FEATURES HIGH GEAR, MARCH, 1977
Tuesday: Chug-A-Mug $2 all draft you can drink Wednesday: Cold Duck and Champagne Special
Jack and Ken's
Page 18
THE GAY AND THE FAMILY
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By MITCHELL MENIGO
One argument used by those who oppose gay rights legislation is the highly questionable conclusion that to grant rights to gays is to undermine the conIcept of the family, the basic social unit in most societies including ours. Although there are clear signs in our society of threats to the traditional concept of the family, the fear expressed is most vocally directed against gays. (Note, for example, the unreasoned ranting of Anita. Bryant, who has fantasies of gays seducing straight youth into the irresistible glamor of gay life but who says nothing to express alarm about the young women who, as she once did in the Miss America pageant, parade in bathing suits in celebration of the female body as a sex object.)
To examine the validity of the conclusion about the gay threat to family life, one must consider gay men and lesbians as sons and daughters, as brothers and sisters, as aunts and uncles and even as parents. I am confident. that a systematic study would
confirm my conclusions, but ! must generalize on the basis of myself and gay people I know.
As unstable as heterosexual relationships are today, even those bound by the religious ties
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marriage, I would begin by conceding that long-term commitments between gays are exceptional. But I would caution against drawing any conclusions that the fact that the partners in such a relationship
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breakdown of intended longterm relationships between two gays. Those who point out this fact of gay life are too often the same people who undermine the stability of gay relationships by making it difficult to live them openly. Although there are good arguments that the relationship between two gays need not or should not follow the model of heterosexual relationships, a long-time gay relationship does, in fact, usually follow the model of family life and it is viewed as threatening.
Another kind of complicity by those who decry gay relationships involved the pressure to conform to heterosexual models placed on men and women, and especially youth, who, despite knowing that they are gay, enter into marriages that are doomed to failure because one of the parties is gay and must eventually deal with that trait. The result is at best emotional pain suffered by two people who have liked each other enough to hope for the success of a marriage. Often a family has resulted from such marriages, and the breakdown of that family follows, as it does in all cases in which divorce is the solution to marital problems. The cause of such family dissolutions is less the result of one of the marriage partner's being gay and more the effect of the great pressure to conform through marriage in the first place.
But in many ways gay men and lesbians contribute to family stability. Most gays do value their families, unless the family has completely rejected them
because of their gayness. Commitment to their families is one form of emotional fulfillment for many gays. Because they frequently do not have the same kinds of demands on their time and money as married siblings, gays often serve other members of their families by caring for the needs of aging parents, by providing financial assistance to families of brothers and sisters, by helping to educate neices and nephews, and by organizing occasions at which families gather.
In families in which gays have not been rejected, their wholeness as persons is recognized, valued and used. Such families are not so narrow as to assume that a gay family member has the goal of turning the children in the family into homosexuals but realize that in most cases gay family members share their goal of helping the children to fulfill themselves as individuals, gay or straight. What happens too seldom, however, is use being made of a gay family member to counsel a young niece of nephew who may have developed as a gay and who is facing the problems that are compounded in adolescence when one recognizes the difference from most of society that being gay involves and faces the problem of dealing with what seems to be unsurmountable rejection. An important resource is being overlooked.
The idea of a gay parent shocks much of our society. Yet
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