America: meet our families!
David on Aug 10th 2007
We noticed something interesting about this year’s Family Week in Provincetown. Many of the families that were in attendance didn’t have queer parents. We weren’t the only ones to notice this trend. The Cape Cod Times wrote an article titled P’town gathering brings straight, gay families together:
For Darrell and Bernice, a straight couple, ages 43 and 37, respectively, the week is about spending time with their gay friends and beginning to include Fiona in that circle. “We have many, many lesbian couple friends,” Darrell Smith said. “We have single lesbian friends, single gay male friends. We have friends that are a gay couple and they have twin boys. We just think it’s about getting together with people.”
About 85 percent of the parents who attend Family Week are gay, Chrisler said, but that composition is slowly changing. “I think gay families are more willing to bring their straight family members along, whereas 10 years ago this is something they would have kept to themselves,” Chrisler said.
That means there were a few hundred non-LGBTQ aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends and neighbors in attendance. When these individuals go to the voting booth in the next election cycle, how do you think they’ll vote? When non-LGBTQ America attaches names, faces and stories to our struggle, it can be a mind, heart and life-changing experience.
A few years ago, Mike Conway, a straight father, penned this op-ed for his local paper about his experience.
For my vacation this year I spent a week on Cape Cod, a week that changed my life. I spent the week in Provincetown volunteering at Family Week. As a straight 40-year-old father of two, why was I spending my summer vacation volunteering at an event celebrating and addressing the needs of families with gay and lesbian parents? Three reasons: first my family has friends within the sponsoring group, Family Pride Coalition, second I am currently unemployed so I was available, and third a career counselor told me I needed a volunteering item on my resume. But my experience during Family Week turned out to be far more significant than the sum of all of these.
While I have been a supporter of gay marriage and gay rights, it had always been from an intellectual standpoint and from outside the issue. I supported gay rights because equality seems only logical. But during the course of my week in Provincetown, surrounded by the reality of hundreds of gay families, I began to emotionally understand and appreciate the struggles these parents and children face every day: children ostracized and threatened at school and on the playground for having two moms, parents in crises denied access to civil and legal resources, and the stares and antagonism that gay parents and their children constantly endure. As a straight, white guy, I have never even been close to facing these sorts of things. But to the parents and children participating in Family Week these issues are all too real, they cut to the heart and spirit of humanity.The issue for them is about loving families, nothing more.
To see children aged four and five excited because they get to march in a parade and carry home-made signs that read simply “I Love My Dads” or “I Love My Lesbian Mom” struck an emotional chord in me that I was not prepared for. As a parent, I know the unconditional love that grows exponentially between parents and children. I cried throughout the week. I cried a lot. I can only imagine how difficult life would be for my family if our love was constantly questioned by strangers, colleagues, teachers, doctors, the courts and the country as a whole.
Growing up in the 70’s, I learned all the stereotypes, bigotry and prejudices of my Northeast Philly roots. Smear the Queer was a popular schoolyard game. As children, we had no idea what the name of this game implied. I had to learn to question and examine the assumptions, beliefs and values of my upbringing. I now consider myself a relatively open-minded person. But Family Week was my first experience at being an open-hearted person. Families, whatever they look like, are about love and nothing else. Sexual orientation, gender, race, none of these matter to a child. Every family is different in thousands of ways, which makes every family equal. Denying equal treatment to anyone, to any family or child is just wrong. Just as denying civil and voting rights based on gender or race was a stupid, small-minded thing to do, so is denying equal rights based on sexual orientation. It’s simply a waste of energy that could be devoted to addressing the myriad real problems, such as poverty, that families and children throughout the world face.
Filed in children, family week, general |
