Starting a Gay Family

There are several ways to start a family. Some families are made when groups of people find each other and create a bond that doesn't come naturally in their biological families. Some families are made without any expectation of their coming about, like through unexpected pregnancy, or relatives becoming the guardians of children when their parents unexpectedly pass away.

But many families start out in a pretty traditional way: marriage. The typical family begins when two people fall in love and decide to spend their lives together. They form a commitment to each other and decide to become each other's family, sometimes having kids, sometimes having pets, and sometimes having just each other.

We in the LGBT community have been told that our desire to start our families with marriage threatens the "traditional" American family. And a lot has been written about why marriage equality is important, and studies have been done proving that gay families are just as healthy and loving and nurturing as our heterosexual counterparts. We could all probably go on forever about this.

But it becomes a little more personal for me this year. My partner of five years and I are less than a month away from our commitment ceremony. Sure we've been together for half a decade, but if things go the way I hope, we're still just at the very beginning of our life together. So what do we, a couple of guys in our mid-20s, have to look forward to as we start our family?

Well let's start at the beginning. We live in Massachusetts now, which means we can be legally married, but we know that somewhere down the line we want to move closer to our families, specifically in the Cleveland area. In Ohio, a Defense of Marriage Act has been signed into law, making it so that our legal Massachusetts marriage will be pretty much useless in the Buckeye State. Sure, there's a registry in Cleveland that allows for gay couples to have certain rights protected by marriage, but even that is under fire.

And then there's the issue of having children. We're at least a few years away from making that decision, but if we do decide to have children, we can't just get pregnant the way that many straight couples can. We can adopt, but there are a number of challenges that face gay couples who are trying to adopt. Most countries do not allow same-sex couples to adopt, and even in the U.S., there are a variety of different laws and regulations for each state. There's always surrogacy, but that of course comes with its own set of challenges: finding the right surrogate, money, medical procedures, etc.

At the end of the day, LGBT people have to work and fight harder than straight people to form families. We have fewer protected rights, we have to pay more money, we have to worry about which states or countries we live in and how they support us, and at the end of the road, we have to worry about hospital visitation, inheritance, and even what retirement might look like. Luckily (as I've linked throughout this piece) there are resources out there to help us navigate the sometimes treacherous waters of creating our own LGBT families. But considering how hard we have to work and fight for our families, isn't it time we got a little more respect?

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons