Raised by Unicorns, page 14
Of course, kissing boys leads to other things, and before I turned thirty I fell in love and moved off the island to get married again. Both my moms walked me down the aisle, and my new in-laws didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. My new husband and I moved to Kansas, and I kept a framed picture of my parents on my desk at work. When some people told me they’d pray for them, I only said, “thank you,” pretending they said that about everyone’s parents. I started contributing to LGBTQ+ charities automatically out of my paycheck every week, because it seemed the only way to reconcile it. When I confirmed that my dog’s veterinarian was a lesbian, I volunteered for her animal rescue after work, just to have somewhere I didn’t feel awkward.
We moved to Cleveland, and I got a federal job in the largest office I had ever worked in. The head of our office, who was also the head of the national headquarters for our division, was an openly gay man. My neighbors were lesbians and not afraid who knew it. Not that everyone was out—I went to a wedding, and a woman my age confessed that her mother was a lesbian, and begged me not to tell a soul, because her mother would lose her job. She was nearly crying with fear that I wouldn’t keep her secret. I understood. My husband had told me there was no place for my rainbow hand towels in our new home, and so those had to go. Away from Key West, I still knew what it was like to need to hide.
I got divorced again. I started to write about how much my femininity was an intentional construct, how I always felt like an impostor. I dated a few women, but I still liked kissing men better. That still wasn’t it, but I didn’t know what it was. I started to realize that my inability to fit in with the straight world was not entirely about having a lesbian mother. As a woman in a group of women, I sometimes felt like I was visiting a foreign country where I was the outsider who used slang slightly incorrectly, or perhaps I was the deaf woman who couldn’t hear herself speak so I emphasized the wrong syllables. I was neither fluent nor effortless, and try as I might, I would never be a native speaker. I couldn’t say why I felt that I was not quite a real woman. I was a swirl of male and female, and while I did not want to explain it to people, I wanted to be understood so damn badly. Every man I had loved possessed some trait that was not entirely masculine: a lock of hair, a curve of hip, a mincing walk. Sometimes it was in the way they held their hands when they chopped vegetables or in how they cried too much at movies. Regardless, it was always the part that didn’t fit with the whole of their masculinity that made me love them.
It wasn’t until I found a man who saw my bidrogyny and saw me beautiful not in spite of it, but because of it, that I understood where I fit. He had long hair, I had short. We were the same height, wore the same size clothing and shoes. We were two nonconforming halves that made sense together. I was no longer concerned about how other people defined me.
I HAVE TWO children now, and they don’t care that they have more grandmas than their friends do. When my parents come to my children’s birthday parties, I introduce them as my parents, not my mom and my aunt, like when I was a kid. My sons know that they can marry a boy or a girl, or no one at all. They understand that how you feel on the inside doesn’t always match how your body looks on the outside. They can wear pink or paint their toenails if they want to. They can also play sports and buzz their hair. None of that has to mean anything, unless they want it to. They get to define themselves, and their definitions can change as they grow—they don’t have to commit to anything.
WHEN I GREW UP, I didn’t know many children with LGBTQ+ parents. I straddled two worlds, and felt like an outsider in both. Now my worlds have come together, and for my kids, there is no separation at all.
CHANGING THE DEFINITION OF GAY
REBECCA GORMAN, age 19
I’M NOT SURE if I can point to a single moment in my childhood and say “Yes, this is exactly when I realized my family was different.” It is difficult to understand your life experience as uncharacteristic when it is all you have ever known. To me, being raised by a mother and father is impossible to imagine. I have two moms and have felt loved and wanted my entire life. This is my definition of a family.
My parents’ identities did not drastically change my experience growing up. I doubt I was even mature enough to understand the concept of sexuality until at least the third grade. Mostly, we did relatively “normal” family things. My moms helped with my homework after school, cooked and ate big meals together, and played with me outside for endless hours. However, being raised by queer mothers has its obvious downfalls, which can be understood by simply flipping through any of the family photo albums from my childhood.
Their understanding of this concept called “fashion” was nonexistent, and hilariously stereotypical. It didn’t help that my brother was only two years older than I, and oversized hand-me-downs were a constant in our house. Until I got tired of being called a tomboy, my usual outfit consisted of oversized T-shirts and shorts down to my calves. If they were trying to be stylish that morning, perhaps some lovely clashing pairing of stripes and plaid.
Learning how to dress myself was one of the greatest accomplishments of my life to date. It wasn’t very easy making friends while looking like a sack of potatoes who had just rolled out of bed. Explaining the cosmetics I wanted for my birthday or why I wanted to start shaving my legs were somewhat awkward conversations, but puberty isn’t exactly comfortable for anyone. It helped that I had an aunt who called herself a “lipstick lesbian” and ran a beauty school. She certainly assisted my fashion needs a smidge.
Our house was briefly in chaos during the two years my mothers simultaneously went through menopause. My brother and I were in an endless battle with them over temperature controls in the house and car. Apparently, menopause and the resulting hot flashes were justifiable excuses to leave the windows open in the middle of a Boston winter. Besides the general confusion with femininity and the extra spice that came with so much estrogen, growing up with two moms was relatively normal.
I don’t think that lacking a male mentor or a father figure in my life was detrimental to either my childhood development or my relationships with men. The values you learn from your parents are not based on their gender or sexuality. If anything, I would imagine that being raised by two queer women born in the 1960s gave me more exposure to important values such as empathy, acceptance, and resilience. My mothers also demonstrated to my brother and me what a healthy relationship looks like, and the importance of shared responsibilities. In some of my friends’ households growing up, their dads worked and fixed things up around the house, while their moms watched the kids and cooked dinner. My house was never like that.
I am thankful to not have been taught to think in such a gendered way. Since my infancy, my parents balanced the responsibilities that come with raising a family—not based on their gender, but on what would be the best for everyone. They both worked, they both cooked. And they expected us to learn things as well and do chores. I knew how to cook, clean, and do laundry way before many of my peers. This came in handy later in life as I sought my independence.
I have thought about—and was asked a surprising amount of times while growing up by curious people—how I think my life may have been different if I had had a father, and I honestly cannot even imagine it. Just because my childhood experience was different from the majority of my peers does not mean that it was inferior in any way. I love my parents, and they have always been enough for me.
However, when I reflect on my experience being raised by queer parents, I cannot help but think of the feeling of embarrassment about my family that I struggled with. I often reflect on where the shame of having two moms originated from. Yes, my family was different, but different is not synonymous to immoral, wrong, or corrupt. I sometimes think it was intrinsically formulated—my own irrational insecurity spurred from the anxiety I have struggled with since I was a child. But I think it was rather people’s constant perplexity about the fact that my family was different that caused the humiliation that I began to associate with talking about my moms.
Regardless of whether or not someone intends to be homophobic, to the shy five-year-old being asked if their dad has red hair by the lady at Supercuts, choosing to say “yes” instead of having to explain how their family is different is an obvious choice. As a child, there was nothing I wanted more than to get rid of the messy mop of red ringlets that framed my freckled cheeks. People would see my rusty afro and immediately feel invited to inquire where it came from. I remember hiding in the bottom of the grocery cart, or stuffing my head under my mother’s shirt, to avoid the shame-filled attention that followed me everywhere I went.
Questions about genealogy were not the only source of confusion and anxiety that were the result of my parents’ sexuality. A lot of times during school, I would be reminded of how different I was. Before every parent-teacher night, I remember teacher after teacher standing up in front of the class letting us all know how “truly excited” they were to meet our moms and dads.” Every time I was given a form to bring home for my parents to fill out, I’d have to cross out the line that said “father’s signature” and replace it with “mother #2.” There was, and is, a general expectation about what the “normal” family looks like. Teachers, and classmates, tended to assume that everyone’s experiences growing up were the same. We were in the suburbs of Boston, after all—it’s hard to imagine a place more focused on achieving what society has defined as the “perfect” American dream. Fences were painted white, not rainbow.
Upon reflection, I wonder how much of my teachers’ assumptions about having a homogenous classroom influenced the experiences of bullying or exclusion that I faced from my classmates. To this day, I still vividly recall my childhood struggle to understand the embarrassment I felt and tried to push away. I can replay in my mind the moments of humiliation, and it’s hard for me to accept that I was embarrassed by my parents. It seemed that none of my friends were embarrassed of their families, so why should I be? Nevertheless, the fear of being “outed” was a constant in elementary and middle school. Nothing made me cringe more than the simple question, “Do you have two moms?”
Difference is uncomfortable, especially when you are ten years old. Classmates sometimes didn’t know how to react to my family, so their way of coping with their discomfort was to ridicule. I often found myself at the center of classmates’ jokes or laughter. One day in third grade, the boy to my left turned to me as my classmate got up to speak at our school assembly, and whispered facetiously into my ear, “Did you hear that the new kid has two dads?” The shivers spurred from the laugh that followed still radiate down my spine. He didn’t know that I had two moms, otherwise he wouldn’t have made the comment. Regardless, the damage was done. Is this what people say behind my back? I thought.
I was terrified that my family situation would be exposed to my classmates, and I would be the target of jokes and teasing. I remember a certain day in fifth grade. We were switching classrooms, transitioning from history to math, and were told to wait outside the next class until the teacher was ready for us. The klutz that my ADHD-rushing-self was, I tripped over my own feet and sent my pencil case crashing to the floor. The contents scattered in every direction, and as I scrambled to collect my mess, one of the girls in my class said the last thing I possibly could have wanted to hear: “Don’t you have two moms?” If the eyes of all my classmates were not on me before, they most certainly were after that shocking question. It was a question that felt to me like an accusation. The intention was most likely one of curiosity rather than spite, but it felt like a dagger to my heart.
After-school pick-ups always brought anxiety. I tried to run out of there as fast as I possibly could before my peers got a good look at who was in the pick-up line. I dreaded every time one of my friends would ask me who the woman was that picked me up. When I responded “my mom,” the next question was always “well, who’s the other woman, then?” “That’s also my mom.” I walked away briskly, leaving them stuck in their bewilderment. Sometimes I was thankful that one of my moms’ hair was nearly all grey—hopeful that my classmates would just assume she was my grandmother. Those who were clever enough to figure out my family situation and accept it were the people who I trusted as my friends.
Inviting someone over for an after-school playdate required slightly more consideration than it would for the normal elementary school kid. I would find myself assessing how I thought my potential playmates would react to my family photos on the wall—containing two moms, instead of one. If I judged their character sound, I would bring them home and show them my life. Friendship meant more to me than just enjoying spending time with someone; it meant that I trusted them enough to show them my whole self. I could expose my vulnerabilities to them, and when they responded with love and respect, I cherished them. As I grew up, I collected a widening circle of people that I felt I could trust with my life. I let more people into my life, so more people knew about my family. My teammates and classmates began to know that I was “the girl with two moms,” and for the most part, they were okay with that.
Although I still would occasionally find myself doubting whether or not to “out” my family, the amount of embarrassment I felt in regard to my moms had significantly dissipated by the time I entered high school. I think this was partially due to how involved I was with sports—my teammates were quickly exposed to my parents coming to watch me play. They, in many ways, set a respectful norm in which my classmates would interact with me about my family—and many got to know and love my moms. I also think that the increase in social media use helped provide me with a platform on which I could write about and share my family with my peers, while slightly protected by the comfort of a keyboard. Through a single post I could show all of my followers my wonderful family; it alleviated me from being confronted with the oh-so dreaded, “Who are those two women who always pick you up after school?” types of questions.
Although the moment at which I first began to struggle with my own homophobic shame is vague, I can clearly remember the instant I overcame all fear I had previously had with being open about my family. It was a Monday night, six o’clock, November of 2014, and I had just begun the classic post-practice race to finish my homework. I had a research paper due later that week, a muckraking essay about human rights, and had yet to put together so much as an introduction paragraph. I slid three fingers across my mouse pad, bringing up my MacBook’s dictionary application. My tenth-grade self, thinking that a definition was the perfect opening line to a serious paper on same-sex marriage, typed the word “gay” into the search bar. My glazed eyes read over the results quickly, then stopped midway down the page. I felt my palms begin to sweat and stomach turn, the same familiar feeling I got after hearing someone say, “that’s so gay” in the hallway. Praying my vision was deceiving me, I reread the definition: “stupid; foolish: making students wait for the light is kind of a gay rule.”
Although I was not surprised to see gay defined that way, I felt disheartened to have society’s colloquial and outright hurtful use of the word recognized by one of the most commonly used dictionaries in the world. What I felt in that moment wasn’t just disappointment with the definition, but a feeling of illegitimacy; I felt as though the world was defining my family as stupid. Without realizing it at the time, I made a decision as I read that definition: I was done submitting to the voices in my society telling me that I was supposed to be ashamed by my family.
What happened in the next twenty-four hours remains somewhat of a blur. I wrote a letter addressed to Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, and received a phone call an hour after pressing send. An administrator talked unconvincingly for two minutes, promising that ““maybe they would eventually fix the problem.” I wrote ten emails to newspapers across the country asking for their help. By the next day, a Google search of my name resulted in over thirty-four pages of domestic and international news sites. ABC, NBC, and FOX showed up at my doorstep, and the Ellen DeGeneres Show appeared on my caller ID.
As I sat on our old red couch staring at FOX News on the screen in front of me, I could not help but become mesmerized by the familiar face reflected back at me. The news reporter’s sharp voice broke me from my trance: “Fifteen-year-old Becca Gorman, the daughter of two lesbians, is campaigning to redefine the word gay.” I perked up as I heard my name, becoming once again entranced by the rather unfamiliar, confident teenager standing up against one of the world’s largest companies: Apple. The auburn hair was the same shade as mine, the red couch imprinted with the same stains and memories, and the voice one I recognized as my own, yet something felt different; something had changed in the past forty-eight hours, whether or not my wide-eyed, passionate teenage self was aware of it.
After my efforts, I discovered that Webster’s definition of gay had been updated earlier that year to include the word offensive. The Apple dictionary was later updated to include the same. Upon reflection, I think what mattered the most to me was not that the definition was actually changed. Rather, I wanted the world to know that using a word that people identify with as an insult is degrading. I hoped that by sharing my own story I could communicate the effects of their actions.
Eventually, my fifteen minutes of fame came to an end, and my story drifted to the back burner. But I emerged with a strengthened sense of understanding that I value dearly to this day: my family is something that I should and do feel proud of, and I could not care less if anyone thinks otherwise. What for years brought on feelings of shame now fills me with pride. My two moms are one of my favorite things to talk about. I am incredibly thankful to have such kind, supportive parents, and I want to share that gratitude with the rest of the world.
