When Beth Niernberg began to search for a mohel to perform her second son's bris, she braced herself for a strange reaction. The Jewish circumcision ceremony has to be performed eight days after birth, so she didn't have time to track down someone who had dealt with gay and lesbian families before. The mohel she found was "not exactly young and hip," she says. But when she explained to him that her son Nicholas would live in a household with Beth, a Jewish lesbian, his two non-Jewish gay dads, and their other son Zander, the old mohel didn't skip a beat. "Great," he said. "I can add this to my résumé. Co-parenting. Is there a hyphen in that?"
photo: Sylvia Plachy
All in the family: James (left); Nicholas, biological son of Phillip; Beth, mother of both sons; Alexander, biological son of James; and Phillip
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In her late twenties, Beth decided she was ready to have kids. She met Phillip Hernandez and discovered that he and his partner, James Slayton, longed to have children, too. They joked about doing it together, and one day the conversation turned serious. The three drew up a formal agreement that was not legally binding but would serve as a framework for this family for the next 18-plus years. They now have two sons, 3 1/2-year-old Zander and 17-month-old Nicholas, and another son on the way. The boys are each biologically related to one of their dads, but Beth thinks the distinction isn't important and balks when people ask her to clarify.
Part of their agreement was that the three would live together and find a house with enough space to accommodate a future partner for Beth. She would stay home and take care of the children while Phil and Jim, both psychiatrists, would continue to work, providing most of the financial support. "The idea of finishing a master's, working full-time, and having a baby did not exactly appeal to me," says Beth. They didn't want a day care baby. "So it made sense for me to stay home and for us to find a way to live together."
Parents who are not lovers often raise their kids together, but it's rare to find them doing it in the same household and even rarer for this kind of living situation to be planned before a baby is conceived. While it's easy to describe a child as a son or a daughter, no language exists to explain the relationships between Beth and her sons' fathers. She is not a surrogate; they are not sperm donors. They are a family, and their relationship lies at the intersection of friendship, kinship, and partnership.
"In our community now, what is conventional is a two-parent, same-sex household. That's two parents who've been really busy over the last decade or so talking about how we're just like everyone else," says Terry Boggis, director of Center Kids, the family arm of New York's LGBT community center."But there are other kinds of households being put together that are very pioneering."
Co-parenting while cohabiting may be the exception to the rule in the LGBT community. It took me months to find just three of these families. But the men and women I spoke to said there were innumerable benefits to this kind of living arrangement. Sharing a household can create more financial resources and give children more time with adults who are deeply invested in their well-being. It also creates a unique bond between gay men and lesbians who, because of their kids, make a long-term commitment to one another. "They're not people I have intimate relationships with," Beth says of Phil and Jim. "But my relationship with them is as intimate as anyone with a significant other who is raising children together. I absolutely consider them family."
It's not as if gay men and lesbians have never lived together or had children together, but their reasons in the past may have been very different from today. "They did it because they had to put on a public face," says Rich Wandel, the historian at the National Archive of Lesbian and Gay History in Manhattan. During times when it was far more difficult than today for gay people to live openly, a traditional domestic arrangement offered social acceptance. Though this type of closeted family no doubt still exists, the families I spoke to were of a new type. They are openly gay, living together—sometimes along with partners of their own—so they can be full-time parents without having to go it alone.
These families are also emblematic of the ongoing development of family planning within the LGBT community. "Instead of saying 'I'm just going to grab this sperm and deal with this guy later,' " says Boggis, "I think people are really saying, 'Am I temperamentally right for this?' I see people really being much more aware about what they need to get down on paper, what they need to anticipate and talk about beforehand."
Creating a partnership between two or more people who are not in love can be tricky, says April Martin, a family therapist and author of The Lesbian and Gay Parenting Handbook. "When you have parents who lack a primary partnership they want to protect, it's a loaded situation. You can't make love to ease tension, and there's going to be a lot of tension in negotiating over the most important thing you have in common: the kid." Tensions can come from many sources ranging from financial disagreements and disputes over the chores to legal challenges and homophobia. "It requires negotiation 24-7 to be in a relationship with three people," says Beth. "It requires an understanding of which issues are important and when to just let things go."
