Gay and Lesbian Families | Introduction
At first glance, questions such as “what is a family?” and “what is marriage?” may seem frivolous and their answers obvious. A closer look at gay history reveals that such questions have been at the center of social, political, and religious controversies for years. Indeed, debates about gay and lesbian families illustrate the old adage, “words matter.”
Scientists distinguish human beings from other species in part by their ability to communicate with spoken and written language. Words cannot be understood without common definitions that clearly convey meaning; words make things and concepts tangible. Definitions provide boundary lines that separate one idea from another in order to make them distinct—they categorize what is real and understandable. The way a word like family is defined can affect social policies and practices in a community. Being included in the definition often conveys important rights and privileges while being excluded bars people from these advantages. Clearly, much is at stake in the meaning of words that classify and identify people.
Those discussing gay and lesbian families often struggle over the definition of words and concepts. Activists who want equal rights for gay and lesbian parents, for example, work to expand legal and social definitions of “family” to include their partnerships and parenting roles. Those who oppose equal rights for gay and lesbian parents work to limit legal and social definitions to heterosexual couples and parents. One of the most contentious controversies in the United States today is over whether to include gays and lesbians in legal definitions of marriage. House representative Marilyn Musgrave feels so strongly about the issue that on May 21, 2003, she proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would ban same-sex marriages. Her Federal Marriage Amendment (H.J. Resolution 56) states:
Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.
Opponents of the Federal Marriage Amendment argue that the definition would destroy the spirit of the Constitution by restricting the rights of a whole group of U.S. citizens. According to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a national gay and lesbian rights organization:
This amendment not only attempts to deny equal rights to gays and lesbians, but it also attempts to undermine legislative and legal efforts to protect American families who are gay and lesbian couples and their children. . . . Marriage, other forms of relationship recognition, and basic civil rights protections are essential components that make all families, including families headed by same-sex couples, safer and more secure.
The battle over what to call gay relationships is the continuation of a long struggle by gays and lesbians for validation through language. The tremendous social and political pressure to hide attraction to the same sex that existed until recent years inspired nineteenth-century Irish poet Oscar Wilde to define homosexuality as “the love that dare not speak its name.” While terms were used in the mainstream public to define same-sex relationships, they were most often disparaging. Public discovery of same-sex love could exact serious penalties, as it did for Wilde when he was sentenced to two years of hard labor for the crime of “sodomy” in 1895.
After Wilde’s time, early generations of gay and lesbian “sexologists,” who studied human sexuality, worked to reverse the stigma associated with being homosexual. Pioneers in uniting activism and scholarship, they toiled to gain more respect for gay people and protect their human rights. However, their work was repressed from 1900 to 1930. According to professors Bonnie Zimmerman and George E. Haggerty,
Economic crisis and political repression in the United States and Europe would drive nascent gay and lesbian communities, with their potential for scholarly research and creative activity, underground. Although individuals produced monumental work, in general academic institutions generally avoided and suppressed gay and lesbian scholarship.
It was not until homophile organizations of the 1950s (the gay Mattachine Society and the lesbian Daughters of Bilitis), the women’s liberation movement (including lesbian feminists), and the gay liberation movement that gays and lesbians gained considerable ground toward influencing the legal and social definitions that affected their lives. The subsequent emergence of more open gay and lesbian communities and scholarship initiated renewed study of gay and lesbian history and provided a proliferation of information about gay and lesbian life. As Zimmerman and Haggerty put it, gay and lesbian studies are the products “of an age in which self-definition is challenged by cultural urgency of various kinds and when lesbian and gay concerns have moved out from the shadows into the bright light of national and international politics.” By the beginning of the twenty-first century, “the love that dare not speak its name” was being pronounced everywhere in the United States. However, far from ending struggles over words, the fight for gay and lesbian rights continues to generate additional controversies related to vocabulary and definitions.
One important debate focuses on the very terms used to represent nonheterosexual people. Just as racial minority groups have rejected pejorative words and asserted their preference for affirmative words to describe their communities, gays and lesbians have deliberated over terms such as homosexual, gay, lesbian, and queer. The word homosexual was first used by European and American scientists and medical doctors at the end of the nineteenth century to describe “inversion,” or a person born into one gender who wishes to be the opposite gender. Same-sex attraction was considered a tragic consequence of gender confusion. Historian Gary Lehring explains:
This understanding of homosexuality as a medical disorder entered official government discourse in the United States early in the twentieth century as a disqualification for military service, and later from all employment with the federal government. It was this repressive history that led many gay liberationists in the second half of the twentieth century to reject the term as one that had been defined and regulated by “experts.”
Many gays and lesbians began to use gay as a preferred term. “By the 1970s,” Lehring explains, “[‘gay’] had replaced ‘homosexual’ in common usage, even by heterosexuals.”
At the same time, the women’s liberation movement initiated a critique of masculine nouns and pronouns used to represent all people. Words such as chairman and mankind were replaced with “chairperson” and “humankind” to make them more inclusive. Women rejected what they called sexist language, and lesbians questioned whether the term gay similarly erased or diminished their visibility. Many in the lesbianfeminist movement of the 1970s argued that both “homosexual” and “gay” primarily referred to men, and “lesbian” should be used to designate women.
By the 1990s, another debate over language surfaced when a new generation of gay and lesbian activists and scholars began to use the term queer to define themselves. The trend was particularly contentious because the word had negative connotations for some older gays and lesbians who had been branded “queer” in earlier decades. Yet political organizations like Queer Nation insisted that the word be reclaimed and used instead of “gay and lesbian.” Different factions had different reasons for using the term. Some found the word’s second definition—“queer” as strange or disorienting—to be useful. In this sense, “queer” was used to define a political strategy of disrupting anything thought to be “normal.” Queer theorists believe that no person can be normal, because conceptions about normal and abnormal are socially constructed by human beings, not dictated by nature or God. Others simply preferred using “queer” as a multicultural umbrella term. As writer Akila Monifa explains, “The term ‘queer’ was adopted for its inclusiveness, since it purports to incorporate lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people, and heterosexual allies.”
Words and definitions have an impact well beyond the broad historical trends and political movements described above. On a personal level, many gays and lesbians and their families struggle to find words to define their relationships; finding the right ones, they feel, can make the difference between being accepted or rejected by others. In her essay, “When Language Fails Our Families,” Abigail Garner describes the complications involved in speaking about her family relationships. As the daughter of man who was once married to a woman but who later partnered with another man, she has no exact words to accurately describe her relationship to her father’s partner. She writes:
This challenge of language is not exclusive to children with partnered [gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered] parents, but for almost all relationships within GLBT families. We often lack appropriate nouns, which results in the need for something close to a short paragraph to explain our relationship with each family member. . . . A mother of a gay son might confuse outsiders if she talks about her son’s partner as her son-in-law. . . . I have heard people experiment with expressions like “sort of my step-sister” and “kind-of my mom” but having to put a devaluing expression like kind-of or sort-of before something as important as family rarely sits right.
Another common quandary is naming same-sex partners. Some gays and lesbians adopt common heterosexual words for their own purposes and call each other “husband” and “wife.” They feel that using these terms brings them social validation. Others strongly oppose what they see as imitating a culture that excludes them. They are more likely to refer to a “significant other,” “life partner,” “longtime companion,” or “lover.” Now that gay marriage has been sanctioned in court decisions in Canada and Massachusetts, subsequent changes in the language used to describe gay and lesbian couples will likely occur.
Debates about definitions weave in and out of the selections in At Issue: Gay and Lesbian Families. This collection presents a diverse sampling of viewpoints about parenting, adoption, family structure, and marriage. The essays in this volume shed light on heated struggles about public policy, government intervention, civil rights, religious power, and moral principles. As the status of gay and lesbian families changes, so too will the language used to define them, for better or ill.
