LGBT Families

Nancy J. Mezey

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781452217383
• eBook ISBN: 9781483321776
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Part of the SAGE Contemporary Family Perspective series, this book presents a comprehensive yet accessible understanding of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families today by drawing upon and making sense of the burgeoning scholarly literature about LGBT families from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It pays particular attention to how structures of race, class, gender, sexuality, and age shape LGBT families, and how members of such families negotiate the social landscapes within which they exist. The book will help readers better understand the formation, experiences, challenges, and strengths of LGBT families, and address two main questions: Why are new family forms so threatening to certain groups of people in society? and How are new family forms beneficial to the society in which they exist?

Here is what author Nancy Mezey had to say in a recent interview:
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"LGBT people are creating families in a society that simultaneously demonizes and embraces them. With a desire to understand and perhaps deconstruct this rocky terrain, I decided to write LGBT Families, a comprehensive overview based on solid research so that readers can form their own opinions."

 

"This book stands in solidarity with all diverse family forms – families that developed out of particular social and economic contexts, and that contribute to the society around them, despite the hardships that some in society may level at them."

1 LGBT Families

My grandpa majored in biology in college, but he wasn't allowed to teach at a high school because he was black. Not long ago, I spoke on a panel at a high school with my mom. This guy in the audience told my mom that he wouldn't want her to teach his kids because she is a lesbian. It reminded me so much of what happened to my grandpa. I think homophobia is like any other “ism.” … Like racism, you learn it from the people you grow up with, from your parents, from television, and from society.

—Rayna White, eleventh grader, daughter of a lesbian mother (PrideSource, 2013, para. 9)

What we collectively define and accept as family has far-reaching implications. The boundaries that we—and others—make between family and nonfamily play both subtle and not-so-subtle roles in our daily lives.

—Powell et al., 2010, pp. 1–2

Because of cultural, political, and religious debates over the past several decades about how families must be structured and function in order to perform a productive role in society, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) families have captured the interest of politicians, academics, and the general public. Fierce debates persist concerning who should be able to form families through marriage, adoption, and the use of reproductive technologies. Policies and laws concerning families in general are developing out of those debates, thus reacting to a changing family landscape and in turn shaping a new family landscape. Amid the debates and changing laws, members of LGBT communities are negotiating the political, cultural, and social terrain that regulate their material and ideological access to the title of “family.” Therefore, if we want to understand how families are changing today, and how those families fit into, are shaped by, and also shape larger society, then we must understand one of the most important growing segments of current families: LGBT families.

In 2010, there were approximately 594,000 same-sex partner households in the United States making up about 1% of all American households (Krivickas & Lofquist, 2011) spread over 99% of all counties in the United States (Gates & Ost, 2004). Of the total 594,000 households, 115,000 (19.3%) reported having children living with them, 84% of whom were children of the householder. In 2008, 13.9% of male-male unmarried households, and 26.5% of female-female unmarried households reported having children (Krivickas & Lofquist, 2011). The numbers of lesbian and gay households with children have increased since 2000 when estimates suggested that only 5% of partnered gay men and 22% of partnered lesbians had children in their households (Black, Gates, Sanders, & Taylor, 2000). While these numbers do not take into account single lesbians and gay men, bisexual women and men, and transgender people who are not living in same-sex households, the data offer some evidence that there is an increasing and substantial number of families in the United States that are headed at minimum by lesbian and gay parents. In addition, in 2010, approximately 78% of LGB people in the United States said they would like the right to marry (Herek, Norton, Allen, & Sims, 2010). In practice, by 2010 government offices within seven states and Washington, D.C. had issued at minimum 41,700 marriage licenses to same-sex couples (Chamie & Mirkin, 2011). The number of states allowing lesbians and gay men to marry has increased from one state (Massachusetts) in 2003 to 19 states plus the District of Columbia by the middle of 2014. Coupled with the U.S. Supreme Court's 2013 verdict that the federal government must honor all legal state marriages regardless of the sexual identity of those married, we can expect to see the number of married lesbians and gay men increase, as well as an increase in visibility of LGBT families within public arenas, because of changing marriage laws.

Social science research strongly suggests that families are socially, not biologically, constructed. This means that the ways in which families are formed—the roles and functions families perform, their structure in terms of who occupies them, and the experiences of their members—are born out of the social, economic, cultural, political, and historical context in which those families exist. There is nothing natural, or normal, or biologically inherent or mandated about any particular family type. We can see how families are socially constructed by studying how families have changed throughout history and how they are structured and function in different geographic locations. Therefore, as a sociologist who understands families to be socially constructed, I wonder about three particular questions: (a) How and why do different family forms develop in particular social and historical contexts, (b) why are new family forms so threatening to certain groups of people in society, and (c) how are new family forms beneficial to the society in which they exist?

Based on the current trends in LGBT families and on my three questions above, the purpose of the book LGBT Families is to provide an understanding of what LGBT families are, why they have developed at this historical moment, how they are socially constructed, why conservative thinkers perceive LGBT families to be a threat to society, and how LGBT families are in fact an important and positive addition to the U.S. family landscape. The book draws on cutting-edge scholarship and data concerning LGBT families, focusing specifically on social constructionist and intersectional (i.e., race-class-gender-sexuality) perspectives. In doing so, LGBT Families highlights the diversity of such families in the United States, as well as globally. This book not only organizes and presents current research on LGBT families, but it also uses that research to better understand how LGBT families strengthen the institution of family. In addition, although the book focuses primarily on the experiences of people within LGBT families, a major theme of how external forces shape these families runs throughout the book in order to place LGBT families in a sociological context.

To start the conversation of what LGBT families are and how they have formed historically, this initial chapter first deconstructs and defines key terms. Then, to illustrate how LGBT families have been socially constructed out of the culmination of several historical factors, the chapter provides a brief history of the development of LGBT families. The chapter then focuses on current barriers that LGBT families face, and finishes with a discussion of the plan of the remaining book.

Deconstructing and Defining Terms

The connection between an active and effective LGBT rights movement, an equally active and effective conservative movement against LGBT families, and policies and laws concerning issues such as marriage and immigration have led to a public discourse on what constitutes family and where LGBT families fit into the current U.S. family landscape. As the quote by Powell and his colleagues at the beginning of this chapter states, how we define family and who we accept as having legitimate claims to being recognized as a family has both serious implications for the United States and beyond, as well as for the individuals within those families.

Although the term LGBT families seems simple enough, the deconstruction of this term illustrates the complexities within LGBT families themselves. While teaching family sociology courses over the past 15 years or so, and through the reading of a variety of sources, I have developed and use the following definition of family: Family is a social institution found in all societies comprising two or more people related by birth, law, or intimate affectionate relationships, who may or may not reside together. I use the above definition because it includes as many configurations of families about which I have read or heard. The more we learn about the diversity of families, the more we can test and stretch our definitions of “family.” For example, some of my students argue that the definition should include animal companions (aka “pets”) as well. In fact, in their study of who Americans count as family, Powell, Bolzendahl, Geist, and Steelman (2010) found that 51% of those surveyed believe that pets count as family. While that fact is interesting, what is more interesting is that only 30% of Americans count gay and lesbian couples without children to be family. So, as these authors pointedly remark, more Americans believe that pets count as family than do gay and lesbian couples (p. 45).

To be clear, my definition of family is not one accepted by a court of law or upon which politicians base family policy. Legal definitions of family generally include people who are connected only by bloodlines or legal ties (e.g., marriage, adoption, legal guardianship, and foster care), although some judges are beginning to use social definitions of family particularly in determining court cases involving LGBT families (Richman, 2009).

I use an inclusive definition for this book because while “family” is a legal term, it is also an ideological and socially constructed term that means many different things to many different people. Family is an idea about how human relationships should be organized. How as a society we define family, who we think should be included or not included in our families, the functions of families, and the structure of families, change over time and over geographic location or space. So there is nothing fixed or innate or “natural” about families. In other words, what families look like and how we think about them depends on the social and historical context and moment in which we are thinking about them. The definition of family above works well for this book not only because LGBT families fit into that definition but also because the definition allows us to compare other definitions used throughout judicial and political systems.

Thinking about the definition of family in general also leads to a question that Judith Stacey asked in her 1996 book, In the Name of the Family: What is an LGBT family? In trying to answer this question, Stacey asked additional questions:

Should we count only families in which every single member is gay? Clearly there are not very many, if even any, of these. Or does the presence of just one gay member color a family gay? Just as clearly, there are many of these, including those of Ronald Reagan, Colin Powell, Phyllis Schafly and Newt Gingrich. (1996, p. 107)

Stacey's question of what we mean by LGBT families is important. In 1991, Kath Weston published a book called Families We Choose, in which she argued that gays and lesbians have been “exiles from kinship” (Weston, 1991). She wrote that “for years, and in an amazing variety of contexts, claiming a lesbian or gay identity has been portrayed as a rejection of ‘the family’ and a departure from kinship” (p. 22). In other words, until very recently, media and other public portrayals of LGBT people assumed that “LGBT” and “family” could not possibly go together. This portrayal was based on two assumptions: (a) that gays and lesbians cannot or do not have children, and (b) anyone who is LGBT must have been rejected by, and therefore alienated from, their families of origin (e.g., their parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.).

Current data and research provide strong evidence that these two assumptions are no longer (if they ever were) true. So what is an LGBT family? Not only Stacey, but other social scientists have also grappled with this question. As Baca Zinn, Eitzen, and Wells (2011) stated, defining LGBT families is difficult “because individuals—not families—have sexual orientation” (p. 429). These authors point out that typically members of families often have sexual identities that differ from one another. Furthermore, sexual identities can change over a life course such that a family member may embrace a particular sexual or gender identity at one point but then later in life embrace another sexual or gender identity. Therefore, defining an LGBT family can be difficult.

Some scholars define LGBT families by the presence of one or more LGBT adults in the family (Allen & Demo, 1995). Others have included “couples, parents, children, and youth, as well as intentional communities” within the definition of LGBT families (Doherty, 2006, p. xxii). For the purpose of this book, I drew on previous definitions, as well as my own general definition of family, to define LGBT families as two or more people related by birth, law, or intimate affectionate relationships, who may or may not reside together, and where the LGBT identity of at least one family member impacts other family members in some meaningful way. This definition is intentionally broad to be as inclusive as possible.

Built into my definition of LGBT families are a variety of sexual and gender identities. Trying to define sexual and gender categories is not always easy, particularly if we understand such categories to be socially constructed, that is, gaining their purpose and meaning from the social, cultural, political, economic, and historical context in which they are created. In fact, queer theory challenges traditional sexual categories and shows how these categories are “products of particular constellations of power and knowledge” (Epstein, 1994, p. 192). Queer theorists, such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1993) and Judith Butler (1993), have problematized sexual categories. For example, Sedgwick argues that sexualities have traditionally been couched in false dichotomies. The notions of out versus in, gay versus straight, male versus female all lead to a false view that masks the fluid and mutable nature of human sexuality. Butler also argues that gender and sexual categories are unstable and contestable because they rely on the social and historical moment in which they exist (Butler, 1993). By revealing how unstable categories really are, there is no end to the ways in which queer theorists can deconstruct gender and sexual categories. Sociologists tend to depart from queer theory at the point of endless deconstruction because sociologists are interested in understanding how underlying and unifying factors create similar experiences for different groups of people based on social structural factors, such as sexuality, as well as race, social class, and gender (Epstein, 1994). That is, sociologists want to examine how the categorization of people is “materially experienced across the world” by specific groups of people (Stein & Plummer, 1994, p. 184).

In defining sexual categories, we tend to use terms that identify the gender toward whom our emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions are directed (Stryker, 2008); f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• 1 LGBT Families
• 2 Marriage
• 3 LGBT Parents
• 4 LGBT Youth
• 5 Intimate Partner Violence
• 6 Learning From LGBT Families
• References
• Index
• Publisher Note