Bringing Up Baby
Looking at Gay Parenting
By Mikee dela Cruz
PUBLISHED: JANUARY 2009

In the middle of 2008, Danny J. was approached by a woman – “A friend’s friend’s friend,” he recalls, “who, unfortunately, got herself (knocked up).  Believing abortion is a grave sin (graver than premarital sex that got her to the situation she was in, in the first place), she was looking for someone, anyone to adopt her baby once it is born.  I offered (to take her up on her proposal).”

And so before the year ended, Danny J. found himself with a baby girl, earlier nicknamed Princess (“She’s the apple of our eyes; our princess,” he says), handily given to him by the mother who only recently left for a job overseas, “and after (I) spent for (the mother’s care) in the last months of her pregnancy (as well as her delivery of the baby).”  “(With Princess, I) now have a child I call my own, and... the feeling’s indescribable,” he says.

As the all-happy Danny J. is still finding words to express how having a child has changed, and is changing his life, he has just become a gay parent – something that, to this date, continues to be a battleground of pros and cons.  Because, after all, much like homosexuality itself (and as a whole), homosexuals rearing children continues to be an issue that generates (rightly or not) much, well, discussion.

CHANGING FACE

As noted by the Marriage and Family Encyclopaedia (MFE, family.jrank.org), in the past, numerous GLBTQIAs used to become parents after the dissolution of heterosexual marriages that they get themselves into prior to their publicly declaring of themselves as gays. 

“Such men (in the case of gay men entering this kind of relationship) report entering into marriage because they loved their spouses, wanted to have children, and desired to live a married life, and because of social and familial expectations or pressures.  Some hoped marriage to a woman would diminish or dispel emerging or present homosexual identities and desires.  Others became aware of their homosexual identity only after having married,” states MFE, adding that “the majority of marriages between gay males and heterosexual females eventually end in (separation), and courts have, in such cases, historically granted child custody to the mother (because of the pervasiveness of) cultural beliefs that female and heterosexual parents are more fit parents have dominated custody decisions.  Still, gay fathers are sometimes awarded custody of their children and serve as the primary caretakers.  Others may live with a variety of visitation arrangements.”

This is no longer the common case, however, since “besides heterosexual marriage or sexual encounters, (GLBTQIAs) now become parents through adoption, surrogacy, and joint parenthood.”  In Danny J.’s case, for example, he became a parent through stranger adoption (when unrelated adoptive parents take in children as their own, what with biological parents unwilling and/or unable to do so – another category of adoption, and as opposed to second parent adoption, when “only one member of the couple is the legal or biological parent of a child or children, and the second couple member wishes to pursue adoption of the child/children as a means of legally recognizing the relationship between that parent and the child/children,” defines MFE).

In Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Families in the Handbook of Family Diversity (Oxford University Press, 2000), R.C. Williams and E.G. Esterberg notes how, “internationally, the majority of countries deny legal adoption rights to people who identify themselves as lesbian or gay, and if one member of the couple adopts or has birth children, his partner is not given parental rights.”

With homosexuality a ground for legally dissolving marriages, the practice – even sans mention in legal documentations – is much the same in the Philippines; though not that this has prevented GLBTQIAs from becoming parents (legally or not), largely because, culturally, “Filipino GLBTQIAs end up caring for relatives, anyway, since (we) remain unmarried, and are, therefore, believed to be able to do so,” Danny J. notes.  Aside from Princess, two nephews, three nieces, and five other distant relatives live with him in his place in Makati City – a “big extended family,” as Danny J. himself notes with a smile, “for someone who (is supposed to stay) single forever.”

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