Two Fathers, With One Happy to Stay At Home

INNEAPOLIS — Right before Christmas, Jamie McConnell arrived at the Lake Country School here, as he does most days of the week, to pick up his son, Ben, 3. Hardly short on spunk, Ben made his way out to the snowy playground, and Mr. McConnell, as parents have done since the dawn of swings and monkey bars, trailed behind.

Mr. McConnell had plenty of time to watch Ben romp and to invite one of his classmates and his mother home for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

For years, Mr. McConnell ate very different lunches. He was a corporate litigator at Dorsey & Whitney, among the country's most prestigious law firms. But since he and Dr. Bill Atmore, an anesthesiologist, adopted Ben as an infant, taking care of the child has been his full-time job. Dr. Atmore, his partner of eight years, works full time.

In assuming those roles, demographers say, the two are part of an emerging population of gay men who are not only raising children but are also committed to the idea that one parent should leave the workplace to do it. Of 9,328 same-sex couples with children whose census returns were randomly selected for analysis by the Census Bureau, 26 percent of the male couples included a stay-at-home parent, said Gary Gates, a demographer with the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington. That figure is one percentage point more than for married couples with children and four percentage points higher than for female couples, said Mr. Gates, who performed the analysis for this article.

The percentage of men who stay at home is significantly smaller among married heterosexual couples, Mr. Gates said.

The obstacles of finding surrogate mothers and of discriminatory adoption laws that favor heterosexual couples have led some gay men to pursue parenthood with fervor.

"Being a planned gay father is such a project in itself," said Judith Stacey, a professor of sociology at New York University and a senior scholar at the Council on Contemporary Families, a research organization. Often, Professor Stacey said, gay fathers or those aspiring to be "remain very judgmental of parents who don't stay home."

To some gay men, the idea of entrusting the care of a hard-won child to someone else seems to defeat the purpose of parenthood.

Ray Friedmann, of Portland, Ore., gave up an accounting job at a credit union after he and his partner adopted their daughter, Ceriwen, now six months old. Unable to join his partner's medical plan because it does not provide for domestic partners, Mr. Friedmann, like many other gay fathers, pays for his own health insurance.

"We never thought we'd even be able to have this child," Mr. Friedmann said. "When we had the opportunity to do it, we wanted to give her the best attention and love."

Four years ago, after Bernie Cummings and his partner, Ernie Johnston, a marketing executive at Warner Brothers, had a baby girl, Caelan, through a surrogate mother, Mr. Cummings left his job as a managing director at Ogilvy Public Relations. Since then, they have added twins to their family, also through surrogacy.

"I've taken myself out of an industry that moves pretty quickly," said Mr. Cummings, who lives in Los Angeles. "But if I were working, I'd miss that moment when Caelan was just getting up from her nap, grabbing and holding on to me."

Same-sex couples with a stay-at-home parent are doing this even though census figures show that their median household income, $35,000, is lower than the $45,000 for a heterosexual married couple with a stay-at-home parent, Mr. Gates of the Urban Institute said.

The 2000 census found that there were some 60,000 male couple households with children in America, and close to 96,000 female couple households. Those figures are about 20 percent of all male couples and a third of all female couples.

Rob Calhoun and his partner refinanced their home in suburban Atlanta when Mr. Calhoun quit his job as a social worker to stay home with their baby daughter. "We really couldn't afford it," Mr. Calhoun said.

Sociologists, gender researchers and gay parents themselves say that because gay men are liberated from the cultural expectations and pressures that women face to balance work and family life, they may approach raising children with a greater sense of freedom and choice.

They may also not fear stigmatization in these new roles, said Ellen Lewin, chairwoman of the women's studies department at the University of Iowa. Professor Lewin is the author of "Lesbian Mothers" (Cornell University Press, 1993) and is working on a study of gay fathers.

Conversely, feminism's legacy may leave lesbians more ideologically committed to equality in their relationships, said Christopher Carrington, a professor of sociology at San Francisco State University and the author of "No Place Like Home" (University of Chicago Press, 2002), which examines how gay and lesbian couples divide household labor.

That staying at home constitutes the just and noble course of parenthood was a sentiment echoed again and again in more than a dozen interviews with gay fathers.

Mike Farina, 40, left his job as an engineer in Anaheim, Calif., after adopting twins with his partner in 1998.

Though many gay fathers may enter into domesticity with few conflicts or reservations, the pressures of starting a new life stripped of professional status can mirror those faced by nonworking mothers. The transition may be even rockier, given that male identity is largely defined by achievements outside the confines of nurseries, mud rooms and kitchens.

Professor Carrington said some of the domestically oriented men he observed struggled with self-esteem. "Men who make these choices really grapple with how to portray their lives to their friends, families, to service people and repairmen," he said.

For Tom Howard, a stay-at-home father of three adopted children, all younger than 4, the consequence of his decision struck two years ago, just before April 15. "I was filling out our tax returns for the first entire calendar year I was not working, and my occupation went from `professor' to `homemaker.' I felt like someone had put a knife in my stomach and twisted it."

For the preceding 10 years, Mr. Howard, who has a doctorate in microbiology, had worked at the University of Southern California, first as a researcher at its virology laboratory and then also as a professor at its medical school. "I can truly empathize with the women's movement now," Mr. Howard said. "I know that I've committed career suicide."

After the birth of his first child, Emma, Mr. Howard, now 47, took a three-month paid paternity leave from the university, returning to work in February 2000. At the same time, his partner of 17 years, Ken Yood, 40, was working his way to a partnership at a Los Angeles law firm. "We realized pretty quickly that Ken's pay scale was going to support the family," he said.

No matter how fair-minded the intentions of partners may be, the myriad obligations of home stewardship invariably fall to the partner who remains at home.

After Tom Seid, 47, and his partner, Howard Ronder, the creative director of Gaiam, a lifestyle company in Boulder, Colo., adopted their son, Matthew, four years ago, Mr. Seid left his career as a feature-film editor. Their shift to a single income meant that they could no longer afford a housekeeper. Now, Mr. Seid's day consists of shopping, cleaning and dropping off and picking up his son from school.

The choice leaves many facing a loss of financial independence that may result in a suddenly dismal credit rating or strong feelings of guilt about buying a CD or sweater.

"I have a problem asking for money, and I have to ask for money every time we're paying the bills," said Bill Koch, who stays home with his 4-year-old son, Frankie, while his partner of eight years, Paul Lennander, works as an investigator at a children's social service agency here.

Mr. Koch, who previously worked in internal technology at General Mills, said that a lack of income had left him feeling invisible.

"After I'd been home a few months, we went to lease a car," Mr. Koch recalled. "We'd sold my car to come up with the money, and the whole time the salesman is only talking to Paul. The guy just looked right through me. Only Paul's name could appear on the lease, and I was just sitting there the whole time twirling my pearls, so to speak."

Still, Mr. Koch, like many of the other gay fathers interviewed, did not betray any eagerness to return to the work world soon.

As Peter Vitale, a gay stay-at-home father in the Twin Cities, put it, "If I were honest, I'd say that I want to do an excellent job at this because I know the world has me under a microscope."

Am I crazy, or has there been an explosion of "wonderful gay parent" articles in the press in the last week? I'm beginning to think there is some sort of organized plan in the media to push "gay parents are wonderful" stories right now.

Not an organized plan so much as generalized laziness. Reporters on the "sociology" beat have to come up with feature stories for their weekend papers, preferably ones with lots of photos, human interest, blah, blah. the best kind are "trend" stories, which can be based on a new statistic that is interesting. The Census just released this data, from what I can tell. So they put out a press release and every sociology beat reporter got it. It's an interesting stat, so call two or three same-sex parenting couples in your town and voila! Your work is done for the week. The fact that every single other town paper will have the same story usually doesn't matter to you, because how many people read the San Diego Tribune and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch? This is why that dumb metrosexual story ran everywhere for about two weeks straight.

Growing up, I knew a girl who was the child of two lesbians (biological child of one of them). She was just mentally messed up...it's hard to describe. She wasn't teased or made fun of (the school system made sure of that) but she always felt different, even from other kids who had single mothers as parents. I know her "moms" were very active in the gay community and I think the poor girl just shouldn't have been exposed to so much at a young age.

In college, I worked with a guy who was the son of two gay men. Guess who ended up gay himself?

My thinking is this: men learn to be husbands and fathers by watching their fathers, and women learn to be wives and mothers by watching their moms. How can a little girl, for example, learn about a normal marriage relationship when she's never had one in her own immediate family, when her "moms" are busy dragging her to gay pride parades? Ideally, children should have two loving parents, a mom and a dad in a healthy marriage who can show their children by example how to be good spouses and parents.

Yes there has been a push. It coincides with the comencement of the Human Rights Campaign radio advertisement masqarading as a conservative group opposed to the Federal Marriage Amendment.

It tracks with the use of the word "parent" NEVER mother or father. The children in this story are described as "gay parents" never in the "heather has two momies" vernacular. The words "mother" and "father" are forbiden.

The homosexuals are trying to counter the fact that marriage as an instutition is for reproduction. They now want to go with the mere raising children ala hilary clinton's village.

You will note how these two homosexuals had to buy their child outside normal channels.

This is part of a larger campaign. I knew it as soon as I saw the headline. Just yesterday, I posted a piece from the Atlanta papers about two lesbians who claim they are being persecuted by the town's wealthiest country club because they are not considered spouses and therefore their (adopted) children have been made to feel "different." I'm not surprised to see the Times leading the charge on this once again.

The elephant in the living room is that children how to behave like men and women by modeling their mothers and fathers.

Little boys learn how to treat women by watching their fathers treat their mothers and vice versa.

Little girls learn how to treat men by watching their mothers treat their fathers and vice versa.

We already see the result of this with the "sons of murphy brown". Women who seek out single parenthood and disparage all that is "manhood".

Homosexuals have no business raising children into their lifestyle any more than the animal sex people or bondage people or any other sexual fetish people have on initiating their children. It is just wrong and a recepie for disaster.

Just as we have the Dirksig boy who was brutalized by the homosexual men, there must be stories about the boys and girls who escaped the homosexual parents.

There is that story out of NJ (I believe) where the boys in foster care were forced to eat wood and root around in the neighbor's garbage while their female charges were not mistreated.

actually acordig to the CDC 92+% of all new AIDS cases are homosexual related.

The non-homosexual cases can be traced back to a homosexual sex encounter. (ie a woman who had sex with a man who had at somepoint had sex with an infected man.)

Aids will infect anyone, but it is overwhelmingly centered on homosexual behavior.

>Of course, the article avoids all of the nasty parts of >the issue, like your 16 year old adolescent having to >explain the 2 mommys to their Prom date, or daddy #1 >explaining why daddy #2 just died of AIDS.

Or why your Daddy left your mom for the floozy OTHER WOMAN in Vegas. Or why your Mom is in jail because she was running drugs for her BOYFRIEND. Scumbag parents do not just exist in the homosexual world. By your example, then ALL parenting is wrong based on a few idiots.

Just FYI. I'm pretty sure that Druid Hills is not the town's wealthiest golf club. It is one of the oldest - probably the fourth or fifth oldest, and I'm sure it is probably in the top ten in "wealth," but it is far from being "the" club in Atlanta. However, an overlooked aspect of this case, and the decision (non-binding, btw, but it went against DHGC) is that it would apply to all of the other old-line clubs in the city.

It's an interesting stat, so call two or three same-sex parenting couples in your town and voila!

Why is it an interesting stat? How many of the children living in male homosexual households are natural born children of one the men? How many were adopted? What are the corresponding statistics for heterosexual couples? It's my guess that if you've gone through the extraordinary measures that most adoptive parents have, the chances are much better that one partner will be a "stay-at-home mom", so to speak.

Of course, that doesn't address the issue that the number of gay men who have children in their households is actually quite small.

My mother couldn't have children, biologically-speaking. She made a wonderful mother. What's not to get?

I assume that your mother had some medical problem/issue that precluded her from bearing children. That is not the case with homosexuals. Nature/God/whatever-you-want-to-call-it precludes them from it. Get that?

<<< I have never heard that a person can get AIDS from living with an AIDS patient. AIDS is spread by sexual contact and intravenous drug use. Besides, I don't think adoption agencies would place a child with someone sick with AIDS. >>>

My response to your implied question:

Quoted from the same scientific study I cited earlier”

>>> Death and disease accompany promiscuous and unsanitary sexual activity. 70% to 78% of gays reported having had a sexually transmitted disease. The proportion with intestinal parasites (worms, flukes, amoeba) ranged from 25% to 39% to 59%. As of 1992, 83% of U.S. AIDS in whites had occurred in gays.

Those who treat AIDS patients are at great risk, not only from HIV infection, which as of 1992 involved over 100 health care workers,21 but also from TB and new strains of other diseases. <<<

AIDS, which I mentioned, is one of several “blood borne pathogens.” Unfortunately, despite the term, “blood borne pathogens,” blood is far from the only body fluid that can transmit the diseases. It is possible to contract these diseases from almost any body fluid under the right circumstances with a long enough and intense enough exposure… i.e., constantly living in close proximity and using the same household fixtures, etc.

As to the adoption agency responsibility for placing children with homosexuals, the post speaks to this issue adequately… it is obviously happening. What is to prevent these diseases from infecting the children after they have been placed, i.e., a post placement infection of the adopting parties?

I hope this has answered your question.

Agree the Hell's Angels did a big PR thing too about 20yrs ago.
To change their image.

Truth is the truth no matter how anyone living in the dark tries to twist it.

Living in the light/truth is so much easier to get along in life...why we go astray even if only from time to time is a question that will be answered when we are standing in front of the Almighty. Hope we can stand the shame of selfishness.

"In the beginning, I was even pig-headed about it," said Mr. Farina, who now has four children with his partner. "I wanted the kids to bond with us. I didn't want any help. In those first few years, I didn't even get baby sitters. I thought, `That's my job.' "

Wish some heterosexuals would have this opinion more often.

Bump to that sentiment. This society has produced a generation of Paris Hilton wannabes. And people wonder why men have zero interest in marriage. Perhaps because the "product" isn't worth purchasing.

Or the Lesbian couple here in Oregon who wanted to sue the Private Catholic school for not accepting their child.

I recently met a group of Gay woman and they seemed so miserable always complaining about how mistreated they were and who they HATED...esp. my hero Alan Keyes.

I was not going to argue with losers I just kindly smiled and said 'Isn't great to live in America"

Then I have known two woman who have been room mates for years and I never hear them whine or complain or even mention their sexuality as far as I am concerned they are two woman that are dear friends living together they are in their 60's and retired wonderful ladies.

So I guess it depends on the personal choices any of make on what type of charactors we are.

I am hetrosexaul and chose not to be sexually active by choice mainly because I was left to raise my son on my own and wanted to be free from distractions. He is now 24 and last summer I had the most fantastic physically speaking affair so many cheered me on but personally it is not in my charactor to have an affair and continue that lifestyle.

If people choose to have it all lovers, children and careers I think that is great if it succeeds but the more people take on at times the more they seem to be the lowliest, gossipiest and whiniest of all. JMO

Just like to know what people think about this.

Aside from the fact that homosexuality is completely un-natural and goes against every single impulse that has ever brought life to this planet, and aside from the fact that same-sex couples playing house and raising children is just the latest perversion of nature to sweep our socially engineered world, I don't have a problem with it.

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