Unhitched

Love, Marriage, and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China

Judith Stacey

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814783832
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Judith Stacey, 2012 winner of the Simon and Gagnon Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the American Sociological Association.

A leading expert on the family, Judith Stacey is known for her provocative research on mainstream issues. Finding herself impatient with increasingly calcified positions taken in the interminable wars over same-sex marriage, divorce, fatherlessness, marital fidelity, and the like, she struck out to profile unfamiliar cultures of contemporary love, marriage, and family values from around the world.

Built on bracing original research that spans gay men’s intimacies and parenting in this country to plural and non-marital forms of family in South Africa and China, Unhitched decouples the taken for granted relationships between love, marriage, and parenthood. Countering the one-size-fits-all vision of family values, Stacey offers readers a lively, in-person introduction to these less familiar varieties of intimacy and family and to the social, political, and economic conditions that buttress and batter them.

Through compelling stories of real families navigating inescapable personal and political trade-offs between desire and domesticity, the book undermines popular convictions about family, gender, and sexuality held on the left, right, and center. Taking on prejudices of both conservatives and feminists, Unhitched poses a powerful empirical challenge to the belief that the nuclear family—whether straight or gay—is the single, best way to meet our needs for intimacy and care. Stacey calls on citizens and policy-makers to make their peace with the fact that family diversity is here to stay.

1

Love, Sex, and Kinship in Gay El Lay

Who are now the most square people on Earth? Who are the only people left who want to go into the Army and get married? Homosexuals.

—Fran Lebowitz, quoted in Stuever, “Is Gay Mainstream?” 2000

Promiscuity was rampant because in an all-male subculture there was no one to say “no”—no moderating role like that a woman plays in the heterosexual milieu.

—Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On, 1987

There is room for both monogamous gay couples and sex pigs in the same big tent of gay community.

—Eric Rofes, Dry Bones Breathe, 1998

NOT SO LONG ago, the notion of a gay or lesbian wedding or family seemed oxymoronic to most people, including many lesbians and gay men themselves. The 1970s-era gay liberation movement, like the 1960s counter-culture and the women’s liberation movement that inspired its birth, rebelled against the gender and sexual constraints of marriage and the nuclear family. “Smash Monogamy,” “Make Love Not War,” “Let It All Hang Out” were popular banners waved by political youth in that innocent pre-AIDS era. “We expose the institution of marriage as one of the most insidious and basic sustainers [sic] of the system,” proclaimed the Gay Liberation Front in 1969.¹

Militant feminists and gays and lesbians blithely garnered reputations as anti-marriage and anti-family, and many gay men embraced their image as sex pigs with pride rather than shame. Often outcasts and exiles from their families of birth, numerous gays and lesbians adopted utopian visions of intimacy and kinship. Instead of matrimony and parenthood, they hankered for sexual freedom and unconventional “families we choose.”² Yet by the 1980s, a lesbian gayby boom was under way, and by the 1990s the gay rush to the altar and the nursery had become a stampede. Increasingly the families that lesbians and gay men seemed to be choosing looked an awful lot like the love, marriage, and baby carriage ideal of my youth. As one daughter in a study of children with lesbian parents described her family, “aside from one little, tiny detail, we are so incredibly normal.”³

Of course, the sexual orientation of spouses and parents doesn’t seem such a little, tiny detail to millions of religious and social conservatives. When the Hawaiian Supreme Court appeared poised to recognize gay marriage in the mid-1990s, the mere prospect incited such a powerful backlash that same-sex marriage began to supplant abortion as the most popular right-wing political wedge issue in U.S. electoral politics. Historic court rulings for gay unions and marriage rights in Vermont, Massachusetts, and Canada in the next decade ignited a potent blowback effect. Campaigns against gay family rights began to score disproportionate victories—from the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996 to dozens of state initiatives and constitutional amendments to prohibit gay marriage and adoption rights. In fact, in the United States every state ballot initiative against these rights but one has passed ever since, including Proposition 8 in California and three other state initiatives in November 2008 and a referendum in 2009 that overturned the newly won right to same-sex marriage in Maine.⁴

Judicial and electoral contests over gay marriage, adoption, and child-custody rights often draw on social science research that compares couples and parents who are gay or straight. Popular questions include the following: Are lesbian and gay couples and parenting more like or different from straight family relationships? If same-sex couples win the right to marriage, will marriage change them, or will they change marriage, and for better or worse? How do children raised by lesbian or gay parents turn out? Are they more likely to be gay? Gender-confused? Do children need both a mother and a father? Such questions are important, and I’ve contributed to social science literature and to public conversations about the research evidence myself.⁵ However, because we too often take straight couples, parents, and families as the gold standard and compare gay relationships to them, we miss the opportunity to explore some of the innovative practices of eros and domesticity that many gays and lesbians have been pioneering, and from which everyone can learn a great deal.

In this chapter and the next, I resist the dominant approach and adopt a more capacious view of intimacy and family. Moving beyond a focus on marriage, couples, and nuclear families, I examine much wider definitions of intimacy, fidelity, parenthood, and family. This chapter focuses primarily on adult love, sex, and family ties; the next, on parenting and other intergenerational bonds.

Gay “El Lay”

Gay men would seem to make unpromising subjects for a study of family life. They lack the biological equipment, the social training, and the conventional institutional and legal resources for forging families. As males, gay men do not receive formal socialization in the feminine labors of “love and ritual”—kin work, emotion work, domestic labor, child care, nurturing.⁶ Because they are gay, they cannot rely on women to perform these services for them. Not only do gay men, like lesbians, still lack the right to marry in most of the United States and the rest of the world, they cannot expect women to furnish them ready access to parenthood. Because women are not the primary objects of their affections, gay men can pursue masculine erotic desires unconstrained by women’s wishes or concerns and without any fear or hope that a baby might appear. Doing so, gay men more frequently than others pursue sex across social boundaries of race, age, education, income, nationality, language, and religion.⁷ And, of course, the HIV/AIDS epidemic decimated the first generation of uncloseted gay men, thwarting the prospect of paternity and picket fences even among those who may have yearned for these. Yet despite daunting barriers and tribulations, gay men have been redesigning kinship with creativity and verve.

Counter-intuitively, Los Angeles, a city often caricatured as La-La-Land or Tinseltown, proved an ideal site for my field research on diverse “families of man.” A vanguard global mecca for sexual migrants among its throngs of dream seekers, Los Angeles is home to the second-largest, and likely the most socially diverse, yet comparatively understudied population of gay men on the planet. It is the birthplace, among numerous gay institutions, of West Hollywood—the first gay-governed municipality in the world; the Mattachine Society, a national gay rights organization formed in 1951; the One Institute, a homosexual rights organization founded in 1952 that is now the world’s largest archive of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender history; the primarily white, but now international, gay Metropolitan Community Church; the primarily black gay Unity Fellowship Church; the gay Catholic group Dignity; and AIDS Project Los Angeles, one of the oldest, largest, and most effective AIDS prevention, advocacy, and service organizations in the world.

At the same time, arguably few cities in the world better symbolize sexual excess, narcissism, or a rejection of family values. And perhaps no population seems to threaten family values much more than the gay male denizens who crowd the bars, beats, and boutiques of West Hollywood. To many observers, and plenty of gay men among them, “Weho” culture signifies gay male decadence in situ. It epitomizes the sexual culture that both conservative gay intellectuals like Andrew Sullivan and anti-gay conservatives, like founder of the Family Research Council Paul Cameron, frequently denounce.⁸ Cursory contact with gay culture in Los Angeles could readily reinforce stereotypes about gay men’s narcissistic preoccupation with erotic allure. Advertisements for corporeal beautification and modification flood the pages, airwaves, and websites of the local gay male press: familiar and exotic cosmetic surgery and body sculpture procedures, including penile, buttock, and pec implants; liposuction; laser resurfacing; hair removal or extensions; cosmetic dentistry; personal trainers and gym-rat regimens; tattooing and tattoo removal; body piercing; hair coloring, growing, and styling; tinted contact lenses; manicures, pedicures and body waxing; as well as color, style, and fashion consultants and the commodified universe of couture, cosmetics, and personal grooming implements that they service.

Nonetheless, when I conducted local field research on gay men’s intimate affiliations, I immediately encountered Tinkertoys as often as tinsel. Los Angeles might well be the cosmetic surgery capital of “planet out,” but much less predictably, the celluloid metropolis was also at the vanguard of gay fatherhood. Organized groups of “Gay Fathers” and of “Gay Parents” formed in the city as early as the mid-1970s and contributed to the genesis of the Family Equality Council (formerly Family Pride, Inc.), which is among the leading national grassroots organizations of its kind anywhere.⁹ Los Angeles also gave birth to Growing Generations, the world’s first gay-owned assisted-reproduction agency, founded to serve an international gay clientele. Several of its first clients were among nine families who in 1998 organized the Pop Luck Club (PLC), a pioneering local support group for gay fathers and their children which rapidly became the largest organization of gay-father families in the world. Despite the city’s historical significance and the fact that, as geographer Moira Kenney has observed, “Gay L.A. is more representative of the full spectrum of gay life than are San Francisco and New York,” it remains “the greatest hidden chapter in American gay and lesbian history.”¹⁰

Between June 1999 and June 2003, I conducted field research on gay men’s intimate relationships in the greater Los Angeles area. My research included lengthy, multi-session, family life history interviews with fifty self-identified gay men who were born between 1958 and 1973 and with members of their designated kin. I did field research also within their community groups, social and political events, religious institutions, and organizations, like the PLC. Most of the men I studied came of age and came out after the Stonewall era of gay liberation and after the AIDS crisis was widely recognized. Popular discourses about safe and safer sex, the gayby boom, gay marriage, domestic partnerships, and “families we choose” informed their sense of familial prospects. This was the first cohort of gay men in the world who were young enough to be able to imagine becoming parents outside of heterosexuality and mature enough to be in a position to choose or reject it. The men and their families came from varied racial, ethnic, geographic, religious, and social-class backgrounds. They also practiced many different relational and residential options. My research sample included sixteen gay men who were single at the time of my study; thirty-one who were coupled, some in open relationships, others monogamous, most of whom cohabited but several who did not; and a committed, sexually exclusive trio. It included men who lived or parented alone, with friends, lovers, former lovers, biological or legal and adopted kin, and children of every “conceivable” origin.

I attempted to contact the men and a few of their women kin again when I began to write these chapters in the fall of 2008. That was several months after the historic California Supreme Court decision in favor of same-sex marriage and in the midst of the pitched electoral-season battle over Proposition 8, which proposed to amend the state constitution to ban such marriages. I was able to locate and update the personal and family histories of twenty-nine of the fifty men from my study. Fearing that Proposition 8 would pass, seven of the eleven couples I located had hastened to marry during what did indeed prove to be a brief historic opportunity. I learned of only two couples who had broken up in the intervening years. I was unable to locate anyone from one complex household that I presume must have dissolved after the death of its central figure. Several of the men I contacted had new lovers, of course, and several men had become fathers or added more children to their families over the years.

The personal histories and lives of the men I studied challenge widely held beliefs, including a few I once shared, about masculine eros and domesticity. They suggest that gay men enjoy some unexpected advantages at the same time that they confront paradoxical pitfalls when they pursue intimacy and kinship outside the heterosexual conventions of gender, sexuality, and family. The stories that follow offer models, as well as muddles, from their efforts to redefine desire, domesticity, fidelity, and kinship.

Four Fellow Families

A Monogamous Gay Couple

Shawn O’Conner and Jake Garner were an interracial, binational couple, both in their late thirties when I met them in 1999. They had been living together for five years in Silverlake, an ethnically and socially mixed Los Angeles community popular with artists, students, activists, and gays. Shawn, a creative landscape and garden designer, was a sexual immigrant who, after a suicide attempt at the age of nineteen, had fled his homophobic, abusive, working-class family and life in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and migrated first to London and then to San Francisco before he settled in Los Angeles. Strongly attracted to black men, Shawn had joined the Los Angeles chapter of Black and White Men Together, a gay multi-racial organization, where he met Jake at a picnic in 1993. The attraction, however, was not immediately mutual. Jake is the son of an educated, happily married, middle-class African American couple who were civil rights activists. Jake’s parents had integrated the white suburban neighborhood where he and his siblings grew up and where he developed enduring misgivings about white guys who had a special taste for “hot coffee.” Moreover, Jake recalled, “I wasn’t attracted to blond white men.” However, Shawn’s lively, funny, smart, engaging, and persistent personality overcame Jake’s reservations, and before long these “black and white men together” found themselves sharing a home and building a life.

It had taken Jake’s generally progressive parents several years to come to terms with his homosexuality, but after doing so they had welcomed Shawn like a son-in-law into their strong, supportive family circle. Shawn, on the other hand, was totally estranged from his Irish-Catholic family of origin. Instead, he had self-consciously crafted an intentional family from a multi-cultural and socially varied array of men and women, gay and straight, in Los Angeles: “Being my mother doesn’t automatically qualify you as part of a circle of my friends and who I consider family. And there’s a lot of, ‘Your sisters above all,’ and, like, ‘No, they mean nothing to me.’ They have to prove themselves that they are my friends. The mere fact that we have the same bloodline doesn’t automatically, you know, get ’em into that circle.” For his chosen family circle, Shawn had supplanted his “bloodline” mother with an adoptive maternal older sister—a sixty-something divorced, Jewish, heterosexual woman who served as his accountant, had invested in his business, and shared his love for frequent excursions to Tijuana. Among Shawn’s chosen brothers was Agostín, a close friend and former lover. A highly educated Asian-Latino sexual immigrant from Mexico, Agostín lived alone nearby and taught Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian to international business personnel. Agostín and Shawn spoke almost daily and visited weekly, and Agostín often shared vacations and holidays with the couple and other friends.

Both Shawn and Jake depicted themselves as a monogamous couple who struggled with differences over love, sexuality, and commitment. They also had difficulties over finances. Jake, who was much more reserved than his flamboyant Irish mate and more ambivalent about his gay identity, held the upper hand and occupied conventionally masculine terrain in the couple’s balance of emotional power. Although both men practiced monogamy, this mattered much more to Shawn than to Jake. Sexual exclusivity, in Shawn’s more “feminine” view, is all about love and commitment: “Monogamy means you’re saying to your lover, ‘It is only you that I will allow myself to be shared with. I am choosing you to be that person.’ Sex in itself isn’t so important, and it alone doesn’t make a relationship. It [a relationship] is so much more than that.” Jake’s commitment to monogamy, in contrast, was much less considered, emotional, or symbolic. His relationships, he reported, had been implicitly monogamous. “It’s not that I’m ironclad opposed to non-monogamy,” Jake explained, but “when I’m in a relationship, I just kind of assume” that it will be exclusive. Jake’s greater, and more stereotypically masculine, capacity to separate sex from love and his interest in cyberporn often left Shawn feeling “shitty,” as he put it.

What was even more upsetting to Shawn, though, was that Jake had resisted the public commitment ceremony that Shawn so dearly wanted: “A sore subject. I want one. Jake doesn’t. A commitment ceremony is very important to me. I want the whole thing: the toaster, the rings, I want to register at the Pottery Barn—hell, I even want the ice sculpture for Chrissakes [laughs], the whole nine yards! … There’s no real acknowledgment of our relationship, there’s no recognition of gay relationships. I want the actual acknowledgment of family and friends that this is for real; this is not temporary. I want it to be for ever and ever.” Jake, however, was less certain of his love for Shawn or of his commitment to their relationship. Shawn recognized that his emotional neediness and assertive style often overwhelmed Jake: “I’m needy, you know, I need affection, I need to be told I’m loved, and when I don’t feel that, I become, you know, more like Velcro. And that’s something that Jake has a hard time with.” Jake, in turn, recognized that he resorted to the conventional “masculine” response of withdrawing emotionally when he felt overwhelmed by Shawn’s demands, thereby allowing his anger to fester: “I need a lot more space than Shawn does…. My pattern is to withdraw and simmer. I build up resentment, and then there will be an explosion.”

The couple’s economic conflicts, however, ran counter to their emotional gender patterns and class origins. Despite the much higher social class in which Jake was raised and the college degree in computer engineering he earned at a research university, he had become uncomfortably financially dependent on and subordinate to Shawn. Jake had quit his last high-powered engineering job in 1999, because he found it too stressful. Instead of seeking a new top-level, well-paying position, he began managing Shawn’s financially precarious landscape design and gardening business. Both agreed that working and living together 24/7 over the next three years had taken a heavy toll on their relationship. If Shawn displayed conventionally feminine emotional vulnerability to Jake’s masculine withholding behavior in the sphere of love and intimacy, their career ambition ledger was quite another story. Shawn conceded that he is a stereotypical masculine, Type A, ambitious workaholic and a controlling, demanding boss: “It’s important for me to be successful. I always need more.” He felt determined to expand his landscaping business and to make more money. “I mean, money is important to me. Success is important to me.” It troubled him that, in contrast, Jake, in his view, “has zero drive” and walked away from a high-powered job because he felt miserable doing it. Jake, in turn, resented Shawn’s intrusive, controlling, micro-managing style: “I need a lot more space than Shawn does. We were always together, and he was my boss. I kinda like to do what I like to do, and he likes to tell people what to do. So it led to a lot of head butting.”

Serving as Shawn’s nonjudgmental sounding board and observer, Agostín gave the couple’s prospects a pe...