Role models

April 1997

Role models

What can straights learn from gays about parenting?
by Marian M. Jones

The title screams out in garish pink block letters. How to Supercharge Your Marriage, Make Your Spouse Leapingly Blissful, and Become A Prize-Winning Parent. Then, way at the bottom, in type so small it belongs at the eye doctor's, the subtitle reads: Relationship Lessons From Gays and Lesbians.
I turn the book over and read the blurb on the back:
Let gays teach YOU how to:
* Be more flexible about sex roles
* Negotiate everything from making the first move to making the bed
* Divide parenting tasks fairly and equally
* Stop taking your commitment to each other for granted, like every other ho-hum hetero couple you know.
Well, okay. The book doesn't really exist. But is it just the feverish fantasy of someone suffering from a gay-pride overdose? Can straight couples learn anything from us, with our U-Haul relationships and 15-minute sex dates? And would they want to?
In fact, a number of psychologists have positive things to say about gay and lesbian couplings. According to a series of studies by California psychologists Robert-Jay Green, Michael Bettinger, and Ellie Zacks, lesbians have greater flexibility and cohesiveness in their relationships than either gay men or heterosexuals, and gay men have greater flexibility and cohesiveness than straight couples. The idea that gay and lesbian relationships are more egalitarian than heterosexual ones is also supported by abundant research, from Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz's landmark 1983 book American Couples to a 1991 study by psychologist L.A. Peplau.
Researchers have even more glowing praise for lesbians and gays as parents. "Planned lesbian families present a viable and valuable model of a functional family in contemporary America," writes Valory Mitchell in a 1995 article in the Journal of Feminist Family Therapy. Mitchell has found that unlike heterosexual two-career couples, where the mother comes home to a "second shift" of child care and housework (while the father devotes an average of three hours per week to child care), lesbian partners share parenting and household duties fully and equally. And psychologist Jerry J. Bigner of Colorado State University has found that gay fathers are more nurturing than straight fathers and less likely to see their parenting role as limited to that of a provider. Gay fathers also tend to provide a more structured environment for their children and to set more consistent limits on their children's behavior, according to Bigner. Both Bigner and Mitchell conclude that the freedom to deviate from traditional parenting roles helps gay men and lesbians take better care of their children.
Some psychologists who study gay relationships believe that heterosexuals could learn a lot from their research. Straight men, especially, might find that their relationships would work better if they absorbed some lessons from gay couples, according to Robert-Jay Green, who is co-editor of the new book Lesbians and Gays in Couples and Families (Jossey-Bass, 1996). Heterosexual men need to become more flexible in their behavior and take on more of the traditional "women's" chores and roles, Green says, from cooking and changing diapers to listening and sharing feelings. To do this, "they'll have to learn to stand up to the pressures of conformity. But progressive straight couples can talk with their gay and lesbian friends and ask them, `How do you manage the gender nonconformity?' "
The experience of Kenneth Lin, a straight 22-year-old artist and musician, suggests that there may be truth in Green's ideas. "Hanging out with a gay friend and his boyfriend, I'm more able to talk about things that are not `male,' " says Lin. "I can open up to them and talk about how I was hurt in a social situation. And I can cross over and bring this new sensitivity into my relationships with women, or even my friendships with other straight guys."
Another example of this queer-straight cross-pollination shows up in a recent Ms. magazine article by Boston writer E.J. Graff. At the end of the article, which addresses the issue of same-sex weddings, Graff mentions a young heterosexual couple who announced at their wedding that the egalitarianism of lesbian relationships would serve as the model for their own marriage.
When asked whether she thinks that our relationships really provide a model for straights, Graff is cautious. "I'm not so sure there's anything that they could learn from us that they couldn't learn from unconventional heterosexual relationships," she says. But Graff, whose book What is Marriage For? will be published next year by Beacon Press, does believe that heterosexuals can learn something from the debate about same-sex marriage. "Because we have been forced to think `What does [marriage] mean to us?' we can bring outside questions to this institution."
The straight children of openly gay or lesbian parents have yet another distinctive perspective on heterosexual institutions. Jamey O'Quinn, a straight woman who grew up with her lesbian mother in Cambridge and her gay father in New York, says she was heavily influenced by the egalitarian relationships she saw around her. "With my mom and her partner, the responsibilities were evenly shared," recalls O'Quinn, 26. "Having grown up in that sort of environment, I'd never want to go out with a typical `role guy' who wore a suit and worked on Wall Street and expected me to be a housewife and do the cooking. It doesn't feel right to me to have rigid sex roles."
Nevertheless, O'Quinn says, "I think that once you fall into the gender roles in a straight relationship, you can't easily get out of them. And you know, sometimes gender roles aren't so bad. I love it when my boyfriend carries my books for me."
O'Quinn's observations suggest that maybe the issue is not just what straights can learn from gays and lesbians, but what heterosexuals and homosexuals can learn from each other. While progressive heterosexuals may be able to learn from our openness, our egalitarianism, and our freedom from gender roles, their willingness to accept gender roles -- their respect for each other's differences -- may ultimately hold lessons for us.
"One of my mom's friends, who used to be gay and now lives with a man, often says `Oh, it's so easy, he drives the car, I cook. We don't have to negotiate everything,' " O'Quinn says. "You know, if you want to let one person do all of the hard labor and another person do all the cooking, there's nothing wrong with that, unless someone is pushed into it."
Perhaps, then, a more appropriate title for the self-help book could be: How to Become More Open-minded: What Gays, Lesbians, and Heterosexuals Can Teach One Another. Look for it at your local bookstore in the year 2010.

Marian M. Jones is a writer and editor living in New Jersey. She can be reached at mjones3791@aol.com.

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