y
Russo-Young, a 22-year-old filmmaker and performer, has a lot to explain,
starting with her name. It's Ry, just Ry, not short for Ryan, or a
misspelling of Ray, or a nickname someone gave her as a child or a
pretension she took on in her teens. Ry is simply a name that her mothers
liked the sound of when they named her, an act of creativity as novel and
yet, to their minds, as natural as the conception of Ry herself, a feat that
involved the sperm of a gay man, the egg of a lesbian in love and one very
clean glass syringe.
Earlier this year, over dinner at a small restaurant in the West Village,
a few blocks from where she was raised, Ry was offering me a short lecture
that she has been called on to deliver dozens of times, politely solving the
puzzle that is her family for other people. She was explaining her name,
explaining her mothers' relationship, explaining her older sister, whose
name, Cade, also demands clarification. She was explaining how it is that
she has no father, and when pressed further -- after all, everyone has a
father -- she raised her eyebrows, dark and thick and finely shaped, just a
little. ''You mean who's my sperm donor?'' she asked. I apologized --
''father'' can be a loaded word for children of lesbian mothers -- but she
shrugged it off with a small wave of her hand, her dark red nails flashing
by. ''It's O.K.,'' she said. ''I'm not fussy about stuff like that.''
Ry has long dark hair, a slightly breathy voice and a hint of a
tough-girl, New York accent. Tall enough that she has presence by default,
she's a natural performer, inclined to stacked heels and deep red lipstick.
On the subject of her parents, she is particularly confident in the quality
of her material, and she unpacked the details at a leisurely pace. As for
her own sexuality, she's straight, which she said she knows with increasing
certainty with each passing year. ''Yeah, you know, I made out with a girl
in high school,'' she said. ''I get an A for effort.''
If she has volunteered to talk frankly to a stranger about her family
life, not to mention her sex life, it's because Ry knows she's one of a
relatively limited number of adults who were raised from birth by ''out''
gay parents (as opposed to a parent who revealed he or she was gay after
marrying and having kids). As more and more gay men and lesbians feel
comfortable coming out earlier in their lives and the possibility of
legalized same-sex marriage appears to be gaining ground in select states,
Ry's experience may represent the future of gay households. Already, the
2000 Census reported that some 150,000 same-sex couples had children in
their homes. If the last three decades of the gay rights movement focused on
sexual freedom and acceptance, the next three decades seem destined to
continue the current battle for the right to marry and, by extension, the
right to be a parent.
Of course, even without the benefit of legal protection, gay men and
women have been raising children for long enough and in large-enough numbers
that they've become an acknowledged part of their communities. Schools in
places like Los Angeles and Boston mount displays of famous gay figures and
make sure the library includes books like ''King and King,'' about a prince
who marries a princess's brother. A well-worn anecdote circulates in Park
Slope, Brooklyn, a progressive neighborhood, about two gay men who were
concerned when a little boy teased their child for having no mommy -- only
to discover later that the little boy in question had two mommies. The story
is funny precisely because it points to an antiquated anxiety, a fear from
another era running up against the startling reality of this one.
In some pockets of the country, the atmosphere is now sufficiently safe
for the older kids of gay parents, kids like Ry, to start speaking plainly
about their childhoods, seeking each other out for support or activism. But
at the very moment when the cultural environment seems secure, the political
environment has become hypersensitive. A central argument advanced against
gay marriage is that gay relationships have a corrosive effect on the
institution of the traditional family. In that context, the children of gay
parents are not just aspiring filmmakers, or dropouts, or Phi Beta Kappas,
or cross-dressers, or serial monogamists. They're also a form of evidence in
the political debate. How do the children of gay parents turn out, when
compared with the children of straight parents, in terms of eventual marital
status, income, psychological well-being? If gay couples give birth, seek to
adopt or become foster parents, what kind of adult members of society will
they produce?
Although definitive studies of these families don't yet exist -- the
sample size is still too small -- that hasn't stopped states like Arkansas,
Mississippi, Utah and Florida from passing laws to limit the rights of gays
to adopt or to become foster parents. Policy makers on both sides of the
culture wars are scrambling to find research to sway the debate:
conservative groups like the American College of Pediatricians argue that
kids raised by gay parents grow up sexually promiscuous and confused;
advocates like the American Civil Liberties Union point to studies that
suggest that the kids are as well adjusted as their peers, if not more so --
more resilient, more open-minded, more tolerant.
As for Ry, who acknowledges that she is a living, breathing result of a
new social endeavor, she says she's more than happy to discuss how having
gay parents shaped her, to the extent that she has figured it out. Truth be
told, she seems to enjoy being her family's self-appointed chronicler, often
referring back to her experience in her films and performances. She may not
be a statistically significant sample, and her stories may sound like
ancient history to the kids born to today's gay parents, many of whom are
assimilating seamlessly in their communities. But as she points out, in some
ways she knows more about the subject than the conservative policy makers
seeking to raise concerns about gay parents, or the mostly gay psychologists
looking to validate the perfect normalcy of gay parents' kids.
Ry, the daughter of trailblazing lesbians, has spent so much time under a
magnifying glass that it's almost as if her feelings about her family -- and
her own response to those feelings -- have been permanently magnified. Any
kid who grew up with gay parents has probably given some thought, at least
in fleeting moments, to how her upbringing shaped her personality, her
sexuality, her gender. As an artist, Ry scrutinizes those thoughts,
performing them live, blowing them up on-screen so that every nuance is
beautifully represented and crystal clear.
''I'm an expert in this subject,'' Ry said as the meal drew to a close.
''And I didn't even have to lift a finger.''
Sitting behind a projector last April in the front row of a small theater in
the East Village, Ry was looking apprehensive. Although her work has been
shown at venues like the Turin Film Festival, she was now about to show a
short film at a comparatively humble event called Avant-Garde-Arama. The
festival's hosts, dressed in a look somewhere between bridal and bondage,
were calling on audience members -- straight, gay, strangers, whatever -- to
volunteer to be married onstage. It might have been great theater if anyone
had, but no one did, and eventually the hosts introduced Ry, who started the
projector rolling.
She had mounted three separate screens, and on each a different variant
of the shower scene from ''Psycho,'' recreated in stark black-and-white
flatness, played itself out: on one, the stabbing of the doomed Janet Leigh
figure happened on cue, while in another, a second actress playing Janet
Leigh turned the knife on her attacker and left him bloody at her feet. That
vengeful Janet Leigh figure then seemed to step, naked and dripping, into
the third screen, where she took her knife to Janet Leigh figure No. 3. The
film was visually interesting and unexpected, a slasher film with a brain,
and the audience responded with enthusiastic applause.
After a few more acts -- a nude dance, a rapper named Mint T. -- Ry's
parents, Robin Young, 49, and Sandy Russo, 64, left their seats to meet Ry
by the stage. Ry was dressed in vintage femme fatale, a black
checked dress with fish nets and heels; her mothers wore jeans and glasses.
Ry still looked uncomfortable, and Young and Russo (whom everyone calls by
her surname) seemed less than enthusiastic, with shrugs passing for
commentary. ''I don't think they liked it,'' Ry reported later. ''They're
not into the violence-against-women thing, I guess.'' She'd been trying to
comment on the hackneyed image of woman as victim, she said, but ''Moms,''
as she and Cade sometimes call their parents, apparently saw only the same
old thing. She sighed heavily: ''Do you ever stop caring what they think?''
At the time, Ry was living with her mothers again, having moved back to
New York after graduating from Oberlin less than a year before. The three of
them were living in the duplex loft on Greenwich Street where Ry and Cade
were raised, on the western fringe of the West Village, about as close as
you can get to the Hudson piers that gave rise to the subculture of gay
nightlife in New York. Ry can remember hearing, as a child, the cries of a
male prostitute being beaten in an empty car lot down the road. Now the
neighborhood, like so much of gay culture itself, is chic and thriving, with
million-dollar town houses, a gleaming grocery, a high-end gym. Cade, who is
gay and works as an AIDS educator, lives nearby, in a small apartment that
her mothers own. The family seems exceptionally tight-knit, as if bonded by
the psychic hazing they've endured over the years, the doubt that has
hovered over them from the moment of Cade's conception.
Over dinner in their duplex a few nights after the screening, Young, a
real-estate manager, and Russo, a legal-services lawyer and educator,
offered the highlights of the family history. Ry had heard it all before,
but she listened with the polite, even rapt attention appropriate for, say,
a war story, even a familiar one. Her story, she knows, starts with theirs.
In 1979, within months of falling in love, Russo, then 38, and Young,
then 23, decided to have a family together, having heard of other women
doing the same -- ''like, these mythical, amazing stories,'' Young said.
Russo and Young flew to San Francisco, where Russo would be inseminated.
Using a syringe, sperm donated by a gay friend of a friend and the
instructions on a mimeographed pamphlet circulating in the lesbian community
at the time, she became pregnant on the first try.
When Russo and Young broke the news to Young's parents, referring to the
future grandchild, Young's father said, ''Well, I guess you could call it
that.'' Russo recalled the exchange with a kind of bitter humor. ''It was
like we were having a dog or something,'' she said. Graying and solid, Russo
stares through clear-rimmed spectacles with a focus so intense it's always
unexpected when one of her frequent, wide smiles takes over her face. From
the way she said ''dog,'' it was suddenly clear who was the source of Ry's
old-school New York accent.
Young and Russo hadn't expected their families to support their decision
to have a child, but they were surprised by how much their new role as
parents distanced them from many in the gay community at that time. They had
lesbian friends who cooed over the girls, but for the most part Russo and
Young found themselves on a different path. ''For years, when we went to the
beach over the summer, we'd be the only one with kids, hanging out with all
these topless lesbians,'' Young remembered. ''They weren't used to dealing
with the kids. If one of them was noisy, they'd be like, 'Can't you do
something with her?''' About a year after Cade was born, Young became
pregnant with Ry, using the sperm of a different gay man, also a friend of a
friend. ''No one gay was having kids,'' Young continued. ''It wasn't
something they could conceive of. It wasn't part of gay culture. It was not
cool.''
Russo's usual affect is one of outrage, but Young's, by contrast, is mild
amusement. She laughs now at the moments that were difficult then.
Pediatricians hung up on them when they figured out the family arrangement.
Other mothers looked at them oddly at the playground. More painful, they
found they grew away from some of their lesbian and gay friends or noticed
they'd been dropped. ''You know, we'd been part of this downtown,
counterculture world,'' Young said. ''Once we had kids, our friends became
other parents with kids. In some ways we no longer related to our lesbian
and gay friends. But at the same time, we weren't fully accepted by the
straight world.''
Ry doesn't recall any one light-bulb moment when she realized her family
was different from others, and she went to a private school progressive
enough that she wasn't taunted for being any different. No one bullied her;
they simply denied the Russo-Youngs' definition of family. A lot of kids
demanded to know which mother was each girl's ''real mother,'' a query the
family made a policy of refusing to answer. ''We also had a lot of arguments
with kids who said Cade and I weren't real sisters,'' Ry said. It still
makes Russo mad: ''If they'd been adopted, no one would have said that,''
she said.
A dreamy child who always loved dress-up and theater, Ry spent most of
her time with her best female friend, forming a friendship so close that, by
middle school, other kids noticed -- and a few decided that the two must be
lesbians. Ry barely picked up on it, hearing about it only years later from
Cade, who'd heard the rumors. ''We just didn't care,'' Ry said. ''We really
were in our own world, and we thought they were losers.''
Ry's mothers admit that even they thought for a while that Ry probably
would grow up to be a lesbian. From the time she was a young kid, they joked
about it with her, which sometimes made her uncomfortable, although now she
says she thinks it's funny. ''You should see pictures of me from when I was
in grade school -- braces, little shaggy helmet haircut,'' Ry said. She
describes a favorite picture of herself at age 6 or so: ''I was obsessed
with pink, but I wore pink corduroys lined with pink flannel and a pink
denim shirt and pink Velcro glow-in-the-dark sneakers. I was really into
these tough pink outfits, so it was like this cool little contradiction,
like Rizzo'' -- the pink-clad bad girl in ''Grease.'' In general, Ry is less
interested in victim politics than she is in gender construction: what all
that pink was about preoccupies her more than how she felt when other kids
teased her.
Cade came out of the closet to her mothers when she was 16, during a ride
home to the city after a weekend at their country house upstate. Her mothers
took it in stride; in fact, they didn't so much as turn around in their
seats, which irritated Cade, she said, as much as if they'd reacted in
shock. Cade had been the more femme of the two girls when they were younger
-- Ry remembers Cade poring over Seventeen as if it contained a code she
needed to crack -- but by the time Cade was 18, she was not only out, but
also intent on owning it. She started wearing men's suits and cutting her
hair so short that even her mothers protested.
Young and Russo later admitted to Cade that they, proud vanguard that
they were, had briefly found themselves avoiding the topic of Cade's
sexuality around people they knew. They were worried about what it would
seem to say about them. Could it be used against them, or other gay parents?
Had they, in fact, influenced Cade too much?
Cade, who previously dated boys, might have been offended by the
suggestion, were she not wondering the same thing herself. ''Every guy I'd
ever hooked up with told me I wasn't gay, that I just thought I was because
my parents were,'' Cade said. ''Even after I came out and had been in a
relationship for a year and a half, I still wasn't sure.'' She eventually
had one last affair with a man, an experience that confirmed she was
interested only in women. When she went to Smith College, she met other
women who, like her, were lesbians and had been raised by lesbian mothers.
In some cases, she said, those women faced mothers who actively disapproved,
distressed that their children were living out conservative policy makers'
most potent fears.
f
the American College of Pediatricians or the Heritage Foundation wanted to
make a case for limiting the rights of gay parents, they surely would want
to start by demonstrating that the children of gay parents are themselves
gay in disproportionately high numbers, or that the kids engage in other
sexual behaviors that social conservatives like themselves consider
undesirable. Gay activists, on the other hand, would presumably like to have
research that suggests just the opposite. In today's politically charged
research climate, however, it's almost impossible to get financing for
inquiries into adolescent sexuality of any kind.
As it stands, most of the studies that do exist have focused not on
sexuality but on ''functioning,'' a concept measured by the Child Behavior
Checklist, a standard assessment form that has been applied to hundreds of
thousands of kids around the world. The checklist, which is more than 100
questions long, asks about everything from children's social competence
(compared with other kids, how well does your child play and work alone, and
play with other kids?) to their problem behaviors (does your child wet his
bed, is he cruel to animals, afraid to go school?). In 1996, Charlotte J.
Patterson, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, asked 55
lesbians and 25 heterosexual women, all 80 of whom had had children via
donor insemination, to fill out the questionnaire. The teachers of their
children were asked to do the same. The results, which Patterson published
in the journal Child Development in 1998, found no significant differences
among the children. In an earlier study that Patterson published in 1994,
about gender development in the children of lesbian parents, she interviewed
kids about their favorite toys, their playmates and their activities, and
concluded, after churning the data, that they made the choices
conventionally associated with their gender.
The American College of Pediatricians, which was founded with the
intention of preserving what it calls children's ''natural families,''
rejects this sort of data, declaring it too limited in scope to be
meaningful. In response to a report on adolescent sexuality published in
Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the group
delivered a sharply worded reply on its Web site: ''Same-gender 'marriage'
is clearly a highly controversial cultural issue and represents a radical
social experiment lacking unbiased research supporting its benefits or even
its safety for both individuals and society as a whole.''
There's yet a third position in the debate about gay parents, one that
argues passionately that there are differences, not to castigate gay parents
for deviance but to embrace the uniqueness of being raised in a same-sex
household. Around 1999, Judith Stacey, then a professor of sociology at the
University of Southern California, took a broad look at the bulk of research
claiming no difference in kids of gay parents and rejected its claims that a
parent's sexuality bore no influence whatsoever on his or her kids. ''That
just didn't make sense to me,'' said Stacey, 61, and now a professor at New
York University. A trim, animated woman, she sat, her feet tucked under her,
on the sofa in her sunny apartment near the school's campus when I spoke to
her in August. She has no quarrel with research suggesting that children of
gay parents are as well adjusted as their peers, but she does contest the
idea that there is no difference when it comes to sexuality. ''Every theory
out there -- be it social constructionist, biological determinist,
environmental or psychoanalytic -- would lead you to expect that a larger
minority of children with gay parents will grow up not to be exclusively
heterosexual. Even a genetic theory would lead you to that conclusion.''
Stacey analyzed 21 studies, including longitudinal research on adult
children of lesbian mothers by the researchers Susan Golombok and Fiona L.
Tasker. One statistic that she drew out revealed that of the 25 kids raised
by lesbians whom the researchers were able to interview as young adults, 17
years after the study began, 6 who had been raised by lesbians said they had
homoerotic relationships or experiences, compared with none of the 20 adults
who had been raised by straight mothers. Sixty-four percent of the adults
raised by lesbians had considered having a homosexual affair, compared with
17 percent of the adults raised by straight parents. Stacey and her
co-author, Timothy J. Biblarz, concluded that the evidence, ''while scant
and underanalyzed,'' seems to suggest the possibility that children of gay
parents ''will be more likely to attain a similar orientation -- and theory
and common sense support such a view.''
Given the small size of Golombok and Tasker's data set -- involving 27
single lesbian mothers' households and 27 heterosexual single mothers'
households -- it's surprising how much attention their research and Stacey's
analysis of it have received: Stacey's paper alone has been cited by both
plaintiffs and defendants in cases governing gay adoption in Florida,
Massachusetts and Oregon, among other states, as well as countries like
Canada and Australia. Stacey now spends almost as much time testifying and
being interviewed as she does researching.
Stacey freely admits that she wants to get ahead of the legal curve: ''My
position is that you can't base an argument for justice on information
that's empirically falsifiable in the long run,'' she said. ''If your right
to custody is based on saying there are no differences, then research comes
along and says you're wrong, then where are you?''
But Charlotte J. Patterson, the author of the studies suggesting that the
children of gay parents exhibit no real differences, looks at Golombok and
Tasker's study and considers a different finding: that the adults who were
raised by lesbians were not statistically more likely to identify themselves
as bisexual, lesbian or gay than adults raised by heterosexual mothers. And
there was no difference between the two groups when it came to reporting
attraction to members of the same sex, she notes. (The adults raised by gay
parents, you might conclude, were merely more likely to act on that
attraction.) ''There was something for everybody, politically speaking, in
that study,'' Patterson says.
Although Ry is curious and thoughtful about her upbringing, she has never
looked into the psychological studies, as if she already knew they couldn't
capture what's interesting and complicated to her about her experience.
''I'm just sort of living my life, and I'm not really dying to know what
people think about my psychological makeup,'' she told me. ''I'm not so
worried about it, really. I hate that you even have to respond to the
hypothesis that there might be something wrong with it. And that's so
off-putting to me, I'm just turned off from reading the research myself.''
or
about a year, as she was developing various film scripts and perfecting her
live performances, Ry has worked at a West Village dress shop called
Darling. Both campy and sincerely feminine, the shop, which suits Ry
perfectly, is best known to downtowners for the repro Marilyn dress that's
almost always featured in the window, a fan perpetually blowing its skirt up
and out. ''Hello, Darling,'' Ry gets to say coyly every time she answers the
phone.
When I met Ry for lunch in June, she had broken her elbow roller-skating,
and she showed up at the restaurant where we were meeting with her arm in a
sling, a look that compounded the whimsy of the rest of what she was
wearing: a satin, patterned cowboy shirt, bright gold shoes, lacy beige hose
and a miniskirt. When she walked in, there was a moment when it seemed as if
half the room was staring at her, trying to decide what to make of this tall
young woman with the sling and the gold shoes: was she a freak or a
knockout? Ry threw her shoulders back and looked around as if she owned the
place and was waiting for the host to recognize her. The moment passed, and
the customers went back to their meals, the verdict rendered: another New
York knockout.
There's something highly self-conscious about Ry's sense of style. It's a
constructed form of femininity that's also confrontational and a lot like
costume. (The woman who owns Darling, in fact, ran the costume shop at the
theater program at the high school Ry attended.) Part of that look is
run-of-the-mill hipster attitude -- girl in quotation marks, fashion as
comedic foil. But part of her look also seems to be drawn from queer
culture: flashy, defiant, intrigued by artifice. It doesn't come as a total
surprise to find out that when Ry goes to the popular gay vacation
destination Provincetown, Mass., with her mothers, as she does every summer,
she identifies more, appearance-wise, with the drag queens than with the
lesbians. One summer, just to play around, walking down the street in
Provincetown, she started mimicking the drag-queen strut she'd seen her
whole life, rolling off her toes, swaggering through her shoulders. She
hadn't walked half a block before she successfully passed. ''I thought that
was a woman!'' someone said to a companion as they walked past Ry.
Ry said she thinks a lot about passing. Sometimes she has the odd sense
that she's passing for straight, even though she is straight. She can spot
two lesbians walking down the street from several blocks away, so why can't
they spot her as the daughter of two women just like them? Doesn't her
family history transmit? Sometimes when she's with her boyfriend, she told
me the first night we met, ''I feel guilty about how much privilege I feel
as a straight couple, but I also love the privilege. It's like the kinetic
energy from everyone around, just walking down the street -- you're young,
you're beautiful, you are what we want you to be, go off and be happy, we
want you to make it. It's like this fairy tale, when you contrast it to the
homophobia -- my parents just hold hands, and they get funny looks. At the
same time, it's like this nightmare to be totally absorbed into this stupid
straight world.'' She made a face, half-sticking her tongue out. ''So at the
same time, it's sad for me. I feel like I'm losing something else.''
Ry and Cade say that neither of them fully realized how stranded they
felt in that in-between space until a few years ago, when they walked into a
party in Provincetown for kids of gay parents -- and the feeling of
isolation went away, like the white noise you notice only when it's finally
silenced. The party was given by the organization Colage, an acronym for
Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere, which now has 45 chapters in 31
states and Canada.
''On the one hand, Colage meetings are a place where kids can foster
their pride in themselves and their parents with kids from similar
families,'' says Beth Teper, executive director of the organization and a
35-year-old whose mother came out when Beth was 10. ''On the other hand, if
kids do have some concerns, or they're angry or upset, they can come into a
space that's real or authentic and say what they think. I think at first
kids expect everyone's going to be like, 'Yeah, whoo whoo, isn't it great
having gay parents?' because that's the only thing you hear kids saying in
the media, or from their parents: 'Everything's hunky-dory.' But there are
always going to be experiences they're not happy about. The trick is finding
a place where you can share what you're not happy about, but with people who
will understand and still not judge their family for it.''
It's at Colage meetings and in their confidential online chat rooms that
the children of gay men and lesbians can confess the complicated thoughts
they often have about their upbringings, thoughts they'd never have
discussed growing up, least of all with their parents. One straight adult
man I interviewed -- he wouldn't use his name because his mother is still in
the closet -- offered a frank confession about why he was agonizingly slow,
as he puts it, to act on his interest in women. ''I got one impression
growing up,'' he says. ''Dad tries to kiss mom. Mom hates it.''
Sex is a common theme at Colage events, and so is the subject of kids'
protectiveness of their parents. You might not tell your mother that someone
at school referred to her with a homophobic slur, but you can tell other
kids who have experienced the same.
For every kid who champions the brand-new world his gay parents have
created, there's another one who sees his gay parents as so banal that
they're not worth mentioning, or another who resents the way her parents'
sexuality has become the central feature of her life. One young woman I
interviewed, an academic in her late 20's who is still close with her out
gay father, recently started dating a man who told her on their first date
that he didn't believe gays should raise kids. She kept seeing him anyway,
as if to prove she wouldn't let that one issue define her life, wouldn't use
it as the litmus test by which she judged every person she encountered.
Stefan Lynch, 32, the first full-time director of Colage back in the
mid-90's, served for years as an informal spokesman on behalf of kids of gay
parents. (''Queerspawn,'' he calls them.) Lynch stepped out of
semi-retirement from his life as an activist to reply to an e-mail message I
sent him. He seemed interested in playing down how much those issues of
alienation preoccupy his peers. ''Looking back on the movement of kids with
gay parents, one of the things I regret is that we call our groups 'support
groups,''' he wrote. ''Sure, we sometimes need support to deal with
unfriendly schools, tensions around divorce, grief about parents with AIDS
or breast cancer, but the support-group model implies that we have personal
problems. I think that instead of an illness metaphor, we need an immigrant
metaphor. Just as new immigrants banded together to negotiate a new culture
while preserving the familiarity of their own, our groups are really
mutual-aid societies. And like immigrants, the broader culture is
strengthened by our influence.''
Lynch emphasized the liberating novelty of his upbringing, its power to
pave new routes to a kid's sense of self. ''I'm a nurse,'' he wrote. ''I
played competitive tennis and rode my bike across the U.S. Last week I
canned five gallons of tomato sauce while crying to stories about the
occupation of Iraq on the radio, then flirted with a cute woman at the
corner diner.'' He continued: ''Boys raised in gay families can and do
reform masculinity so that instead of being simply not feminine, it's
positive. There's room for emotions. There's room for affection (even
attraction!) for other men. And there's room for women as people, lovers,
not a Mysterious Other.'' His e-mail message started out with a
pronouncement that he sees as progress, and that conservatives may see as an
indictment: ''One of the most powerful parts of growing up in a gay family
is the opportunity, which not every child or parent takes, to transcend
gender.''
One of Lynch's successors is Abigail Garner, a 32-year-old activist and the
author of ''Families Like Mine,'' a sort of ''Feminine Mystique'' about the
children of gay parents, articulating their pride and their struggles with
homophobia but also the grievances they have with their families. Ry first
contacted Garner after she was moved by a column Garner wrote in a
publication for alternative families, and they began a correspondence. Ry
allowed Garner to quote in her book from an e-mail message that Ry sent her,
commenting on how being raised by lesbian mothers influenced her outlook on
men.
''I got the book,'' Young announced when she came home one afternoon this
past June. Ry was lounging on the couch in the TV room, hanging out with
Meema Spadola, a documentary filmmaker who got to know the Russo-Youngs when
she profiled them in ''Our House,'' a documentary about kids with gay and
lesbian parents. Young stood in the doorway holding it out as Ry looked up
from her vantage point. ''That's quite a quote,'' Young said to Ry.
''What do you mean?'' Ry asked, propping herself up on her elbow.
''You read it,'' Young said, handing it to Spadola. ''It sounds like she
was raised by lesbian wolves in a lesbian wolf cave.''
Spadola read Ry's quotation out loud: ''It took me a lot of struggle to
realize that I really was attracted to men, yet now it is really hard for me
to deal with men as human beings, let alone sexually.'' There was more along
those lines -- Ry was intrigued but ''repulsed'' by heterosexual relations,
afraid of the ''sexist soul-losing domain of oppression.'' Her parting
thought: ''I cannot understand or relate to men because I am so immersed in
gay culture and unfamiliar with what it is to have a healthy straight
relationship.'' As Spadola read, Ry appeared to be examining her own
blood-red-painted, neatly trimmed nails, as if deciding what tack to take.
She settled on defiant. ''So what?'' she asked. ''I think it's cool.''
''It's kind of cool,'' Young said, as usual, kind of amused. ''But all I
can say is it seems like you've really gotten over that problem.'' Since she
was 16, Ry says, she has had a string of sensitive boyfriends, each one of
them more open and artistic than the next. There was Turner, who came and
lived with Ry and her mothers just after Ry graduated from high school. Then
there was the composer who accompanied her to Dublin for her semester
abroad. More recently, she'd fallen for Tony, a music engineer who was so
mature and understanding when Ry tried to break up with him that she
realized how much she loved him after all, and was awaiting his arrival in
New York that week.
Ry suddenly sat up straight. ''I think it's cool how critical I am of the
heterosexual world,'' she said. ''It is sexist and gross.''
''Ry, you make it sound like you've never seen a man in your whole
life,'' Young said.
Her daughter lay back down on the couch. ''I guess it was a little
dramatic,'' Ry allowed. ''I was feeling isolated from men at the time. I
don't feel like that now.'' She'd given the quotation a year or two before
she'd met Tony, when she'd been single for a while, feeling lonely and
unsure she could ''even pull off the straight thing.'' For Ry, one aspect of
being raised by gay mothers is not knowing what to attribute to the travails
of being a given age, or a woman, or a feminist, or a New Yorker, and what
to attribute to the particular gaps and connections that come with having
lesbian mothers.
Ry could find yet another source for her wariness about men by looking to
the central drama of her childhood: a legal struggle with the man who
donated his sperm to Young. When Ry was 9, her sperm donor, a gay lawyer
from California named Thomas Steel, sued for an order of paternity, turning
what had been an affectionate, intermittent relationship into a bitter,
hostile one. From the beginning, for Russo and Young, it was a given that
Steel would have no parental rights, although they made it clear he was
welcome to visit the family and to get to know Ry and Cade. ''I mean, it
wasn't like a parent at all, but he was affectionate, and I went along,''
said Ry, who saw him a few times a year starting when she was a toddler.
''Here was this really fun, big, tall man picking me up and telling me, 'Oh,
you're so cute.' You know, that was fun. But I didn't rely on him for
anything -- he was like an uncle you love hanging around with.''
When Ry's mothers refused to let Steel take Ry to California to visit his
parents and grandmother, he filed for paternity, which would have granted
him certain rights over decisions governing Ry's life. Despite Russo's law
degree, she and Young had decided not to ask him to sign a document
relinquishing his rights; at the time, they said, they suspected such a
document could not have been honored, given the novelty of the issue. As the
case made its way through the courts over the course of four years, the
family suffered from the stress of the challenge: Young lost 20 pounds, and
both women were swamped with legal fees and meetings with lawyers. Cade said
she felt the burden of testifying to court psychiatrists about their
family's dynamics, fearful that any wrong word would lose her her sister. Ry
started having nightmares about the police coming to take her away.
To Russo and Young's dismay, a significant portion of their mutual
friends sided with Steel. As groundbreaking as their family was, Russo and
Young seemed to be taking an almost conservative view of parenthood, one
defined by the number two. In the context of an era when gay men and women
were just starting to try to recreate notions of family and community, their
structure struck some of their peers as limited: if two parents were good,
why wouldn't three be better? Wasn't Steel, indeed, both involved in Ry's
life and a biological parent? Shouldn't that give him some rights?
Steel made significant legal headway before ultimately dropping the case,
perhaps because he suspected he'd gone as far as he could, or because he
realized the suit had already cost him Ry's affection. One of the last
conversations he had before dying of AIDS (a fate that also befell Cade's
sperm donor) was with his estranged biological daughter, then 16, who called
him when she learned he was deathly ill. At times when Ry talks about Steel,
a hint of a wistful tone creeps in; but in front of her parents, she's
almost uncharacteristically tough. ''He was high on medicine,'' she said.
''He was saying, I'm sorry, I loved you, I never meant to hurt you, I always
wanted to be your father. But after going through the case, I was rolling my
eyes. You know, so now you want me to forgive you because you're on your
deathbed.'' Ry then softened a bit. ''I mean, there was a time when I did
care a lot about him,'' she said. ''Not as a father -- more like as an icon
of a man.''
Ry's mothers may not have been heterosexual role models for her, but
they've always encouraged her in her relationships with men, provided they
approved of her choice. When she was 16, she fell in love with her first
boyfriend but was unsure of where to take things. Several months into the
relationship, there were a couple of weeks, her mothers recall, when she
mooned around the house, talking around and about the relationship, seeming
stressed out, uncertain, in need of counsel. ''Finally, my mom said, 'You
should just go have sex with him,''' Ry recalled.
It's always a little awkward to have to ask Ry which mother she means;
friends who know the family well can always tell from context. ''Russo,''
answered Ry, and then it seems obvious, the bluntness being the crucial cue.
''She just cut to the chase. You know, it wasn't like I actually asked her
if she thought I should or I shouldn't, although that was what was on my
mind. She was just really intuitive about what was really going on.'' Within
a week, Ry had taken her mother's advice, and the relationship eventually
developed into a relatively long-lasting one, at least on the teenage time
line. (The two were together a year and a half.)
The story has become a favorite family chestnut, partly because of the
way it embraces heterosexuality while upholding values Russo and Young pride
themselves on, values they see as part of queer culture -- an openness about
sexuality, a fearlessness communicated not just from friend to friend, but
also, now, from mother to daughter. To Ry, the story signifies something
slightly different. ''It was like I needed to ask their permission to have
sex with this man,'' she explained to me. The issue for Ry wasn't sex -- it
was sex with a man, which meant ''growing up and away from my mothers,'' as
she put it. They gave their consent, with love and encouragement, but it
seems to pain Ry that she felt, of her own accord, that she had to ask at
all: ''I felt a little bit like I was betraying them. Like I was leaving
them emotionally. I wasn't sure if it was O.K. with them. But then I got
that O.K. and that made me feel relieved, like I could go ahead.''
oward
the end of June, as Ry was getting ready to move out of her mothers'
apartment for good, she had a dream about a transgendered woman named Robin,
who comes into Darling from time to time. Robin, Ry says, seems a little bit
fragile, even broken, and Ry always goes out of her way to make sure she
feels comfortable. In her dream, Ry was on a bus, and she was embracing
Robin. It felt a little bit like being in love, she said, but there was
nothing erotic about it -- it was more of a protective embrace. Still, even
in the dream, she was wondering if she'd been wrong after all -- maybe she
really was a lesbian.
The dream's haphazard logic slowly revealed itself, and it became clear
that she was embracing Robin because they were in some sort of danger, and
it was imperative, somehow, that she and Robin pass as straight. Looking
back, Ry can't even remember if she was trying to pass as the man or pass as
the woman, but she said she knew it was somehow her responsibility to pull
it off. Although Ry reported the dream in almost vivid detail, she didn't
have a lot to say about what she thinks it means. As for her mother's name
also being Robin, she's pretty sure that's just a coincidence.
For most of her life, Ry has been both parent and child to her mothers,
protecting them from the burden of bias she herself is spared, but needing
their help, their imprimatur, to keep her connected to the gay community she
grew up with.
When Ry spent her semester abroad in Dublin, she felt homesick for the
United States, or at least for New York. She didn't care much for Dublin,
but one night in particular stands out for her as the worst. She and her
boyfriend at the time went to a gay bar that struck her as the only place
she wanted to be that night, a place that promised to feel familiar in a
certain way. It was a rainy night, and she and her boyfriend stood in line
watching the gay men around them get in, while they did not. When Ry made a
move toward the door, the doorman blocked her from entering. Ry got it --
that they didn't get it, didn't get her. She wasn't getting in. She got
angry. Then she finally walked away, feeling cast out, estranged, a
stranger. She stopped in the middle of the street and wept.
''You know, I feel like I'm somewhere in between queer and straight
culture, wedged in this strange place, this lonely place,'' Ry told me. ''I
can relate to both cultures, but sometimes I feel like I'm not belonging to
either. But I'm O.K. with that. In fact, I wouldn't trade it for anything:
it's given me such a unique perspective. It's like I have a sense of double
vision, the ability to see things from many perspectives at the same time,
in a way that's strange and beautiful. It lets you open little doors and
look into a little world. It's a vantage point.''
ntil
recently, Ry considered ''The Middle Ground,'' a mixed-media piece she
created, to be her most significant work. Everyone in the family shows up:
her mothers are seen dancing in dreamy, soft-focus slow-mo, Cade needles Ry
about her sexuality, Ry appears in a TV news clip filmed just after the
judge ruled in her family's favor. Ry says that she and her sister have
always felt watched; Ry took that sensation and used it, making art that
other people watch about the feeling of being a specimen. For now, she's
temporarily putting that piece aside, having decided that maybe she has
exhausted the drama of her family story. Her next feature film is also about
a family, but one that bears no relationship to her own.
When Ry finally moved out of her mothers' duplex, she chose to live in an
apartment with her best friend from college -- a lesbian, as if Ry was
transitioning slowly away from home. But as the summer wore on, and her
boyfriend showed up in New York, the apartment seemed smaller and smaller.
Ry and her friend decided the arrangement wasn't working, the friend moved
out and, for the first time, Ry was living on her own.
Ry still sees her mothers all the time -- they live just a few blocks
away, and they sometimes stop by Darling to hang out, or the mothers and
daughters all run into one another at the favorite family restaurants, or
deliberately get together. The four of them had dinner a few days after
Russo and Young had held a successful fund-raiser for a transgender legal
organization, and they were all in a good mood. Ry had been intrigued by a
young woman at the party who looked like someone she'd want to befriend --
but because of the context of the party, she found herself wondering if
there was an attraction there, rather than just an interest. By now, no one
in the family takes those kinds of musings from Ry terribly seriously, but
Russo asked who it was anyway. ''Oh, her?'' Russo made a face. ''She's
terrible. Thank God you're not a lesbian.'' Everyone laughed.
Russo suddenly leaned back in her seat and looked around the table. ''You
know, sometimes I can't'' -- here she used a profanity for emphasis --
''believe it. We're sitting around the table with our two grown daughters.''
In some ways, Russo and Young's family turned out to be more conventional
than the families of half the New York City kids Ry and Cade went to school
with. For one thing, their parents are still together. ''You know, the older
I get, the more I want to live up to what they have,'' Ry said. Cade added
that it's rare to see a couple who have so much mutual respect after so
long, or a couple for whom the parental duties were so equal throughout.
''It's not like we don't fight,'' Young said, looking a little embarrassed
by her daughters' idealizing of their relationship, even as she clearly
loved hearing it. That's the whole point of respect, Cade said -- knowing
that you'll work it out.
Young and Russo exchanged a self-consciously sappy look. Russo started
rubbing an eye underneath the clear-rimmed glasses. ''It's like our whole
lives together have been this one big, messy, incredible experiment,'' she
said. Then she broke out into one of her broad smiles, a look of pride mixed
with amazement. ''And it worked.''
Susan Dominus, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about
the widows of firefighters who died on Sept. 11.