by Arlene Stein

Cross-posted from Arlene Stein’s blog.

Last week, the man who washed my hair in a beauty parlor –he was perhaps 30– nonchalantly referred to the person he shares a home with as his “husband.” That term, along with “wife” and “fiance” are rolling off the tongues of more and more people I encounter, suggesting that “girlfriend,” “boyfriend,” and “partner” or “lover,” may soon be quaint reminders of an age before gays and lesbians could marry.

I’ve been thinking a lot about marriage–and the fact that I’m not really the marrying kind, even if long-term monogamy seems to suit me fairly well. I was domestically partnered for over 20 years, and am the nonbiological mother of a 15 year old. I’m no radical queer, at least in relation to the broad contours of my life. But neither have I harbored the belief that marriage would make me more secure, respectable, or complete.

I am, in short, ambivalent about the whole thing.

The other day, at a Mother’s Day brunch with my ex, her fiance, her fiance’s ex, my current partner, and our kids (it takes a lesbian village to raise a child!) we sipped mimosas and discussed the impending wedding of my ex and her fiance, whose ring finger is now graced by a glittering diamond.

“Do you think it’s a radical act to get married?” her fiance asked me.

“No,” I replied. “It’s a liberal act.” It doesn’t exactly strike a blow against male domination, or class inequality. It does, however, open up a powerful institution to a group of people–gays and lesbians– who have been excluded from it.

For most of us the urge to be married is not about changing the world, but about gaining access to the same rights, privileges, and social affirmation that coupled, middle class people enjoy in this country. Because of the centrality of marriage in our culture –as a route to gaining decent health care, inheritance rights, and community membership– I can’t begrudge anyone for wanting that.

Even in relatively liberal parts of the country, such as the suburban New Jersey town where I lived for many years, we’re still marginalized. Several years ago, when our son was in middle school, he was asked to fill out forms that asked him for his mother’s name, his father’s name, and their respective telephone numbers. The configuration of this form assumed that all children have a mother and a father, and also that both parents share one address. There were many, many more mundane instances of a how we went unrecognized as a family.

In a soon-to-be-published volume, I’ve contributed an article, “Who’s Your Daddy?: Intimacy, Recognition, and the Queer Family Story,” about how nonrecognition and misrecognition impacts gay and lesbian parents, particularly our children–and threatens our sense of worth.

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415626903/

In the piece, I describe the ways many of us have improvised rituals and objects to represent our families. In my own queer family, for example, we made our son a book which tells the story of how he came to be. With the right to marry, such improvisations would no longer be necessary. It would accord many of us instant recognition, belonging and ease, furthering what some have described as the “normalization” of homosexuality.

Yet I can’t help but think about those who are left out of the wedding party– such as single people, people whose material circumstances prevent them from marrying, and couples who choose, for any number of reasons, not to do so. (I’ll write about this in future posts). That’s why, for my own part, I’ll continue to the use “girlfriend” or “partner” to describe my significant other–blurring the distinction between those who marry, and those who do not.

Conferences are lonely. Two years ago, Cameron Macdonald and I flew out to the Eastern Sociology Society meeting in Philadelphia to sit on a panel with Myra Marx Ferree to discuss to the sociological implications of the Wisconsin Uprising, give an on-the-ground ethnographic perspective of the events, and solicit donations for the ongoing occupation efforts. Besides Myra and Cameron, I knew almost no one else there. However, a gay man with an iPhone is always connected to the gay community. As soon as the conference events for the day were over, I launched Grindr, changed my profile text, and began looking for friends.

From Promotional Materials

People often talk about Grindr as a sexual field. Indeed, it is one. Tristan Bridges, here at Social (In)Queery, recently asked us to consider a sociology of Grindr. If Grindr is a sexual field, how is it different from the sexual fields of competing applications? How do the hookup rules and interaction look differently from other venues?

However, one area that I seldom see discussed when looking at Grindr is the many ways that gay men use it non-sexually. Grindr is undoubtedly a venue for people to hookup and find sexual partners. Competing applications treat it as a place only for “one-off relationships,” as Thomas McAfee, member of competing application Distinc.tt said on a comment to Bridges’s piece. “We are currently working on a redesign to focus more on community building/place discovery as we feel that being gay is about a lot more than just sex,” McAfee said.

However, many gay men use these sexual fields not only for sexual activity, but also to find community. They are also places where gay men go in order to talk with other gay men, form friendships and pen pals, and find events to attend. Distinc.tt then is coming in to fill an explicit service that gay men have already been finding through their sexualized communities. I argue that as gay bars and neighborhoods are increasingly assimilated and sexually diversified, places like Grindr that are more explicitly sexual are taking on some of the community functions that were previously fulfilled by happy hours out at the bars. Similar to the desexualizing of gay bars, applications like Distinc.tt try to tease out the nonsexual community from these sexual communities.

At ESS, I went to a local cocktail lounge nearby. This was the beginning of the craft cocktail phase, with prohibition-era drinks and secrecy to add to the allure. From the bar at the Franklin Mortgage and Investment, named for the business that served as a front for Philadelphia mobsters to distill moonshine, I talked with several locals about the best place for a young gay man to go in Philly. After about 30 minutes, I decided to meet Luis and a few of his friends for dinner. It would be a trial run for one of the many ways that I would meet participants in my future project in Boystown.

I shouldn’t overly cleanse the record though. I received my fair share of headless torsos and unsolicited pictures of strangers’ penises. However, I was in a monogamous relationship with my now ex-boyfriend Andrew at the time and turned them down politely. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, it probably also helped my quick turnaround that I was a young able-bodied white guy that suddenly appeared in the area. One can hardly write about gay hookup sexual fields without discussing the sexual racism that infuses all of them in different ways.

However, I want to focus on the sense of community that Grindr enabled that night. I was a lonely guy in a new city, friendless and bored. My iPhone connected me to a local world full of people to talk to and possible new friends. Luis, his friends and I hung out until 2 in the morning, swinging between a few local bars and the tastefully decorated home of one of his friends that lived in their little gayborhood. Grindr enabled me to find a fun group of people, connecting us initially through only our shared gay identity and the happenstance of being on Grindr at the same place and same time.

Without Grindr, perhaps I would have showed up to one of the gay bars alone. Here in Chicago, that certainly worked plenty of times for meeting new people when I first moved to Boystown. Of the groups that I’ve followed regularly, I met 3 of 4 just by showing up alone at a bar and making friends with those sitting nearby.

However, Grindr enables an “augmented reality,” an overlay of the physical world with additional information and meaning derived from digital applications. With it, I can hook into the sea of gay men that are around me at any time. Out at a gay bar, it is the norm to see men alone at the bar chatting on their phone, sometimes with men only feet away. At my apartment in Boystown, a few are listed only 0 feet away, almost certainly living somewhere in my building or the next. But in rural Iowa? The nearest gay person on Grindr might be 20 miles away, but still available to chat.

A participant, Frank, wakes up every morning, shuts off his alarm, and logs onto Grindr to wish a good morning to the fleet of men he’s met around the country on his travels. To him, the community of Grindr is even more important than the hookups available. No matter where he is, there are other gay men to talk to. Standing in line at the bank or on the train, there are men a thousand miles away and men only feet away. No need for gaydar. He knows these ones are gay.

Beyond the sociology of Grindr as a sexual field, Grindr and other online applications are transforming the way that gay men form and interact with gay communities. Grindr, like so many sexual fields and institutions, interacts with the other communities, fields, and structures that pervade 21st century gay life. Let’s not take a “digital dualist” perspective on Grindr, splitting it from the trends that are influencing gay communities today. The nonsexual communities that form within the sexual fields of online applications are similar to the offline nonsexual communities that formed in the sexual fields of gay bars. The splitting of these nonsexual functions off into applications like Distinc.tt follows the wider trend of desexualizing and assimilating gay male spaces. As Bridges notes, these feed changes feed into sexual stratification by race and class. Grindr’s sexual field has unique aspects, but sits within the constellation of fields that gay men navigate to find friends and sexual partners.

Jason Orne is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on assimilation and sexual racism in gay male and queer communities. Currently, he is conducting an ethnography of Chicago’s Boystown gayborhood. He blogs about his ethnography, sexualities, and race at Queer Metropolis.

–Cross-posted at Inequality by (Interior) Design and Your Queer Prof

Becoming a parent is fascinating, but becoming a parent who studies gender and sexuality, and—for one of us—identifies as queer… well let’s just say that creates a whole different level of awareness and curiosity. Prior to becoming parents, we both had a fine-tuned appreciation of the ways that gender and sexuality structure our experiences and opportunities. Anne Fausto-Sterling draws a great metaphor comparing the onset of gender binaries to the process of water erosion. At first, the erosion (read: gender) may not be visible. Small watery tributaries begin to form—the arms of future rivers that could, at this stage, easily change route. Gradually, streams emerge, slowly becoming rivers. And before long, you end up with something like the Grand Canyon. Yet, looking at the Grand Canyon disguises all of the crises that the fledgling streams navigated—a watery path whose flow, course, and geography were yet to be determined. Gender, said Fausto-Sterling, is no different. It takes time to learn to think of it as permanent and predetermined when it is actually anything but.

Just to put this in context, let us provide an example illustrating this issue as well as the sociological imagination of children at work. It involves a trip to the grocery store, a bold 3-year-old girl and her mother. At the checkout line, the girl trotted up to Tristan’s cart with her mother, pointed at Tristan’s son, and asked her mother, “Is that little baby a boy or a baby girl?” The mother looked at Tristan. He smiled, revealing nothing. “That’s… um… a boy, honey,” the mother responded, with a questioning tone (guarding, I’m assuming for the possibility of having mistaken a him for a her). “Why?” the little girl asked. Rolling her eyes at Tristan, the mother looked down and gave that classic parenting response—“Because!” she said. “Will he always be a boy?” she continued. The mother awkwardly chuckled, shrugging her shoulders, grinning and shaking her head at Tristan. “Yes, honey,” she laughed, “He’ll always be a boy.” And with that, they moved on.

The questions seemed odd to the mother, but the little girl clearly wasn’t joking. And she learned something significant in the interaction, even if her mother wasn’t actively teaching a lesson. In fact, some of the most important lessons we teach children are probably not on purpose—showing them what’s worthy of attention, what to ignore, what should be noticed but not discussed, and more. This little girl learned one of the ways that we think about gender in this culture—as a permanent state of being. To think otherwise, she learned, is laughable. This little girl seemed to understand gender as a young stream capable of becoming many different rivers. Her mother seemed equally sure that the stream had a predetermined path. And here’s where things get tricky—they’re both right. It’s likely Tristan’s son will identify as a boy (and later on, as a man). Most boys do. But treating this process as inevitable disguises the fact that… well… it’s not. This question came out of a 3-year-old because she’s actually in the process of acquiring what psychologists refer to as “gender constancy”—an understanding of gender as a permanent state of being. She’s not there yet, but interactions like the one discussed above are fast helping her along. These beliefs are institutionalized throughout our culture in ways that don’t make interactions like these completely predetermined, but make them much more likely.

With the news of a new child, D’Lane feels certain she’s somewhere in the stream, while Tristan is beginning to see the emergence of branches that are beginning to feel more likely than others. Yet, both of us feel the slow creep of the Grand Canyon. We have lectured for nearly 10 years on how gendering begins prior to birth. “Do you know the sex yet?” is one of the top two questions asked by most people. As a part of a same-sex couple, D’Lane experiences these questions as even more telling. Prior to birth, we organize names, nurseries, and language to prepare. One of the biggest reasons folks offer to justify their inquiries about the sex of babies before they’re born (when they do so) is largely gift-related. And the market for parenting and baby supplies structurally invites the question in more than a few ways and is a powerful force in reproducing our cultural understandings of gender.

“Gender-Neutrality” and the Market for Baby Gear

A great deal of marketing research must have gone into figuring out exactly what parents mean when they say they want “gender-neutral” clothes, toys, diaper bags, and all variety of baby and parenting paraphernalia. We’d guess that the meanings are pretty straightforward, and we’d imagine if you pressed parents, most would offer a sort of “Not too girly for a boy” response rather than vice versa (which—if true—would be interesting in and of itself). Through this process, colors like yellow and green have become the default “gender-neutral” colors. So, if someone has elected to not find out what their child’s genitals look like in the womb, there’s a line of products people can feel comfortable purchasing without worrying that they might have bought something “gender transgressive.”

And it’s not just colors; just about anything can acquire gendered meaning. Animals are clearly gendered. “Boy” clothes and objects display animals like dogs, lions, bears, dragons, any of the big cats or pachyderms. Meanwhile, “girl” clothes and objects are littered with kittens, unicorns, horses, butterflies, and dolphins. “Gender-neutral” lines that want to use animals end up selecting from an odd assortment of what’s left over—foxes, hedgehogs, owls, turtles, armadillos and an odd assortment of animals that don’t have enough of a cultural reputation for violence that might make them “boyish,” but are simultaneously not “girlie” enough either. But, the prototypical gender-neutral animal is the duck. In fact, if you ask for gender-neutral items before a baby shower, prepare yourself for ducks.

Patterns also become gendered. Through personal experience with gendered gifting, it follows that stripes are masculine, as is camouflage (unless it’s pink). Stars and hearts are feminine, as are rainbows. Results from a quick Google search show that geometric shapes and lines are considered masculine while polka dots, floral patterns, and scripts are feminine. There’s also a trend in bold colors vs. pastels for boys and girls respectively.

Gender-neutral clothes are easily available for the tiniest babies—presumably for those parents who elect not to “find out.” Though there’s not a huge selection, and almost all of it is yellow and depicts ducks, most stores in which you can buy for babies 6 months and younger have a selection of objects whose gender is not immediately apparent. As babies get bigger, however, gender-neutral options shrink—or perhaps more accurately, they migrate. Toddler-dom, for instance, is a life stage at which it’s increasingly difficult to find much that doesn’t scream “boy” or “girl.” It’s a niche that some of the more up-scale stores and labels have been keen to occupy. This is one part of a slow process that those fledgling streams begin to ossify into more predictable paths.

And it’s not just our children that get gendered. As parents, we’re also being re-socialized into new roles (mothers, fathers, and more) that subtly invite/compel us to take up certain gendered behaviors, roles, and gender-marked objects and clothing as well. Parenting gear is increasingly becoming as gendered as the objects we buy for our children.

Gendering Parenting Paraphernalia

Parenting gear has only recently emerged as a more sex-segregated market. New parenting “stuff” allows parents to consider how a diaper bag really reflects their own gender identity, and whether couples might require separate gear. There also seems to have been a sudden increase in the diversity of parenting gear available at all. This could be a byproduct of what feels like an increasing diversification of parenting philosophies. There have always been different ideas about what’s “right” for babies and what the “right” and “wrong” ways are to raise a child—but it feels like these ideas are becoming more polarized and/or parents of different philosophies are subtly encouraged to be at war with one another. And it’s significant that this is often referred to as the “Mommy Wars,” a label that casually implies that this is a war men seem to have been largely able to avoid. This might partially be because, while we assume that women will have one of an increasing diversity of parenting philosophies, we presume that men parent in one way (if we’re lucky enough to have them parenting much at all).

As men have begun playing larger roles in the parenting process—or, at the very least, are culturally expected to—parenting gear for men has emerged as well. Diaper bags, burp clothes, sippy cups, and more are now made with the consideration that men might have to lug them around too. Our brief survey of available “Daddy-specific gear” found that it really comes in two varieties (which often overlap): it’s either less practical than the “feminine” gear to which it was created in opposition (which is, somewhat ironically, exactly the opposite of how it is marketed), and/or it’s simply offensive (and not just to feminists, or even women… it ought to offend men as well).

For instance, companies like Diaper Dude market bags specifically to men. The website for Diaper Dude provides an origin story for the bag—and “movement,” according to the founder:

Diaper Dude, created by Chris Pegula, is a movement that began after the birth of the first of his three children by turning feminine-style diaper bags into ones that dads would want to carry. Pegula noticed that most diaper bags and accessories sold at retail stores were designed with women’s sense of style in mind. Instead of carrying his baby-stuff around in a gym bag or backpack, Pegula created The Diaper Dude for dads.

While the Diaper Dude appears to be a fairly reasonable option for parents who want colorful options without the “feminine” patterns, it is also a smaller bag. It will be great for those afternoon excursions or quick outings to the store, but appears to not be designed as an “everyday” diaper and childcare bag. Its size highlights a number of cultural assumptions, one of which is that dudes won’t be primary caretakers—at least in larger increments of time that might necessitate bigger bags.

There are other more extreme examples of masculinity in parenting gear. Using the diaper bag as a sort of case study, some of our examples include what we call the “Construction Bag” and the “Combat Daddy Bag.” There’s more than one bag that fit each of these patterns and most are too expensive to only qualify as gag gifts. Their existence led us to wonder what is being said through their purchase and use.

Consider the Combat Daddy Equipment Bag, a product that implicitly draws a connection between childcare and going to war. Indeed, it’s a cultural trope that’s amassed a small industry. Vin Diesel’s portrayal of a Navy Seal forced into a his most difficult mission yet (becoming a parent) in Disney’s “The Pacifier” plays on this same cultural narrative. That Diesel initially finds himself woefully unsuited to the task might superficially appear to honor the hard work that women do by illustrating that even a Navy Seal would struggle with the multitasking and time management required of good parenting. Yet, the story is not of Diesel becoming a “mom,” but rather, of finding ways of masculinizing parenting so that he can deploy his Seal skills in a new setting. Tristan is currently working on a collaborative project analyzing the content and imagery used in the new parenting books written explicitly to dads, and the metaphorical connection between parenting and warfare is a theme that’s emerged among the many new books marketed to men.

The idea that one may not know what they will be dealing with or what “equipment” might be needed, that a man couldn’t solve an issue without a shed of tools, and material on their backs as if they were going camping or to battle in dealing with children is offensive. Neither does this critique even consider the offensiveness toward all the women taking care of children whose men are unavailable due to actual military deployment.

Parenting products like these emerge out of a climate that asks women to “let him do it (t)his way” while subtly telling both men and women that “he” will seemingly inevitably parent differently from (and with less competence than) “her.” In fact, prior to the emergence of parenting books for men, there was often a section for men in parenting books for women—or a section “about men” for women to read. Advice in these sections often contains the notion that “he’s going to do things differently,” which may be perfectly true. Yet, we’d question the notion that he is inevitably going to do things differently because he is a he.

“Men’s” parenting products help reproduce a cultural narrative that implicitly works to conceal the actual work that goes into care work by presenting some as naturally having it (women) and others as having to compensate for what are implicitly presented as intrinsic deficiencies with all variety of gadgetry.

Toward a Queer Revolution of Parenting

But what about parents who might not want the typical patterns of the classic “mom” look, but also might not want to be less functional or more kitschy daddy gear? Are there gender-neutral parenting paraphernalia options available? Can Diaper Dude fulfill their desires too?

Gender-neutral baby clothes and toys, just like the recent push toward “daddy” gear, relies on a partial understanding of how gender works. Objects acquire a gender, but are also gendered in how we use, display, play with, and contest them. So, calling a onesie “gender-netural” or referring to a diaper bag as a “daddy diaper bag” presents gender as though it resides within the objects themselves. This calls our attention away from the fact that we reproduce these meanings in how we use and display these objects, and as a result, conceals our ability to challenge the meanings in how they are used as well.

There is a lot to say about how parenting objects and paraphernalia are used in ways that might challenge their meanings. The construction diaper bag is a great example. Comments on Amazon concerning the product indicate that items like this might often be a gift that women are buying for men (something that may be the case for a variety of new “men’s” products). Yet, what would this bag mean if worn by a gay dad (inviting a comparison with the play on masculinity that made the Village People famous)? What would it mean if worn by a woman? Does the meaning change? Is the product suddenly “queered” in how it’s been used?

But even things that are moving away from pink and blue can acquire different meanings when “queered” by the parents making use of them. For instance, Timbuk 2 sells a diaper messenger bag (the Stork Messenger Bag) that is marketed with images of men and women whose gender displays are marginally transgressive. In fact, when D’Lane first saw it she was stoked that most of the pictures online showed a diversity of gender. She believed it might be something queer and they could even potentially be marketing to queer parents. Like gender-neutral clothing for children, the Stork Messenger Bag is being marketed to a specific group: the ad depicts only white parents and children and the cost implies that it’s being sold to middle and upper-middle class parents. The video detailing the bag’s specifics, however—like most of the bags marketed to men—focuses more on practicality, including a joke about carrying around a beer for dad (referred to as “daddy’s milk” in the ad) in one of the many compartments. Here, the androgynous non-gendered bag, through language alone, becomes masculinized.

The images and the video are participating in marketing this product in two ways. In some ways, the Stork Messenger is being marketed no differently than the Diaper Dude, Combat Daddy, or Construction Daddy—it’s being sold to men who might want a diaper bag that doesn’t make them feel emasculated. But, men alone aren’t the only ones who might desire a less feminine bag. Images of parents with more transgressive gender displays market this product more covertly to parents who might desire to create new models of care, working to illustrate that a capacity to engage in care work can come in a variety of different “packages”—or gender performances, if you prefer. This subtle dual-marketing of the Stork Messenger is an illustration of our capacity to play with the meanings and gender of objects.

Thus, new products “for men” might be read as offensive in one light. But, the agency of consumers allows for a queer revolution in parenting roles and identities in which these objects provide the raw materials. Queering parenting is a cultural process that actively considers the ways in which parenting practices and identities can resist heteronormative assumptions that structure predominant parenting forms and relations. There is also an exciting potential embodied within these practices–aspects of which might become somewhat normalized within a wider parenting culture–to become an agent of change.

In this age of consumerism, it’s hard to disentangle the processes at work, but it is clear that there are more options available giving us more opportunities for gendering, disrupting gender, and gender play.

Considering how this all relates to Anne Fausto-Sterling’s comparison is instructive when thinking about long-term change. There are many ways in which we—and others—can intervene in the process of the formation of landscapes. For instance, there are many things we can do to encourage young streams to flow in certain directions and avoid others, but we’re also capable of challenging, re-routing, and even halting massive rivers. And we’re not alone. If we’re metaphorically considering rivers as gender, we can also metaphorically consider consumers as beavers. Beavers are capable of dramatically altering the flow, look, use, and geography of rivers and lakes. It’s what they do best. But it is also a slow and tenuous process. It takes time and incredible collaboration. Consider the largest known beaver damn, located in Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park. Numerous families of beavers through several generations have worked on the damn construction since the 1970’s. Most well known for being visible from space, the damn is now approximately 2,800 feet long, more than 5 times the size of what is typically considered a larger beaver damn—and still growing. To quote one Discovery News article, “they’re re-engineering the landscape” and we should be taking notes!

Cynthia Nixon (right) and wife Christine Marinoni (left)

The problem with such statements is that they infuse biological accounts with an obligatory and nearly coercive force, suggesting that anyone who describes homosexual desire as a choice or social construction is playing into the hands of the enemy.  In 2012, the extent to which gay biology had become a moral and political imperative came into full view when actress Cynthia Nixon, after commenting to a New York Times Magazine reporter that she “chose” to pursue a lesbian relationship after many years as a content heterosexual, was met with outrage by lesbian and gay activists.  As one horrified gay male writer proclaimed, “[Nixon] just fell into a right-wing trap, willingly. …Every religious right hatemonger is now going to quote this woman every single time they want to deny us our civil rights.”  Under considerable pressure from lesbian and gay advocacy groups, Nixon recanted her statement a few weeks later, stating instead that she must have been born with bisexual potential.

Yes, it’s true that straight people are more tolerant when they believe that lesbian and gay people have no choice in the matter.  If homosexual desire is hardwired, then we cannot change it; we must live with this condition, and it would be unfair to judge us for that which we cannot change.  By implication, if we could choose, of course we would choose to be heterosexual.  Any sane person would choose heterosexuality (not so. see here). And when homophobic people come to the opposite conclusion—that homosexual desire is something we can choose—then they want to help us make the right choice, the heterosexual choice.  And they are willing to offer this help in the form of violent shock therapy and other “conversion” techniques.  So I can absolutely understand why it feels much, much safer to believe that we are born this way, and then to circulate this idea like our lives depend on it (because, for some people, this really is a matter of life and death).  Indeed, most progressive straight people and most gay and bi people–including Lady Gaga herself–hold the conviction that our sexual orientation is innate.  They have taken their lead from the mainstream gay and lesbian movement, which has powerfully advocated for this view.

But the fact that the “born this way” hypothesis has resulted in greater political returns for gay and lesbian people doesn’t have anything to do with whether it is true.  Maybe, as gay people, we want to get together and pretend it is true because it is politically strategic.  That would be interesting.  But still, it wouldn’t make the idea true.

2. The science is wrong (Part 1): People like to cite “the overwhelming scientific evidence” that sexual orientation is biological in nature.  But show me a study that claims to have proven this, and I will show you a flawed research design.  Let’s take one example:  In 2000, a team of researchers at UC Berkeley conducted a study in which they found that lesbians were more likely than heterosexual women to have a “masculine” hand structure.  Presumably, most men have a longer ring finger than index finger, whereas most women have the opposite (or they have index and ring fingers of the same length).  Lesbians, according to this study, are more likely than straight women to have what we might call male pattern hands.  The researchers concluded that this finding supports their theory that lesbianism might be caused by a “fetal androgyn wash” in the womb—that is, when female fetuses are exposed to greater levels of a masculinizing hormone, it shows up later in the form of female masculinity:  male-pattern hands and… attraction to women.  But this study makes the same error that countless others have made: it does not properly distinguish between gender (whether one is masculine or feminine) and sexual orientation (heterosexuality or homosexuality).  Simply put, the fact that a woman is “masculine” (itself a social construction) or has been introduced to greater levels of a male hormone need not have anything to do with whether she is attracted to women.  We would only assume this if we had already accepted the heteronormative premise that masculine people (or men) are naturally attracted to femaleness and that normal (i.e., feminine) women are naturally attracted to men.  Herein lies the bias.   Many “masculine” women who are heterosexual (have you been to the rural South?) would like you to know that their gender does not line up with their sexual desire in any predictable way.  And many very feminine lesbians would like you to know this too.  The bottom line is that ideas about sexual desire are so bound up with misconceptions about gender and with the presumption that heterosexuality is nature’s default, that science has yet to approach this subject in an objective way.  For a comprehensive examination of the flaws in the most widely cited research on sexual orientation, see Rebecca Jordan-Young’s brilliant book Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (Harvard University Press, 2011).

3.  The science is wrong (Part II): An even greater problem with the science of sexual orientation is that it seeks to find the genetic causes of gayness, as if we all agree about what gayness is.  To say that “being gay” is genetic is to engage in science that hinges on a very historically recent and specifically European-American understanding of what being gay means.  In Ancient Greece, sex between men was normative and widespread; it was considered the most praise-worthy, substantive and Godly form of love (whereas sex between a man and a woman was, for all intents and purposes, sex between a man and his slave).  If men having frequent and sincere sex with one another is what we mean by “gay,” then do we really believe that something so fundamentally different was happening in the Ancient Athenian gene pool?  Wow!  How did Plato’s ancestors later develop all of those heterosexual genes?  And what about native cultures in which all boys engage in homosexual rites of passage?  Do we imagine that we could identify some genetic evidence of propensity to ingest sperm as part of a cultural initiation into manhood?  What about all of the cultures around the globe in which male homosexual sex does not signal gayness except for under certain specific circumstances (e.g., you are only gay if you are the receptive sexual partner, or if you are feminine)?  And while I am on this subject, what about the fact the United States is precisely one of those cultures?  When young college women lick each other’s boobs at frat parties, or when young college men stick their fingers in each other’s butts while being hazed by their frat brothers, we don’t call this gay—we call this “girls (and boys) gone wild.”  My point here is that a lot of people engage in homosexual behavior, but somehow we talk about the genetic origins of homosexuality as if we are clear about who is gay and who is not, and as if it’s also clear that “gay genes” are possessed only by people who are culturally and politically gay (you know, the people who are seriously gay).  This is a bit arbitrary, don’t you think?

Just 150 years ago, scientists went searching for the physiological evidence that women were hysterical.  Hysteria, by Victorian medical definition, meant that a woman’s uteruses had become dislodged from its proper location and was floating around her body causing all sorts of trouble—like feminism and other matters of grave concern.  And guess what, they found the evidence, and they published books and articles to prove it.  They also looked for and found the evidence that all people of African and Asian ancestry were intellectually and morally inferior to people of European Ancestry.  Many books were published dedicated to establishing these obviously absurd and violent beliefs as legitimate and indisputable scientific facts.  Similarly, the science of sexual orientation has a long and disturbing history.  In the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was believed that homosexuals had beady eyes, particularly angular facial structures, and “bad blood.”  Today, we apparently have gender variant fingers and gay brains.

Is it possible that people who identify themselves as “gay” in the United States (again, keep in mind that “gay” is a culturally and historically specific concept), share some common physiology?  Perhaps.  But even if this is so, do we really know why?  Indeed, we may find (as Simon LeVay did) that men who identify as gay share a certain trait—a larger VIP SCN nucleus of the hypothalamus, for instance.  But how do we know that this “enlargement” is a symptom or cause of their homosexuality, and not, say, a symptom or cause of their general propensity for bravery, creativity, or rebellion?  In a homophobic culture, you need some bravery (and other awesome traits) to be queer.  Perhaps these personality traits are what are actually being observed under the microscope.

And, of course, there is the time-eternal question: why aren’t scientists looking for the genetic causes of heterosexuality?  Or masturbation?  Or interest in oral sex?  The reason is that none of these sex acts currently violate social norms, at least not strongly enough to be perceived as sexual aberrations.  But this was not always true.  In the 19^th century, scientists were interested in the biological origins of the “masturbation perversion.”  They were interested because they believed it was pathological, and because they wanted to know whether it could be repaired.

At the end of the day, what we can count on is that the science of sexual orientation will produce data that simply mirror the most crass and sexist gender binarisms circulating in the popular imagination.  This research will report that women are innately more sexually fluid than men, capable of being turned-on by almost anything and everything (hmmm…. other than in Lisa Diamond’s research, where have I seen that idea before?  Ah yes, heterosexual pornography.)   It will report that men are sexually rigid, their desires impermeable.  It will tell us that straight men simply cannot be aroused by men and that gay men are virtually hardwired to be repulsed by the thought of sex with women.  Regardless of what else we might say about the soundness of these studies, what is evident to me is that they have been used to authorize many a straight man’s homophobia, and many a gay man’s misogyny.

4.  Just because you have had homosexual or heterosexual feelings for as long as you can remember, does not mean you were born a homosexual or heterosexual.   There are many things I have felt or done for as long as I can remember.  I have always liked to argue.  I have always loved drawing feet and shoes.  I have always craved cheddar cheese.  I have always felt a strong connection with happy, trashy pop music.  These have been aspects of myself for as long as I can remember, and each represents a very strong impulse in me.  But was I born with a desire to eat cheddar cheese or make drawings of feet?  Are these desires that can be identified somewhere in my body, like on one of my genes?  It would be hard to make these claims, because I could have been born and raised in China, let’s say, where cheddar cheese is basically non-existent and would not have been part of my life.  And while I may have been born with some general artistic potential, surely our genetic material is not so specific as to determine that I would love to draw platform shoes.  The point here is that what we desire in childhood is far more complex and multifaceted than the biological sciences can account for, and this goes for our sexual desires as well.  Some basic raw material is in place (like a general potential for creativity), but the details—well, those are ours to discover.

5.  Secretly, you already know that people’s sexual desires are shaped by their social and cultural context.  Lots of adults worry that if we allow little boys to wear princess dresses and paint their nails with polish, they might later be more inclined to be gay.  Even some liberal parents (including gay and lesbian parents) worry that if they introduce their child to “too much” in the way of queer material, this could be a way of “pushing” homosexuality on them.  Similarly, many people worry that if young women are introduced to feminism in college, and if they become too angry or independent, they may just decide to be lesbians.  But if we all really believed that sexual orientation was congenital—or present at birth—then no one would ever worry that social influences could have an effect on our sexual orientation.  But I think that in reality, we all know that sexual desire is deeply subject to social, cultural, and historical forces.  We know that if the world today were a different place, a place where homosexuality was culturally normative (like, say, Ancient Greece), we would see far more people embracing their homosexual desires.  And if this were the case, it would have nothing to do with genetics.

The concept of “sexual orientation” is itself less than 150 years old, and almost equally recent is the notion that people should partner based on romantic attraction.  Most of what feels so natural and unchangeable about our desires—including the bodies and personalities we are attracted to—is conditioned by our respective cultures.  The majority of straight American men, for instance, will tell you that they have a strong, visceral aversion to women with bushy armpit hair.  But this aversion, no matter how deep it may now run in men’s psyches and no matter how nonnegotiable it may feel, is hardly genetic.  Up until the last century, the entire world’s female population had armpit hair, and somehow, heterosexual sex survived.

People like to use the failure of “gay conversion” therapies as evidence that homosexuality is innate.  First of all, these conversions do not always fail; if you make someone feel disgusted enough by their desires, you can change their desires.  Call it a tragedy of repression, or call it a religious awakening—regardless, the point is that we can and do change.  For instance, in high school and early in college, my sexual desires were deeply bound up with sexism.  I wanted to be a hot girl, and I wanted powerful men to desire me.  I was as authentically heterosexual as any woman I knew.  But later, several years into my exploration of feminist politics, what I once found desirable (heterosexuality and sexism) became utterly unappealing.  I became critical of homophobia and sexism in ways that allowed these forces far less power to determine the shape of my desires.  If this had not happened, no doubt I’d be married to a man.  And if he wasn’t a complete asshole, I’d probably be happy enough.  But instead, I was drawn to queerness for various political and emotional reasons, and from my vantage point today, I believe it to be one of the best desires I ever cultivated. [Does this mean that your daughter may decide to be a lesbian if she takes some women's studies courses? Yes. Whatcha gonna do now?!]

Perhaps most importantly, the fact that we might cultivate or “choose” something doesn’t mean that it is a trivial, temporary, or less a vital part of who we are.  For instance, is religion a choice?  Certainly it is if we define “choice” as anything that isn’t an immutable part of our physiology.  But many religious people would feel profoundly misunderstood and offended if I suggested that their religious beliefs were a phase, an experiment, or a less significant part of who they are then, say, their hair color.  Choices are complex. Choices run deep.  And yes, choices are both constrained and fluid–just like our bodies.

Post script: Ultimately, the terms set forward in the public debate about this subject–biology versus “choice”–are quite limited, mainly because “choice” is not the most useful term for describing all of the possibilities that sit apart from biology.  Several social, cultural, and structural factors can shape our embodied desires and erotic possibilities.  The fact that these factors are not physiological in origin does not mean that they aren’t coercive or subjectifying, resulting in a real or perceived condition of fixity or “no choice.”  We know that social factors also become embodied over time.  And yet, I remain somewhat committed to the concept of “choice”–or something like it–to describe the possibility of a critical and reflexive relationship to our sexual desires. Personally, the idea that I don’t have control over who or what I desire is a big turn-off to me, so I am constantly pushing back on what feel like the limits of my own desires. For instance, I went through a period of pushing myself to date femmes because I had some good reasons for being suspicious about why I had ruled them out from my dating pool. When it felt like I could never be nonmonogamous, I made it a goal to at least try. Then when I realized I only really felt attracted to alcoholic rebels, I nipped that in the bud too. Just when I thought I’d never think hairy men were hot, I allowed myself to face my attraction to Javier Bardem.  When my tastes and proclivities start to feel like they are solidifying, I get suspicious and disappointed. So, in the interests of full disclosure, I am writing from the perspective of someone who finds sexual fixity pretty uninteresting, and who believes that there are really good feminist and queer reasons to take regular, critical inventory of the parts of our sexuality that we believe we cannot or will not change.

Gallup recently published results from a new question garnering a nationally representative sample of more than 120,000 Americans: “Do you, personally, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender?”  The results come out of interviews conducted in 2012 and confirm recent estimates by demographer Gary Gates on the size of the LGBT population in the U.S.  Combining data from a range of surveys, Gates suggested that approximately 3.5% of the adult population in the U.S. identifies as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, and an additional 0.3% identifies as transgendered.  The Gallup poll also found that around 3.5% of the U.S. adult population says “yes” when asked whether they “identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.”

These findings are interesting and important for a number of reasons.  One issue that they bring up is simply the issue of actually measuring sexuality.*  It’s harder than you might assume.  For instance, Gallup asks how people identify themselves.  Questions about sexual identification produce some of the lowest percentage of LGBT responses on surveys.  Asking questions about  sexual desires and behaviors produces higher percentages.  Questions about same-sex attraction have found that as much as 11% of the U.S. population can be classified as LGB.  Similarly, questions concerning same-sex behaviors have produced numbers as high as 8.8% of the U.S. population.  This doesn’t mean that the Gallup findings are unimportant; it means that we need to recognize that sexuality is more dynamic that we might initially assume.

Subsequently, Gallup released a report documenting the relative prevalence of LGBT individuals throughout the U.S.  Simply put, LGBT individuals are not uniformly distributed throughout the country.  Some places have relatively high numbers, while other have lower numbers.  Gallup chose to break this down by state.  The state with the highest proportion is not actually a state at all; it’s a federal district—the District of Columbia (10%).  The state with the lowest proportion of “yes’s” to the question was North Dakota (1.7%).

It’s an interesting commentary on the geography of sexuality.  I’ve decided that the report is less meaningful than it might initially appear.  A break-down by population density within states would be much more interesting.  This is one of the reasons that Washington D.C. (at 10%) appears to be a bit of an outlier in the report.  The next closest state is Hawaii, with 5.1%.  D.C. is a city, and cities have more LGBT individuals.  So, it would be more meaningful to compare D.C. with Los Angeles, Chicago, and Atlanta than with Nebraska, Wyoming, and Arkansas.  This is why Edward Laumann, John Gagnon, Robert Michael, and Stuart Michaels (1994) included questions about the “level of urbanization of current and adolescent place of residence” in their survey of sexual practices, identities, and desires (here).

One of the more interesting features of the distribution of same-gender sexuality by type of place is that it helps explain some of the disbelief expressed by members of the gay community in response to recent estimates of the prevalence of homosexuality…  [O]ur data indicate that about 9 percent of eighteen- to forty-nine-year-old men living in the largest cities in the United States currently identify as either homosexual or bisexual; a higher proportion (14 percent) have had male sex partners in the last five years; and an even higher proportion report some level of sexual attraction to other men (about 16 percent). (here: 307)

They’re only talking about men here (and are also not discussing transgendered individuals), but their interest in population density is significant.  The same issue occurs when we visualize states as either “red” or “blue” in elections.  This simple fact disguises the diversity of red and blue spaces within each state.  Physicist Mark Newman presents a variety of ways of visualizing election results that illustrate the choices that go into deciding both what is meaningful in the data and how to present it to highlight the meaning.  Thus, just as an example, Newman illustrates the ways that state-level visualizations of election results actually hide a lot of meaningful data that might cause us to think very differently about how people in the U.S. are voting.  Imagine a similar map for proportions of LGBT individuals throughout the U.S.  It makes the state-level analysis seem a lot less meaningful.

Laumann and colleagues came up with two explanations to account for the larger proportion of same-gender sexual practices, interest and identifications among people in larger cities.  The first, they call the migration model.  This is simply that “People interested in sex with people of their own gender move to more congenial social environments” (here: 308).  In a sort of anti-diaspora, the migration model suggests that LGBT individuals may have to migrate to places unknown to find “home.”  This is consistent with a good deal of scholarship, and bears out work like Kath Weston’s “Get Thee to a City.”

The other explanation Laumann, et al. offer they call the elicitation/opportunity model.  Rather than moving to social spaces with larger proportions of LGBT individuals (migration model), this model suggests that there might be something about growing up in these environments that might affect their sexualities.  So, rather than asking whether LGBT people are moving to cities, they’re asking the extent to which cities might play a role in causing people to identify as LGBT.  They measured it by asking about the level of urbanization for both current residence and residence while growing up (something respondents likely had less control over).  This is consistent in some ways with John D’Emilio’s historicization of the emergence of gay identity in the U.S. as structurally enabled by industrialization.  As men were pulled into increasingly homosocial environments, homosexual behavior was simply more possible.  This is also what might account for the “situational homosexuality” that we see in prisons or when men have gone to war.

Laumann, et al. found that the elicitation/opportunity model had more explanatory power for men than for women.  They suggested that this might imply that “homosexuality among men and women in the United States may be socially organized quite differently” (309).  Perhaps we could learn more about this if we present and analyze Gallup’s new data a bit differently.  The presentation of the data at the level of state is interesting, but I’d be much more interested in seeing the data presented by population density within states.  How about you?

[See also: Comments to the post on Inequality by (Interior) Design were really interesting and deserve more attention.  See the comments to that post here.]

_________________________

*I’m going to primarily discuss the findings with respect to sexuality.  Gallup grouped transgender responses in with the LGB responses which is unfortunate.  Gallup’s findings also don’t enable us to distinguish between those identifying as lesbian and gay and those identifying as bisexual.

The American Sociological Association just filed an amicus brief in the same-sex marriage cases at the Supreme Court presenting the strong social science consensus that children of same-sex couples fare just as well as children of opposite-sex couples. This brief hasn’t received much attention in the mainstream press, but it has been mentioned in at least some of the blogosphere (see here, here, and here). I’m going to summarize the main points from the brief, then I will praise the brief for focusing on family stability instead of marriage, and finally I’m going to argue that this brief exemplifies the role that the ASA should play at the Supreme Court.

Summarizing the Brief

The amicus brief has two main sections. In the first section, it presents the scholarly consensus that “children of same-sex parents fare just as well as children of opposite-sex parents.” In the second section, it specifically responds to studies claimed to undermine this consensus. In particular, the brief details the methodological flaws and limitations of the Regenerus study that the anti-same-sex marriage side has heavily cited.

The brief starts out by presenting the “numerous nationally representative, credible, and methodologically sound social science studies [that] form the basis of this consensus.” It goes into detail on how these studies reveal no differences across several important measures, including “academic performance, cognitive development, social development, psychological health, early sexual activity, and substance abuse.” In very accessible language, the brief highlights the methodological strengths of various studies. Implicit in this discussion is the special authority of the ASA and its members in judging the methodological soundness of sociological research. The brief emphasizes that findings on child welfare are consistent across multiple areas. It also notes that, as a legal matter, the research presented in the brief is consistent with what experts presented at the trial level and the conclusions in the lower court opinions.

In the second section, the brief directly addresses the studies that opponents of same-sex marriage cite as support for claims that children fare better with opposite-sex parents. The brief carefully illustrates how these studies do not address same-sex parents. The ASA brief also argues that opponents of same-sex marriage mischaracterize the results of the studies. In particular, the brief includes a detailed discussion of the methodological flaws and weaknesses in the study by Mark Regnerus (himself a sociologist).

As explained in the ASA brief, the Regnerus study is heavily cited for the idea that children of opposite-sex couples fare better than children of same-sex couples. The study “examines children who… had a parent who at any time had a same-sex romantic relationship.” The vast majority of these children were not raised by stable same-sex couples. Instead, most of these were children of divorced opposite-sex couples where one parent later had a same-sex relationship of any duration. In many cases, the child did not even live with the parent in a same-sex relationship. Regnerus compared this group to children raised by married opposite-sex couples. The ASA brief powerfully makes the claim that Regnerus’s results only point to the importance of family stability and have no implications for same-sex parenting: ”If any conclusion can be reached from Regnerus’s study, it is that family stability is predictive of child wellbeing.”

The brief then explains how anti-same-sex marriage groups mischaracterize other research involving single parents, divorced parents, step-parents, and adoptive parents. As with the Regnerus study, this other research shows how family stability matters to child outcomes but does not have implications for same-sex parenting. In fact, as the ASA brief notes, the authors of some of this other research have rejected the ways that anti-same-sex marriage groups have tried to use it.

How the Brief Avoids Privileging Marriage

Advocates for same-sex marriage frequently argue that the children of same-sex couples are hurt by laws prohibiting same-sex marriage. Same-sex marriage becomes the only solution to promote the welfare of children of same-sex couples. In this formulation, marriage and married couples become privileged over any other family form (see Nancy Polikoff for a great discussion of the problems with privileging marriage). Scholars from various disciplines argue that this leads to a failure to consider how state and social support matters to families that do not fit the two-parent married-couple model.

I was happy to see that ASA’s brief avoided this privileging of marriage. A few sentences (in a long brief) do suggest this idea of marriage as the solution. For example: “To the extent some of the studies cited by BLAG and the Proposition 8 Proponents show that stability improves child outcomes, they confirm that marriage rights for same-sex couples and the federal recognition of such marriages are likely to improve the wellbeing of children of same-sex parents by providing enhanced family stability;” ”Extending this logic to the context of same-sex couples and their children, recognition of marriage rights of such couples could improve, not impair, the wellbeing of children being raised by currently unmarried same-sex parents” (Emphasis added). Even here, the language is careful. Marriage could contribute to the well-being of same-sex children, but it is not privileged as the only solution or the necessary goal.

Outside of these few sentences, the body of the brief forcefully argues that family stability is the key concern. The brief carefully avoids privileging marriage as the source of this stability: ”In sum, as the overwhelming body of social science research confirms, whether a child is raised by same-sex or opposite-sex parents has no bearing on a child’s well being. Instead, the consensus is that the key factors affecting child wellbeing are stable family environments and greater parental socioeconomic resources, neither of which is related to the sex or sexual orientation of a child’s parents.” The brief ”demonstrat[es] that children of residentially stable same-sex parents are as likely to make normal progress through school as children from stable opposite-sex married parents.”

This is true even when the brief explains why studies that compare divorced or single parents to married opposite-sex parents have no bearing on same-sex parents. The brief explains that “the studies confirm that parental stability and higher parental socioeconomic resources are the key drivers of positive child outcomes.” It would be easy to treat marriage as the explanatory factor for why married opposite-sex parents fare better than single parents, using that to argue for same-sex marriage. But the brief instead explains that parental stability is the key factor. By insistently focusing on family stability instead of marriage as the predictor for positive child outcomes, the brief avoids privileging marriage.

As a scholar who has worked on the power of law to legitimize and privilege marriage above other family forms, I particularly appreciated this care in not privileging marriage.

This Brief Exemplifies the Role That ASA Should Play

While ASA does not frequently file amicus briefs at the Supreme Court, this is not the first time that it has done so. The last time (that I’m aware of) that ASA submitted an amicus brief was in 2011, in the Wal-Mart v. Dukes case. In the Dukes case, William Bielby (past president of ASA) presented expert testimony on how Wal-Mart’s managerial culture may have led to a consistent pattern of gender discrimination in employment. ASA’s amicus brief specifically did not take sides on Bielby’s substantive argument, instead defending the scientific legitimacy of his methods (Nielsen et al. 2011). The debate surrounding that brief raises useful issues to think about how ASA should be involved at the Supreme Court.

One of ASA’s key roles is defending and promoting sociology as a discipline. By filing an amicus brief at the Supreme Court, ASA puts its imprimatur on a set of scientific claims as legitimate. While different parties disagreed over how ASA’s Dukes brief presented the scholarly literature, they did agree that ASA could play a key role in certifying to the court the state of scientific knowledge in a field (Nielsen et al. 2011, see also other articles in that same special issue of Sociological Methods and Research). The same-sex marriage brief is a model for this goal of presenting the state of scientific research. The brief reflects an extensive review of the relevant literature. It includes key discussions of methodology, laying out in layman’s terms why the methods used in particular studies are important. The brief takes the time to describe the process of developing scientific consensus around how parenting impacts children. Instead of making more aggressive normative claims about how children should be raised or how same-sex parents are good for children, the brief is limited to the very modest claim that no evidence shows that children of same-sex parents fare any worse than children of opposite-sex parents.

One of the key questions that came up in debate over the ASA’s Dukes brief was over the strength of the causal claims. Opponents of the brief claimed that even if Bielby accurately described the literature on employment discrimination, he had insufficient data to determine what happened at Wal-Mart. The ASA’s brief, however, only defended the applicability of sociological methods to individual case studies, not Bielby’s specific substantive arguments. Likewise, in the marriage cases at hand, the ASA brief does not make any causal claims about Proposition 8 or DOMA. The brief is limited to presenting the scholarly consensus that children of same-sex parents fare no worse than children of opposite-sex parents. From there, many advocates jump to the argument that Proposition 8 and DOMA are harmful to children of same-sex parents. But the ASA brief is far more measured. In a couple places it offers a qualified suggestion that marriage may promote the family stability that benefits children. But the bulk of the brief specifically does not engage with what impact, if any, Prop 8 or DOMA has had on families.

Perhaps the most contentious issue in the ASA brief is the strong direct refutation of the conclusions that the supporters of Prop 8 draw from the Regnerus study. Can a professional association present a scholarly consensus when at least one of its own members argues against that consensus? There might never be complete unanimity on any scholarly point. But as Nielsen et al (2011) so eloquently explain: ”What does this mean for disciplinary associations like the ASA? It could mean abstention from the public sphere; because sociologists disagree, their collective representative cannot speak to these debates. But this solution comes with a major consequence. If the ASA does not represent our discipline, someone else will.”

Judges and courts are going to use social science evidence, whether we participate in court or not. Various studies suggest that judges actually do try to apply the relevant scientific standards to evidence presented in court. Judges want to know if evidence holds up to the standards of its discipline. They look for markers of acceptance in the scholarly community. ASA (and other professional academic organizations) can play a key role in providing this evidence. ASA’s brief in this case carefully detailed the numerous studies that went into producing a scholarly consensus. The brief particularly emphasized the methodological standards involved. It carefully explained the methodological flaws in Regnerus’s study, but even then the brief only claimed that the study did not support the results claimed of it. The brief was careful to provide the justices with the tools to evaluate the scientific knowledge for themselves. The brief uses strong, clear language to “[state] our findings in ways that are relevant to the questions before the court” (Nielsen et al 2011).

Without the ASA brief in this case, the Regnerus study would have stood for the voice of sociology. Thus the choice of whether to file a brief was not made in a vacuum. The choice was to stand up for disciplinary standards and methodological rigor. The choice was to identify what criteria sociologists agree on in studying same-sex parents. The choice was to defend the role of our discipline in the public sphere. And I’m glad that ASA filed the brief that it did.

References

Nielsen, Laura Beth, Amy Myrick, and Jill Weinberg. 2011. “Siding with Science: In Defense of ASA’s Dukes v. Wal-Mart Amicus Brief.” Sociological Methods and Research 40(4):646-67.

Polikoff, Nancy D. 2008. Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families Under the Law. Boston: Beacon Press.

Apps like Grindr have really changed the ways gay men can interact in public.  I’ve heard Grindr described in different ways, but it—and apps like it—are often talked about as “gay GPS.”  They’ll tell you, based on your current location, who in your vicinity is also on the App.  As with Myspace, Facebook and other social networking sites, Grindr became popular among a diverse group of gay, bi, and curious men, prompting some groups to remain, while others migrate to different digital spaces.  The most recent I saw marketed is Distinc.tt which is clearly being marketed as a space for those looking for a gay digital space devoid of what are framed at Distinc.tt as the less savory elements of Grindr culture.

As they put it, Distinc.tt is “prettier and less sketchy.”  Organizing themselves around more than just Grindr’s “who, specifically around me is gay” approach, Distinc.tt also tells users about where local “hot spots” are (locations with a critical mass of Distinc.tt users).  So, while Grindr’s ploy has been to market the sheer volume of users it has, Distinc.tt is framed in a way that suggests fewer users–a smaller, elite collection of the “right” kind of gay men.

How these apps are marketed (i.e., who they’re “intended to be used by,” who they’re hoping to dissuade from use, and precisely what the app states as it’s intended use) illustrates racialized, classed, and gender-presentational tensions and dynamics at work in organizing gay men’s public erotic lives.  Distinc.tt (left) doesn’t state this explicitly, but it seems intended to be used by a more economically and culturally elite group of (primarily) white, young, gay men.  Conversely, Grindr (right) is presented as more of a free-for-all of younger gay men of all different races and classes.

Adam Isaiah Green’s theorization of sexual fields and erotic capital is a great analytical tool to discuss these social spaces that occupy that fuzzy terrain between the digital and physical.  “Sexual fields” refer to spaces within which a specific set of “erotic capital” are understood to have purchase.  Green defines erotic capital in this way: “the quality and quantity of attributes that an individual possesses, which elicit an erotic response in another” (here: 29).  So, a constellation of physical, emotional, sensual, and aesthetic elements of identity are at play in this definition.  Yet, like Bourdieu’s conceptualization of cultural capital—and similar to my theorization of gender capital—how much erotic capital one has depends on the field one occupies.  Green conceptualizes sexual fields—within Bourdieu’s theoretical framing of “fields”—as “semiautonomous arenas” (here: 26).  By this he is arguing that they are the social spaces defined by the erotic capital understood to have purchase.

So, gay bars organized around sexual fields make sense because they provide physical locations within which one can be reasonably aware of one’s relative desirability.  Thus, sexual fields are best thought of as “semiautonomous” because they are organized by the erotic capital of individuals within them.  So, within Green’s framework, a bar that caters to different groups of clientele that exalt, seek out, and perceive erotic capital in different ways at different times of the day can be understood as a different sexual field depending upon what time you happen to show up.

Some social spaces are primarily organized by an erotic capital everyone recognizes, while many spaces we occupy involve overlapping sexual fields whose erotic capital might be dramatically at odds.  In effect, Grindr clumps “gay men” together as a homogenous group, asking those who join to digitally join a single sexual field.  Yet, designers neglect to recognize here that gay men are not all a part of one single, homogeneous sexual field—as Green’s research shows.

Sexual fields are organized hierarchically, with what Green refers to as “tiers of desirability.”  The higher in the hierarchy you are, the more power you have over sexual status and contact.  Yet, Grindr ignores this, clumping together anyone willing to sign up.  It is primarily for this reason that competing apps have emerged in the market—as a way to digitize sexual fields that select groups of gay men might want to occupy.  And, just as significantly, their creation illustrates a desire to digitally segregate themselves from “other” groups.  Grindr allows some of this as well, yet users have to be a bit more proactive—and the interface subtly suggests that erotic capital is almost solely organized around physical attractiveness.  Surely, this is a significant factor, but sexual fields exist in which interest in and proficiency with certain kinds of sexual acts can function as a reliable source of erotic capital (e.g., “cuddling” in Bear culture and a variety of acts and interests in leather culture).

The few scholars I’ve talked with or heard talk about Grindr who are interested in not only the fact that gay men are using it, but also how they are using it.  The ability to “block” certain people (making oneself digitally invisible to others) allows users the ability to digitally screen a social venue for interactions one might like to avoid.  But, in some ways, it exacerbates existing systems of inequality, and forces people to acknowledge the various “-isms” that structure sexual fields: racism, ableism, athleticism, classism (so far as this is made visible), etc.  More than one scholar I’ve talked to have mentioned the ways that some (primarily white) men make use of the app involves selectively “blocking” anyone not white from interaction when entering a given venue.  In some ways, apps like Distinc.tt could be seen as stepping in to potentially help gay men avoid the self-evaluation that might accompany ritualistically “blocking” non-white people.

It’s also of interest to sociologists because social networking like this is—technically—publicly available “data,” from a social scientific perspective.  But, should there be some kind of checks and balances on scholars attempting to use apps like this to study groups of gay men?  Or, are some ways of using the app okay, while others might be breaching people’s trust and sense of relative anonymity and security on the app?

Apps like Grindr and Distinc.tt allow gay men to locate one another in space–digitally removing the necessity of things like “gaydar” in some social spaces.  Men can send each other messages, “block” others from seeing or contacting them, and digitally interact before they decide whether or not and how to physically or emotionally interact.  But they also seem to rely on a superficial understanding of all that Green shows is at stake in erotic capital—forcing users to use physical appearance as the only source of erotic capital, or at the very least as a proxy for other forms.  This is not to deny that physique plays a critical (perhaps the critical) role in structuring many sexual fields, but to highlight the fact that reducing erotic capital to physical appearance might take an unacknowledged digital toll on the social organization of intimate life.

–

Tristan Bridges is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at the College at Brockport, State University of New York.  His research considers the many ways that men think about, reproduce, and resist gender and sexual inequality.  He is currently investigating the historical roots of “man caves” in heterosexual couple households and examining the ways that men and women make sense of these spaces in their homes.  Tristan blogs on issues related to gender and sexual inequality and space at Inequality by (Interior) Design.

(@tristanbphd)

This op-ed contrasted wildly with the continuing saga of events in my own neighborhood. Last summer, following some isolated violence in Chicago’s Boystown neighborhood, a group calling itself “Take Back Boystown” formed. This group attributed the violence to the increased presence of queer youth of color in Boystown. Many of these youth come to Boystown from the South side of Chicago and other parts of the city, because they feel safer in Boystown and local organizations in Boystown offer services to support these youth. Having no where else to go, these youth often congregate on the sidewalks and in parking lots. “Take Back Boystown” describes the youth as menacing and intimidating, claiming they do not belong in the neighborhood. This group has called for increased police patrols in Boystown, to help clear the parking lots and sidewalks and keep residents safe. Most recently, the Northalsted Business Association (a business association for businesses in Boystown) responded to this pressure by hiring private security guards, a move applauded by Take Back Boystown.

As I kept thinking about these examples, I focused on how differently they seemed to define the boundaries of the LGBT community. The poor homeless youth despised by some in Boystown are clearly drawn into the expansive understanding of community suggested in the op-ed by NCLR. To suggest that we need to “take back” Boystown excludes these youth from the community. And so I was thinking about intersectionality, asking what does this tell us about processes of secondary marginalization (Cohen 1999). And these two examples do raise a lot of important questions about how intersectionality does or does not work. But a lot of queer bloggers in Chicago have already roundly criticized much of what Take Back Boystown has done (here and here for examples). So then what I want to talk about is how these examples explicitly and implicitly mobilize very different understandings of the past.

The Stonewall Riots of June, 1969 are typically commemorated as the beginning of the modern LGBT movement (Armstrong and Crage 2006 discuss why Stonewall is commemorated instead of other, earlier events). In these riots, queer people fought back against the frequent police raids on gay bars in New York City. Activists in San Francisco similarly fought back against police harassment and bar raids, including at Compton’s Cafeteria in 1966 (Armstrong and Crage discuss some of these events). The work done by Harvey Milk, celebrated in the NCLR op-ed, was in response to this history of police violence. Modern Gay Pride Parades are the continuation of the early commemorations of Stonewall. But while the early marches celebrated the willingness of LGBT people to fight back against the police and the state, today’s parades are often organized in conjunction with and depend upon the police.

How did we get here? And how do our commemoration practices matter to how we think about the present-day problems facing LGBTQ people? Various scholars and activists have compared the LGBT community to ethnic minorities, suggesting that unlike ethnic minorities, LGBT people cannot count on learning about “their” past from their families (e.g., Epstein 1987 for an academic discussion, here for a recent example from the blogosphere). But it’s too easy to just say that NCLR is remembering a history that Take Back Boystown forgets. Collective memory scholars describe how we actively construct past memories and attribute meaning to them. Both groups, then, are engaged in a present-day process of constructing the past.

Eviatar Zerubavel (1997) describes how we construct a set of interpretive schemata as we make sense of past events. These schemata define different types of events and include their various characteristics. We use these schemata as we construct memories of the past. “Police violence” and “protester riots” invoke different understandings of the same events, influencing how we think about their meaning.

So then one way of thinking about this difference between the events in San Francisco and Chicago is to ask how these groups invoke different schemata and how this influences their conclusions. The development of hate crime legislation is particularly important to describing these different schemata. Hate crime laws institutionalize a way of thinking about anti-LGBT violence as located outside the state. LGBT advocates used narratives of anti-LGBT violence in arguing for the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity in hate crime laws (Jenness and Grattet 2004). In the process, these advocates simultaneously obscured how the police target marginalized people, including queer people (Mogul, Ritchie, and Whitlock 2011). They forgot the history of anti-LGBT police violence. While the Tack Back Boystown group did not directly describe the violence as “hate crimes,” these laws almost surely provided a model. Following the hate crimes script, Take Back emphasized how LGBT people were unsafe, how they were victimized. The violence was not directly described as based on hate, but the idea of outsiders coming into the community was emphasized.

This insight points to the importance of thinking about how we choose schemata as we construct the past. Different assumptions about the role of the police follow from the different schemata we might employ. The different schemata used by NCLR and Take Back Boystown have critical implications for how we describe the boundaries of the queer community, how we describe the problem, and how we think about solutions. Even while remembering the same set of events, by using different schemata, different groups can draw very different meaning from those events. The hate crime schemata demands clear “victims” and “aggressors,” walling the LGBT community off from others. The “police surveillance” script instead connects LGBT people to other communities targeted by police practices.

But perhaps an even more interesting insight comes when we think about the social construction of past time periods. While we may think about the past in terms of different time periods or eras, past events do not really draw these sorts of clear lines (Zerubavel 2003). Instead, we socially construct the meaning of the past, defining when one era ends and another begins (id.). We tend to assume that events in an era “belong” together. An event at the end of one era may be very close in time to an event at the beginning of the next era, but we classify them as separate.

What does this mean for how we think about LGBT history? In his book, The World Turned, historian John D’Emilio writes that in the 1990s “A group of people long considered a moral menace and an issue previously deemed unmentionable in public discourse were transformed into a matter of human rights, discussed in every institution of American society . . . During the 1990s, the world seemed finally to turn and take notice of the gay people in its midst” (2002). Hate crimes legislation was one piece of this broader change.

And so today, for many young LGBT people, the relevant history is the past decade. Sure, the state repressed LGBT people. But that was in the past. Not today. Not now. And so that past is lost as a point of comparison. It’s in a different era. Surely “Take Back” does not refer to taking back the early days of pride parades in Chicago, when very small numbers marched through present-day Boystown. When few LGBT friendly businesses existed. When LGBT people avoided contact with the police. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that the iconic rainbow pillars were installed on Halsted Street, down the main through-fare of present-day Boystown. So then “Take Back” refers to a much more recent past. It uses a narrative of a past when LGBT nightlife thrived, out in the open, on the streets, carefree and celebratory. The possibility of anti-LGBT police violence does not exist in this narrative. That was then, this is now.

The NCLR op-ed refuses this periodization of the past. It says sure, things are better for some LGBT people. But we still face problems of police surveillance, of police intimidation. We still need to be vigilant. The NCLR op-ed doesn’t only draw a distant historical lesson. It describes the past as part of the same era as the present, it connects events together. The NCLR op-ed says even if police raids of gay bars and police surveillance of (some) LGBT people are not common anymore, we are not past the era where we have to be concerned with police practices in relationship to the lives and security of LGBT people.

Divergent understandings of police protection are not only about how we understand the relationship between LGBT people and the police today. They are also about how we understand the past. Both of these examples are rooted in longer histories, in longer practices of commemoration. To really understand these divergent responses, we would have to study how these groups have told different narratives of the past over time, and how they have used those narratives of the past to construct themselves in the present.

References

Armstrong, Elizabeth A., and Suzanna M. Crage. 2006. “Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth.” American Sociological Review 71(5): 724-51.

Cohen, Cathy J. 1999. The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

D’Emilio, John. 2002. The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Epstein, Steven. 1987. “Gay Politics, Ethnic Identity: The Limits of Social Constructionism.” Socialist Review 93/94:9-56.

Jenness, Valerie, and Ryken Grattet. 2004. Making Hate a Crime: From Social Movement to Law Enforcement. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Mogul, Joey L., Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock. 2011. Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. Boston: Beacon Press.

Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1997. Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Zerubavel, Eviatar. 2003. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

2012 has been a big year for the ex-gay movement so far. In May, Columbia psychiatrist Robert Spitzer recanted his infamous study on therapeutic interventions into sexual orientation. Before the study Spitzer was known for his role in eliminating homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the official guidebook to recognized mental illnesses. Thirty years later he authored a highly controversial study that affirmed the possibility of changing sexual orientation through therapeutic means, a study based on participants recruited from ex-gay ministries by leaders at Exodus International. Spitzer had been wavering on his study for some time, issuing statements opposing the way in which Christian right organizations used his work to fight against gay rights legislation. But this year he renounced it altogether, issuing an apology to the gay community for the harm his work had caused. Later in May the California senate passed a bill outlawing the practice of reparative therapy—therapy aimed at changing sexual orientation—with minors, a move that enraged the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, an organization of reparative therapists and long-time Exodus International ally.

And in a June interview for The Atlantic, Exodus International president Alan Chambers said that his organization was no longer aiming to cure homosexuals of their sexual orientation. “In the past,” he said, “we’ve been aligned with organizations that believe feelings can completely change, temptations can completely go away. We now believe that’s an unrealistic and unhealthy expectation that can cause a lot of damage.” The pronouncement has led many observers, including myself, to scratch their heads in wonder at what, exactly, such a statement means for Exodus itself, for ex- and anti- gay politics, and for the people that find their way to Exodus ministries.

In this piece I want to think about one aspect of the changes in afoot Exodus: the movement away from therapeutic language and toward re-emphasizing religious language. This shift is an interesting one given the complicated history evangelicals have had with therapeutic culture. But I focus on it here because it both reflects discursive changes in how Exodus frames the issue of homosexuality and impacts the political realignments that are happening in tandem with this reframing. Discourse and politics, of course, go hand in hand, and I’m not making an argument about causality—the evidence for it isn’t in yet. But I do want to sketch some thoughts about what a shift away from the therapeutic might mean for Exodus, the ideological frameworks its members work within, and the political alliances it has developed and is now changing.

The shift in Exodus’s discourse that has received the most attention is that mentioned above: that Exodus is no longer trying to effect whole scale change in sexual orientation in its members. But this move is embedded in a larger shift away from therapeutic language and a re-emphasis on religious language in framing of homosexuality and Exodus’s relationship to it. One example is Chambers’ statement that Exodus is “not a scientific or psychological organization” but a “discipleship ministry.” Another is his comment in the Atlantic interview that “by no means does being part of Exodus mean we don’t still struggle or feel tempted. It’s a very real part of the lives we lead. Our goal isn’t to snap our fingers and present those struggles don’t exist. But we have a conviction that same-sex sexual expression is incompatible with a healthy Christianity sexual ethic. It’s not that we don’t have attractions. It’s just that we have a priority higher than our sexual orientation.” In both cases, Chambers is refocusing the organization on its religious purposes and away from its therapeutic ones.

This shift away from therapeutic language has a number of uses for Exodus. First, if change is not what the organization is saying it’s trying to accomplish it, it need not be the measure of its success. Ex-gay ministries have certainly gotten in trouble with their over-confidence that science and psychology would vindicate their theology on homosexuality. Thus their over-reach in claiming that change – literal change in sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual – is possible. Backing off from the language, and thus the expectation, of change has the potential to give them space from critics who focus on achieving change in sexual orientation as the sole measure of the organization’s value, success, or menace. And from the frustration of members who wait for change for years.

It also reflects a growing critique of, and potential distance from, therapeutic culture that I observed when I researched Exodus in 2005-2007. Evangelical culture has been deeply influenced by the therapeutic turn in American culture and ex-gay ministries’ appropriation of reparative and other therapeutic interventions have exemplified this influence. Reparative therapy was marked by a personal search, with the assistance of a therapist or a small group, for the underlying childhood experience that would explain a person’s homosexuality. Many of the Exodus members I spoke with took great pains to explain to me how their early childhood experiences explained their sexual orientation in ways that fit into reparative therapy’s narrative frame of how homosexuality develops.

But there were always others who were frustrated in their attempt to make their life stories fit the reparative therapy models: people who remembered happy families, who weren’t sexually abused, who didn’t experience questions about their gender identities, or whose experience otherwise contradicted the reparative model. Former Exodus president Bob Davies, for example, wrote: “I’ve never really understand [sic] why I grew up to struggle with same-sex attractions. I grew up in an intact Christian family. My family attended church every Sunday. My parent’s marriage was stable and loving. I have many happy memories of my childhood.” (Exodus Impact, March 2006). People I spoke with whose stories didn’t align with the dominant therapeutic narrative felt frustrated, either by an inability to remember the “smoking gun” that might have caused their sexual orientation or by the organizational imperative to keep looking for one. Shifting the frame for understanding homosexuality away from the therapeutic will make a space for those whose stories don’t fit that frame and save many others a great deal of time and frustration in their pursuit of such causal factors.

Another critique of therapeutic culture that is part of this shift can be seen in Chambers’ statement that “I found the greatest amount of freedom when I stopped focusing on my sin and struggles and started focusing on the grace and peace found only in Christ and the man He created me to be. This life isn’t most about sin management but about living daily as the sons and daughters of God. In part, it is the peace and rest found in that identity alone that transforms us daily.” Therapeutic practices, in this view, are concerning because they lead to an over-emphasis on sin and an under-emphasis on anything else. In other words, it makes people who are “struggling” to “overcome” homosexuality focus too much on homosexuality and not enough on God.

Note the particular phrasing of “in that identity alone.” This reflects another re-emphasis that the move away from therapeutic discourse will allow. It’s been reported that Exodus leaders have been deeply influenced by Christian anthropologist Janelle Williams Paris’ book The End of Sexual Identity (Pedagogical note: This would make a fascinating contribution to a queer theory syllabus). In it, she argues (in a decidedly queerish fashion that I’ve explored elsewhere in relation to the ex-gay movement) that Christians should abandon sexual identity categories in favor of finding identity in Christ. The therapeutic over-emphasis on sin runs the risk of crystallizing sexual identity categories that Exodus, for many reasons, finds useful to disrupt. Re-focusing on the theological allows Exodus to retrain its members on the one identity they think really matters: Christian.

Finally, the move away from the therapeutic both justifies and allows increased distance between Exodus and some of its more therapeutically oriented allies. The ex-gay movement has been a tenuous coalition of different kinds of organizations that found common cause in theological conservativism, therapeutic intervention into homosexuality, and political opposition to gay rights. It seems that the changes in Exodus reflects, at least in part, the fraying of that coalition and the realignment of its constituents. The most obvious example is NARTH. The two organizations at one time had a close relationship, with NARTH board member Joseph Nicolosi speaking regularly at Exodus events and the Exodus bookstore stocked with items on reparative therapy. But that relationship has been changing since Exodus stopped working with Nicolosi and purged its bookstore. Now the NARTH website features an interview done by Nicolosi with Andy Comiskey, an outspoken critic of the changes at Exodus and leader of Desert Stream Ministries which defected from the Exodus fold.

The more significant ally that Exodus has been changing its relationship with is Focus on the Family, an organization that exemplifies the overlap of therapeutic culture, evangelical Christianity and conservative politics. Strong allies in the late 90s and aughts, Focus and Exodus have been moving apart in more recent years. This alliance and its demise is dissertation material and can’t be recounted adequately here. But moving away from Focus does allow a certain distance both from its therapeutic focus and its political imperatives.

The driving forces behind these shifts are unclear and will take some time to understand, but there are a few we can surmise. The first is the impact of the recession and the need for fundraising. Exodus has been in a financial crisis for the last few years and Ex-Gay Watch has reported that it has considered anything and everything in its quest for financial survival. The second is time and its corrosive effect on claims for change. The longer people are involved in Exodus ministries, the longer they see that change doesn’t happen and the more that discredits the organization. If the claim to scientific and therapeutic legitimacy continued to be made, the organization would be increasingly accountable to evaluation on those terms, which clearly would not be favorable to them. The third is a changing wider culture. The increased acceptance of gays and lesbians in American culture  makes organizations like Exodus look like the bad guys. And, whatever else you might say about them, Exodus does not like to appear old, stodgy and reactionary. A fourth is the conversation with critics, both from the evangelical world and the gay world. These include former reparative therapists who maintain their Christian commitments but have come to question their professional practices, former Exodus members and their allies who work diligently to hold the organization accountable for its practices, and other critics who have managed to keep some thread of conversation open.

*****

Lynne Gerber is a scholar in residence at the Beatrice Bain Research Group, University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of  Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America, which looks at two Christian efforts to discipline wayward desires and tame unruly bodies: Christian weight loss programs and “ex-gay” ministries.

The Method

As others have pointed out, we actually don’t learn anything about gay and lesbian parents from this study.  While Regnerus asks “Do the children of gay and lesbian parents look comparable to those of their heterosexual counterparts?” he cannot answer that question. We don’t know if there are any gay or lesbian parents in the study.  All we know is that 236 adult respondents said that they had knowledge that one of their parents having a same sex relationship before the child was 18 (Heck, what Regnerus could be measuring is the effect of knowing intimate and personal information about one’s parents…).  We don’t know if their parents identified as gay or straight nor do we know anything about those respondents who had no idea of their parents’ sexual or romantic lives.  Regnerus refuse that to engage in any sort of discussion about the arbitrary nature of classifying sexual identities by appealing to “brevity.”  This brevity allows him to then make claims on categories he essentially (pun intended) created.

It is clear to us that this instrument (http://www.prc.utexas.edu/nfss/) was not designed to speak to issues of sexual identity or orientation in a thoughtful manner—a manner that understands the nuances between issues of identities and behavior, along with the structural constraints and discriminatory climate in which queer families actually live. There seem to be few controls set in place to minimize this leap—within the survey design and the analysis. Regarding the actual analysis, the matrix that Regnerus has employed to compare across family types is quite complex, yet has few controls (especially at the structural level) relative to its complexity.  With this study we are unable to disentangle outcomes from issues of sexual orientation, divorce, or from being in a single parent household.  Indirectly, we could be seeing different outcomes based on a number of structural issues including but not limited to the benefits of marriage, resources associated with two-parent households, issues of discrimination and family social support, and how children come to being in the home—biologically or otherwise.

Meanwhile, scholars like Gary Gates and Lee Badgett at the Williams Institute have spent decades developing and advocating for more rigorous methods of measuring sexual orientation and diverse family forms on surveys. A $785,000 project designed to study exactly that might at least take some of their sound advice into account.

THE Family

Why should we be surprised to find that in a society that it set up to valorize, defend, celebrate and financially reward families headed by a legally married male and female that outcomes for those children are better?  The question is not whether their children benefit but how to ensure that the wide diversity of family forms that already exist have access to important forms of social and economic support. The way in which studies such as these reify a particular family form as the ideal is even reflected in the critiques of this type of research.  For instance, some of Regnerus’s critics (such as Slate’s William Saletan) have thrown single parents, binuclear families, and working class families under the bus to promote the assumption that married, two-parent families are just “better,” regardless of sexual orientation.

The last sentence of the article reads “Insofar as the share of intact, biological mother/father families continue to shrink in the United states as it has, this portends growing challenges within families, but also heightened dependence on public health organizations, federal and state public assistance, psychotherapeutic resources, substance use program and the criminal justice system.”  Did you see what has been lumped together here?  Psychotherapeutic resources, utilization of public health resources and federal/state aid is apparently on par with substance abuse and the criminal justice system.  While the article’s author makes repeated claims to political neutrality, the notion that THE Family can be the receptacle and shock absorber (to borrow a term from Arlie Hochschild) for larger social ills is one that mirrors a political agenda intent on weakening state resources.  Rather than beefing up a public social support network, bemoaning the decline of the “optimal” nuclear family reorients public energy and support to defending it from imagined attacks.

Why are we so obsessed with proving that kids from same sex families turn out just fine (whatever that means – it seems that some of the undesirable outcomes in this study involve therapy, same sex relationships and cohabitation)?  The assumption is that these types families are a priori deficient.  That can only be the assumption in a society that valorizes a certain family form, as we do.  Of course anthropologists and sociologists have long documented that this “traditional” family is nothing but.  So long as we continue operating on the myth that the biological “intact” male/female married parental unit is the best in which to raise children we will continue to see results like this.  The assumption that masculinity and femininity are necessary social manifestations of maleness and femaleness and that both are necessary to the functioning of a family unit elides the fact that the real families in which many people live can and do (and, dare we say, should?) consist of a wide variety of loving and supportive social and economic bonds.  However, these assumptions do not only undergird research that is potentially harmful to those in same sex relationships but, also informs GLBT activism as well.  Assumptions such as these guide the fight for inclusion in a form of legal relationships that award legal and social benefits to a limited family form while denying them to those (often socioeconomically marginalized) folks who do not, cannot or will not limit their family to such a restrictive definition.

The Take Home

If there’s one thing we can learn about Regnerus’s study, it’s this: studying same-sex families quantitatively is very, very difficult. Family and sexuality are both fluid, dynamic features of our everyday lives, but capturing them in a demographic snapshot is complicated even further by a lack of federal support for research. Population-wide datasets like the U.S. Census have failed to adapt to family change by including a broader range of options for marital status and living arrangements, and most still refuse to include a single question about sexual orientation. It’s not as though family scholars are unaware of the methodological weaknesses that Regnerus complains about in his lit review – many of us have had to rely on convenience samples and snowballing just to get a sample size of same-sex families high enough to test statistical significance. As a result, much of what we know about gay and lesbian families is based on the most visible among them – white, class-privileged, two-parent families. Scholarship has had no small part in contributing to the power disparity between these families and the statistical majority of same-sex parents, most of whom are not wealthy, white, or living in urban areas. Unfortunately, Regnerus has presented us with a perfect example of how not to solve this problem: substitute weak methods for weaker methods, and feign an analysis that further marginalizes all families who might conceivably fall under the category of “same-sex parents.” So, sadly, even though this data largely cannot speak to the experience of glb/queer families, it still has the same significant social and political implications as if it could.  Take this article as a call, not to get enraged at those who will use it to try to further marginalize queer, non-nuclear, non-biologically “intact” families, but to begin to examine the challenges that underlie both social science research and political activism that will allow these families and their children to flourish.

-Megan Carroll, D’Lane Compton & C.J. Pascoe

*We are sure we are not alone in hearing echoes of The Bell Curve in Regnerus’ guiding assumptions, treatment of the data, presentation of findings and claims of  political neutrality (side note – for a brilliant critique of The Bell Curve research, see here).