Seminary to Host Transgender Conference
By Shona Crabtree - Religion News Service Friday, January 19, 2007 - Web Link
January 19th, 2007
BERKELEY, Calif. (RNS) The first Transgender Religious Summit to be held at a Christian seminary will bring together 50 activists, transgender members of faith communities, academics and religious leaders this weekend (Jan. 19-21) at the Pacific School of Religion here.

"Transgender people are emerging from the spiritual closet," said Justin Tanis, program manager for the National Center for Transgender Equality, a Washington-based advocacy group that is co-sponsoring the summit with the seminary's Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry.

The summit is designed to create dialogue among transgender people and their allies in faith communities who are concerned with human rights and social justice issues. Tanis said the program will empower people to speak about transgender matters in churches and the public sphere. Participants come from Jewish, Christian, Buddhist and pagan faith communities.
"Something like this conference would have been unheard of 12 years ago," said the Rev. Erin Swenson, a transgender Presbyterian pastoral counselor.
Organizers said the transgender community is gaining momentum and is organizing itself as a movement. In addition, more religious communities are realizing that transgender people are part of their congregations, Swenson said.

Response, however, has been mixed. In 2003, the Catholic Church banned transgender people from religious orders while Unitarian Universalists and the United Church of Christ have begun ordaining transgender ministers. Swenson said transgender people have many gifts to offer to their congregations and society at large. She said these gifts include having a deep sense of personal integrity and an ability to be honest about who they are.

Transgender people also can help faith communities emphasize love, self-respect and human dignity as "central core values."

While conservative religious groups have opposed steps to protect against gender discrimination, none were invited to the summit. Tanis, however, said dialogue between transgender people of faith and conservative groups is a "worthy goal."

Truth And Justice
by Libby Post

I was ten years old when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.I remember the sadness that permeated my house. My parents weren’t well off but they gave money to King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

I remember writing a poem about King which made the rounds in my elementary school eventually making it to a display in the library. I remember thinking that it was now up to each of us to carry on the fight against injustice.

There has been no single leader quite like King in any social justice movement. However, for those of us who do speak out against injustice of any kind King’s legacy, whether we recognize it or not, is part of the work we do.

As the nation paused this past Monday to remember the man, it was also a time for us to remember the woman—Coretta Scott King—who, in her own right, was a force for civil rights for all human beings. Outliving her husband close to four decades, Mrs. King certainly carried on his work but as her own person, in her own way.

Mrs. King was an outspoken supporter of LGBT rights, including marriage equality. She took the Radical Christian Right to task for their on-going attacks on our humanity. She made the connection between the on-going struggles for racial equality and LGBT civil rights. The 30th anniversary of her husband’s assassination found Mrs. King in the news. Reuters quoted her as saying “I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people and I should stick to the issue of racial justice. But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King, Jr. said ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to make room at the table of brother and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.”

Speaking at the 25th anniversary celebration of the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, Mrs. King reaffirmed her commitment to LGBT rights by again using her husband’s words who said “We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny . . . I can never be what I ought to be until you are allow to be what you ought to be.” Mrs. King went on to say “I’ve always felt that homophobic attitudes and policies were unjust and unworthy of a free society and must be opposed by all American who believe in democracy.”

At that event, Mrs. King also pointed out that gays and lesbians stood up for civil rights in Montgomery and Selma, Alabama, in Albany, Georgia, in St. Augustine, Florida and many other civil rights campaigns of the 1960s. She said “Many of these courageous men and women were fighting for my freedom at a time when they could find few voices for their own and I salute their contributions.”

In fact, Bayard Rustin, one of Dr. King’s closest advisors and the architect of the 1963 March on Washington, was an openly gay man who was the object of derision by many of the others who surrounded King. But King stood his ground and didn’t distance himself from Rustin—a political decision called for by many including President Kennedy and New York City Congressman Adam Clayton Powell.

Mrs. King endured the wrath of conservative African-American clergy for making the connection between racism and homophobia. The clergy were swayed by Karl Rove’s political tactics to drive a wedge between two communities who share a common burden—hateful discrimination. Rove used the same-sex marriage issue to bolster President Bush’s support in the African-American community—it was only after Hurricane Katrina did many of those same supporters realize they had been taken for an electoral ride.

But as far as Mrs. King was concerned marriage equality was a basic civil right. She was quoted in USA saying “Gay and lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil union. A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriage.”

The likelihood of naming a national holiday for Mrs. King is slim to none. But since she and Dr. King were married in June, perhaps the creative forces in the LGBT community can come up with a way to celebrate their lives together and the love we want to legally share. After all, their struggle for justice is the truth that is the foundation of our work for full equality.

©365Gay.com 2007

Group Expands To Provide Legal Aid To Low-Income LGBT Families
Nationwideby 365Gay.com Newscenter Staff
Posted: January 18, 2007 - 9:00 pm ET

(San Francisco, California) The National Center for Lesbian Rights is launching a new project to provide access to family law services for low-income same-sex parent families.

NCLR already has a track record representing same-sex couples in legal battles for marriage rights.

Existing legal services for poor and low-income families generally lack the specialized knowledge and expertise to effectively serve clients the San Francisco-based organization said in a statement.

Called the Family Protection Project, NCLR said it intends to fill this gap by providing specialized training and materials to legal services programs in selected states, beginning with California, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin.

"Every day, NCLR receives calls from LGBT people across the country who are desperate because they cannot afford an attorney," said NCLR Executive Director Kate Kendell.

"This is a huge unmet need. By training attorneys who work specifically with low income and poor communities about the unique legal issues facing the lesbian, gay bisexual and transgender community, we will be giving them the tools to assure that their LGBT clients get meaningful help and representation."

Nationally, experts estimate that at least six million children in the U.S. have LGBT parents.

On average, according to recent studies by the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA School of Law, same-sex parents with children earn $10,000 less than married couples with children. Despite the need for free or low-cost legal services for these families, however, they are virtually non-existent in most states, Kendell said.

The Family Protection Project will help low-income LGBT parents protect their relationships with their children by increasing and improving the capacity of legal services organizations and by educating families about their rights.

The organization said that the Project will train and assist attorneys who provide free and low-cost family law representation. NCLR said it is working with community groups to educate families about their rights and reach out specifically to communities of color with relevant, culturally competent information.

"Children with LGBT parents often don’t have a legal relationship with at least one of their parents, which leaves them and their families vulnerable,” said NCLR attorney Cathy Sakimura, who will manage the project.

"If a child’s biological parent dies or is incarcerated and her other parent isn’t a legal parent, she can end up in foster care, even though she has another parent who is able to take care of her. Also, low-income families are ineligible for many government benefits if their parent-child relationships aren’t recognized."

Sakimura said that in each state, NCLR will collaborate with organizations serving low-income families, LGBT people, and communities of color.
NCLR’s first partnership is in Pennsylvania with Equality Advocates Pennsylvania, one of the few organizations providing free representation specifically for low-income LGBT families.

©365Gay.com 2007

In Conservative Chile, a Push for ChangeGays and Others Grow Bolder in Their Challenge to Nation's Cultural Arbiters
By Monte ReelWashington Post Foreign ServiceThursday, November 30, 2006; A14

SANTIAGO, Chile -- Emma de Ramón recently bought a condo here. But even before she moved in, she said, everyone in the building knew one fact about her: She's gay.

De Ramón and her partner, Karen Atala, a judge, have become unintentional celebrities since waging a battle against Chile's Supreme Court, which forced Atala to surrender custody of her three daughters because of her relationship with de Ramón.

Now the couple has become emblematic of a segment of the population growing noticeably bolder recently: those eager to shed Chile's questionable label as the most culturally conservative country in Latin America.

Some of those seeking change have challenged powerful institutions, which they say don't represent the public will. Atala and de Ramón have taken their fight outside the country to an international human rights commission in Washington, which they hope can convince the Chilean government that its highest court was wrong.

"Oh, we're famous now," said de Ramón, a historian who met Atala after the criminal court judge separated from her husband in 2001. "As for myself, when I'm out in public I usually don't feel like I'm the target of discrimination, and I don't hear disparaging comments. That's only from the Supreme Court."

Groups that have historically determined Chile's cultural norms -- including the Supreme Court, the Catholic Church and a traditional class of political elites -- are now being tested on multiple fronts.

A new national policy, for example, offers free morning-after pills to anyone 14 or older. Congress is debating proposals to explicitly protect the legal rights of gays and other minorities. Another proposal that would allow "merciful deaths" to terminally ill patients has ignited a debate about euthanasia. And a government-funded AIDS prevention campaign launched this month shows school-age girls and a gay couple, among others, promoting condom use. The campaign has riled Catholic Church leaders.

For a country that legalized divorce just two years ago, the pace of the changes is remarkable. The church remains influential and is viewed favorably by most Chileans, but its leaders say they are concerned about a general movement away from its teachings. This month, the country's Catholic bishops issued what they termed a moral wake-up call to the nation, citing "strange currents" running through society that are distancing people from their religious foundations.

"We will not stop saying what we have to say and doing what we have to do," the bishops said in their statement. "There are moments in history when they listen to us, blessed be God, and there are moments when they do not listen."

As president, Michelle Bachelet -- an agnostic, separated mother of three -- stands at the center of many of the cultural disputes. She was inaugurated in March after running a campaign that emphasized social tolerance. Though she is part of the same governing coalition that has held the presidency since Gen. Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship was ousted 16 years ago, her style of governance at times has been markedly different from those of her predecessors.

For example, Bachelet, a former health minister and pediatrician, pushed for the distribution of free morning-after pills without extensive consultation with more conservative members of the ruling coalition -- lawmakers who for years have successfully put the brakes on culturally divisive proposals. Bachelet's political alliances with those members make radical changes very difficult, but analysts say she is willfully trying to break up the influence of the traditionally powerful classes.

"She didn't consult with them because if she had, it wouldn't have passed," said Marta Lagos, a political analyst and pollster in Santiago. "So there is a tension now that has a lot to do with the way the traditional ruling elite -- which is very conservative -- views the way she exercises her leadership. It's very startling for them, but the general population couldn't care less."
Though it was a bitter fight in political circles, the morning-after pill issue didn't affect Bachelet's approval rating, which increased slightly after the controversy. One poll conducted about three weeks ago placed her approval rating at 59 percent, higher than the 53 percent of the total vote she was elected by in January.

"There's a difference in attitudes between those in the higher levels of society and the rest of the population, I think," said Daniela Ullrich, 23, a university student in Santiago. "Like with the morning-after pill -- powerful people from high society were against it, but they always could get the pills at any time, if they wanted them. But the rest of the people couldn't, and they were the ones who supported the proposal."
Macarena Saez, the attorney handling the Atala custody case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, said a growing recognition of the distances separating Chile's general population and its institutions make her hopeful that the government will reach an amicable agreement in the case.

"We're facing a society that is way more open than its institutions, and that's a good sign for us," Saez said.

Saez is part of a group of lawyers who first challenged Chile's justice system by disputing its strict censorship laws. In 2003, their efforts prompted a constitutional change of censorship laws after the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ruled that the Supreme Court was wrong in upholding the ban on films such as Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ."

Now Saez and her colleagues are hoping the commission, part of the Organization of American States, will issue a similar ruling about the Atala case, resulting in new anti-discrimination legislation that would specifically ban child custody decisions based on the sexual orientation of the parent. For Juan Ignacio Correa, who is working on the Atala case in Santiago, such a change would represent a victory for democracy.
"The group of society that wants to preserve the status quo is very powerful, but I believe that there exists a much more massive group beneath them in society that wants change," Correa said.

Felipe Rivas, who four years ago founded a student group for gay men and lesbians at the University of Chile, said the Atala case and the possibility of anti-discrimination legislation are viewed as important steps for gays, but said they also hold broader meaning here.

"In Chile, human rights has always meant torture and the crimes of the dictatorship," said Rivas, 23. "But now the definition is changing, and people are seeing that human rights abuses can extend to a lot of other areas, too."

How Corporate America fell in love with gays and lesbians. It's a movement.

By Marc Gunther, Fortune senior writer
November 30 2006: 3:41 PM EST

(Fortune Magazine) -- Business is booming at Raytheon (Charts), the $22-billion-a-year defense contractor that sells Tomahawk cruise missiles, laser-vision goggles and advanced radar systems to the Pentagon. This, improbably, is good news for the gay-rights movement.

A platoon of Raytheon employees wearing identical blue-and-black bowling shirts, pins with the company's logo and black pants proudly walked the halls of this fall's convention of Out & Equal, an organization that brings together the networks of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people - GLBT, in the argot of the moment - that have taken root at America's big companies.

Proud parents: After Mike Syers and partner Darryl Hudak adopted Holly, Syers became a leader of a GLBT group at Ernst & Young.
Members of bEYond, the GLBT and ally network at Ernst & Young.

For three days in Chicago, with about 1,700 delegates from other companies, the 67 members of Raytheon's GLBT network could attend workshops with such titles as The Cost of Transgender Health Benefits, Breaking Through the Lavender Ceiling and Male-on-Male Sexual Harassment: An Emerging Issue.

As a high-profile supporter of gay rights, Raytheon of course provides health-care benefits to the domestic partners of its gay employees. It does a lot more, too. The company supports a wide array of gay-rights groups, including the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay-advocacy group. Its employees march under the Raytheon banner at gay-pride celebrations and AIDS walks.
Corporate America backs gay rights
And it belongs to gay chambers of commerce in communities where it has big plants. Why? you may ask. Not because gay people buy missiles or radar - at least as far as we know. No, it's because the competition to hire and retain engineers and other skilled workers is so brutal that Raytheon doesn't want to overlook anyone.

To attract openly gay workers, who worry about discrimination, a company like Raytheon needs to hang out a big welcome sign. "Over the next ten years we're going to need anywhere from 30,000 to 40,000 new employees," explains Heyward Bell, Raytheon's chief diversity officer. "We can't afford to turn our back on anyone in the talent pool."

Corporate America embraces GLBT

Last June the gay rights movement quietly achieved a milestone: For the first time, more than half of Fortune 500 companies - 263, to be precise - offered health benefits for domestic partners, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Ten years ago only 28 did.

Along with health benefits for their families, many workers also get bereavement leave when their same-sex partner dies, adoption assistance or paid leave if they have children and relocation assistance for their partners if they are transferred. Put another way, gay marriage - an idea that has been banned by all but one of 27 states that have voted on it - has become a fact of life inside many big companies.

"Corporate America is far ahead of America generally when it comes to the question of equality for GLBT people," says Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign.

Solmonese is right. The nation's Roman Catholic bishops last month advised gays to be celibate because the church considers their sexuality "disordered." Prominent evangelical minister Ted Haggard stepped down from his church after he was accused of having an affair with a gay man. Social conservatives flock to the polls to oppose gay marriage.

Business is different. "It's not a faith-based community," says Ed Offshack, a chemical engineer and gay activist at Procter & Gamble (Charts). "It's a logic-based community." The changes in attitudes toward gays and lesbians have been swift, deep, and altogether remarkable. People who once were shunned and then merely tolerated are today being embraced by corporate America. Yes, embraced. And not just on Seventh Avenue and in Hollywood:

When Justin Nelson was trying to get the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce off the ground in 2003, IBM (Charts) offered its support. "If they hadn't joined, there wouldn't be a chamber," Nelson says. Big Blue was followed by Wells Fargo, Motorola, Intel, American Express and recently, Wal-Mart (Charts). Today the Washington-based gay chamber, which has 24,000 members, certifies small businesses as gay-owned so that they can qualify for supplier-diversity programs at big companies. Think about that: Homosexuality, once a career-killing secret, has become enough of a competitive advantage in some circles that certification is needed to deter straight people from passing as gay.
Companies are taking their support for gay rights into the political arena.

Last spring, after internal soul-searching, Microsoft (Charts) was persuaded by its GLBT employee group, GLEAM (Gay and Lesbian Employees at Microsoft) to support state legislation to ban discrimination against gays. CEO Steve Ballmer said, "Diversity in the workplace is such an important issue for our business that it should be included in our legislative agenda."

Some companies are grappling with how to manage employees switching from one sex to another. American Airlines and its HR people helped a 58-year-old pilot - an ex-Marine and Vietnam combat veteran - go from being Robert to Bobbi. Energy giant Chevron (Charts) published "Transgender@Chevron," an eight-page guide to the issues that come up when a worker changes gender identity, ranging from the bureaucratic (don't forget to get a new security badge) to the everyday (when it's appropriate to move from the men's room to the ladies' room or vice versa).

Yes, the world of work is changing - though not without a backlash.

Backlash

When Walgreens, Kraft and Harris Bank signed up to sponsor the 2006 Gay Games, a weeklong festival in Chicago that attracted 11,000 athletes, conservative Christian groups attacked.

Peter LaBarbera, the president of Americans for Truth, which calls itself the only national organization devoted exclusively to exposing and countering the homosexual activist agenda, wrote to Walgreens: "Make no mistake: The 'Gay Games' was conceived as a way to build acceptance for homosexuality in the name of sport - a perversion of the athletic ideal."
A Walgreens' store manager in Alabama quit in protest. Chief executive David Bernauer got 250,000 e-mails, most from a Web site of the American Family Association, another Christian group. "Having the CEO's server crash was not a positive thing," says Phil Burgess, national director of pharmacy operations at Walgreens.

Burgess, who is gay, said the company made the $100,000 donation to support its GLBT employees and let gay and lesbian customers know that they are welcome at Walgreens. The company writes more prescriptions for AIDS-related drugs than any other pharmacy chain.

Some people may simply wish all the controversy would go away. "It's a distraction," says Stephen Viscusi, the (gay) owner of an executive-search firm. "You should be defined by the work you do." People can do whatever they want in bed, this line of thinking goes, but in the workplace, sexual orientation shouldn't matter.

The trouble is, it still does: In 34 states it's legal to fire an employee simply for being gay. Last winter a photographer named Laurel Scherer, who took pictures of skiers at the Wolf Laurel Ski Area near Asheville, N.C., lost her contract with the resort after she and her partner were married in Massachusetts and ran their wedding announcement in the Asheville Citizen Times. The Human Rights Campaign gets about 25 to 30 complaints a month about workplace discrimination.

Pioneering change

What would people think? Mike Syers, a 42-year-old partner at Ernst & Young, was coming out in a very big way. About 3,000 partners of the firm had gathered in Orlando for a conference last year. A two-minute video of Syers played on giant TV screens throughout the convention center. He sat in the audience watching himself.

"When I started in public accounting," the onscreen Syers said, "I really didn't think there was a long-term career opportunity for me. Being a gay man, I didn't see gay partners." But things were different at E&Y, he said. He felt comfortable and welcomed.

As the screen went dark, Syers's BlackBerry began vibrating. Messages of support poured in. Afterward a partner came up to him to say that his son was gay, and that he would call home that night to tell his son how proud he was to work at E&Y.

E&Y had asked Syers to make the video because he is a leader of bEYond, the company's GLBT employee group. bEYond is only two years old, but it sent 72 people to this fall's Out & Equal convention. It also sponsored the 2006 Reaching Out MBA conference, a gay and lesbian recruiting event that attracted about 700 MBA students to New York. Courting them were Accenture, Dell, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lehman Bros., McKinsey, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, Target and Toyota, among others.
This is how workplace changes typically happen at big companies - from the inside out. Gay and lesbian employees come out of the closet. They find one another. They organize. They enlist straight allies. And they take their concerns to top managers.

The first company-sanctioned network of gays, called League, was formed by gay employees at AT&T in 1987. Now more than 110 company-supported GLBT employee groups have registered with Out & Equal.

These gay networks customarily meet in company facilities, use the company intranet, and receive financial support. Some get more respect than others. Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, makes it a point to clear his calendar each year for the annual gatherings of the African American and women's networks at GE, but he has never met with the GLBT group. That's caused some bad feelings.

When Ernst & Young hired Syers in 2002, he decided to be more open about being gay, partly because he and his partner had just adopted a daughter. "I will never, ever let her think that her family is something to be ashamed of," he says.

When he mentioned his new baby to an E&Y colleague, she asked, "So what does your wife do?" He replied, "Actually, my daughter has two dads." She said, "That is so cool."

Things hadn't always gone so smoothly. Years earlier he'd come out only to a few friends and co-workers; his best friend from high school never spoke to him again. So Syers wasn't sure what to expect when he and Chris Crespo, a lesbian colleague, went to see John Ferraro, the firm's senior vice chair, to ask for company recognition of a gay employee group that had begun to meet informally.

Ferraro listened. The 51-year-old Boston native had not spent much time with gay people - he'd been raised in a religious family, with ten brothers and sisters - and he was surprised to learn that some GLBT employees felt uncomfortable at Ernst.

He offered to become the executive sponsor of bEYond. "It was obvious that they had to make decisions every day on whom they could talk to and how much of themselves they could bring to work," Ferraro says. "I can't imagine coming to work every day and feeling afraid. It just felt wrong." It was wrong for the business, too, he says. "Do the percentages. Whether it's ethnicity, gender or GLBT, people are our top asset."

The Cincinnati affair

There may be places in America where companies can sidestep the controversy over gay rights. Cincinnati is not one of them.
In 1993, Cincinnati voters, by a 65 to 35 percent margin, adopted Article 12, a charter amendment that prohibited the city from passing any law to protect gays against discrimination. It was put on the ballot by conservative Christians. In 2004, the voters repealed Article 12 by a 54 to 46 percent margin. In between, business stepped in.

The day after the 1993 anti-gay vote, Ed Offshack, an Ivy League-educated chemical engineer at P&G, came to work in a sour mood. He announced to his manager that he intended to do what he could to make the company more gay-friendly.

Offshack, 46, is a second-generation P&Ger - his father worked as an hourly employee at a big manufacturing plant in Mehoopany, Pa. - and he had no complaints about how he'd been treated by the firm. In 1989 his supervisors arranged for Offshack's partner to accompany him when he was transferred to the Philippines. "I've always felt supported," he says.
But P&G was at first reluctant to support gay people in a public way. Not until 1996 did the company permit GABLE, its gay and lesbian employee group, to create an e-mail network. Two years later children of same-sex parents were not allowed to attend a P&G-sponsored "family" event at a local amusement park.

Gradually P&G came around to GABLE's point of view. At the group's urging, it pulled its ads from talk-show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger's program after she was accused of being anti-gay. It offered domestic-partner benefits in 2002.

Not long afterward P&G agreed to support the repeal of Article 12. In a speech to the regional branch of the National Conference for Community and Justice (formerly the National Conference of Christians and Jews), CEO A.G. Lafley said, "Article 12 is neither inclusive nor just, and it has severely harmed the economic vitality of our city."

P&G donated $40,000 to gay-rights group Citizens to Restore Fairness. Lafley gave about $5,000 in company stock. Susan Arnold, a lesbian who is P&G's vice chairman and a possible heir apparent to Lafley, gave $10,000. GE Aircraft Engines, Kroger, Federated and Hewlett-Packard all gave money to Citizens to Restore Fairness, and some urged their employees to vote against Article 12.

Christian conservatives were aghast. The company and its executives have "publicly thrown their support and money behind the homosexual political agenda," said the Rev. Donald Wildmon, president of the American Family Association.

He also objected to P&G's decision to offer same-sex-partner health benefits and to its advertising on gay-themed TV shows such as NBC's "Will & Grace." The AFA, Focus on the Family and an Ohio-based group called Citizens for Community Values called for a boycott of Tide, Crest and Pampers.

Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values, which opposes gay marriage and pornography, still can't understand why P&G would insert itself into the culture wars. "Why in the world would corporations get involved in something as murky as people's sexual lives?" he asks.
Burress, 64, is a force in Ohio politics: Citizens for Community Values has eight staff members and a $1.5 million annual budget. Burress is also a board member of Exodus International, a group that helps people walk away from homosexuality by finding Christ, and is a key member of the Arlington Group, a high-powered Washington, D.C.-based coalition of groups opposing same-sex marriage.

P&G has reached out to Christian conservatives like Burress, and he says the firm is listening. Unlike Wildmon, he does not object to P&G's decision to provide domestic-partner benefits. "What they do on the inside, that's their business," he says.

But Burress thinks it's wrong for P&G to support what he calls "special rights" for gays - by which he means legal protection against discrimination. Prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, he says, interferes with other people's rights to be guided by their own moral values when deciding, for example, whether to rent an apartment to a same-sex couple or hire homosexuals in their business. "This is a battle of rights," he says.

The Christian groups called off their boycott last year. Says Burress: "P&G has quietly backed away from promoting homosexuality, but they'll never admit it."

He may be right on both counts. P&G's score on the Corporate Equality Index, an annual rating of companies by the Human Rights Campaign, has dropped in recent years. What do P&G executives say about this? We can't tell you. They declined to be interviewed.

Big Blue on the cutting edge
I
n 1953, Thomas J. Watson Jr., the president of IBM, issued a written policy promising that the company would hire people based on their ability, "regardless of race, color or creed." This was a bold move, coming as it did a year before the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown decision and 11 years before the Civil Rights Act.

IBM was planning to build plants in Kentucky and North Carolina, and Watson wanted to make sure they were integrated. With that history it's no surprise that IBM is now at the cutting edge when it comes to promoting gay rights:
Among corporations, IBM is the No. 1 financial supporter of gay rights groups in the U.S.

To export its gay-friendly culture, IBM supports employee GLBT groups in 23 countries, including Singapore, Slovakia and Colombia. There's plenty to do: In 80 countries homosexual acts are illegal, as they were in parts of the U.S. until a few years ago.

Last year IBM convened a group of gay college students at the Human Rights Campaign to form a national organization of students in science and technology.

IBM persuaded Dr. Marci Bowers, one of the world's leading sex-reassignment surgeons and herself a transgendered person, to participate in the company's health insurance program.

IBM stepped up its diversity efforts in 1995, when Louis V. Gerstner, then CEO, formed eight executive-level task forces, one each for women, African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, people with disabilities, employees with work-life issues, GBLT people and men. Men? "Everyone needs a support system," says Ron Glover, the company's vice president of global workforce diversity.

Each task force was asked four questions: How can IBM attract the most talented people from your group? How can the company keep them engaged and productive? How should IBM market to them? And which outside groups should become IBM's partners? The goal was for IBM to get better at attracting talent and selling to broader sets of customers. "It was pretty simple at one level and pretty profound at another," Glover says.
The IBM of today looks very different from the IBM of 1995. The number of female executives worldwide has increased by 490 percent. The number of self-identified GLBT executives has grown even faster - and the number of executives with disabilities has more than tripled. IBM buys $2.1 billion worth of goods and services from suppliers owned by women, minorities or GLBT people, and it sells more than $500 million of goods and services by marketing to those groups.

Randy Foster is one name behind the numbers. A former U.S. Air Force captain, he got very good at keeping secrets during his eight-year military stint. Foster could not tell his family or friends about his work with the National Reconnaissance Office, a classified government agency that builds spy satellites. And he could not tell anyone in the military that he was gay. Rather than lie about his sexual orientation, the South Carolina native left the service in 1995.

After working at defense contractors TRW, Boeing and General Dynamics, Foster settled at IBM, where he sells technology and services to the defense industry and the government. "Come hell or high water, I wanted to live one life," he says. "The only things I have to hide now are national security secrets, and those are good secrets."

Foster didn't join the gay employee groups at any of the companies where he has worked. "I'm not an activist," he says. But he does want to feel welcomed.

"The most incredible thing about IBM is that since the day I arrived, I've never thought about being gay and how it might affect my job," Foster says. "IBM's a notch above."

The movement goes to Bentonville

So where is the corporate gay-rights movement going from here? To Bentonville, Ark. Yep, Wal-Mart's getting gay-friendly. Or as an HR manager for the company put it during a workshop at the Out & Equal conference, which Wal-Mart sponsored: "We're here, we're queer and we're proud to be here."

Wal-Mart has invited gay-rights leaders to Bentonville and hired Witeck-Combs, the preeminent gay marketing and consulting firm. It is organizing workshops with the national gay chamber of commerce. It sponsored a panel at a conference of gay journalists, sent a small group to the Human Rights Campaign's annual dinner, and donated three scholarships to the Point Foundation, which provides support and mentoring to students who are marginalized or cast out by their families because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Wal-Mart becomes gay-friendly

Ken Pearson, a middle manager at Wal-Mart University, got Pride, the company's GLBT employee group, started just last year. He said the group has made headway with the company by arguing the business case for gay-friendly policies - that they will help Wal-Mart attract more skilled employees, reach a broader range of customers and expand into urban markets.

This year the company tried selling gay-themed jewelry and promoted the DVD release of the gay love story "Brokeback Mountain." Domestic-partner benefits are now being talked about by America's largest private employer. "I didn't expect this much movement this quickly," Pearson says.
Here comes the backlash. The American Family Association called for a Thanksgiving-weekend boycott (called off at the last minute). Phil Burress, the Cincinnati-based activist, says, "Wal-Mart has no idea what they have taken on here. This Christmas, Wal-Mart's going to take a huge hit for what they've done."

It's possible, but the truth is that for the past 15 years, boycotts or no boycotts, corporate America has been moving in only one direction, and at a pretty rapid pace.

Do you recall that the restaurant chain Cracker Barrel fired gay workers back in 1991 for not having "normal heterosexual values"? Well, a few years ago, when a Kodak employee sent an e-mail to co-workers objecting to the company's endorsement of National Coming Out day as "disgusting and offensive," he was the one who was fired when he declined to apologize. He was entitled to his beliefs, the company explained, but his behavior was not aligned with Kodak's values.

So it's clear where big business is going. What's interesting is to watch it pull the rest of the country along. It turns out that the most important factor shaping people's feelings about gay issues is not their age or even their religion - although those do matter - but whether they have relatives, friends or co-workers who are gay.

"The more out and open people are, the more changed the straight people are all around them," says Joe Solmonese, the Human Rights Campaign president. HRC began organizing workplaces to secure benefits for gay employees. This has inadvertently become a shrewd political strategy as well. "To move the mindset of the American people, we need to find the places where they congregate," Solmonese says. "Priority one is corporate America."
__________________
Religious group calls off Wal-Mart boycott
ExxonMobil's gay problem
From the December 11, 2006 issue

Ruling Lets Women Share Rights Custody Fight
By ADAM LIPTAK

Lisa Miller and Janet Jenkins had a child while joined in a same-sex civil union in Vermont.

The breakup of their relationship, and what it means for their daughter, Isabella, has for years been a source of tension between the Vermont courts, which recognize both women as Isabella’s mothers, and a Virginia judge who granted sole custody to Ms. Miller, Isabella’s biological mother, reasoning that Virginia law makes same-sex unions “void in all respects.”
But yesterday a three-judge panel of the Virginia appeals court unanimously accepted a ruling of the Vermont Supreme Court that conferred parental rights on both women.

The decision averted, at least temporarily, a collision between the civil unions for same-sex couples recognized in Vermont and the Virginia law.
The court ruled that a 1980 federal law, the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act, required Virginia to defer to the Vermont court.
The law requires states to give full faith and credit to other states’ custody determinations. Because Ms. Miller filed papers in Vermont to dissolve her union to Ms. Jenkins in 2003, the appeals court said, the Vermont courts thereby gained sole jurisdiction over custody and visitation issues concerning Isabella.

Neither the federal Defense of Marriage Act nor the Marriage Affirmation Act of Virginia overrode the 1980 law, the appeals court ruled.

The Defense of Marriage Act, or D.O.M.A., enacted in 1996, said that states need not recognize judicial proceedings from other states “respecting a relationship between people of the same sex.”
“This case,” Judge Jere M. H. Willis Jr. wrote for the Court of Appeals of Virginia, in Alexandria, “does not place before us the question whether Virginia recognizes the civil union entered into by the parties in Vermont.
“Rather, the only question before us,” Judge Willis wrote, is whether under the 1980 law “Virginia can deny full faith and credit to the orders of the Vermont court.”

To the extent that the Virginia marriage law applied, he continued, it was overridden by the 1980 federal law.

Mathew Staver, a lawyer for Ms. Miller, said he would ask the full appeals court and, if necessary, the Virginia Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court to hear the case.

“Our client is certainly not giving up, is in this for the long haul and, since her daughter is at stake, is prepared to take this as far as she has to,” Mr. Staver said.

Ms. Miller and Ms. Jenkins had lived together for several years in Virginia before traveling to Vermont in 2000 to enter into a civil union. Isabella was born in Virginia in 2002, after Ms. Miller was impregnated with sperm from an anonymous donor whom Ms. Jenkins helped select. Ms. Jenkins was present in the delivery room.

When Isabella was 4 months old, the women moved to Vermont, where they lived for about a year before separating. Ms. Miller and Isabella moved back to Virginia.

Ms. Miller has said that she no longer considers herself a homosexual. She said that she was Isabella’s only mother and that she did not want Ms. Jenkins to have visitation rights.

Greg Nevins, a lawyer for Ms. Jenkins, said the Virginia decision was a straightforward application of binding federal law. The court, he said, “didn’t get caught up in a lot of the more sensational-type issues.”
Mr. Staver said the court focused on the wrong part of the legal landscape.
“We believe the federal D.O.M.A. controls the matter and allows Virginia to set its own marriage policy,” Mr. Staver said. “Virginia clearly does not recognize same-sex marriages, same-sex civil unions or any law that derives from those unions.”

Ms. Jenkins has not seen her daughter since June 2004. Though the appeals court instructed the trial judge “to extend full faith and credit to the custody and visitation orders of the Vermont court,” it was not clear whether Ms. Jenkins would see Isabella before the case is concluded.

Christian groups assail video game
By Jeff Brumley - Florida Times-UnionFriday, December 01, 2006 - Web Link
November 30, 2006

Shoppers should reject the Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game and the false theology behind the best-selling books that inspired it, a coalition of liberal Christian groups, including one in Jacksonville, said Tuesday.
The Christian Alliance for Progress and three other organizations held a news conference in Phoenix blasting Chicago-based Tyndale House, publisher of the popular Left Behind series, for its support of the video game released just in time for the Christmas shopping season.

The Rev. Tim Simpson, a Jacksonville Presbyterian minister and president of the Christian Alliance for Progress, said the newly released game mangles biblical prophecy and promotes religious intolerance and violence.
Left Behind Games disagrees. The California company says its apocalypse-themed game provides biblical teaching in a format appealing to the video-game generation. In a statement earlier this year, Tyndale House President Mark Taylor said it worked closely with Left Behind Games to ensure the game is appropriate.

The fictional Left Behind series by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye presents a dramatic interpretation of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Jesus. In the real-time strategy game, the rapture has already taken the faithful to heaven. Those left behind must fight the Antichrist's forces in New York City.

Gamers conduct military and spiritual warfare, use prayer to strengthen troops, recover ancient scriptures and control various unit types such as prayer warriors, hellraisers, tanks, spies and special forces. Players can also assume the role of the Antichrist's Global Community Peacekeepers to fight the good guys, namely the Tribulation Force.

The game is rated "T" for teens.

"There is no blood or gore" in the game, Troy Lyndon, chief executive of Left Behind Games, said on the company's Web site. "The game is designed to be a classic battle between good and evil, but it does not gratuitously depict violence or death."

Lyndon countered criticism of the books' and game's theology, saying it is fiction meant to "encourage gamers to think about matters of eternal significance, a topic largely ignored by modern games."

Simpson acknowledged "that you don't see intestines" in the game but that it does present faith-based killing.

And the game's theology, like that of the Left Behind books, rejects accepted biblical scholarship by misreading prophetic books like Revelation, Simpson said.

The protest was organized by the Arizona-based CrossWalk America. Also participating were the Beatitudes Society of Palo Alto, Calif., the Center for Progressive Christianity of Gig Harbor, Wash., and Simpson's organization from Jacksonville.

Conservative faith groups urge cuts to AIDS fund
By John Donnelly - Boston GlobeFriday, December 01, 2006 - Web Link
December 1, 2006

LAKE FOREST, Calif. -- Some leading Christian conservatives, angry over the Global Fund to Fight AIDS's promotion of condoms and its perceived lack of support for faith-based programs, are pushing Congress to cut US support for the AIDS initiative, which was initiated by President Bush in a Rose Garden ceremony five years ago with a $200 million commitment.
The fund -- whose full name is the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria -- has become one of the pillars of the international effort to fight infectious diseases, growing into a $6.6 billion organization that supports programs in 136 countries.

It is a primary vehicle for the AIDS-fighting efforts of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The only larger HIV and AIDS program in the world is the president's $15 billion, five-year plan.

But the Global Fund, which works closely with foreign governments, is not nearly as popular among conservative Christians in the United States. Some take issue with the Global Fund's policies, which include buying clean needles for drug users, and many are furious that just 6 percent of its program dollars goes to faith-based groups.

"There's cancer in the fund," said Peter L. Brandt, senior director of government and public policy at the Christian group Focus on the Family. "It does such an unbelievable job in discriminating against faith-based organizations."

Fund officials, worried about the religious right's influence in Congress, are pledging to try to give more money to religious charities. The executive director of the fund, Richard G.A. Feachem , yesterday told 2,000 people at an AIDS conference organized by the influential Saddleback Church in Lake Forest that the battle against the virus "will only succeed if the great faiths of the world become totally mobilized."

Feachem, in an interview, said the fund "wants to see many more programs" run by faith groups, though most funding decisions are made by local boards.

Feachem's visit to the church-organized conference occurred as the Senate is considering a proposal to more than double the Bush administration's $300 million budget request for the fund, to $700 million next year; the House wants to spend $445 million. This year, Congress sent $545 million to the fund, $245 million more than Bush requested.
Nonetheless, Brandt said he wants the government to eliminate all spending on the Global Fund's HIV programs because it is not providing sufficient money to faith groups and has given little support to abstinence messages. Brandt said the government could continue to support the fund's tuberculosis and malaria programs.

Some other Christian activists, such as Raymond Ruddy , president of the Gerard Health Foundation in South Natick, which gives about $2 million annually to anti abortion and abstinence programs worldwide, want all US money cut from the fund.

"I see a direct correlation of dollars given to the Global Fund and dollars taken away from" the Bush administration's AIDS efforts, Ruddy said. "The Global Fund is systematically excluding faith-based groups from getting money, and that's not right."

The Bush administration, for its part, has taken something of a middle ground, favoring spending of no more than $300 million on the fund this year.

"The Global Fund has to work; it has to be an integral part of the global response to AIDS," Ambassador Mark R. Dybul , US global AIDS coordinator, said in an interview in his Washington office. But Dybul said he wants the majority of government funds directed to the president's program because he believes it is "right now our most rapid response" to the AIDS pandemic.

Christian health associations deliver at least 40 percent of healthcare in several African countries, including Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Liberia, and Kenya, according to UN figures. In the past year, the US program spent 24 percent of its funds on faith-based groups.

Christoph Benn , director of external relations for the Global Fund, said 6 percent of the fund's principal recipients are religious groups, but money also flows to faith-based subcontractors, although the organization does not track the spending.

He said its system makes it difficult to earmark contracts to faith-based groups. Country oversight boards, consisting largely of government officials and community activists, put together proposals and a Geneva-based technical advisory panel selects recipients only among submitted plans. Faith-based groups hold 4 percent of seats on the country boards, according to fund documents.

Benn objected to several other allegations US Christians made , saying that many programs support abstinence-only messages for young people and also emphasize marital fidelity.

Some US Christian leaders support the fund. Rick Warren , head of Saddleback Church and author of the bestseller "The Purpose Driven Life ," gave Feachem, the Global Fund's director, a bear hug yesterday and pledged that he would work with the fund.

The battle over the fund, though, only is expected to intensify in the weeks leading up to the vote by Congress, expected early next year.

Shepherd Smith , who was instrumental in persuading Congress to set aside 33 percent of US AIDS prevention funds to support abstinence messages, said he and Ruddy tried a year ago to persuade the fund's board to increase spending on faith-based groups. "We were just blown off," he said.

Some Christians' objections also are personal. A letter written earlier this year to members of Congress and signed by Ruddy and Focus on the Family decried the election of Asia Russell , a longtime AIDS activist, to the fund's board.

"She served as spokeswoman for the group who tried to strip naked at the [2004 Republican National] Convention as a protest against Bush administration policies," the letter said, adding, "The fact that the fund would elect a woman with zero qualifications to its board sends a clear message that this is not a serious healthcare organization but, rather, a group dedicated to pursuing a social agenda opposed to US policy."
Bernard Rivers , editor of the Global Fund Observer , an independent newsletter that reports on the fund, defended Russell's election, calling her "phenomenally talented and hard - working."

Russell said in an interview that "my qualifications are not the issue. The issue is the extreme, radical religious right attacking the Global Fund and its supporters because the fund is driven by what countries actually want and doesn't fund unscientifically and technically unsound approaches." She was referring to abstinence-only programs.

John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com.

Gay Donor or Gay Dad?
By JOHN BOWE
Correction Appended

R. described himself as “a man in his 40s, voluntarily employed in the arts,” a situation made possible, he explained, by a private family income. His six-foot frame is fit and slim; his eyes, blue and bright. He dresses in a cultured but casual way, an aesthetic captured in his speech, in which phatic blips like “kind of” or “sort of” are interspersed with terms like “Richter-esque.” As in Gerhard, the German painter.

In an effort to become a parent of a sort, R., who is gay, agreed, 11 years ago, to donate sperm to a lesbian couple aspiring to pregnancy. A few years before, R. became friendly with a woman — white and upper class like himself — through the gay activist world. They weren’t good friends, he said, “just friendly.” The woman had a partner, a middle-class black woman, whom R. knew less well but who seemed solid.

The couple decided that the black partner would become impregnated with a white man’s sperm so that the baby would be biracial, reflecting the appearance of both mothers. They approached R. about being the donor. (Like all the subjects I spoke to for this article, R. asked that I not use his full name — R. is his middle initial.) It seemed like a good fit, R. said. “My life and my family background and my socioeconomic position kind of matched the profile of the nonbiological partner.” R. and the white woman even looked somewhat alike.

R. had always loved being around kids, particularly his niece and nephew, whom he saw often. But like many gay men, R. never thought of himself as a likely candidate for fatherhood. He always felt that parents opting to raise a child alone were choosing a rocky road, and at the time, R. himself had no long-term partner. He did, however, have an ex-boyfriend who had started a donor relationship with two lesbians; it seemed to be going well. He quickly became taken with the idea. Having a child of his own, he thought, would mean creating a relationship more intense and involved than what he had with his siblings’ children. “I guess I felt that maybe I wanted to have some kind of more lasting relationships in my life,” he said. “I said I was interested.”

And thus began a series of conversations. R. made it very clear that he had no ambition to be a primary parent and that he was happy to renounce his parental rights. (The latter is crucial to many lesbian couples, allowing the nonbiological mother to adopt and protecting her bond with the child in the event of the death of, or separation from, the biological mother.)

Nevertheless, R. saw himself playing a significant role in the child’s life. “I saw myself holding a baby,” he said. “I wanted a child to be part of my life. I wanted to have a relationship with somebody that was in some sense unconditional, that wasn’t subject to the fading whims of friendships. And I don’t think it’s because I was not finding commitment somewhere else. I wanted to develop a relationship where I was nurturing somebody in a consistent way. I wanted to show up and be part of a child’s life in a significant way.”

R. said he felt that it would be fussy and unrealistic to insist upon specific visitation hours, but on the other hand, he said, “I didn’t want to be someone who’s wheeled out on holidays.” His expectation was to see the child a few times per month. “No one said, ‘That’s a problem.’ Everyone seemed to be on the same page.” And so, according to R., “we went ahead and started to try to get pregnant.”

Virtually every lesbian couple electing to use a known donor’s sperm pursues one of two methods of artificial insemination. One is for the man to go to a clinic, have his sperm harvested and then passed to the mother, usually by doctor-assisted injection. The other, homier and cheaper course is commonly known as the “turkey baster” or “natural” method. As R. described it, after confirming that he was H.I.V.-negative, he simply went over to the mothers’ house and masturbated into a sterilized container. The women injected it into the would-be mother’s vagina with a needleless plastic syringe, and voilà. It could not have been easier, R. said with a shrug. Happened on the first or second time. Like, not a problem.

Since the 1970s, when gay men and lesbians began gaining wider acceptance, there has been a substantial increase in the number of children being reared by gay parents. According to the 2000 U.S. census, 34 percent of lesbian couples and 22 percent of gay male couples are raising at least one child under 18 in their home. Even allowing for a higher percentage of families willing to identify themselves as gay, these numbers still represent a large increase from the 1990 census. “It is more than just a product of better reporting,” says Gary J. Gates, a senior research fellow at the Williams Institute, a center dedicated to sexual-orientation law and public policy at the U.C.L.A. School of Law. “The percentage of same-sex couples raising children more than doubled for men and increased by about 50 percent for women. Couple that with a fairly large body of anecdotal evidence about child-rearing among gay people, and I think that this is strong evidence of a ‘gayby’ boom.”

Though precise breakdowns are hard to come by — demographers have yet to track all the different types of gay families — for many gay parents, the family structure is more or less based on a heterosexual model: two parents, one household. Heather may have two mommies, but her parents are still a couple. Then there are families like R.’s and his partner’s that from the outset seek to create a sort of extended nuclear family, with two mothers and a father who serves, in the words of one gay dad, as “more than an uncle and less than a father.” How does it work when Heather has two mommies, half a daddy, two daddies or one and a half daddies?

“People are in many cases redesigning ‘family,’ ” says Judith Stacey, a sociology professor at New York University. Stacey has written about gay fathers, gay mothers, gay men who form family units with single lesbians and lesbian couples who form households with one gay male father. As radical as families like R.’s may seem, she says, in her experience the people engineering them aren’t motivated by ideology but by a deep, and frankly conventional, desire to have children. “They want to have a relationship to children,” she says. “And they want to be able to create whatever kinds of security and stability they can. They’re drawing from all kinds of traditional forms, but at the same time, they’re inventing new ones.”

Primary among the reasons mothers to be choose to become impregnated by a known donor who remains part of the family is a reluctance to raise children in the shadow of anonymous heritage. As one donor dad, an East Coast lawyer named Guy, told me, his lesbian co-parents “felt like it was important for their kids to know as much as they could about their story.

When there’s an anonymous donor, it’s not always an ideal situation for the child.” As for why lesbians often choose donor fathers who are gay, Judith Stacey and others told me that many prefer gay men for reasons of “solidarity.” “They think that gay men will be more sympathetic, more amenable to agreements they might create and stick by,” Stacey says. And finally they — along with the straight women who choose to use gay donors — say they feel that gay men simply come with less baggage. Heterosexual sperm donors are more liable to marry and father children of their own, which has the potential of causing jealousy and competition among the children and their mothers.

While the role of the mother in gay co-parenting arrangements can, on a day-to-day basis, be quite traditional, the father’s is often part-time and ancillary from the first. Why would any man, gay or straight, choose a kind of fatherhood that would seem to curtail both its joys and responsibilities? In part, the answer has to do with the fact that a gay man’s options are already somewhat limited. Though gay men can and increasingly do become parents through adoption or by using surrogates, pursuing those avenues can be difficult. Many (though not all) states allow “single people” to adopt, but in practice some make it tough for gay men to do so. Surrogacy can be wildly expensive, easily costing $100,000 or more for multiple egg harvests, in vitro fertilization and the surrogate mother’s expenses.

Most of the men I spoke to didn’t want to be single parents; they cherished the idea of fathering children with partners they knew and liked.
Frequently, gay men and women entering into co-parenting arrangements draft some kind of document that specifies participants’ roles and responsibilities — the father’s visitation schedule, how many kids everyone plans to have together, what happens if one of the partners moves, dies or becomes involved with a new partner. These homemade, sometimes expensively drafted documents can run as long as 30 pages.

Many agreements stipulate that the donor will waive his parental rights, allowing the nonbiological mother to become a legal parent. (Three states have statutes permitting second-parent adoptions; nearly two dozen others have granted such rights through the courts.) But generally, unless the co-parents choose to use a clinic, a donor may relinquish his parental rights only after the child is born. What if the father sees the child and decides he can’t bear to part with her? What if the new mothers decide he is wanted less than originally agreed? It is not unusual, in such cases, for custody battles to ensue.

Agreeing to be a father while stepping out of the way means navigating a thicket of emotional and legal issues. “I talk to a lot of guys who have this offer from women,” Guy, the East Coast lawyer, said. “And I always say: ‘You’ve got to completely trust these people. Because this relationship is going to be so tested in so many ways. If you can’t talk through every single, possible issue, this is not going to work. You’ve got to be able to bring your fears to them and vice versa. ”

Drawing up an agreement can have what Guy called “immense stop-look-and-listen value.” That is, it makes “you think for a minute about what you’re doing.” But as he readily admitted, such documents — even when drawn up by a lawyer — often carry little legal weight. According to Arthur Leonard, a New York Law School professor and an expert on sexuality and the law, families can draft as many documents as they want, but “in the eyes of the law a parent is either the biological parent or an adoptive parent or, in some jurisdictions, a de facto parent.”

At best, co-parenting agreements serve as a way to establish intent, which state courts can choose to factor into their decisions — or not. Charged, above all, with looking out for the best interest of the child, judges are free to ignore even the most well-drawn documents.

“The law,” Leonard went on to say, “has lagged far behind in taking account of nontraditional family forms.” Partly, he said, this can be attributed to the “natural inertia in the legislative process.” Legislatures on all matters are “slow in reacting to changes in society,” but in this case they are also reluctant to offend socially conservative voters. (In the midterm elections this month, seven states voted to ban same-sex marriage.) Finally, Leonard said, despite the current outcry about “activist judges,” many courts are skittish about reshaping social issues from outside legislative bodies.

A result is that gay donor dads must not only trust that their co-parents will abide by whatever agreements they have designed but also hope that as dads they have managed to adequately predict their own reaction to being a parent. As Guy, who has two children of his own with a lesbian couple, said: “A lot of guys can’t do that. They think they can do it, but when the baby’s born, they really can’t.” In other words, a father-donor working with a lesbian couple must make peace with the fact that he just isn’t going to be a TV dad, a heterosexual dad or a full-time gay dad. “Ideally,” as Guy put it, you need to be “willing to accept that the baby has two parents, who are the two moms — and then there’s you.”

Each of the 10 gay donor dads I met with in recent months maintained a different level of involvement with his lesbian partners and their children. Some co-parents buy houses near one another and interact nearly every day. Others, like Guy and his co-parents, live a thousand miles apart and arrange visits or vacations together every few weeks or months. (When I asked Guy if there was any downside to fathering in this way, he answered yes, missing the kids. “They give me incredible joy,” he said. But then he added, “It’s the kind of thing where it’s, you know, when you miss someone, although that hurts, it’s a good reason to feel bad.”) One donor dad told me that he never had any plans to be a father. The day he realized he was gay, he said, he felt he had been given a pass. No child-rearing. No Little League talk or barbecues. He looked at donating his sperm as “helping my friends make a family.” But like a lot of gay donor dads I spoke to, he didn’t fully anticipate just how attached he would become. He is now thrilled to visit with his 21/2-year-old daughter every Wednesday from 4p.m. to 6 p.m. When I asked him what she called him, he said: “That’ll be her choice. I think ‘Dad’ is a word. That’s a word I hope to use.”

Others always knew they wanted to be fathers. Before embarking upon the creation of his family, Mark, who works at a local museum, spent years discussing the idea of being a co-parent with two lesbian friends, Jean and Candi. At first, he said, the tone was “ ‘You know, wouldn’t it be fun if we all had kids? And then it kind of got more serious as time went on.”
Mark and the mothers to be took the time to discuss every conceivable angle. What would happen if one or another combination of parents didn’t agree with the others? What would happen if someone died? They talked about their family backgrounds, how they had been raised, what they liked and didn’t like about their upbringing. They wrote a document in which Mark was absolved of any financial role in the child’s life. (Many co-parents put this stipulation in their agreements; the father’s sustained financial support of the child could be used to help establish his claim to custody should relations become contentious.) He also agreed to put the child up for adoption by the nonbiological mother once it was born. Moreover, it was spelled out that the child would be brought up knowing Mark was the father and that Mark could visit as agreed upon.

At first Mark’s role was circumscribed. But, he said, from the moment of birth, “things just got a lot nicer than that.” Candi had a natural delivery, and as Mark described it to me, watching the process of birth had a transformative effect on him: “The excitement, the fear that maybe something could go wrong. And to watch the head crown — it was just exciting.”
Mark, 48, Jean, 37, and Candi, 34, now have two children — Mark (named after his father) is Candi’s biological son, and another boy, Joseph, now 7 months old, is Jean’s biological son. For a long time Mark, who was working as a freelance information technologist and financial consultant in Minneapolis until he took the job at the museum, could arrange his schedule to suit the mothers’ needs. He spends time with the kids once a week, sometimes alone, sometimes with his long-term partner, Jeffrey, who is 36 and went to college with Candi, and sometimes with one or both mothers. The relationship among the fathers and mothers has been a surprise benefit, he said, creating a brother-sister feeling. Despite the fact that the mothers are still financially responsible for the children, Mark has put them in his will. Each birthday and Christmas, he deposits a $1,000 bond for their education. Like any good father, he said, “I want to see them do well.”

When I asked him if he ever ran into resistance from school personnel or his own family about his less-than-conventional parenting arrangement, he told me a story. He had taken the girls, as he calls his lesbian co-parents, to Wisconsin to visit his mother and his sisters. “We went to a lake place over by Wausau.” He laughed. “My nephew” — his sister’s son — “had a lot of questions. He was asking my mom, ‘Why does Mark have two moms?’ My mom was like, ‘I didn’t know what to say.’ ”
Mark continued: “I guess in people’s minds there’s a kid’s cartoon drawing of a family unit. Well, ours is the same thing. It’s just that the characters have changed a bit. People make a lot out of it, but it’s really quite simple: you’ve got four parents now instead of two. And they’re all together.” Considering how many heterosexual parents are overworked, divorced or otherwise unavailable, he said, in the end he advised his mother what to say to anyone asking about little Mark: “Tell ’em he’s lucky.”

If Mark’s role as a father comes closer than some to a traditional dad’s, that of his friend David falls squarely in the middle of the “more than an uncle but less than a father” continuum. At 43, David works for the University of Minnesota general counsel’s office and is very serious about furthering his acting career. (He and Mark became friendly through a theater company Mark used to manage.) When David’s friends, P. J. and Vicki, now 52 and 37 respectively, approached him about “helping them out with kids,” he was receptive, although he had reservations. The first was that he wasn’t interested in being a full-time dad. His acting career, he said, “pretty much supersedes anything else. Spending a lot of time with little ones, that’s not where my focus is. I’m far too selfish a person.” He still had plans to leave Minneapolis for New York or L.A. to further his career. But in the end, he agreed, with several conditions.

The major one was, as he put it, “if we do one, we’re doing two.” David agreed with P. J., who didn’t want to create an only child. “Nothing against only children,” he explained, “but I feel that it’s important for kids to have a sibling. I remember when I was growing up, with my brother, you just kind of go, What’s going on with Mom and Dad?” How much more, he wondered, would a kid need an ally with strangers asking questions about his or her unconventional family?

The mothers insisted on one other condition: until or unless David actually left for the bright lights of Broadway, his interaction with the kids had to be consistent. As P. J., the children’s nonbiological mother, said: “I told him you have to choose. You’re either going to be in for five cents or you’re in for a buck.”
David, Bobbie (David’s long-term partner), P. J. and Vicki were more laid back than were many co-parents I met. They made no legal or quasi-legal document. They never spelled out exactly how often David would see the children, just that it couldn’t be once a week and then once a month. The attitude shared by David, P. J. and Vicki (Bobbie, as the nonbiological father, was the least involved in the discussions) was, as David summed it up: “If stuff happens, then it happens; it happens in married people’s lives, it happens in straight people’s lives and it happens in single mothers’. Stuff happens everywhere, to everybody.”

When I asked David whether he and his partners had gone to a doctor or used the “turkey baster” method to become pregnant, his answer surprised me. He looked at me with a big, devilish grin. “We did it,” he answered.
David had never been with a woman, but he and Vicki decided that they didn’t want the process to be impeded by technology. Using syringes and cups seemed inorganic and inefficient. Sperm would lose potency during each transfer. “I wanted the numbers,” David said. The first attempt resulted in an uneventful two hours of awkward huffing and puffing. As David remembers: “We were sort of like, O.K., then! Let’s get breakfast!” But within a month, after another try, Vicki became pregnant. “Thank God for videos,” David said.

David has now fathered two children with Vicki: Eli, who is 6, and Wyatt, who is 21/2. Being a parent has not been without its challenges. One morning last October, Eli woke up with abdominal pains. P. J. took him to the emergency room. The doctors found a mass in his abdomen, which turned out to be a tumor. The diagnosis was neuroblastoma, a childhood cancer of the sympathetic nervous system.

“At the outset,” David said, “They said he was at Stage 4, high risk, which is just about as bad as you can get.” The tumor was the size of a fist and had wrapped itself around every major blood vessel in his abdomen and attached itself to his kidney and liver. It had also metastasized into Eli’s bone marrow and lymph nodes. At one point, the doctors gave him a 30 percent chance of survival.

During eight and a half hours on the operating table, the doctors removed the tumor, one of Eli’s kidneys and his appendix. Soon after, he began chemotherapy, had a stem-cell transplant and started radiation. Luckily, David told me, the treatment took.

When the crisis first hit, everyone came together and dealt with it as a team. Vicki quit her job to be the full-time caretaker, and as David told me, any notion of part-time fathering went out the window. All hands were called on deck, and everyone responded in kind. After the initial trauma, however, when the emergency decisions and arrangements had been made and treatment was under way, David wanted to return to his part-time role. As he admitted later, this caused “some resentment.” The mothers, or at least Vicki, expected that David would continue to be more involved.
“It was tough, because I was under the impression we were all going to stand together,” Vicki told me later. “As time went on, it was: ‘Well, I’m going to work. I’m going to a play. I have this; I have that.’ And so the bulk of everything sort of fell on my shoulders.”

The treatment schedule was grueling and left P. J. on her own with Wyatt; cancer was not something the family had planned on. “You go in under the assumption that you’re going to have a healthy child,” Vicki said. “Some things worked and some things didn’t work.

David, the way he describes himself, he’s the machine who figures things out and gets things done; I’m more emotional; and P. J. is really levelheaded; Bobbie’s not necessarily a man of action but feels things really deeply — we all sort of reverted to our roles and got through it.” As a mother, she felt it was her job to bear the brunt of Eli’s care. But, she said, “it would have been much nicer to have the responsibilities spread out a little more. I think David’s aware of my feelings.”
David, as he explained it to me, saw things a little differently: “I’m like, Well, at the beginning, I was needed in that role. Now that things are together and moving, I’m pulling myself back, because I’m not — I didn’t sign on for —.” He stalled. He still had his bills to pay, his house to pay off and all his other affairs. Most significant, he said, “this wasn’t a responsibility that I necessarily took on. You know? This was where the untraditional part of the family arrangement came into question or got defined or whatever. Because that’s not what my role is here.” It was, he said, at times, “a difficult wire to walk.”

As we talked, Bobbie, who is 45 and has been David’s partner for nine years, arrived, wearing a black polo shirt. He’s well over six feet tall, big like David. His expression seemed sour, but when he smiled, he revealed a broken bicuspid, which produced an oddly sweet effect. Unlike two of the other gay “stepdads” I met in my research, who had described themselves as playing a sort of “fun uncle” role, Bobbie admittedly played the family heavy. Maybe, he said, in some ways it was his Mormon upbringing. “I just set more limits and probably expect more out of the kids,” he said.

Recently, when the entire family took a weeklong trip to the East Coast and visited David’s mother, Bobbie recalled, Eli handed an orange peel to one of his aunts for her to throw away rather than walk 10 feet to a garbage can. Bobbie chastised him, and Vicki took exception to that. Bobbie was left feeling, as he put it, “disenfranchised from the family unit.”

He continued: “There’s definitely a pecking order. Vicki is on top, then David, then P. J., then me.” Coming last, he said, is an inherently difficult position to maintain. If he gets too involved, he gets yelled at for doing so in the wrong way. If he seeks distance, he gets called on the carpet for being aloof.

“There have been a couple of times when I’ve been made to feel that I’m the fourth wheel,” he said. Once, he was told, “Look, you’re only here because of him” — because of David. “I was told that to my face,” he said, looking pained. “That was probably the deepest knife in the back I’ve ever had in my life. That totally destroyed my entire self-image as part of the family.”

As in most families, members get hurt to a degree that seems unfathomable — they feel exiled, exact revenge, remain silent, do what they need to do, then pick themselves up and keep going. I later learned that David never changed diapers. When the children were with their fathers, the job fell to Bobbie. When I mentioned the disparity, both men smiled. That’s the way it is.

For David, the admittedly vain actor, one of the supreme joys of fatherhood is the idea that one day his sons might see him on television. He imagines them turning on the TV and pointing him out to their friends: “There’s my dad!” Bobbie has a nearly opposite take. “A lot of what Mormonism is about is what you’re passing on to the next generation, some type of legacy, whether emotionally or through teaching.” His fondest wish is to empower his kids, to help Eli find happiness, “after all the drama and heaviness of his illness,” to help Wyatt become, say, “a great mathematician who goes on to become famous and prove great new theories or something along those lines.”

Being a father has taught him, he said, to “look for the enjoyment in life rather than the humor. Watching a kid discovering an anthill and watching him spend a half-hour poking around, discovering the way ants move and walk. It makes you stop and look at nature all over again, because you’re rediscovering it through kids’ eyes.”

As David listened to Bobbie describe this, he smiled very warmly. When the kids call Bobbie Dad, he said, “I know that just fills his heart. You know? It fills his heart.” Bobbie positively beamed. “It does fill your heart when, you know, when they call you Dad. You feel like you’re a part of something.”
If David and Bobbie’s experience was tumultuous but ultimately rewarding, R.’s venture into fatherhood seemed cursed from the beginning. “I don’t think any of us expected that we would find the pregnancy happening before we actually sat down and did a contract,” he told me. “I mean, I think part of it was, we thought, Oh, this is going to take a while. And there was just this excitement about getting started.” So R. and his co-parents began trying to become pregnant before any papers had been drawn up. Lowering his voice and faltering a bit, R. continued, “So it was foolish of us to kind of do that.”

What happened next would have been remarkable for any family. R. took a monthlong vacation to Australia, where he contracted hepatitis. The illness progressed to a neurological disorder called Guillain-Barré syndrome, and after he returned to New York, he became fully paralyzed and lay ill in the hospital for several weeks. He recovered, but by the time he resumed discussions with his parent partners, more than five months had passed.

During his absence, R. said, his partners had suffered what he called “serious amnesia.” Instead of keeping to terms he had thought long-ago settled, they now said: “No, we never agreed to these. We just said we understand that’s what you expected.”

The discussions became heated and disagreeable. Someone suggested mediation. His partners chose the mediator, a woman, he said, who had written a parenting book in which she seemed to be saying that to give the father any rights at all was to open the door to disaster. In R.’s view, her position was: “If you give the guy any rights, he may want more and want to take the child away from you.”

Lawyers were hired, both prominently involved in New York’s gay community. The two lawyers had worked together on activist fronts, and because of this shared history, R. thought his partners’ lawyer would be sympathetic to a harmonious outcome. Wrong. As R. recalled, “The first thing she said to my lawyer was: ‘Your client’s not getting any rights. I just want you to know. Whatever he thinks he’s getting, he’s not getting it.’ ”
M., the woman who carried R.’s child, told me that, in fact, she and her partner were afraid to give R. any official access to their daughter. “The contract we wanted him to sign really didn’t give him any rights, didn’t really specify anything,” she said, “because that’s the advice we got from our lawyer — no spelling out of rights.” They didn’t want to lay the groundwork for him to demand custody later.

So much for brotherhood, sisterhood, gayhood — amity had curdled into enmity. R. said his “partners” blamed him for the discord. Every time he tried to approach them directly, he said, they refused.

Meanwhile, the pregnancy had reached the third term. R. was despondent. Over the last nine months, his desire to be a parent had only become more ardent. Now he had apparently fathered a child he might never get to see. His lawyer, he said, told him: “I don’t know what to say. You’re in a terrible position.” R. could have insisted on his rights as a biological father. He could have used legal precedent in New York State to press for joint custody or, at the very least, visitation rights. But then, of course, it would have been an awfully contentious beginning for a family. R. chose to honor the original intent of his and his partners’ undertaking. In effect, he caved in.

After R. ceased making specific demands, tensions eased — somewhat. R. and the mothers had a rapprochement — enough of one to allow him to be at the hospital during his daughter’s birth. But later, when she began to speak, his daughter never called him Dad, Daddy, Father — anything of the kind. “For a long time,” he said, “I was just . . . my name.” He was seldom, if ever, allowed to be alone with his daughter. There were times, he admitted, when he grasped the amount of full-time devotion it took to raise a child and felt relief that the job was not his. But more often, he said, he would observe “the physical relationship my daughter had with her mothers and feel tremendous pain that I was never going to have that.”

In many respects, R.’s experience would seem to confirm the worst fears of those — inside and outside the gay community — who think attempts to re-engineer family dynamics in this way are doomed from the start. “I could never get a regular schedule for visiting,” R. said. “I was always kept at a distance. I was never brought in in a way where I felt like I was being acknowledged as really more than just a friend.” This went on for years, and he started to tear up as he described it. What pained him most, he said, was the feeling of irrevocability, the fact that each moment was a lost opportunity. “I was basically watching her grow up and having no control, just watching it go by. I would see her on the street, it was like, you know, you can imagine, I was looking at my child but not having access to her really.”

Like a lot of lesbian mothers at that time, M. said, she and her partner were, as she put it, “kind of paranoid. We didn’t want to promise a set amount of time or, say, summer vacation or any of that stuff.” She continued: “I think one of our big mistakes in our situation was we had no clue, all three of us going into it, and there weren’t that many people for us to talk to or things to read about it. He was just saying he wanted to be around and be known and have a relationship. And looking back, even that seemed scary to us.”

It was a deeply painful period for R. “I mean, if I were to say anything to people who were thinking about something like this,” he said, “it would be that with this kind of donor relationship, this web of affinity and genetics, it’s not like an article of clothing where someone gives it to you and then it’s yours and you can walk away. If you don’t want to have to be answerable to somebody, then go to an anonymous sperm bank. It’s like they wanted the privilege of being able to say to their children, ‘That’s your father,’ without having to really give up anything. And so, what’s that about?”

Luckily for R., things changed over time. When his daughter was 2, her nonbiological mother became impregnated with sperm donated by a gay black friend. She bore twins. A couple of years later, the mothers split up. A custody battle ensued, in which the white mother tried to gain sole custody of all three children. The judge ruled against her. The final agreement essentially assigned the three mixed-race children to the white mother roughly 60 percent of the time and to the black mother 40 percent of the time.

The current family tree is a crazy circuit board: The black woman has a new female partner. The white woman is now living with a man, and the two have had their own child. So, as R. said, between the one child that R. has with the black mother, the twins borne by the white mother with a black donor and the newest, fourth, child born to her with her new male partner, all of whom have some sort of sibling relation to one another, things can be a little confusing. “They’re quite a little petri dish of a family, as you can imagine,” R. told me. The children go from the white mother, who lives in a SoHo loft, to their black mother, who lives in a nice, middle-class row house in Crown Heights. On weekends, they often visit the white mother’s family’s country estate. “I’d say they’re like divorce kids,” he said. “They’ve got a family that split up; they go back and forth.” But the kids love both their mothers, and though the relationships may seem confusing to outsiders, there is certainly no lack of people in their lives who care about them — something many “straight” families can’t claim.

How he fits in as a father is less clear. Since the mothers broke up five years ago, R.’s relations with the birth mother — and his daughter — have warmed. When R.’s daughter turned 6, he was allowed to see her alone for the first time. And now? “It’s a work in progress,” he said. “We really enjoy each other. There are still issues about how much I get to see her.” But by now, R.’s birth mother wants him to have a relationship with his daughter.

“My perspective has changed,” she said. “It’s good for her; it’s good for him; there’s no reason not to. She loves hanging out with him.” R.’s relationship with his daughter’s other mother remains strained. When I asked to speak with her through an intermediary, she declined to comment.

R. is not quite sure yet what his daughter thinks of him. He knows that she knows he’s her father. But he’s not sure what that means. A couple of years ago, he said, he took her to the Museum of Natural History. Outside, they bought a hot dog. “She couldn’t open the soda,” he said, “so she asked the vendor, ‘Can you open this?’ And he said, ‘Well, ask your father.’ So she started hearing that from strangers at a certain point. She probably didn’t know exactly who I was.”

He is still not positive to what degree any of the children in the various branches of the family have affixed their relation to all the parents. The white woman’s twins, the ones not biologically related to him, identify him as a “donor” — not their donor, not their father, but a title, donor, like uncle or godparent. As for his daughter, he said, “there are many men in her mothers’ lives. There are friends; there is the donor father of his daughter’s siblings; and there is the white mother’s new partner.” With all of these men in quasi-parental roles, he conceded, “I’m not sure if I’m — I can’t say honestly that I know that she’s accessing anything through me that she’s not getting anywhere else.”

Struggling to be precise, he said: “She recognizes me. I feel like we have a relationship, that there’s some . . . that I mean something to her, that she recognizes an affinity that’s not just: I like this guy; he’s a nice guy; I have a fun time with him. I think she sees me as being part of some kind of heritage of hers. Now maybe that’s my wanting to make a relationship where I want there to be one, but I think that there is something there.” He mentioned that last summer his daughter and her twin brothers visited R.’s family on Cape Cod. At the end of the trip, he was able to spend an entire day alone with his daughter and his own family — his parents and siblings. After the day was over, M. told him that his daughter hoped maybe next year she would be able to spend two days there.

“So,” he laughed, “who knows? Maybe in the end, all of this will be a plus. Maybe we won’t end up having that typical Oedipal hand baggage that she’ll have with her primary parents. It’s been a long road. It’s been very up and down. But I got through it, and I wouldn’t ever say I wish I hadn’t done it. Because it’s great, actually, to have her in my life. I just” — he paused — “would certainly have done it very differently.”

It was late August on a wooden deck overlooking a quarter-acre lot in Coon Rapids, a suburb north of Minneapolis. The deck was next to a three-bedroom house. A big glass table was loaded with barbecue fixings of time eternal: bean salad, chips, nuts, corn on the cob and the staple of American child-rearing, juice boxes. The guests included two gay fathers, one gay boyfriend-cum-stepdad, three lesbian mothers (one couldn’t attend) and four boys.

P. J., David and Bobbie’s co-parent, is an X-ray technician with a bawdy and infectious sense of humor. Mark’s co-parents, Candi and Jean, one of whom is a former prison guard, were more reserved. Eight conversations were juggled as children came and went, screaming, laughing, crying, demanding juice boxes, spilling juice boxes, getting sand on the frosting on their mouths and so on. Eli arrived — post-chemo, post-stem-cell-transplant. He looked fragile and skinny. His veins glowed slightly in the sunshine. His blond hair was coming back, silky and short. One of his front teeth was missing, and he gawked, open-mouthed, squinting in the sun.
P. J. told me that he seemed to have overcome most of his physical problems in a matter of months. The emotional trauma might take longer. She recalled his, and her, time at the hospital. “To watch your 5-year-old son staring through a glass-pane window at a room full of other 5-year-olds playing ball, and he can’t do it. And the look of sadness on his face. Every day it was: ‘Mom, why am I here? Why do I have to do this? Why, why, why?’ ”

Eli had run off to play in the yard. He looked fine. Just awkward.
Mark and Candi and Jean’s child, also Mark, showed up, looking still three-quarters asleep.

“Is that the monkey shirt?” someone asked him.

No answer.

“What’s Wyatt doing?”

“He’s downstairs playing.”

An electronic child monitor sat on the table, confirming that Wyatt was indeed downstairs playing.

A bee buzzed. One of the mothers swatted it. “No bugs! Bugs are not allowed.”

“I need some water.”

Little Mark followed Eli to the backyard. Big Mark followed little Mark. David followed big Mark. All of them marched past the Playskool house and a litter of toys to the T-ball setup. Eli began to swat at a Wiffle ball.
Wyatt emerged from downstairs.

A chorus of parents began to chirp. “Hey, big guy!” “Hi!” “Hey, big guy!” “You big guy!” “Come here, you!”

Wyatt ran to Bobbie and gave him a big kiss and a hug. Bobbie, whom I initially judged to be a bit dour, was clearly warmed to the quick. And it was only at that moment that I realized he was as much a part of the family as everyone, even if his role seemed more precarious. Wyatt made the rounds, hugging everyone. Little Mark returned and also went around kissing and hugging everyone. The adults cooed.

The conversation skittered and zigzagged as it does in any group of people addlebrained by the presence of four children. Topics covered school meetings, health benefits, the rate at which kids outgrow clothes. Circumcision (pro or con). Potty training. Toys. Birthdays. Sibling relations. Crying (when to ignore, when not to).

Suddenly, Eli’s mother jerked up. Where’s Eli? David shrugged, lazily. “He’s off being a boy!”

Wyatt nestled into her lap. “I want grape!”
“You want grape? You want some mandarin oranges, too?”

He shook his head.

“You want some cantaloupe?”

He shook his head again. “Uh-uh.”

“You want some nuts?”

“Yah.”

“What do you say?”

“Thanks!”

Candi turned to me. So, she wanted to know, What’s this article about? I told her it’s about part-time fatherhood for gay men and how well it works out and how it works out, period. She seemed suspicious. But . . . what’s the agenda? she asked. I laughed. Hadn’t she heard? Journalists are objective.

A bee came around the table. Eli panicked. He kept whining until it began to seem a bit attention-seeking. David asked him to quiet down a few times and finally told him to leave the table. Candi’s attention returned to me: “Why is this worth a story? It’s not even worth discussing. We’re just as American as our next-door neighbors. You see all these families with stepdads and stepmoms and half brothers and half sisters. What do you say about marriages that 50 percent of the time end in divorce? Why are we so threatening?” Most heterosexual parents, she said, marry, have sex “and then suddenly: ‘Whoops! We’re pregnant!’ Our families are designed. They’re conscious. They don’t just happen by happenstance. We had to sit down and say: O.K., what’s your relationship to the kid going to look like? What’s our relationship to each other going to look like? What’s this family going to look like?” She didn’t understand what the big deal was. “We want the same things that every other family wants! You know? We shop at Costco; we shop at Wal-Mart; we buy diapers. We’re just average. We’re downright boring!”

Two or three Saturdays after the barbecue, back in New York, R. knocked on the door of an East Village apartment. His daughter had been at a sleepover, and he was picking her up for an afternoon visit. A mellow, biracial couple answered and greeted him warmly. His daughter gathered her things, and we were on our way.

Now 10, R.’s daughter, H., has long, frizzy brown hai