Why Are Gay Families In Salt Lake City?

According to a recent study, the US city in which the highest percentage of itsr gay couples is raising children is in a state that I wouldn't expect to legalize same-sex marriage in my lifetime.  In fact, two of the next three cities with metropolitan areas  of a milion or more are in such states.

The winner in that category is Salt Lake City.   Next is Virginia Beach, followed by Detroitand  Memphis. Jacksonville, FL is another place where more than one in four gay couples is raising children..  Of those cities, only Detroit is in a state in which there seems to be any chance of legalizing same-sex unions any time soon.

Mind you, New York, San Francisco and Boston have larger overall numbers of gay couples raising kids. But the percentage of such couples is actually much smaller than the cities I've mentioned--or the California communities of Visalia and Porterville.

The researchers who conducted the study say that the main reason for this phenomena is that members of gay couples in Salt Lake City and the other seemingly-unlikely hubs were in heterosexual marriages before coming out as gay.  They had kids in those unions and brought them into their new domestic arrangements.

The terrible irony of this is that in such places, gay people often feel more external or internal pressures to get married and have children--whether to mollify members of their families or churches, or in an attempt to silence their own inner voices.  A young person who's grown up in Park Slope or Chelsea or Castro or the Back Bay is less likely to feel such pressures and thus more likely to come out earlier--and less likely to enter into a heterosexual marriage.  On the other hand, I can only imagine how it feels to grow up gay or trans in a place where the center of life is a fundamentalist church.

Now, I don't want to depict all of those places where gay people are raising kids as backward or imprisoning.  Rather, I want to point out that the very same social milieu that causes people to avoid living as themselves--or simply not to be aware of their true natures--is also, in many ways, more conducive to raising families than what we find in larger and more cosmopolitan cities.

One, of course, is economics.  One almost has to be very wealthy to raise kids in New York, where I live, or in San Francisco, Boston or Washington.  At least, one has to be wealthy if one wants his or her kids to be safe, attend good schools and get good health care--and find kid- and family-friendly facilities.  What that means, of course, is that one has to have independent wealth or the sort of career that both pays well and has policies that allow parents to take time off to care for kids and such without losing a day's pay--or risking his or her job.  Contrary to popular perception, not all LGBT people are in such careers.

Also, while there is more than likely plenty of homo- and trans-phobia in the smaller cities and towns, those kinds of hatred are not absent in the Big Apple, the Hub or the City by the Bay.  In fact, gay, lesbian and transgender people from other places have expressed, to me, their surprise at how much homo- or trans-phobia they found here.  One reason for that, I think, is that New York is a much more segregated city than most people realize.  Many people live in neighborhoods populated mainly by people who come from their country or culture, or share their religion.  And, in another contrast to public perception, there's religious fundamentalism in this city.  We may not have snake-handlers and such here, but there are people who belong to various fundamentalist churches.  And, of course, there are ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic Jews who, although they barely communicate with anyone else in this city, have a disproportionate influence on public policy.

(To my own surprise, in my early transition, I didn't encounter prejudice from religious Muslims or Catholics, even those who come from "macho" cultures.  The latter may have to do with my own Catholic upbringing and the fact that I speak Spanish.)

So, really, I'm not surprised that so many gay couples by the Great Salt Lake or along the Virginia coast or across the river from Windsor are raising kids.   To me, it means that simply legalizing same-sex marriage or adding protections for LGBT people to civil-rights laws--as important as those things are--aren't enough to ensure that any kid with gay parents (or, for that matter, LGBT kids) will have the same access to the benefits of a good family and community that their peers (some of them, anyway) have.  

Kudos to all of the people in those places--and in my hometown and the other gay "capitals"--who are doing what they can to understand (and, hopefully, accept and support) same-sex parents and their kids.  If they are doing so out of their concern for children, as I suspect they are, that is as good a starting point as any.  

Not Standing Idly By Transgendered Youth

There are days when I wish I'd gotten on a bus, or my bike, the day after I graduated high school and gone to some place where nobody knew me.  Then, I could have done whatever I needed to do to begin my transition into my life as a woman.

However, I also realize that such a thing would have been infinitely more difficult than it is now.  Part of the reason for that, of course, has to do with societal attitudes.  While many of us still face ostracism, and worse, there was even less understanding of, and hostility directed toward, us three and a half decades ago than there is now.

Another reason why transitioning into a life in my true gender would have been more difficult is, of course, the cost. I, like most new high school graduates, didn't have the money necessary for everything from psychotherapy and hormonal treatments--let alone surgery.  In fact, about the only way I could have gained access (legally, anyway) to that much money was through a loan--which I could have used only to go to college.

Still another thing that would have made my journey much more arduous and perilous than it has been is the lack of facilities and competent (let alone willing) providers of health care and other services for transgenders.  In most places, such facilities and services didn't exist at all; those services and techniques in use at the time were, at best, primitive compared to what we have today, simply because so few providers and policy-makers understood our needs and concerns.

So, it is heartening to read about resources and people available to trans people, especially the young, that weren't available in my youth.  

In particular, I'm glad to see someone like Dr. Norman Spack doing the kind of work he does.

Dr. Spack has worked at the Boston Children's Hospital for 39 years.  In his early days at the hospital, he treated street kids as a volunteer on a medical van.  Some of those young people were "throwaways" who were rejected by their families and communities because of their gender variance.    That is how he first learned of the difficulties faced by transgender children and teenagers.

Later, a colleague referred a young transgender adult, who was a Harvard graduate, to him.  This patient introduced the doctor to other transgender young adults.  Dr. Spack would become one of the few doctors who was willing to provide care and treatment for transgenders.  Even today, many doctors are reluctant or unwilling to take on trans patients, let alone those who are young adults or children.

Five years ago, Dr. Spack co-founded the Gender Management Services Clinic, or GeMS, at the hospital.  This clinic provides many services to transgender children and teenagers.  Among the most controversial is treatment with hormonal suppressants that delay the onset of puberty.  In addition to relieving depression and cutting down on self-destructive behaviors, the treatment buys time for the transgendered child.  A teenager is better able to decide whether or not to start taking the hormones of the "opposite" that trigger permanent physical changes.  Hormonal suppression treatments, on the other hand, are fully reversible.

Dr. Spack's work at the clinic is not limited to medical treatments.  He, who comes from a family of noted Jewish educators, does what he can to reassure this young patients that God has not played a trick on them.  "Things happen," he tells them. "It's not because of anything you did.  It's our job to find a way for you to be balanced, to be happy."

His inspiration for his work, he says, comes from Leviticus:  If your neighbor is bleeding by the side of the road, you shall not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor."

Carved In Granite?

Two years ago, New Hampshire became the sixth state to legalize same-sex marriage.

Now state Representatives David Bates and Leo Pepino are sponsoring a bill that would repeal the same-sex marriage law.  According to surveys, voters in New Hampshire oppose a repeal by a nearly two to one margin.

Now, I must say that I got a chuckle out of something in this story. When I went to Catholic school, the nuns used to refer to the boys as "Master" followed by their last names.  So, as an example, I was Master Valinotti.

Because the neighborhood surrounding the school was mainly Italian and Jewish (though not many of the latter went to our school), there weren't many kids named Bates.  I can't recall any.  So what would the nuns have called David Bates?

I'm sure someone must have asked this question.

Anyway...You know how some things and people don't go down without a fight.  (If you read a sexual connotation into the previous sentence, it's on you!)  Well, it seems like any laws that protect LGBT people or give us the same rights as everyone else don't come up or pass without a fight.  The moment any such law is passed, the opposition is ready to do battle.

You might think this is paradoxical, but I think that it's important to have laws that allow gay marriage for exactly the same reasons why I oppose them in principle.

I believe that the government should not be involved in any way with marriage, and that no one should get tax or any other benefits for being married.  If the government is to be involved in deciding whose marriages are legitimate, it should simply give the equivalent of a Domestic Partnership Agreement to any two people over the age of 18 who want to hook up.  Then, if they want to legitimize their relationship as a marriage, they should go to their church, synagogue, mosque or whatever so unites people in their communities.

However, I am enough of a realist to know that probably won't happen, at least not in my lifetime.  So I think that the best we can do in terms of equality is to make same-sex marriages legal.

The funny thing about New Hampshire is that it was always considered a "conservative" state.  Yet there has always been a very strong tradition of minding one's own business--which, by the way,  isn't the same as "live and let live."  While it was one of the most reliably Republican states (even as it was surrounded by some of the "bluest" states in the nation), it has never completely embraced some of the most reactionary notions espoused by the Far Right.  That may be because Christian Fundamentalism wasn't part of the mix, or at least wasn't as much a part of the mix, as it has been in some of the Southern states.

I don't know much about Bates and Pepino.  So I can only wonder on what, exactly, are they basing their opposition to the same-sex marriage law.  If they not motivated by religious beliefs (which, I'm discovering, actually plays less into anti-gay legislation than I'd previously assumed), what else motivates them but pure and simple bigotry?  From what I know about New Hampshire natives from the few I've known and the little time I've spent there, I don't think such prejudice will move them:  If nothing else, how much can they hate (or, for that matter, love) someone whose business they're ignoring?  Plus, a lot of Bostonians have moved to the state, at least along its coast and in its southern part.  Combine the tolerance they have developed simply by living in a metropolis with the native propensity for not interfering in other people's lives, and it's hard to see how the law is going to be repealed.