A Decade Later

I’ve posted a similar version of this for a few years now, but it seems appropriate to do so again.

In honor of all the victims of the tragedy of September 11 and its aftermath, their families, and their friends.

I will always remember, as will many of us, where I was the morning of September 11, 2001. A lucky change in job the day before kept me away from Ground Zero at the time of the attack.

I was a vice president at Merrill Lynch, working at its headquarters in New York City. For a year, I had been commuting on the PATH train from New Jersey to the World Trade Center, arriving around 8:45 a.m. every day. I then took an escalator and sky bridge over to my office at Two World Financial Center.

On Monday, September 10, 2001, I started a new position in the company’s Princeton, New Jersey office. At 8:46 a.m. on Tuesday, when the first plane hit, I was pulling into a parking lot in suburbia, not in a crowd of panicked commuters underneath the WTC. The first sign that something was amiss was when my NPR signal went out. (WNYC had a transmitter on top of the WTC.) The “could have been” occupied my thoughts for weeks.

I don’t want to overstate my experience versus those who were killed, injured, or knew those who were. My heart goes out to them every time I think about it. The event affected me, though, in more ways than I realized at the time. It is perhaps not coincidental that shortly after September 11, Helen and I began to talk seriously about having a child, after more than eight years together. Unseized opportunities took on new immediacy. Yes, it gave us pause, wanting to bring a child into a world where “detonate” is a reflexive verb. But when we lose our faith in the future, the terrorists have already won.

May we all work in whatever way we can for a safer, more peaceful world for our children.

(The tall building with the flat black top just to the left of the WTC in the photo is Two World Financial Center, where I worked.)

Weekly Political Roundup

• The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced new guidance related to rules that protect hospital patients’ right to choose their own visitors, including a visitor who is a same-sex partner.
• On a related note, HHS’ Health Resources and Services Administration awarded $248,000 to the Fenway Institute in Boston, Mass., to create a National Training and Technical Assistance Center to help community health centers improve the health of LGBT people.
• A federal appeals court upheld a temporary injunction against against an Arizona law that would take away the right of state employees to obtain health coverage for their domestic partners.
• California’s Proposition 8 battle continued, with proponents arguing to the state Supreme Court that Yes on 8 must be granted standing to defend the marriage ban in federal court, and opponents arguing Yes on 8 must be denied standing, per the state constitution.
• U.S. Representative Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin), the only out lesbian to serve in Congress, has announced her run for the Senate. If elected, she would be the first out LGBT U.S. senator.

Around the world:

• Iran executed three men on charges of having sexual intercourse with other men.
• The U.K. Department of Health said it will change the lifetime blood donation ban on any man who has ever had sex with another man and allow men to donate blood if they have not had sex with another man for at least a year.

“Rory’s Story” About Son of Lesbian Moms in Ireland

Here’s a great new video from Marriage Equality, an organization dedicated to achieving equal access to civil marriage for same-sex couples in Ireland. It features Rory, the grown son of lesbian moms, who discovers that his lack of a legal relationship with his non-biological mother has some very serious consequences. (Thanks to the Irish Examiner for the link.)

(Notable note: legal marriage of same-sex parents is not the only, or even a sufficient, way to ensure a legal relationship between a child and a non-biological parent, at least here in the U.S. But more on that in an upcoming post. Stay tuned. . . .)

LGBT Parenting Roundup

Family Creation

• The American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s Sexuality, Reproduction & Menopause (SRM) e-journal has an article explaining, “What are the reproductive options when a same-sex couple wants a family?“

Law

• The New York Law Journal tells us, “Creative Parenting Agreements Still Needed With Same-Sex Marriage,” reminding us why second-parent adoptions are still needed even if same-sex parents are married.
• The Nebraska Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling and said that a nonbiological lesbian mom has a right, under the doctrine of in loco parentis, to a custody and visitation hearing regarding the child she and her former partner were raising together. Nancy Polikoff has the details.

Family Profiles

• Gay dad David Valdes Greenwood writes a must-read column for HuffPo on being the only two-dad family in their daughter’s elementary school. While this means taking on the role of “Encyclopedia Homosexualis” at times to explain gay life to straight friends, he writes, “I think we have an obligation to do so, for if we don’t tell the truth about our lives, the stuff made up by politicians and preachers may be allowed to define us instead.” And there’s more good stuff, too. Go read.
• The Windy City Times profiles gay adoptive dads Brian Walker and Mike Demetria.

Things We Don’t Like to See

• Although lesbian mom Denise Steele had been a den leader and assistant scoutmaster for her son’s Cub Scout and Boy Scout troops for six years—and the head scoutmaster knew she was in a relationship with another woman—she was removed when another assistant scoutmaster found out and raised objections with the national organization, according to the Loudoun Times.

Where Are the Most Same-Sex Couples Raising Kids?

Where are are most same-sex couples raising kids?

Mostly in the deep South and Mountain West regions, according to a new analysis of Census 2010 by the Williams Institute of UCLA—although the data confirms a trend already seen in Census 2000.

Williams demographer Gary Gates explains, “In these socially conservative areas, LGBT people likely come out later in life and are more likely to have a child from a relationship with a different-sex partner when they were younger.”

Twenty-two percent of all same-sex couples across the country are raising children, according to Gates. (Keep in mind, of course, that there are also single LGBT parents, who are not counted here.)

Gay Cruising of a Different Kind

Wallpaper in ship corridor

(Something a little lighthearted at an otherwise somber time for me. Originally published several weeks ago as my Mombian newspaper column.)

I’d only ever done gay cruising before. No, not that kind of cruising—I mean the floating around on a big ship kind. My in-laws recently took my spouse, our son, and me, plus my spouse’s two siblings and their spouses and children, on a cruise to Mexico as a way of getting the family together. I wasn’t new to cruises, having done two with my spouse via Olivia, the venerable lesbian travel company, and one with R Family Vacations, which caters to LGBT families and allies.

But it struck me that being on a boat of predominantly non-LGBT people would be a significantly different experience than being on one with several thousand queer folk. It’s not as if I live my life in isolation from non-LGBT families, but the thought of being one of the few queer people crammed on a boat with them for a week made me understand how anthropologist Jane Goodall must have felt before going to live among the chimps.

I feared the worst when during our first-day safety drill, the safety officer announced there was—even in this day and age—a “women and children first” policy for the lifeboats. I’d never heard that aboard any of our previous cruises, where the very suggestion might have gotten the officer thrown overboard by a bunch of burly lesbians.

It turned out, however, that other parts of our recent cruise were very gay indeed.  Read the rest of this post »

In Memoriam

By way of further explanation for my blog absence this week: My father passed away on Monday. It was not unexpected, but no less difficult because of that.

I focus a lot on moms at this site, because many of us are raising our children in mom-only families. At root, however, I would not be half the parent—or the person—I am today if it wasn’t for both of my parents, my mom and my dad. It is not the gender of our parents that matters as much as the love—and I could never doubt my dad’s love.

I won’t make this into a eulogy, because my father was a fairly private person, and his life is not mine to share here. Suffice it to say my family and I will miss him more than I can express.