality (gay/straight), coming out is often treated as a binary (concealment/disclosure) stand-in for something that is far more complex and diverse. Strong models or typologies of some of the general processes involved are Cass’s (1979) stages (identity confusion, identity comparison, identity tolerance, identity acceptance, identity pride, identity synthesis) and D’Augelli’s (1994) identity processes (exiting heterosexuality, developing a personal Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual (LGB) identity, developing an LGB social identity, becoming an LGB offspring, developing an LGB intimacy status, entering an LGB community) (Bilodeau and Renn, 2005).
The age at which youth begin to disclose to others is on the decline, which may be a result of cohort changes and increased levels of social and familial acceptance (Floyd and Bakeman, 2006); cohorts born in the 1960s and 1970s disclosed at an average of 5 years later than contemporary cohorts (Kryzan, 2000). The young men and women in the study of D’Augelli (2002) experienced first awareness at an average age of 10 or 11 and first disclosures at around age 17. In contrast, the elders in the study of D’Augelli and Grossman (2001) remember first awareness occurring around age 14, on average, and first disclosures did not occur until they were close to 30 years old. Ironically, the trend toward early coming out is also leading to a decline in the number of LGBT parents, as many contemporary LGBT parents had children in heterosexual relationships at a young age, before asserting a nonheterosexual identity (Gates, 2011).
Queer youth’s struggle for acceptance is apparent in literature which positions the heterosexual nuclear family as oppressive both before coming out and after as a result of rejection (Gorman-Murray, 2008). Families may respond negatively to a child’s nonheterosexual identity, mistakenly assuming that the identity is diametrically opposed to marriage and children (Hammack, Thompson, and Pilecki, 2009). Withholding one’s orientation can create feelings of distance with family members, and queer youth often disclose to parents out of desire for closeness with them. They often succeed, as families usually successfully move from conflict to acceptance. The length of time this takes and the actual processes involved are poorly understood. Tremble et al. (1989) indicate that families work to reinterpret their values in order to arrive at acceptance, while contemporary scholarship complicates this narrative. For example, many parents in the study of Fields (2001) did not so much accept their child’s identity as they accepted their inability to change it, arriving at a place of tolerance.
An immediately positive parental response to a child’s coming out is rare; the more frequent first response is that of loss (Fields, 2001). When a child comes out, many families go through a process of moving from loss to acceptance in rough parallel to grief models (Heatherington and Lavner, 2008). We still know little about what occurs within families after the initial response and how families adjust to the youth’s identity over time.
Families with queer youth can tell us quite a bit about how families challenge stereotypes and navigate the coming-out process of their child. While queer youth typically disclose to their fathers after their mothers, Pilkington and D’Augelli (1995) found that mothers were more likely to respond with verbal abuse, though they are also more likely to be protective of their child. The gendered dynamics of these disclosures for both the parent and the child require further study. For example, following disclosure, fathers’ reactions may be particularly important to the well-being of boys (LaSala, 2010).
Factors that predict parent’s reactions include whether the child discloses or is discovered, the age of the child, the age of the parents, level of education, ethnicity, and religion. More recent data (Ryan et al., 2010) indicate that youth’s gender, sexual identity, or transgender identity does not influence family’s acceptance as significantly as do the family’s ethnicity, immigration and occupational status, and religious affiliation. Families whose parents had higher levels of occupational status, for example, were shown to be more accepting of their child’s nonheterosexual identity. Family diversity, therefore, needs to be brought into the exploration of queer youth, pointing to the continued need for intersectional research rather than resting on the assumption that all families with queer youth operate and respond similarly.
Parents who accept their child’s same-sex desires may ultimately join advocacy groups in order to create a more positive social climate for their child. This advocacy by the family is essential in communities that may have a lower degree of tolerance as a result of cultural or religious beliefs. Families can create a sense of local belonging and resist heterosexism by “threading the logic of the family through the few community-based organizational structures available” (Gray, 2009, p. 169). In all communities, families have been shown to be a tremendous buffer against the harmful effects of victimization that queer youth may face. Family acceptance predicts better self-esteem and guards against harm (Ryan, Russell, Huebner et al., 2010).
All youth keep secrets. The secrets of sexual confusion and comparison are experienced to some degree by mostly all teenagers, but that of homoerotic desire is particularly weighty. This secret is often kept for years from self and for more years from others. The fear of the psychological violence that might accompany someone finding out, or telling someone, can be tremendous. Social reaction can range from kind to horrible; rarely is even the most accepting reaction ever completely free of homophobia because of the predominance of heterosexual institutions. In these contexts, many processes are not well understood. What strategies, for example, do queer youth utilize in order to navigate discussions of desire and attraction among their peers and their families? How do queer youth begin to explore their feelings of attraction and broach these topics with potential partners? How are the experiences and views of youth who experience both same-sex and different-sex attraction silenced or not by the heterosexual/homosexual binary?
In the transition to adulthood, gay youth face challenges not only in their local environments but in the considerable constraints imposed by the state regarding sexual orientation (e.g., constraints on marriage, adoption, and fertility services) and by the culture, around the meaning of adulthood and the markers that signal its full arrival. Focusing on what kind of an order queer people might belong to and following Foucault’s suggestion that we contemplate why homosexuality is threatening as a lifestyle more than as a form of sexuality, Halberstam (2005) observed that queer lives often fall outside of the heteronormative time sequence of birth–marriage–reproduction–death. In a social structure where marriage and reproduction are the core markers of adulthood, queer temporality that falls outside of this sequence can be viewed as childish, self-centered, and immature or as a kind of extended adolescence. Queer culture is often represented by conventional institutions as a subculture, and subcultures are something one is eventually supposed to grow out of.
Similarly, Edelman’s (2004) concept of reproductive futurity suggests that traditional Western politics are predicated on making the future a better place, and the child works as the symbolic image of that future. As queer people are symbolically separated from the act of reproduction, queerness “names the site of those not fighting for children” and is positioned as a “relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-negating drive” (2004, p. 3). Queers are positioned as a threat to the child and to the future the child belongs to. For queer youth, this can be experienced as a fatalistic message about their own futures.
Jones (2011) presents a more optimistic analysis of queer youth’s actual futures, in which she argues that conventional life trajectories have simultaneously become more accessible to LGBT people and less compulsory overall. In her study of 33 bisexual young adults, many participants literally drew futures for themselves that were both positive and nonnormative. In Goltz’s (2009) study, younger lesbian women were more likely to associate their own futures with positive meanings and images of family and children, compared to young gay men. A range of factors may influence these contradictions, such as the extreme variability in tolerance toward diverse sexualities over time and location, or the well-documented tendency for men to internalize homophobia at higher rates than women (Grossman, D’Augelli, and O’Connell, 2002; Fredricksen-Goldsen and Muraco, 2010). What applied scholars do tend to agree on is the importance of discussing positive aspects of gay and lesbian lives, compared to the negative life experiences that often dominate the literature (Riggle et al., 2008).
Millions of queer youth, while mostly barred from legal marriage, grow up and form families, have children, foster children, adopt children, coach children, teach children, care for their nieces and nephews, and otherwise undermine cultural assertions that being gay means being antichild. In the scholarship on how parental sexual orientation matters, the question has shifted from whether being raised by gay or lesbian parents is harmful to children (as against makes no difference at all) to less report card explorations of where parental sexual orientations and genders may and may not matter for parents’ and children’s lives and development along the life course. Unfortunately, in the current historical period, these questions cannot be fully answered by social science research because of arguably insurmountable selection problems, mostly rooted in the extrafamily environment.
Say, for example, that research detected higher levels of certain kinds of qualities in youth with gay parents than with straight parents. This might be due to the influence of some aspects of parents’ sexualities and genders (disentangling those two itself is an intractable sort of overidentification problem), and home environments, but it could as well be due to parents’ unequal access to the formidable public and material privileges of legal marriage, or children having to contend with vicarious social stigma at school, and so on. Researchers cannot hold constant (un)equal protection in law and the larger society. As same-sex marriage achieves full legal status nationally, or in states or provinces, our ability to discern whatever unique effects the sexual orientation and gender mix of parents have on family processes and child outcomes would, accordingly, be enhanced, because we could match samples on actual marriage and the opportunity to marry.
Social science finds consistently that children from groups that face prejudice and discrimination have tougher odds of scoring high on conventional success measures. In turn, the baseline expectation here would be that in a heterosexually privileged culture, children with straight parents would do better. This is partly why the many findings of equal (or better) outcomes of children with gay parents (e.g., Tasker, 2005) are noteworthy, an instance where nonfindings are unexpected findings.
This in turn points to another side of the stubborn selection issues that out gay parents in most of our samples to date are a relatively privileged group of whites who are comparatively educated, urban, and mature. Recent national evidence shows that gay couples are far more socioeconomically, racially, and spatially diverse than is often depicted. For example, 39% of adults in same-sex couples who have children under age 18 in the home are people of color (Gates, 2013b), and same-sex parenting couples have lower average incomes than comparable different-sex couples. At the same time, gay couples in the US population have regularly been found to be more educated than their heterosexual counterparts (Black et al., 2000; Gates, 2013b).
The selection issues go well beyond sample bias. For example, the structure and form of different routes to parenthood require different amounts of resources and thus sort and select users almost by definition. Conceiving a child through heterosexual reproduction is the least expensive (and so least selective) route to parenthood. Other routes like donor insemination (sometimes in vitro), adoption, foster care, traditional surrogacy, gestational surrogacy, and elective coparenting take considerable time, work, money, reflection, intention, proaction, and wantedness. (In this book, see Chapter 25 on the development of assisted reproduction technologies.) The children produced by them are the result of especially high levels of parental investment (Bos, van Balen, and van den Boom, 2003). In a complex way, homophobia and marginalization come up against privilege and perseverance in many of these families.
What is it like raising kids outside of heterogender designs where, in accord with their different sexes, fathers and mothers tend toward different gender repertoires and domains of specialization? It appears that more egalitarian family lives unfold; research has repeatedly shown that lesbian parent couples, for example, have high levels of shared employment, decision making, parenting, parenting goals, and family work (see Biblarz and Savci, 2010; Biblarz and Stacey, 2010). This includes more parental partnering in time spent caring for children, talking with children, playing with children, disciplining children, helping with homework, and time spent in employment. One or another of these findings spans studies from four different western countries. Research coming out on gay fathers shows similar patterns (e.g., Goldberg, 2012).
Even so, unlike straight parents, gay parents have to be concerned with homophobia, and this in turn may inform decisions like choosing the child’s pediatrician, parental involvement at school, opening up to the child’s school teacher, and screening other persons in the child’s life (Johnson and O’Connor, 2002). While personal choice and aptitudes tend to guide task sorting in degendered parenting arrangements (Silverstein, Auerbach, and Levant, 2002), some specialization or division of labor between partners still occurs of the sort typically characteristic of Western capitalist societies (e.g., differences between partners in relative time spent in public/employment and private/family arenas). That gender does not vary within lesbian coparents or between lesbian coparent families does not mean that these families are immune from other stubborn axes of inequality. One example is biological relatedness to the child: lesbian biological mothers often provide more of the primary childcare than comothers and may be afforded more recognition and legitimacy by others (e.g., Goldberg and Perry-Jenkins, 2007). Another is marital status: family fears, behaviors, contingencies, and interaction with institutions in the extrafamily environment may vary across married, domestic partner, civil union, or not recognized legal statuses (Rothblum, Balsam, and Solomon, 2008; Shapiro, Peterson, and Stewart, 2009). Another axis is route to parenthood. Within, for example, gay cofather families, some stratification of status and privilege may exist (from high to low) across gestational surrogacy, other kinds of surrogacy, adopting children, and families where children came out of former heterosexual relationships (Carroll, 2012). Finally, race and class matter of course, as the very meaning of egalitarianism and sharing varies across LGBT families in different social locations (e.g., Moore, 2008, 2011).
Recent research examining the relationship between LGBT families carries important methodological and theoretical implications. For example, despite the expectation that LGBT people and their families would gravitate toward urban areas where they can more easily access LGBT-affirming resources, LGB families are geographically diverse and often reside in nonmetropolitan areas with varying levels of acceptance or support (Oswald and Lazarevic, 2011; Oswald and Holman, 2013a). In order to understand how space-specific social conditions can impact LGB families, Oswald et al. (2010) developed a methodology of community climate to measure the degree of support that LGBT people and families may receive in a particular location. Their scale was created using municipal-level data on the number of LGBT organizations and legal nondiscrimination ordinances, as well as county-level demographics that included the number of religious adherents and the number of same-sex partner households. Both were validated alongside the survey data of LGBT individuals’ perceived community climate (see Oswald and Holman, 2013b), and the resulting scale is the first of its kind: a comprehensive tool to empirically assess the level of support for LGBT people and families within a particular zip code. Future studies conducted using this new data set may help researchers improve on minority stress models that link wellness outcomes to social support and other environmental circumstances as well as invite more visibility to geographically diverse (and intrinsically, racially, and economically diverse) LGBT individuals and families (Oswald et al., 2010; Oswald and Holman, 2013a).
What aspects of family life might we expect will be conditioned by two parents of the same sex, and where would we expect patterns from the heterosexual family literature to obtain right across the gender mix of parents? We suspect that the gender mix of parents substantially moderates most dimensions of family process studied in mainstream family sociology, because gender matters that much. For example, the time bind and second shift (Hochschild and Machung, 1989, 1997) experienced by mothers in dual career couples are in some ways shaped by the fact that their partners are men; these kinds of work/family conflicts may take on different shapes when the partners are two mothers or two fathers (Burke, 2013). Domestic violence, intergenerational relations, kin keeping, class and families, race and families, the state and families, privatization of family life, religion and family life, courtship, etc., mostly everything we know about these and other textbook topics rests in one way or another on an assumption of heterosexuality. These topics need to be rethought and reexamined when parents are of the same gender. Accordingly, as heterosexual couples become less guided by gender, gay male and lesbian coparent families may be setting trends that family sociology can learn from more generally.
One particularly interesting aspect of this is that out gay parents generally have to go outside the family and bring a third party in to conceive children. Where legally permitted, some gay fathers hire surrogate mothers for pay, while others may have a friend who will surrogate. Still others may choose elective coparenting with a woman. Lesbian mothers may use an anonymous sperm bank donor, but they may also use a brother’s or other man’s donated sperm, making him a kind of potential biosocial father or uncle-like figure at the same time. Increasingly, adoptions are of the open or cooperative sort, where the birth mother and adopted family know who each other are and have the option of contact.
This raises the opportunity for more parents or parent-like people in the lives of children, and for the concomitant negotiations of new relationship boundaries and role definitions that gives rise to. That not all of the adults with an investment in the children live under the same roof makes same-sex families both part of and a bellwether of the continuing separation of family and household (Cherlin, 2010). For some time now, out same-sex individuals have had to go outside of the household to achieve parenthood. Research might benefit by threading these experiences with those of the many other emergent families that move beyond traditional nuclear and especially beyond the purely private household – blended, step, multigenerational, elective, transnational, commuter, and so on.
Though they are often left out of the academic conversation about same-sex families, gay and lesbian elders can also inform our broader understanding of families and sexuality. Attention toward gay and lesbian elders is becoming increasingly important as the boomer generation ages and large cohorts of gay and lesbian parents become grandparents (Whalen, Bigner, and Barber, 2000). The overall body of literature on gay and lesbian elders tells a story of diverse family structures and informal systems of social support (Fredriksen-Goldsen and Muraco, 2010). These dynamics emerge through a number of themes in the growing body of literature on LGB elders’ families, each of which much be understood within the historical context of LGB elders’ lives.
Many elders came of age during a cultural shift in gay identity expression and meaning. Early homophile movements promoted an understanding of homosexuality as a private, intimate relation, but the gay liberation movement, most commonly associated with Stonewall, propelled gay identities into the realm of public and political action. Combined with other historical events that many gay elders witnessed, such as the AIDS crisis and the removal of homosexuality from the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association), these competing discourses have shaped and divided elders’ perspectives about the appropriate contexts for disclosing their sexual identities (Fox, 2007; Haber, 2009).
The current generation of gay and lesbian elders has lived through a historical period of intense homophobia, and research accordingly suggests that most gay and lesbian elders see passing as a practical resource for maintaining relationships with heterosexuals (Pollner and Rosenfeld, 2000; Heaphy, Yip, and Thompson, 2003; Almack, Seymour, and Bellamy, 2010). Many elders themselves have described the experience of being gay or lesbian as not safe or dangerous during the majority of their lifetime (e.g., Orel and Fruhauf, 2006). Other gay and lesbian elders, however, view passing as a betrayal of their authentic self. The proportions of each group seem to be changing as boomers continue to age and assert their identities (Grossman, D’Augelli, and O’Connell, 2002; Haber, 2009).
Many scholars have been careful to contextualize elders’ experiences in reference to the historical period through which they have lived. Rosenfeld (1999, 2003) especially has documented the interplay between generational cohorts, identity expression, and social change. Studies that have reported the most positive outcomes of LGB elders have generally relied on participants who are involved in the broader gay and lesbian movement and therefore identify more strongly with the Stonewall era’s philosophies of gay identity (e.g., Whitford, 1997; Orel, 2004; Henrickson and Neville, 2012). By contrast, elders who have not disclosed their sexual identities are generally characterized as having lower quality of life (Fredriksen-Goldsen and Muraco, 2010). To the extent that internalized homophobia can be measured, it has been correlated with worse mental health and increased suicidal ideation (D’Augelli et al., 2001; Fredriksen-Goldsen and Muraco, 2010). These outcomes have been found to vary by gender, with men internalizing homophobia at higher rates than women and thus experiencing more severe outcomes with age (D’Augelli et al., 2001). Research addressing racial diversity among LGB elders is extremely limited, but one study found that older black gay men perceived higher levels of racism than younger black gay men, as well as higher levels of ageism than older white gay men (David and Knight, 2008). Groups like Services and Advocacy for Gay Elders (SAGE) are working to combat these issues, though they are unlikely to be sought out by elders who do not affirm a positive gay identity (Friend, 1989; Haber, 2009).
Family dynamics are of course deeply intertwined with elders’ decision to disclose their sexual identities. Many who chose not to disclose feared rejection from family members, in particular, whose reactions could be difficult to predict (Friend, 1989; Pollner and Rosenfeld, 2000). As the participants in Pollner and Rosenfeld’s (2000) study pointed out, these anxieties contradict dominant discourses about the resiliency of family bonds, which were criticized by some elders as a strictly heterosexual privilege. Some elders also felt that disclosure was unnecessary because family members already knew but were equally invested in maintaining secrecy (Friend, 1989; Pollner and Rosenfeld, 2000). Again, this attitude is generally attributed to dominant, pre-Stonewall (a series of New York City riots often positioned as the beginning of the gay liberation movement) gay identity expression which viewed sexuality as a private aspect of the self (Rosenfeld, 2003).
LGB elders face the same bodily challenges of aging as their heterosexual counterparts and thus require similar aid from care providers. However, their distinct social needs present an added challenge during the aging process (Maylor et al., 2007; Slevin, 2008). Whereas literature on families often focuses on the younger relatives of elders performing care work, LGBT elders are less likely to have children or grandchildren to care for them (Almack, Seymour, and Bellamy, 2010). Institutionalized homophobia and heterosexism in the healthcare system also constrain elders’ ability to communicate with healthcare providers or receive quality care (Richard and Brown, 2006; Blank et al., 2009). Some LGB elders may even avoid professional care in anticipation of discrimination (Hash, 2006; Richard and Brown, 2006). For many, homophobia could exacerbate the rude or hostile treatment they could already expect from a healthcare system that has become far too impersonal (Hash, 2006, p. 132). Several studies have recommended separate retirement or care facilities for LGB elders as a solution to these challenges (Johnson et al., 2005; Fredricksen-Goldsen and Muraco, 2010).
Many LGB elders rely on close friends and fictive kin, commonly referred to as families of choice, to meet their care needs (Grossman et al., 2000; Blank et al., 2009). Families of choice are often cited as an alternative to blood-related kinship available to LGBT individuals, though, as Heaphy (2009) notes, the choices involved in these relationships are often constrained by the availability of economic, social, and cultural resources. Furthermore, the formation of families of choice is highly dependent on one’s level of outness and integration into a gay community, which is less common among elders. The dynamics between visibility, community ties, and aging can have far-reaching effects on LGB elders’ access to care. For example, one study that recruited participants through community organizations and personal contacts found that a majority of gay men and lesbians over 65 perceived themselves to be healthy, happy, well adjusted, and ready to negotiate the challenges of aging (Orel, 2004). In another study that recruited elder LGB participants exclusively through churches, 51% had no support system and 70% feared that they lacked the financial means necessary to meet their needs through the aging process (McFarland and Sanders, 2003). Due to the challenges of recruiting participants who are not involved in institutionalized forms of LGBT support, it is difficult to more precisely measure the relationship between sexuality, aging, family, and care.
Despite such limitations, support systems based on choice have been found to offer similar rates of wellness to LGB elders, compared to heterosexual elders (Fredriksen-Goldsen and Muraco, 2011). LGB elders who rely on choice-based relationships for care have also reported better mental health and higher quality of life than those who relied on family members (Masini and Barrett, 2008). Despite these outcomes, families of choice are often cut off from the resources offered to families who are tied through blood or legally recognized marriages, such as insurance benefits, hospital visitations, decision-making rights, and the ability to use the Family and Medical Leave Act (Calhill and South, 2002; Blank et al., 2009; Knauer, 2011).
End-of-life planning is especially challenging for LGB elders as a result of their legally unrecognized relationships. Not only are their preferred next of kin often excluded from end-of-life decisions, but an LGB person’s will could even be contested on the basis that homosexuality itself is evidence of incompetence (Friend, 1989; Almack et al., 2010). To prepare for these challenges, gay and lesbian elders often plan ahead for their futures by legally naming their families of choice as their next of kin, though there is no guarantee that their wishes will be upheld if challenged by a blood relative (Friend, 1989; Hash, 2006; Almack et al., 2010). The grieving process is also exacerbated for elders’ same-sex partners, whose loss may go unrecognized by those who were either not aware of the relationship or refused to acknowledge it (Hash, 2006; Almack et al., 2010).
Among those that suffer most from the challenges of aging are unmarried or widowed LGB elders, who are often isolated from any form of community. Research indicates that more LGB elders live alone than heterosexual elders, and those that do tend to experience more negative physical and mental outcomes (Heaphy, Yip, and Thompson, 2003; Blank et al., 2009). However, Hostetler (2009) argues that maintaining a healthy single lifestyle may be difficult against strong normative expectations that privilege marriage and family. His study of 94 single gay men, ages 35–70, found that participants often justified their singlehood as a step along the way to establishing a family or as a result of unconscious choices they may have made. Very few participants reported that they actively intended to live a single lifestyle. While it is possible that a social desirability bias influenced interviewees to describe their singlehood in terms that conformed to strict societal expectations of marriage and family, Hostetler (2009) argues that these narrative strategies are indicative of a missing single-by-choice identity in society, which could be accompanied by more institutional forms of support. In other words, maintaining a healthy and happy single lifestyle is challenging within a society that views singlehood as an involuntary result of failed relationships.
The need for acceptance of a wide breadth of relational configurations is also reflected in interviews with partnered gay and lesbian elders. Elders who choose to pass and keep their sexual identities secret may have been more likely to marry heterosexually than younger generations, for whom marriage is seen as optional (Friend, 1989; Almack, Seymour, and Bellamy, 2010). Yet even older same-sex couples who have been together for 40 or more years have expressed diverse responses to the increased availability of legally recognized partnerships. For example, among the nine couples interviewed by Porche and Purvin (2008) about their attitudes toward marriage, the two couples who chose not to legally marry were the oldest. Both couples had formed their relationship before the Stonewall riots, and neither was involved in the gay or lesbian community. In explaining his reasons for not marrying, one participant expressed, “I’m old enough to know that civil rights – those laws don’t change the way people act or think or anything, it’s a much longer process” (Porche and Purvin, 2008, p. 155). He and his partner wore rings to symbolize their commitment but refused to define their marriage in terms of legal sanctions. The other participants who deliberately chose not to marry, a lesbian couple in their 60s, explained that they had already spent so much time and money arranging legal protections for themselves. They believed a marriage would only make those arrangements more complicated. This couple also did not feel that marriage was particularly important or necessary, and they expressed criticism toward the marriage movement.
In a study of 18 Canadian grandmothers, Patterson (2005) also uncovered a strong streak of ambivalence toward legal marriage via Bill C-38, which legalized same-sex marriage across Canada. Many couples appreciated the legislation as a sign of increased acceptance, but they were also concerned about the bill’s potential to erase alternatives for gay and lesbian couples. As one couple reflected, “the loss about Bill C-38 is the loss of creativity; we are being fit into a box that we didn’t create” (Patterson, 2005, p. 47). As Heaphy (2007) explains, the creative forms of kinship that permeate elders’ lives are grounded in their resilience against hegemonic meanings of gender and sexuality. Even though gender inequalities can be found within these creative kinship patterns, they represent the diverse values and possibilities that can accompany social change (Patterson, 2005; Heaphy, 2007).
Researchers estimate that one to two million LGB Americans are either grandparents or soon to become grandparents (Orel and Fruhauf, 2006). Only recently, however, has scholarship begun to explore relationships between LGB grandparents and their grandchildren. These relationships are often mediated by LGB grandparents’ adult children, whereas elders who are not accepted by their children may have less contact with their grandchildren or be less likely to disclose their sexual orientation (Orel and Fruhauf, 2006; Fruhauf, Orel, and Jenkins, 2009). For those that are involved in their grandchildren’s lives, grandparents’ sexual orientation influenced a range of dynamics in the relationship.
Six of the sixteen lesbian and bisexual grandmothers in Orel and Fruhauf’s (2006) study had not disclosed their sexual orientation to their grandchildren out of worry that they would react negatively to their sexual orientation. These grandmothers characterized their relationship with their grandchildren as distant and dishonest, and they generally found it extremely stressful to maintain an illusion of heterosexuality. A study by Fruhauf et al. (2009) found similar dynamics among gay grandfathers, who had little to no contact with their grandchildren when their adult children did not approve of their sexuality.
Lesbian and bisexual grandmothers who had disclosed their sexual orientation to their grandchildren felt that honesty was essential in maintaining a warm and intimate relationship with their grandchildren (Orel and Fruhauf, 2006). Most of the grandfathers interviewed by Fruhauf et al. (2009) reported that coming out to their grandchildren was easier or more natural than coming out to other family members, including their own children. Adult children usually assisted in the grandfathers’ coming-out process, and the process itself was often prompted by the grandchildren’s questions. However, some grandfathers indicated that their grandchildren did not need to ask questions. As one participant said, his sexual orientation “became part of the fabric of life…as race, or hair color, or anything else” for his grandchildren (Fruhauf, Orel, and Jenkins, 2009, p. 110).
Orel and Fruhauf (2006) also found some inequalities between biological and nonbiological cograndmothers. Biological grandmothers were generally granted higher status and sometimes felt angry at their partners’ lack of interest in the grandchildren. Other times, biological grandmothers were jealous that their partners were not obligated to assume as many responsibilities for the grandchildren. Biological grandmothers were also faced with the added challenge of maintaining a positive relationship and ongoing communication with their exhusbands, who had a strong influence over grandmothers’ relationship to their adult children.
Participants in multiple studies did not feel that their sexuality significantly affected their role as grandparents (Whalen, Bigner, and Barber, 2000; Orel and Fruhauf, 2006). As Orel and Fruhauf (2006) explain, grandmothers’ sexual orientation did not in itself have an impact on their relationship to their grandchildren, but their relationships were constrained by the heteronormative and homophobic context in which those relationships took place. Interestingly, grandmothers believed that cultural gender expectations, not sexual orientation, primarily influenced their role as grandmothers (Orel and Fruhauf, 2006). They were expected to take on a nurturing role with the grandchildren, in support of their adult children. Whalen et al. (2000) also emphasized the emotional support that grandmothers provided for their adult children and grandchildren. Fruhauf et al. (2009), by contrast, did not emphasize nurture in grandfather’s roles, instead describing a diverse range of roles that included active grandparent, source of wisdom, father figure, and absent figure. A very small number of participants in each LGB grandparenting study referenced their attempt to challenge dominant notions of gender and sexuality through their role as grandparents, providing messages of gender role flexibility and tolerance. Many of the women in a Canadian study of 18 lesbian grandmothers were especially introspective regarding the alternatives to hegemonic meanings of gender and family that they had embraced in response to a homophobic society (Patterson, 2005). For these women, their role as grandmothers consistently included the presentation of diversity, self-acceptance, and successful nonconformity.
Aside from the body of research addressing LGBT grandparents, a few other scholars have begun to examine the relationship between LGBT elders and today’s youth more broadly. This research raises critical questions concerning the impact of LGBT elders’ invisibility on gay youth and identifies some of the communicative barriers across generations within the LGBT movement.
Ever since Berger (1982) referred to older gays and lesbians as the unseen minority, the invisibility of LGBT elders has been a very strong theme in the body of research addressing aging and sexual orientation. This invisibility has consequences within the families of LGBT elders, but it also has an impact on the families of others affiliated with the LGBT movement. In the absence of more positive images of LGBT elders, stereotypes of older gay men as lonely, self-loathing, and predatory have dominated relations between gay elders and gay youth. Fox (2007), for example, investigated the use of the term troll as a dehumanizing slang term referring to older gay men within the LGBT community. These stereotypes are widely available in the society, and they permeate beyond gay and lesbian individuals themselves. Many young gay and lesbian people, for example, have reportedly had family members discourage their sexuality by saying things like “imagine how lonely you will be when you are old” (Friend, 1989, p. 242).
In a society in which images of the future that are offered to young people are primarily tinted with heterosexual images of marriage and family, Goltz (2009, p. 562) asks of queer youth, “what does it mean to exist in a space outside of these blueprints and images, to be denied access to the dominant scripts?” Goltz thus argues that the negative stereotypes associated with gay elders, combined with the invisibility of LGBT elders’ actual lived experiences, influence younger gay men’s tendency to attach negative and gloomy meanings to their own futures. Goltz argues that the invisibility of LGBT elders is thus connected to some of the risk behaviors associated with queer youth (Goltz, 2009).
While many LGBT elders do struggle with loneliness (Grossman, D’Augelli, and Hershberger, 2002), a review of the last 25 years of LGBT aging literature found that the majority of published research described predominantly positive adjustment to the aging process among older gay men and lesbians (Fredrik-Goldsen and Muraco, 2010). Furthermore, research has found that there is not one normative life course for older gay men and lesbians, but rather a variety of life trajectories influenced by gender, cohort, marital status, coming out, and friendship networks (Herdt, Beeler, and Rawls, 1997). Using this information to dismantle stereotypes and offer greater visibility of LGBT elders could potentially improve young gay men’s visions of the future, but improving relations between LGBT elders and the broader LGBT community also comes with its own challenges.
For many elders, even the term queer may have negative connotations strong enough to alienate them from the larger LGBT movement, which has reappropriated the term to describe a variety of ideologies and identities (Fox, 2007; Brown, 2009). Ageism is also a challenge within the gay and lesbian community, particularly for older gay men who face a well-documented emphasis on youth in gay subcultures (Heaphy, 2007; Goltz, 2009). Furthermore, as previously discussed, elders who have spent a lifetime learning to survive by hiding their sexuality may find it difficult to adjust to contemporary LGBT identity politics that stress outness and authenticity. This appears to be the case even when exposing their sexuality no longer threatens their survival (Fox, 2007). However, researchers predict that as LGBT boomers age, they will be more out than generations before them and more likely to assert their rights as LGBT Americans (Haber, 2009). In the meantime, more attention paid toward the diverse configurations of LGBT families at every life stage can not only inform our sociological understanding of families more broadly, but as Goltz (2009) argues, it may help set a standard for young people of a brighter future.
A number of themes unfold from this chapter. First, the report card model (grading the effects of gay parenthood on children) is the wrong model, because differences in the wellness of family members across genders and sexual orientations per se tend to be infrequently occurring and the least interesting. We would like to see a better balance of studies on, for example, the covariates of youth’s gender repertoires and sexualities, as against the studies on youth’s psychometric measures of adjustment ranked high to low. Indeed, if the interest is in how the gender mix and sexual orientations of parents affect children intergenerationally, children’s own genderedness and sexual orientations seem like a more theoretically interesting starting point (in part because it is isomorphic to the question) than children’s internalizing or acting out. Of course, the same questions should be extended to heterosexual families as well.
Second, this idea of how queer youth emerge into adulthood, and the different pathways they follow in young adulthood, is intriguing. Many queer youth have begun a process of unpacking a secret about self to self and others that can lead to a greater sense of freedom, relief, and joy. They tend to do this in close proximity to entering a life course stage wherein they are somewhat freer than their heterosexual peers from heteronormative time expectations (e.g., of marriage and reproduction). Rindfuss (1991) has shown that the young adult years are a period of multiple transitions; they are demographically dense. Fruitful would be to explore how sexual orientation moderates the diversity of sequencing work/school and family transitions, orderly/disorderly transitions, and clear/blurred transitions (Rindfuss, 1991).
Finally, the idea that LGBT family patterns can inform understanding of new form heterosexual families deserves further exploration. For example, among the most striking western demographic trends of the past 50 years is the decline in marriage rates and the rising proportions of women (and men) that remain childless. This means that larger numbers of people will enter old age unmarried and childless. Lesbians and gay men, it turns out, have a lot of experience at this. Exploring how they create families absent legal or biological ties later in life could prove helpful to all kinds of families.