<\/span><\/p>\n After my mother\u2019s partner\u2019s children had left for college, she moved into our house in town. I lived with both of them for the brief time before my mother died at the age of 53. I was 19. In other words, I was the only child who experienced life under \u201cgay parenting\u201d as that term is understood today.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Quite simply, growing up with gay parents was very difficult, and not because of prejudice from neighbors. People in our community didn\u2019t really know what was going on in the house. To most outside observers, I was a well-raised, high-achieving child, finishing high school with straight A\u2019s.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Inside, however, I was confused. When your home life is so drastically different from everyone around you, in a fundamental way striking at basic physical relations, you grow up weird. I have no mental health disorders or biological conditions. I just grew up in a house so unusual that I was destined to exist as a social outcast.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n My peers learned all the unwritten rules of decorum and body language in their homes; they understood what was appropriate to say in certain settings and what wasn\u2019t; they learned both traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine social mechanisms.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Even if my peers\u2019 parents were divorced, and many of them were, they still grew up seeing male and female social models. They learned, typically, how to be bold and unflinching from male figures and how to write thank-you cards and be sensitive from female figures. These are stereotypes, of course, but stereotypes come in handy when you inevitably leave the safety of your lesbian mom\u2019s trailer and have to work and survive in a world where everybody thinks in stereotypical terms, even gays.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n I had no male figure at all to follow, and my mother and her partner were both unlike traditional fathers or traditional mothers. As a result, I had very few recognizable social cues to offer potential male or female friends, since I was neither confident nor sensitive to others. Thus I befriended people rarely and alienated others easily. Gay people who grew up in straight parents\u2019 households may have struggled with their sexual orientation; but when it came to the vast social universe of adaptations not dealing with sexuality\u2014how to act, how to speak, how to behave\u2014they had the advantage of learning at home. Many gays don\u2019t realize what a blessing it was to be reared in a traditional home.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/a> <\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n My home life was not traditional nor conventional. I suffered because of it, in ways that are difficult for sociologists to index. Both nervous and yet blunt, I would later seem strange even in the eyes of gay and bisexual adults who had little patience for someone like me. I was just as odd to them as I was to straight people.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Life is hard when you are strange. Even now, I have very few friends and often feel as though I do not understand people because of the unspoken gender cues that everyone around me, even gays raised in traditional homes, takes for granted. Though I am hard-working and a quick learner, I have trouble in professional settings because co-workers find me bizarre.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n In terms of sexuality, gays who grew up in traditional households benefited from at least seeing some kind of functional courtship rituals around them. I had no clue how to make myself attractive to girls. When I stepped outside of my mothers\u2019 trailer, I was immediately tagged as an outcast because of my girlish mannerisms, funny clothes, lisp, and outlandishness. Not surprisingly, I left high school as a virgin, never having had a girlfriend, instead having gone to four proms as a wisecracking sidekick to girls who just wanted someone to chip in for a limousine.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n When I got to college, I set off everyone\u2019s \u201cgaydar\u201d and the campus LGBT group quickly descended upon me to tell me it was 100-percent certain I must be a homosexual. When I came out as bisexual, they told everyone I was lying and just wasn\u2019t ready to come out of the closet as gay yet. Frightened and traumatized by my mother\u2019s death, I dropped out of college in 1990 and fell in with what can only be called the gay underworld. Terrible things happened to me there.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n It was not until I was twenty-eight that I suddenly found myself in a relationship with a woman, through coincidences that shocked everyone who knew me and surprised even myself. I call myself bisexual because it would take several novels to explain how I ended up \u201cstraight\u201d after almost thirty years as a gay man. I don\u2019t feel like dealing with gay activists skewering me the way they go on search-and-destroy missions against ex-gays, \u201ccloset cases,\u201d or \u201chomocons.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Though I have a biography particularly relevant to gay issues, the first person who contacted me to thank me for sharing my perspective on LGBT issues was Mark Regnerus, in an email dated July 17, 2012. I was not part of his massive survey<\/a>, but he noticed a comment I\u2019d left on a website about it and took the initiative to begin an email correspondence.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Forty-one years I\u2019d lived, and nobody\u2014least of all gay activists\u2014had wanted me to speak honestly about the complicated gay threads of my life. If for no other reason than this, Mark Regnerus deserves tremendous credit\u2014and the gay community ought to be crediting him rather than trying to silence him.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Regnerus\u2019s study identified 248 adult children of parents who had same-sex romantic relationships. Offered a chance to provide frank responses with the hindsight of adulthood, they gave reports unfavorable to the gay marriage equality agenda. Yet the results are backed up by an important thing in life called common sense: Growing up different from other people is difficult and the difficulties raise the risk that children will develop maladjustments or self-medicate with alcohol and other dangerous behaviors. Each of those 248 is a human story, no doubt with many complexities.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Like my story, these 248 people\u2019s stories deserve to be told. The gay movement is doing everything it can to make sure that nobody hears them. But I care more about the stories than the numbers (especially as an English professor), and Regnerus stumbled unwittingly on a narrative treasure chest.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n So why the code of silence from LGBT leaders? I can only speculate from where I\u2019m sitting. I cherish my mother\u2019s memory, but I don\u2019t mince words when talking about how hard it was to grow up in a gay household. Earlier studies examined children still living with their gay parents, so the kids were not at liberty to speak, governed as all children are by filial piety, guilt, and fear of losing their allowances. For trying to speak honestly, I\u2019ve been squelched, literally, for decades.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n The latest attempt at trying to silence stories (and data) such as mine comes from Darren E. Sherkat, a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, who gave an interview to Tom Bartlett of the Chronicle of Higher Education,<\/a> in which he said\u2014and I quote\u2014that Mark Regnerus\u2019s study was \u201cbulls**t.\u201d Bartlett\u2019s article continues:<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Among the problems Sherkat identified is the paper\u2019s definition of \u201clesbian mothers\u201d and \u201cgay fathers\u201d\u2014an aspect that has been the focus of much of the public criticism. A woman could be identified as a \u201clesbian mother\u201d in the study if she had had a relationship with another woman at any point after having a child, regardless of the brevity of that relationship and whether or not the two women raised the child as a couple.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Sherkat said that fact alone in the paper should have \u201cdisqualified it immediately\u201d from being considered for publication.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n The problem with Sherkat\u2019s disqualification of Regnerus\u2019s work is a manifold chicken-and-egg conundrum. Though Sherkat uses the term \u201cLGBT\u201d in the same interview with Bartlett, he privileges that L and G and discriminates severely against the B, bisexuals.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Where do children of LGBT parents come from? If the parents are 100-percent gay or lesbian, then the chances are that the children were conceived through surrogacy or insemination, or else adopted. Those cases are such a tiny percentage of LGBT parents, however, that it would be virtually impossible to find more than a half-dozen in a random sampling of tens of thousands of adults.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Most LGBT parents are, like me, and technically like my mother, \u201cbisexual\u201d\u2014the forgotten B. We conceived our children because we engaged in heterosexual intercourse. Social complications naturally arise if you conceive a child with the opposite sex but still have attractions to the same sex. Sherkat calls these complications disqualifiable, as they are corrupting the purity of a homosexual model of parenting.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n I would posit that children raised by same-sex couples are naturally going to be more curious about and experimental with homosexuality without necessarily being pure of any attraction to the opposite sex. Hence they will more likely fall into the bisexual category, as did I\u2014meaning that the children of LGBT parents, once they are young adults, are likely to be the first ones disqualified by the social scientists who now claim to advocate for their parents.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Those who are 100-percent gay may view bisexuals with a mix of disgust and envy. Bisexual parents threaten the core of the LGBT parenting narrative\u2014we do have a choice to live as gay or straight, and we do have to decide the gender configuration of the household in which our children will grow up. While some gays see bisexuality as an easier position, the fact is that bisexual parents bear a more painful weight on their shoulders. Unlike homosexuals, we cannot write off our decisions as things forced on us by nature. We have no choice but to take responsibility for what we do as parents, and live with the guilt, regret, and self-criticism forever.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Our children do not arrive with clean legal immunity. As a man, though I am bisexual, I do not get to throw away the mother of my child as if she is a used incubator. I had to help my wife through the difficulties of pregnancy and postpartum depression. When she is struggling with discrimination against mothers or women at a sexist workplace, I have to be patient and listen. I must attend to her sexual needs. Once I was a father, I put aside my own homosexual past and vowed never to divorce my wife or take up with another person, male or female, before I died. I chose that commitment in order to protect my children from dealing with harmful drama, even as they grow up to be adults. When you are a parent, ethical questions revolve around your children and you put away your self-interest . . . forever.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Sherkat\u2019s assessment of Regnerus\u2019s work shows a total disregard for the emotional and sexual labor that bisexual parents contribute to their children. Bisexual parents must wrestle with their duties as parents while still contending with the temptations to enter into same-sex relationships. The turbulence documented in Mark Regnerus\u2019s study is a testament to how hard that is. Rather than threatening, it is a reminder of the burden I carry and a goad to concern myself first and foremost with my children\u2019s needs, not my sexual desires.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n The other chicken-and-egg problem of Sherkat\u2019s dismissal deals with conservative ideology. Many have dismissed my story with four simple words: \u201cBut you are conservative.\u201d Yes, I am. How did I get that way? I moved to the right wing because I lived in precisely the kind of anti-normative, marginalized, and oppressed identity environment that the left celebrates: I am a bisexual Latino intellectual, raised by a lesbian, who experienced poverty in the Bronx as a young adult. I\u2019m perceptive enough to notice that liberal social policies don\u2019t actually help people in those conditions. Especially damning is the liberal attitude that we shouldn\u2019t be judgmental about sex. In the Bronx gay world, I cleaned out enough apartments of men who\u2019d died of AIDS to understand that resistance to sexual temptation is central to any kind of humane society. Sex can be hurtful not only because of infectious diseases but also because it leaves us vulnerable and more likely to cling to people who don\u2019t love us, mourn those who leave us, and not know how to escape those who need us but whom we don\u2019t love. The left understands none of that. That\u2019s why I am conservative.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n So yes, I am conservative and support Regnerus\u2019s findings. Or is it that Regnerus\u2019s findings revisit the things that made me conservative in the first place? Sherkat must figure that one out.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Having lived for forty-one years as a strange man, I see it as tragically fitting that the first instinct of experts and gay activists is to exclude my life profile as unfit for any \u201cdata sample,\u201d or as Dr. Sherkat calls it, \u201cbullshit.\u201d So the game has gone for at least twenty-five years. For all the talk about LGBT alliances, bisexuality falls by the wayside, thanks to scholars such as Sherkat. For all the chatter about a \u201cqueer\u201d movement, queer activists are just as likely to restrict their social circles to professionalized, normal people who know how to throw charming parties, make small talk, and blend in with the Art Deco furniture.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n I thank Mark Regnerus. Far from being \u201cbulls**t,\u201d his work is affirming to me, because it acknowledges what the gay activist movement has sought laboriously to erase, or at least ignore. Whether homosexuality is chosen or inbred, whether gay marriage gets legalized or not, being strange is hard; it takes a mental toll, makes it harder to find friends, interferes with professional growth, and sometimes leads one down a sodden path to self-medication in the form of alcoholism, drugs, gambling, antisocial behavior, and irresponsible sex. The children of same-sex couples have a tough road ahead of them\u2014I know, because I have been there. The last thing we should do is make them feel guilty if the strain gets to them and they feel strange. We owe them, at the least, a dose of honesty. Thank you, Mark Regnerus, for taking the time to listen.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Robert Lopez is assistant professor of English at California State University-Northridge. He is the author of Colorful Conservative: American Conversations with the Ancients from Wheatley to Whitman. This year he will be publishing novels he wrote in the 1990s and 2000s. Reprinted with permission from thePublicDiscourse.com<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2002\/10\/Robert-Oscar-Lopex.jpg\" "\\"Robert")
<\/a>Between 1973 and 1990, when my beloved mother passed away, she and her female romantic partner raised me. They had separate houses but spent nearly all their weekends together, with me, in a trailer tucked discreetly in an RV park 50 minutes away from the town where we lived. As the youngest of my mother\u2019s biological children, I was the only child who experienced childhood without my father being around.<\/span><\/p>\n