Barack Obama became the first president to acknowledge Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month. In a May 2011 proclamation he stated, “The story of America’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community is the story of our fathers and sons, our mothers and daughters, and our friends and neighbors who continue the task of making our country a more perfect Union.”1 This was the unplanned opening salvo in what was soon to become some of most dramatic months in LGBT history. Between June 24, 2011, the day the state of New York legalized same-sex marriage, and September 20 of that year, when the eighteen-year-old Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy ended, LGBT people were some of the most unpopular folks in the country. Oklahoma state representative Sally Kern told a talk show host that “homosexuality is a bigger threat to the United States than terrorism.”2 GOP presidential candidates Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum signed the National Organization for Marriage pledge that, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, not only supports an amendment to the US Constitution barring recognition of marriages between same-sex couples but also appoints a presidential commission to “investigate harassment of traditional marriage supporters.”3 Not to be outdone, Pat Robertson, after discussing the Biblical destruction of Sodom on his television show The 700 Club, proclaimed, “In history, there’s never been a civilization ever that has embraced homosexuality and turned away from traditional fidelity, traditional marriage, traditional child-rearing and has survived… So you say, ‘What’s going to happen to America?’ Well, if history is any guide, the same thing’s going to happen to us.”4 Responding to the amount of hate rhetoric being disseminated during this time, Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign (the nation’s largest LGBT civil rights organization), sent out an e-mail to members on August 11, 2001, stating, “It’s the sheer, unbridled hate from right-wing leaders and national politicians that keeps me up at night.”
Solmonese isn’t the only LGBT person kept up at night by “sheer, unbridled hate.” For many lesbian and gay parents, the political backlash against the strides made by sexual minorities threatens their day-to-day safety and the sanctuary they have created in their communities. For example, numerous homophobic and sometimes simply mean-spirited responses by antigay groups and high-profile individuals follow each step forward for LGBT people, and these occur at the federal, state, and local level; national campaigns against gay families eventually seep down to local communities and feed into preexisting homophobia, heterosexism, or confusion regarding sexual minorities. For example, Michigan’s attorney general waged a three-year campaign against domestic partnership benefits and a Michigan Court of Appeals ruling overturned a trial court’s holding that public employers may offer domestic partnership benefits. This government-level backlash was followed on the community level by the state’s largest increase in violence against LGBTs. As summarized in a 2007 report by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), “In Michigan and elsewhere in the U.S., these highly visible political attacks on LGBT communities reinforce the idea that it is acceptable to target LGBT persons with violence.”5
While many queer parents are satisfied if they can simply be left alone to raise their children, at present even this humble hope is crumbling as they experience an inevitable counterattack against gay rights. Indeed, the more LGBT men and women make strides at the national level, the less safe many individuals feel in their own communities. These advances turn the spotlight on many families, and the unwanted attention is complicating their lives, and for some even exposing them to danger.
Justin stands out as an exemplar of this unfortunate dynamic. During our introductory e-mail exchanges, he made it clear he would not talk with me unless I agreed to disguise his identity as well as the community in which he lived. I, of course, assented and, upon our first meeting I naively informed him I would simply describe the geographic region of the country that he called home—the Deep South. He immediately alerted me that even this sweeping generalization was still a source of anxiety: Could somebody still infer his location from this seemingly inconsequential information?
Justin had never planned on raising children and, until several years earlier, had given up hope of even entering a long-term romantic relationship. Then he met Scottie at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Justin sensed Scottie was gay from their brief interactions at the meetings, but they did not share too many personal details other than those concerning their struggles with drug use. Scottie was raising a four-year-old daughter and in the process of getting a divorce. When an opening in another branch of the corporation in which he worked became available, he voluntarily moved to this new location to escape the “people, places, and things” of his old neighborhood. Justin was initially crushed when he learned of this because this evidence convinced him that Scottie was straight. Still, over the next several months, they exchanged confidences, revealed secrets, and ultimately confessed their mutual attraction. Within six months, they became close enough to call themselves a family. Three years later they are still together, happy, and completely abstinent from all addictive substances. Yet some cracks have become increasingly evident, not from any issues occurring within their family, but rather from without.
From Justin’s perspective, the more progress sexual minorities have made in regard to their civil rights, the more constricted he and his family have became. Every night, it seemed, the national news covered at least one story concerning gays in the United States, and the three that garnered the most coverage were court battles over gay marriage, gays in the military, and gay bullying in schools. Justin and his family felt the effects in a series of alarming incidents. First, Justin was taunted with “Fag!” by several youth congregating outside of a convenience store. Less than a month later, as he rode his bike through in the center of their small town, an empty beer can was launched at his head through the window of a passing car, accompanied by a shout of “Fag!” Justin didn’t know if it was the same group or not. Finally, on the same night that news coverage of the dissension regarding the Defense of Marriage Act filled the airways, the entire family was startled awake when a car stopped in the driveway. Several young men urinated in front of the house and threatened to come back unless the “fag family” left and took their “asses where they were wanted.”
Justin had lived in this community his entire life, and he and his new family were living in the very same house he had grown up in and that had been bequeathed to him by his mother. Justin admits he was never “out” and is still not comfortable with his sexuality, yet he had never experienced any mistreatment. There had seemed to be a tacit understanding that as long as he remained “asexual” (his term) in his behaviors he posed no “threat” to the community. Somehow, though, that compact had been broken. Was this because his presence as a gay male had somehow become community knowledge since he had moved Scottie and Emily into his home? Justin knew for a fact that several men in his community were gay but lived stereotypical married lives, but he knew of no other gay families. Or was it because gay issues were suddenly unavoidable? After all, even the weekly community paper covered gay-related issues occurring in the closest city. Maybe it was also due to incessant media attention on gay families? He concluded that it was a combination of all factors. Where once his sexuality had been overlooked, ignored, and considered inconsequential, current events were placing him and his new family in an unwanted spotlight.
A 1954 study of twelve-year-old boys at a summer camp in the idyllic Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma might seem an odd item to include in this chapter, but its findings and implications are profoundly relevant to modern LGBT families.6 While at the camp, the boys were randomly divided into two groups, which were kept separate from each other, though they know of each other’s presence. Each group participated in team-oriented exercises, and, within the first few days, the bonding between the members of these two individual groups was solidified. This is the point at which the experiment became infamous.
The researchers arranged competitions between the two groups in which there were clear winners and losers. Antagonism escalated from name-calling and singing derogatory songs about the other group to refusal to eat together in the dining hall, raids on each other other’s cabins, and physical altercations. The groups had clearly developed a mutually destructive “us versus them” mentality in a matter of a few days.
Now, jump ahead approximately fifteen years to a related and controversial 1971 study, in which researcher Philip Zimbardo assigned young adult males—all volunteers—the role of a prisoner or a guard in a simulated prison for two weeks.7 The study was decisively cut short by more than a week when those assigned to the guard role began to torture the “inmates” through such means as stripping them naked, forcing them to simulate sexual activity, and subjecting individuals to solitary confinement.
Both the Robbers Cave and the Zimbardo studies are cited as evidence of the ability of the environment to influence aggressive behavior, but they also offer empirical support as to the propensity of individuals to treat others of a separate group very differently—even if these “others” are in no way different than the majority and/or power-wielding group except for a randomly assigned and purely fabricated label.
Humans have an inborn tendency to form groups. Yet there is a dark side to the group identification process. Research such as that cited above shows that once we have identified ourselves as a group, we likewise identify other groups that are different from “us.” As influential psychiatrist Aaron Beck expresses it: “The tendency to place people in either a favorable or unfavorable category has been observed in all cultures: we or they, friend or foe, good or evil, honest or dishonest.”8
Psychological research has found that once we create group divisions, three insidious cognitive processes naturally follow. First, we tend to favor our own group. A second consequence is the tendency to downplay or even disregard the strengths of another group while at the same time excusing the mistakes of our own group. The third process is that out-group derogation occurs when group identity is threatened. The backlash by antigay forces has caused innumerable straight men and women people to feel threatened by the legal gains made by sexual minorities, and these forces have purposely conflated equal rights with special rights and privileges that undermine heterosexuality. For example, churchgoers across the country have been exhorted to oppose gay rights on the grounds that church leaders would then be forced to preach homosexuality from the pulpit or face arrest. Additionally, hate-crime laws are decried by antigay forces, who claim that they will force the legalization of practices such as bestiality and necrophilia. The response of Jane Porter of Faith2Action to the 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act illustrates this demagoguery; the act would “jail pastors” and criminalize speech “against the homosexual agenda.”9 While this is not true, it certainly has been effective in furthering the “us versus them” dynamic.
Fortunately, the polarizing us-versus-them schism seems to be eroding, albeit slowly. In 2011, the Human Rights Campaign administered a national survey that found encouraging results: on basic civil rights issues such as employment and housing, huge majorities supported protections for LGBT individuals; a majority of Americans supported marriage for same-sex couples; 77 percent of men said they “could be close friends with a gay man”; and 57 percent said it would not bother them if their child or grandchild was gay.10
Still, the pollsters reminded us that “while the country is moving toward equality, it is not there yet.”11 Some of the less positive results were
• Only half (50 percent) believe gay jokes are “never acceptable.”
• The nation divides evenly on the issue of whether people are “born gay” (45 percent believe people are born gay, 42 percent believe people choose to be gay).
• 24 percent of Americans believe gay people can be made straight through intensive psychological therapy or prayer.
The most shocking finding was that nearly half (48 percent) believe they have “nothing in common with gay people.” How different are gays and lesbians from heterosexuals? How different are the families they are raising? The research shows that the differences are negligible, but as will be described below, there is a small but vociferous phalanx dedicated to encouraging the us-versus-them schism through misinformation, exaggeration, and, on occasion, outright lying.
Up until the 1970s most lesbian and gay parents were in opposite-sex marriages, kept their sexual desires hidden, and did their best to raise their children. But as feminism, women’s equality, sexual liberation, and empowerment movements by disenfranchised and minority groups rocked the country, these parents, for the first time, saw a glimmering of freedom to live their lives other than the model prescribed by society.
During the 1970s the first psychological studies of the impact of gay and lesbian parenting on children were undertaken. In retrospect, for many readers, the results of these early studies (carried out in the United States and the United Kingdom) will come as no surprise: there were no pernicious psychological effects stemming from this parenting, and repeated studies over the next four decades have consistently found the same results.12 The most important balm for societal fears was the realization that boys did not become effeminate, girls did not become masculinized; in other words, same-sex parents had no impact on their children’s sexual orientation. In comparison with children raised in heterosexual families, those raised by gay and lesbian parents were just as psychologically and socially well-adjusted. In response, detractors claimed that the impact of gay and lesbian parenting was insidious and problems would not become manifest until children reached adulthood. Further studies discounted even these claims but also led to a growing backlash against gay and lesbian parents, which reached its nadir in the 1990s as exemplified by two notorious legal battles.
The first case involved Sharon Bottoms, who in 1993 lost custody of her two-year-old son to her own mother because her conduct was considered illegal and immoral. The Virginia Supreme Court wrote: “We have previously said that living daily under conditions stemming from active lesbianism practiced in the home may impose a burden upon a child by reason of the ‘social condemnation’ attached to such an arrangement, which will inevitably afflict the child’s relationships with its peers and with the community at large.”13
The second case, occurring in 1996, involved Pensacola resident Mary Ward; she lost custody of her twelve-year-old daughter to her former husband despite the fact that he had been in prison for eight years for murdering his first wife. Judge Joseph Tarbuck explained his decision: “I don’t think that this child ought to be led into that (lesbian) relationship before she has a full opportunity to know that she can live another lifestyle if she wants to and not be led into this lifestyle just by virtue of the fact of her living accommodations.”14
These two cases, while stunning in the implications of their defeat, were also pivotal galvanizing moments in the politicization and professionalization of gay-rights organizations.
For the foreseeable future, as an Advocate article states, there will exist a contingent of social conservatives who are “permanent and implacable foes of LGBT equality… They are immune to our stories and lead lives according to the dictates of their religious leaders.”15 Fortunately, these are a minority; there are far more social conservatives who rely on their own consciences to make moral decisions. Unfortunately, is spite of their relative small number and isolation from the mainstream, this minority contingent—the religious right—is well funded, well connected, and continues to purposefully inflict harm in innumerable communities.
The religious right promotes traditional family values along with evangelical Christian interpretation of marriage and parenting. According to the Traditional Values Coalition, “Traditional Values are based upon biblical foundations and upon the principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, the writings of the Founding Fathers, and upon the writings of great political and religious thinkers throughout the ages.”16 Most such organizations emphatically stress the Biblical nature of their belief system.
These organizations have no qualms regarding their beliefs about homosexuality: it is a behavior deserving condemnation. Leaders of antigay organizations encourage their members to act as spiritual missionaries and crusaders carrying out the word of God. In one of most controversial speeches in its long history of controversy, Focus on the Family board member Albert Mohler proclaimed:
The scientific evidence is mounting that human sexual orientation may be fixed by genetic and biological factors. Th[is] discovery… would not change the Bible’s moral verdict on homosexual behavior. Rather than excusing homosexual behavior, such a genetic discovery could lead to pre-natal ways to eliminate homosexual orientation and Christians should support such a development… we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin.17
The American Family Association. Family Research Council. Family Research Institute. Illinois Family Institute. The names sound innocuous enough, implying that professional family-based treatment and research occur in such organizations. However, the Southern Poverty Law Center, in its 2010 groundbreaking report on antigay groups in the United States, identified these organizations, along with nine others, as hate groups, producing “demonizing propaganda aimed at homosexuals and sexual minorities.”18 All work to derail a hypothetical homosexual agenda that has ensnared the populations of the Western countries and is now insidiously spreading to less-developed countries.
Regardless of their size and scope, organizations that promote bias against gays often champion one or more of the following claims:
• Homosexuality is a sin.
• Homosexuality is a “condition” (either medical or psychological) that can be cured through appropriate treatment and therapy.
• Homosexual acts should be criminalized, even those occurring between consenting adults.
• Same-sex couples should not be legally recognized.
• Gay and lesbians should not be allowed to be parents, including through adoption, foster parenting, and medical technologies.
These organizations are more than willing to offer supporting evidence for these assertions; to counter the rigorous studies and existing empirical data on homosexuality, they offer “facts” about gay individuals as they perceive them. The following is a list of the most common concerns promulgated by antigay organizations:
• Homosexuals molest children at higher rates than heterosexuals.
• People become homosexual because they were sexually abused as children.
• People become homosexual because there was a deficiency in appropriate sex-role modeling by parents.
• No one is born a homosexual.
• Homosexuals are more prone to mental illness and to substance abuse and addiction.
• Gays and lesbians are wealthier and more privileged than the rest of society.
• Gay men and women actively recruit young people to become homosexual.
• Homosexuality is a choice; people can change their preference.
• Hate crime laws will lead to the jailing of pastors who criticize homosexuality and the legalization of practices such as bestiality and necrophilia.19
It’s no wonder that antigay groups denounce gay parents. However, these “facts” are based on spurious research by professionals discredited in their fields or case studies of children raised by severely damaged parents. No one is claiming that there are no unstable gay parents whose children should be removed for their best interests. This is just as true for heterosexual parents. But, just as for heterosexual families, in no way do the above descriptions pertain to the vast majority of gay families.
These “Family” think tanks and organizations have created a network that is determined to inculcate their message globally. Sadly, they are succeeding, and the messages of hate reach even the smallest towns in the United States. According to former evangelical pastor Jason Childs, who left his church after years of teaching heteronegative and divisive messages, those in the religious right “believe that if you have not been ‘saved,’ you are living under a curse and are incapable of knowing what is best and that because of this you should be ruled over.”20
Particularly virulent groups make no effort to disguise their mission as a war against sin, particularly homosexuality. These groups praise aggressive tactics. Consider the words of Michael Brown, author of Revolution: “As Christians, we believe that everyone who rejects our message will be sentenced to eternal punishment by God.”21
Imagine having the majority of your neighbors and the classmates of your children embracing such an extreme religious perspective, as well as the common antigay myths listed above, and you can begin to grasp the challenges of living as a gay-parented family in certain communities. Though these organizations publicly declare violence against gay as unacceptable, intimidation is implicitly allowed and even expected. After all, when the goal is trying to save a soul from eternal damnation, every tactic must be considered.
Not every community hosts a rabidly antigay church such as the controversial Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, infamous for its demonstrations at the funerals of slain soldiers, but many communities are familiar with the “antigay lite” approach now taken by many organizations that have softened their approach in the wake of high-profile antigay-violence tragedies and changing beliefs regarding sexuality. National opinion polls repeatedly find declining rates of distrust and antipathy toward gay individuals, and younger generations are less likely to emulate the antigay attitudes of older generations. In response, high-profile national organizations espousing antigay agendas are on the defensive. Some have tempered their language of hate, while others have taken the opposite tack and become even more aggressive in their efforts.
When organizations have softened their antigay stance, it doesn’t mean they are necessarily more tolerant or welcoming; instead they are merely protecting their public image by not being so blatantly hateful. Sue Spivey and Christine Robinson of James Madison University examined the change in tactics taken by ex-gay groups and those that promote reparative therapies (i.e., treatments based on the belief that homosexuality is a choice or pathology and can be “cured”).22 They find that these groups have most certainly backed off on their disturbingly hate-laced language and now take a “love them to death” approach. Homosexuality is no longer promulgated as a vile life choice leading to pernicious consequences for one’s mortal body and immortal soul but rather “a condition” that can be treated through compassionate and humane means. With twisted logic, the new gay-friendly agenda taken by antigay groups seeks to annihilate homosexuality, not homosexuals themselves, and, in this way, such organizations are able to dissociate themselves from the harm they commit. According to Julie Harren Hamilton, president of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), a well-known ex-gay organization:
It puts it in a different light instead of just seeing it as awful and ugly sin… [I]t takes the focus off the sin and puts in onto the person who is hurting and lets you see them in a new light. Instead of just a “sinner” you now see a “hurting person who needs God’s love.”23
Indeed, many of the parents I spoke to reported that community hostility did not come in the expected forms of violence and outright harassment but instead subtle and heartfelt invitations to explore the impact of their sexuality on their relationship with God. These community members wanted same-sex parents to acknowledge that they were “sinners” who were dissatisfied with their lives. Rarely, though, did they openly malign gay men and women. Still, even a community with an “antigay lite” climate is not a welcoming place for LGBT families and does nothing to deter the perpetration of hate crimes.
Despite the strides that have been made toward acceptance, gay individuals and families remain at terrible risk. The violent deaths of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd received nationwide, high-profile media attention. Many of these accounts gave (or sought to give) the impression that antigay hate crimes were fairly isolated, mostly rural occurrences, but they occur even in the most cosmopolitan cities. On October 10, 2010, in New York City, nine young men, ranging from sixteen to twenty-three years old and calling themselves the Latin King Goonies, forced a thirty-year-old man to strip to his underwear, tied him to a chair, hit him in the face, burned him with a cigarette on his nipple and penis, and sodomized him with a small baseball bat, all the while shouting gay slurs. The city council speaker, Christine Quinn, called the event among the worst hate crimes she had ever heard of.24
Hate crimes do not necessarily have to involve physical attacks and bodily harm, though this is the fear of so many gay parents for themselves and their children. The federal government defines a hate crime (also known as a bias crime) as a criminal offense committed against a person, property, or society that is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin. Types of hate crime commonly tracked by the FBI include destruction and damage of property (including vandalism, robbery, theft, and arson), intimidation, simple assault, aggravated assault, forcible rape, and murder. The majority of hate crimes are offenses against people rather then their property, though both do occur simultaneously. Many gay parents whose property has been attacked fear that such acts will ultimately escalate into physical attacks against them or their children.
A remarkable 2010 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, based on fourteen years of federal hate-crime data, found that homosexuals (and perceived homosexuals) are the most targeted group in America for violent hate crimes. The analysis showed that LGBT people are more than twice as likely to be attacked as Jews or African Americans, more than four times as likely as Muslims, and fourteen times as likely as Latinos.25 A 2011 report by the NCAVP was even more enlightening. It found that in 2010 violence against LGBTs impacted minority groups disproportionately. People who identified as transgender or as LGBT people of color were twice as likely to experience assault or discrimination as nontransgender white individuals, and 1.5 times more likely to experience intimidation.26
Who are the men and women who engage in hate crimes? In its 1998 report Hate Crimes Today: An Age-Old Foe in Modern Dress, the American Psychological Association stated that most hate crimes against sexual minorities were committed by “otherwise law-abiding young people who see little wrong with their actions.” Four categories of offenders were identified:27
1. Ideology assailants: Those whose crimes stem from their negative beliefs and attitudes about homosexuality that they perceive other people in the community share
2. Thrill seekers: Typically adolescents who commit assaults to alleviate boredom or to have fun
3. Peer-dynamics assailants: Typically adolescents who in engage in hate crimes in an effort to prove their toughness and heterosexuality to friends
4. Self-defense: Individuals who believe that homosexuals are sexual predators and say their attacks were motivated by aggressive sexual propositions
More recently, Jack Levin, a criminologist and sociologist of hate crimes at Northeastern University, finds that we are now seeing a change in the makeup of hate-crimes assailants. While ruffian, thrill-seeking teens—such as those who assaulted Justin in the story that began this chapter—are still threats in many communities, their acts are increasingly overshadowed by those committed by older sole perpetrators engaged in what Levin calls “defensive hate crimes—crimes carried out in reaction to sweeping social changes that they see as threat to their home, family, religion, culture, or country.”28
A 2007 study found that an estimated 2 million LGBT people are interested in adopting, yet respective state laws may hinder or outright prevent the process.29 Gays and lesbians face significant legal hurdles in many states, particularly because they cannot legally marry in those states. Still, the percentage of same-sex parents with adopted children has risen sharply. About 19 percent of same-sex couples raising children reported having an adopted child in the house in 2009, up from just 8 percent in 2000.30 “The trend line is absolutely straight up,” said Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a nonprofit organization working to change adoption policy and practice.31 At the time of writing, an estimated 65,500 adopted children are living with a lesbian or gay parent, an estimated 14,100 foster children are living with lesbian or gay parents, and gay and lesbian parents are raising 3 percent of foster children in the United States.32
During the early 2000s, a number of states enacted or attempted to enact legislation to prohibit gays and lesbians from fostering or adopting children, using the same arguments that purportedly disqualified them from biological parenthood. In 2002, the American Academy of Pediatrics, an illustrious organization with sixty thousand members in the United States, Canada, and Latin America, released a report supporting adoption by gay parents.33 The backlash occurred quickly—several members of the Academy formed their own group, the American College of Pediatricians, and set about delaying further progress for gays and lesbians seeking to adopt. In one of its most cited pieces, the college stated, “There is significant risk of harm inherent in exposing a child to the homosexual lifestyle. Given the current body of evidence, the American College of Pediatricians believes it is inappropriate, potentially hazardous to children, and dangerously irresponsible to change the age-old prohibition on homosexual parenting, whether by adoption, foster care, or reproductive manipulation.”34 Other pseudo-scientific organizations followed suit, including the Family Research Institute and the Family Research Council.
There are two types of adoption, and each state has its own laws governing these adoptions. In a second-parent or stepparent adoption, a person can petition to adopt the child of his or her partner; a joint adoption, involves a couple adopting a child from the child’s biological parent(s) or adopting a child who is in the custody of the state. It is this second form that has become a focal point for controversy. For example, LGBT couples in Illinois have been able to enter into civil union since June 2011; this new law also granted same-sex couples the right to be foster and adoptive parents, a move that infuriated the Catholic Church in the state. The Church, which runs several charities in the state that place children in homes, was informed it would have to abide with the law or risk losing state funding. The charities argued that they shouldn’t be forced to place children in families whose lives don’t align with Catholic teaching, namely, unmarried couples. Not surprisingly, the Church responded with a lawsuit. When the state court sided against the Church, the charities transferred cases to other agencies, stopped accepting state money, or formed new groups that are compliant with the law.35
As the country struggles with momentous societal changes regarding the status of same-sex relationships, particularly marriage, more and more gay parents are finding themselves in an unwelcome spotlight that jeopardizes the fragile bubble of safety that currently surrounds their families. Hate crimes and community intolerance—either overt or of the “lite” variety—are common in the lives of gay families. Certainly, many LGBT parents are out and proud regarding the status of their families, but there are just as many who attempt to maintain a low profile that minimizes risk and danger to their families and lifestyles. The less welcoming their local community, the less obvious these families want to be. Without a doubt, this will change in the future, and LGBT families will inevitably be a nonevent. But that awaits us in the future; currently, societal turmoil over LGBT issues and concerns is leading to unexpected complications for less-out families.