Homosexuality and Family Formation

For the first time in its history, the U.S. Census Bureau will count gay marriages in its 2010 surveys. By collecting and releasing data on same-sex partners, both married and unmarried, and on the numbers of children being raised in these households, the new census will enable researchers and policy makers to do more than extrapolate from existing data.

In previous rounds of census taking, the Bureau has classified married households as only consisting of opposite-sex couples, while unmarried households could consist of either opposite-sex or same-sex couples. Gay or lesbian partners, on the other hand, were either classified as unmarried, even if they declared themselves to be spouses, or erroneously recorded as opposite-sex spouses.

The Bureau has attempted to hypothetically correct its existing data using models such as those that reassigned respondents’ gender based on their first names. The results increased the number of same-sex unmarried partners in the United States in 2000 from 0.6 million to an estimate ranging from 1.1 million to 1.6 million. This model does not correct the data on marital status of same-sex partners, however.

Without official, longitudinal data, it is difficult to track trends in gay/lesbian family formation or to quantify the impacts on children of these household types and of the policies affecting them. As states and voters increasingly weigh the pros and cons of gay marriage and other issues, these data will provide vital (and presumably politically neutral) information.

Heterosexual and homosexual-headed families stand to learn more of both their differences and their similarities in terms of life experiences and challenges in raising children.

Parenting by Homosexuals

Parenting may be as strong an urge in homosexual individuals as it is among heterosexuals, despite what may be counterintuitive from an evolutionary point of view. In a recent study of Samoa’s fa’afafine (a unique gender classification for gay men), Canadian evolutionary psychologists Paul Vasey and Doug VanderLaan found a strong willingness for caretaking and teaching of nieces and nephews, offering the uncles a boost for their family lineage and a way to “earn their evolutionary keep.”

The Western world has not been as supportive of gay males as nurturers as has the more-isolated and communitarian Samoa, but the urge to raise children appears to be especially strong among gay men in the United States. According to a 2007 study of adoption trends by the UCLA School of Law and the Urban Institute, more than 50% of gay men said they desired to be a parent, compared with 41% of lesbians surveyed. Yet, more than a third of lesbians had given birth, while just one in six gay men had fathered or adopted a child.

The study further noted that there may be significant social and economic costs of banning adoption or foster care by lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) parents. Same-sex couples and homosexual singles applying for adoption tend to be older, better educated, and have more economic resources than their heterosexual counterparts. The national cost of excluding this group of motivated and resourceful parents from foster care in the United States was estimated at $87 to $130 million.

Gay men who do become fathers may require more social services, suggests a recent study of fatherhood in the Netherlands. Though same-sex marriage has been approved since 2001 in the Netherlands (the first country to allow it), parenting by LGBT people is less widely accepted. Gay fathers must often share custody with biological mothers, so they typically spend far less time with their children — and have fewer of them — than heterosexual fathers. They also report experiencing more pressure to justify their choice to become fathers, though they are more likely to state that happiness was their motivation than are heterosexual dads.

“Many people can understand a lesbian’s desire to have a baby because they appreciate the idea of maternal instinct,” says University of Iowa anthropologist Ellen Lewin, author of Gay Fatherhood (University of Chicago Press, 2010). “They’re much more suspicious about why gay men would want to be dads, and therefore gay men have to jump through a lot more hoops to be parents.”

As with the Dutch dads, gay fathers in the United States indicate that the desire to have children is part of finding happiness or satisfaction in life, particularly as they mature, Lewin notes. Another motive is to pass on their own values and traditions, just as heterosexual parents do.

“I interviewed several guys who adopted kids with disabilities or other challenges and basically gave their lives up for their children,” says Lewin. “But most weren’t out to be heroes or do something revolutionary by becoming gay fathers. Most were ordinary people who live in suburbs, go to Disney World for their vacations, and just want to have children like anyone else.”

A side effect of parenthood may be the repair or strengthening of relationships with LGBT parents’ own parents, according to Lewin: “I heard stories about gay men who were estranged from their families, but once they had a kid, the grandparents came over all the time. Their relatives may not have understood or supported them in the past, but having kids was something their family got and related to.”

In the United States, gay dads may face another source of criticism — members of the gay community who view parenthood as conformity, according to Lewin. But LGBT parents’ activism may simply have evolved along with their family-oriented lifestyles, as witnessed by such groups as the Family Equality Council and Our Families Count, a campaign partnering with the Census Bureau to ensure that LGBT families are aware of the new Bureau policies and of the importance of being counted.

— Cynthia G. Wagner

Sources: United States Census 2010 Activities Update (December 2009); “Editing Unmarried Couples in Census Bureau Data,” Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division Working Paper (July 2007), Bureau of the Census, www.census.gov.

“An Adaptive Cognitive Dissociation Between Willingness to Help Kin and Nonkin in Samoan Fa’afafine,” Paul Vasey and Doug VanderLaan, Psychological Science (February 4, 2010), www.psychologicalscience.org.

LGBTQ Families, Research Article Summaries, Family Equality Council, www.familyequality.org.

Gay Fatherhood by Ellen Lewin (University of Chicago Press); University of Iowa News Service, www.uiowa.edu.