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expendable, to nature-nurture controversies over sexual and gender identities and the
gender division of labor, to the meaning and purpose of voluntary marriage, and, most
broadly, to those ubiquitous family values contests over the relative importance for
children of family structure or process, of biological or psychological parents.
From the African-American Million Man March in October 1995, the stadium
rallies of Christian male Promise Keepers that popularized the subject of responsible
fatherhood in evangelical churches across the nation, and the National Fatherhood Ini-
tiative, to congressional hearings on the Father s Responsibility Act in 2001, the nation
seems to be gripped by cultural obsession over the decline of dependable dads. Here
research on lesbian families, particularly on planned lesbian couple families, could prove
of no small import. Thus far, as we have seen, such research offers no brief for Blanken-
horn s angst over radically fatherless children. Also challenging to those who claim that
the mere presence of a father in a family confers significant benefits on his children are
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498 Part IV " Families in Society
surprising data reported in a study of youth and violence commissioned by Kaiser Per-
manente and Children Now. The study of 1000 eleven to seventeen-year-olds and of 150
seven to ten-year-olds found that, contrary to popular belief, 68 percent of the young
people exposed to higher levels of health and safety threats were from conventional two-
parent families. Moreover, poignantly, fathers were among the last people these troubled
teens would turn to for help, even when they lived in such families. Only 10 percent of
the young people in these two-parent families said they would seek their fathers advice
first, compared with 44 percent who claimed they would turn first to their mothers, and
26 percent who would first seek help from friends. Many more youth were willing to
discuss concerns over their health, safety, and sexuality with nurses or doctors.74 Thus,
empirical social science to date, like the historical record, gives us impeccable cause to
regard fathers and mothers alike as expendable. The quality, not the gender, of parent-
ing is what truly matters.
Similarly, research on the relationships of gay male and lesbian couples depicts
diverse models for intimacy from which others could profit. Freed from normative
conventions and institutions that govern heterosexual gender and family relationships,
self-consciously queer couples and families, by necessity, have had to reflect much
more seriously on the meaning and purpose of their intimate commitments. Studies that
compare lesbian, gay male, and heterosexual couples find intriguing contrasts in their
characteristic patterns of intimacy. Gender seems to shape domestic values and practices
more powerfully than sexual identity, so that same-sex couples tend to be more compat-
ible than heterosexual couples. For example, both lesbian and straight women are more
likely than either gay or straight men to value their relationships over their work. Yet
both lesbian and gay male couples agree that both parties should be employed, while
married men are less likely to agree with wives who wish to work. Predictably, same-sex
couples share more interests and time together than married couples. Also unsurprising,
lesbian couples have the most egalitarian relationships, and married heterosexual couples
the least. Lesbian and gay male couples both share household chores more equally and
with less conflict than married couples, but they share them differently. Lesbian couples
tend to share most tasks equally, while gay males more frequently assign tasks to each
according to his abilities, schedules, and preferences.75 Each of these modal patterns for
intimacy has its particular strengths and vulnerabilities. Gender conventions and gen-
der fluidity alike have advantages and limitations, as Blumstein and Schwartz and other
researchers have discussed. Accepting queer families does not mean converting to any
characteristic patterns of intimacy, but coming to terms with the collapse of a monolithic
cultural regime governing our intimate bonds. It would mean embracing a genuinely
pluralist understanding that there are diverse, valid ways to form and sustain these.
Perhaps what is truly distinctive about lesbian and gay families is how unambigu-
ously the substance of their relationships takes precedence over their form, emotional
and social commitments over genetic claims. Compelled to exercise good, old-fashioned
American ingenuity to fulfill familial desires, gays and lesbians improvisationally as-
semble a patchwork of blood and intentional relations gay, straight, and other into
creative, extended kin bonds. 76 Gay communities more adeptly integrate singles into
their social worlds than does mainstream heterosexual society, a social skill quite valu-
able in a world in which divorce, widowhood, and singlehood are increasingly normative.
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Chapter 11 " Dimensions of Diversity 499
Because queer families must continually, self-consciously migrate in and out of the
closet, they hone bicultural skills particularly suitable for life in a multicultural society.77
Self-identified queer families serve on the front lines of the postmodern family condition,
commanded directly by its regime of improvisation, ambiguity, diversity, contradiction,
self-reflection, and flux.
Even the distinctive, indeed the definitional, burden that pervasive homophobia
imposes on lesbian and gay families does not fully distinguish them from other con-
temporary families. Unfortunately, prejudice, intolerance, and disrespect for different
or other families is all too commonplace in the contemporary world. Ethnocentric
familism afflicts the families of many immigrants, interracial couples, single mothers (be
they unwed or divorced, impoverished or affluent), remarried couples, childless yuppie
couples, bachelors and spinsters, househusbands, working mothers, and the home-
less. It even places that vanishing, once-hallowed breed of full-time homemakers on the
( I m-just-a-housewife ) defensive.
Gay and lesbian families simply brave intensified versions of ubiquitous contempo-
rary challenges. Both their plight and their pluck expose the dangerous disjuncture be-
tween our family rhetoric and policy, on the one hand, and our family and social realties,
on the other. In stubborn denial of the complex, pluralist array of contemporary families
and kinship, most of our legal and social policies atavistically presume to serve a singu-
lar, normal family structure the conventional, heterosexual, married-couple, nuclear
family. In the name of children, politicians justify decisions that endanger children, and
in the name of The Family, they cause grave harm to our families. It is time to get used
to the queer, post-modern family condition we all now inhabit.
Notes
1. An estimate that at least six million children would have a gay parent by 1985 appeared in J. Schu-
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