Teenage sisters find love, trust with gay dads
From diapers through dating, the men have taught the girls about the rites of passage into womanhood, about life at its most comforting and its most confounding.
Howard and Darry Leonard, gay partners for 22 years, are the only parents the sisters know. Each man is the biological father of one of the girls, and the adoptive parent of the other.
"I love being in this family; I've never felt like I was missing anything," said Chelsea, 13, sitting on the floor between her two fathers in the family's Redmond home. "And if I could choose, I'd choose to be right where I am."
As the national debate rages over how America ultimately will regard such families, a growing number of children raised in same-sex households — like the Leonard girls — are of an age now where they can reflect on how their parents' lives have shaped their own.
They understand that the issue of gay marriage inevitably is linked to children, because so much of how Americans feel about marriage centers on child rearing.
In Chelsea and Sara Leonard's eyes, their family is no different from those in which parents are married, divorced or single. "If anything, other kids have been envious of us," said Sara, 17. "We still have two parents who are together, and they're cool."
Still, many critics of gay marriage believe two parents of the same sex are no different from a single one, and that it takes a woman and a man, each bringing different attributes to a family, to ultimately help children become well-adjusted adults.
"The further you move away from that ideal family form — mom and dad, married — the more damage you do to kids," said Patrick Fagan, a social scientist with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research think tank.
Even some Americans who in surveys say they believe same-sex couples should be allowed to form civil unions and receive benefits back off in their support when asked whether same-sex couples should adopt.
The American College of Pediatricians, a national association of physicians and health-care professionals opposed to gay marriage, recently said "it is inappropriate, potentially hazardous to children and dangerously irresponsible to change the age-old prohibition on homosexual parenting, whether by adoption, foster care or by reproductive manipulation."
Citing a host of child-development reports, the group said children reared in homosexual households are more likely to be sexually confused and engage in sexual experimentation.
Still, the 50 or so studies of children raised by gays show that overall, they're as socially and psychologically adjusted as those who grow up in heterosexual households.
But even experts who support gay marriage describe the studies as too limited in scope — samples are small, selection biased and most of the children studied were born into heterosexual families with a parent who later "came out," they say.
Nationwide, estimates of children raised by gay parents range up to 12 million. The 2000 census showed that 57 percent of same-sex households nationwide and 46 percent in Washington are raising children under 18. That's less than one percent of all households in the nation and in the state.
Judith Stacey, a professor of sociology at New York University who has studied and testified extensively on the issue of gay marriage, said there's no "respectable research" indicating a male and a female parent are required for child rearing to be successful.
"Most psychologists and child-development specialists will tell you what children need are reliable standards, good parenting, strong bonds, reliable caretakers," she said.
Two years ago, Stacey and a colleague analyzed 21 studies of children raised in lesbian households and found slight differences between them and children raised in heterosexual households. On average, she said, the research showed that boys raised by lesbian mothers tended to be less aggressive and more nurturing, and generally were more sexually restrained, than those raised in heterosexual families.
Girls raised by lesbian mothers, on the other hand, were more sexually adventurous and more likely to aspire to become doctors, lawyers and engineers. Overall, the children were more open and less judgmental, the researchers found.
But Fagan, the Heritage Foundation social scientist, said too little is known about gays and gay households in this country to reach any solid conclusions about their children.
"We don't even know how many gays we have in this country — forget how many have stayed together or split up; how many have adopted children and are still together. And that's without getting into how the kids are doing."
He calls the gay family model the most radical of family types since the sexual revolution began.
"What kids in (gay) households are missing is the experience of the love between a man and a woman who are their parents," Fagan said. "They don't get the intimate modeling that sets them up more easily for a stable, procreative relationship between a man and a woman in their adulthood."
Stacey, the New York University professor, said it's true that some kids with gay parents will not be "straight or exclusively straight."
But "that should be the case, whether your theory on sexual development is role modeling, biology, permission, communities," she noted.
The majority of people are heterosexual, whether or not their parents are gay, Stacey points out, and in many of the studies most children of gay parents identified themselves as heterosexual.
Kate Fortmueller, 21, whose biological mother and her partner had been together about six years when she was conceived through artificial means, agrees. "I think having gay/lesbian parents makes you more open to same-sex relationships and, in the end, much more comfortable with your own sexuality.
"I have always considered myself straight."
Howard Leonard, whom his daughters call pappa, believes gay couples have special strengths, such as a commitment to building a strong family against the odds. "All things being equal, a man and a woman are equipped to cover more ground than two men or two women can," he said.
"But that's less important than a family doing things right," relying on trust, communication and honesty, he said.
Because gays have to work harder at becoming parents, and seldom have unplanned pregnancies, Stacey said, "they tend to be better parents, on average."
"It's not like gays are pure," she said. "But at this point in history, gay parents are more committed, responsible parents than heterosexuals, on average. For them, the admission criteria are higher, more demanding."
Learning experiences
Howard Leonard met Darry, a general contractor, when the two lived in western New York. The men wanted to live in a place open to two gay men raising children and moved to the Puget Sound area.
Surrogate mothers helped them become fathers. From the start, they decided as soon as the girls were old enough to understand, they would know everything about their lives and the family into which they were born.
"They told us that if we ever had any questions we didn't feel comfortable asking them, that we could go to any number of female figures in our lives: our aunts, grandmothers, people up the street," said Sara, who heads off to college this fall.
When it came to things such as bras and menstruation, the men told their daughters what they knew. What they didn't know, they researched, together.
Tampons or pads? Their fathers bought both and let them decide.
In April, when Sara went shopping for her prom dress, the entire family tagged along. It was a big deal, she said: she was the first person in her immediate family to go to a prom. She picked out a black number by punk-rock clothier Lip Service that has a Victorian look to it, she said.
Her pappa told her it looked like something someone should be buried in. It was perfect, she said. Her boyfriend drives a hearse; it went with the theme.
At each new school, the girls' fathers sat down with the principal to describe their family, Sara Leonard recalls. "We've been so open about our family's configuration, if kids didn't like it they'd simply have to get over it," she said.
But school can be tough for kids with gay parents, particularly during the middle-school years when young people are exploring their sexuality.
Some children struggle with their gay parents' lifestyle, worried about how it reflects on their own sexuality and concerned that it sets them apart.
On the playground, in the lunch room and even in class, children use the word "gay" as an insult or to describe something "negative" or "uncool," said AJ Neff, 19, whose mother came out when Neff was about 10. Her parents divorced a few years later.
"They'd make a statement like, 'This math problem is so gay,' " said Neff, who is studying linguistics at Seattle Central Community College. "It became a general negative word."
Neff and the Leonard girls say kids like them, who are open about their parents' sexuality, often feel compelled to defend them when "being gay" comes under attack.
"I'd come home crying after standing up to someone using anti-gay terms — that's my mother you're talking about," Neff said. "I knew it wasn't her fault, but I did harbor some resentment for part of my childhood."
For some, it's easier not to tell.
After she transferred from a private elementary school to public middle school in the Lake Washington School District, Fortmueller simply didn't tell her friends that her parents were lesbians. Instead, she made up stories to explain her other mom: an aunt, a family friend.
After a while, she said, she lost track of her lies.
"It is hard to imagine that people did not know, but I honestly think most people would not jump to the assumption that my parents are gay, because we look like a middle-class family," she said.
"All families are different; I think I just considered my family different in the sense that some people have two sets of parents, or single parents, and some kids are raised by their grandparents or other family members," she said.
Because of that, many children of gay parents have a tough time understanding why their parents are sometimes treated differently.
When she applied to college, for example, Fortmueller said she crossed out "father's name" on all of the application forms. And she recalls that only her biological mother could declare her as a dependent for insurance coverage, or take time off to care for her when she was ill.
And Darry and Howard Leonard recall that for years they carried a letter in their cars, certifying they were Sara and Chelsea's parents.
In March, the Leonards went to Portland, where Howard and Darry married — an occasion long overdue, Chelsea had decided.
Seven years earlier, she had learned for the first time that her parents were not married. Howard recalls: "She looked up at us and said 'You mean you guys aren't married?' It was the first time she realized that there was this important thing her two dads weren't allowed to do."
Seattle Times news researcher Gene Balk contributed to this report.
Lornet Turnbull: 206-464-2420 or lturnbull@seattletimes.com