MEETING Mr and Mr Luciani-Crout and their daughter Rani for the first time requires some mental gymnastics. Two men and a toddler are a somersault and a half. Yet this tight domestic unit mirrors the average Australian family in so many ways.
A lush garden inhabited by free-range chooks surrounds their modest home near the Victorian spa town of Daylesford. Inside is neatly kept and comfortable. Framed professional certificates hang above the computer in a nook of the kitchen where baby bottles drain beside the sink. Christmas decorations brighten the lounge room. Season’s greeting cards dot the sideboard. Assorted toys on the floor belong to Rani, who clings to Allan’s hip, her arms around his neck. Dressed in a hot pink tulle fairy dress, her blonde hair is swept into a high ponytail tied with a silver bow. Her conception was unbelievably complicated and costly. Sperm from one of her fathers fertilised an egg harvested through an anonymous donor in India where the embryo was implanted into the womb of a surrogate. (Elton John and his partner last month became parents to a baby boy using similar mothers of invention.) Silver anklets and Rani’s name are the only clues to an exotic heritage camouflaged by naturally fair skin.
After putting his daughter down for a morning nap Mark switches on the baby monitor to listen for her cry. These two men hover dotingly like any new parents caring for a sweet-breathed gift of flesh and blood. They would never squeeze into Jane Austen’s 19th-century ideal of marriage and yet they are just as preoccupied by this social virtue because the privilege is denied them. Australian law forbids them to marry. So they’ve shown the law to be an ass. They have hyphenated their surnames and done everything within their power to tighten the knot that binds them together.
Five months before Rani was born, they invited 100 of their friends and family to a “commitment ceremony”. “We told everyone it was a shotgun wedding,” Allan jokes. A sympathetic priest braved church opposition and blessed their rings. A former nun sang Ave Maria. There were speeches and toasts and Allan’s mother made a white cake. “Why can’t I have two daddies?” one of the younger guests was heard to lament. Questions like this make traditionalists squirm. But when a son or a daughter or a brother or a sister or a niece or a nephew turns out to be gay there’s an inevitable mellowing of suspicion and prejudice. Is there a grandparent on the planet who would spurn a soft, warm bundle of kinship, however tangled the threads?
Gay families are multiplying. The 2001 census counted 19,594 same-sex de facto marriages. By 2006 numbers had swollen to 27,000. Younger gays born since decriminalisation have benefited from anti-discrimination laws which have encouraged tolerance. They expect to live together openly. Now reproductive technology is delivering them children. They want to share surnames, mortgages. They want to swap rings and vows. They want to be as boringly normal as it’s possible to get. They want the imprimatur of marriage, and the momentum for this stroke-of-the-pen amendment is gathering pace.
“It is the final citadel to be stormed in the quest for legitimacy,” says Anglican archbishop Peter Jensen, who supports the status quo yet at the same time sees an opportunity to revisit what marriage means to us.
Battle lines were staked last November when Greens MP Adam Bandt introduced a motion to kindle national conversations on gay marriage. Australia’s Marriage Act did not define marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution for the first 44 years of its legislative life. Only in 2004 was the Act changed to lock out same-sex couples, in a pre-emptive strike by the former Howard Government’s attorney-general Philip Ruddock. He rose first in last year’s parliamentary debate to argue against reform. “Marriage is a union that can give rise to the procreation of children”, who deserve “both a father and a mother available to them and influencing their upbringing”, he said.
Tell that to the littlies who attend childcare with two-year-old Dougal Mok, son of Melbourne couple Helen and Cath Mok. When his parents come to collect him, their arrival is often heralded by the children calling out: “Dougal! Your mother’s here… and your other mother.” Their daughter Maisie, now six, was the one who clamoured for them to share the same surname. She badly wanted the four of them to be “the Mok family”. Helen and Cath wear traditional gold bands on their wedding-ring fingers. Cath says when she was young she didn’t much care about marrying, but since the children came along “I feel strongly about it – I want the same thing for us as my family had”.
Ruddock says the only same-sex families he’s ever encountered comprise women with children from a traditional marriage who have left their husbands and set up house in a lesbian relationship. “I’ve never heard of men raising children,” he splutters a week before Elton John’s progeny makes international headlines. There are hundreds of these families. Allan and Mark recently attended the Gay Dads Christmas party where there was a crowd of fathers with kids. The Rainbow Families Council has more than 200 same-sex couples with children registered as members.
Although gays and lesbians tend to congregate in inner-city neighbourhoods, their family networks reach into every cranny of the country. There was nothing “queer” about the Sydney plumber and former Vietnam veteran who made an impassioned plea to Tony Abbott on the ABC’s Q&A for his gay son to be able to marry. His emotion was visceral. The politics behind the push for reform crosses party lines and traverses city and bush, uniting battlers, professionals, farmers, every kind of voter with a personal connection to someone who is gay. The Governor General’s private secretary, Stephen Brady, is gay. Julia Gillard’s chief of staff, Amanda Lampe, is gay. Her partner, Frier Bentley, has just given birth to twins. Federal cabinet minister Penny Wong, who is gay, swung the South Australian ALP behind same-sex marriage with her promise to argue for reform.
Gillard is committed to the status quo. She’s aligned herself with conservatives, church leaders, and older Australians who balk at the idea of Mr and Mr or Mrs and Mrs reversing the customary order of family life. This resistance will be targeted over coming months in the campaign to change hearts and minds.
Days after Liberal frontbencher Malcolm Turnbull spoke against gay marriage, he began to equivocate. He now acknowledges he’s “open” to persuasion. “If Turnbull doesn’t believe in gay marriage we’ll make Wentworth a Green seat,” warns a local resident who galvanised the Hawke Government’s response to HIV. On Labor’s side, sympathisers want the party to support a binding vote or at least allow a conscience vote when the national conference meets in December.
Hard-won rights
why do gays and lesbians want to marry? Divorce rates remain high in Australia, with between a third and a half of all marriages doomed. Mark and Allan Luciani-Crout both worked in family law. Mark, who has been married once, is a solicitor. Allan was a personal assistant in a family law firm. They’ve seen the hatred and fury first hand. “Seeing so much dysfunction didn’t put us off,” Mark says.
Marriage is not something that Mac Ronan, 84, and Geoff Allingham, 83, aspire to after living together for 62 years. When they first hooked up as young teachers in Melbourne their relationship was a criminal act. “For 30 years the law was against us,” says Ronan. “Marriage always seemed like such a long shot, something that was never likely in our lifetime.” The idea of fathering children was an even tinier speck in the landscape of possibility. They spent years as activists fighting for decriminalisation and countering the threat of AIDS. “I can see a lot wrong with the hypocrisy of marriage. Some of our friends say, ‘We don’t need to get married.’ But that’s a smug cop-out. Of course we need the choice for all.”
That’s how Tasmanian gay activist Rodney Croome explains the desire for marriage amongst a younger cohort he calls “the Family Law Act generation”. Thirty years ago gays and lesbians made a virtue out of their exclusion. “Queer” was a badge of pride. But the minority is becoming more mainstream, hungry for the rituals and traditions that shape society as a whole. Most gay couples recorded by the 2006 census are aged 30 or younger. According to a University of Queensland study of 2032 gay and lesbian participants, around 63 per cent of under-30s favour marriage, which jumps to 67 per cent for under-19s. “In the era when men were breadwinners and women were stay-at-home mothers it was difficult to conceive of two men or two women living together because it didn’t make economic or cultural sense. Now there is a breakdown in the social dichotomy,” says Croome. The institution of marriage has evolved through no-fault divorce and the rise of de facto relationships. “It is now just another life choice. When you are not allowed to make that contract it sends a powerful message of exclusion.”
Alex Grimshaw, 30, spokesman for Australian Marriage Equality, remembers wrestling with his sexuality as a teenager and being stung when the then Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating tossed off his throwaway taunt that “two men and a cocker spaniel” don’t cut it as a family. “I wanted to grow up and get married and have a family,” says Grimshaw. “I remember walking to school and trying to convince myself I was straight.” Marriage matters to him: “It’s important for equality, the symbolism, because it allows us to be more comfortable with who we are.”
Megan Peters, 29, and Leanne Ferguson, 32, personify the new wave of same-sex couples who are renovating the architecture of heterosexual relationships with their own radical design. They had a wedding of sorts in a Hunter Valley vineyard before 118 people. Photos of the girls dressed in floor-length silk gowns on the arms of their silver-haired fathers suggest a traditional bridal party until a second glance fails to locate any groom. Megan has taken her partner’s surname. “It helps make us one family. Just as straight couples do. I was always going to change my name whether I ended up with a guy or a girl,” she says. She met Leanne, “the goddess”, in 2002 and they’ve been together since.
Once the courtship drew them into a deeper commitment they began canvassing the idea of children. Whereas straight couples may stumble into a pregnancy by accident or with the barest preparation, parenting for same-sex partners requires meticulous planning and discussion. The Fergusons imported sperm from a US donor after an online search through thousands of profiles, settling for a blond-haired blue-eyed professional whose identity might never be revealed to the son he’s fathered. “We did think of asking my brother to be the donor but it didn’t seem right,” Megan explains, “Too Jerry Springer.” Leanne is the birth mother of baby James. “I’m meant to go next,” Megan says. They can draw on frozen reserves from the same donor stored in a sperm bank.
Megan works full-time for her brother, manufacturing and selling products to clean coffee machines. Leanne is on leave from her human resources job, to cope with the breastfeeding and demands of a newborn. Many of their heterosexual girlfriends marvel at how much Megan helps when she gets home, compared with their own couch potato husbands. “I cook dinner and chuck on a load of washing,” Megan laughs. Her name is on James’s birth certificate, which means a lot to them but lacks any legal punch.
Gay couples want to secure the non-biological parents’ role. Step-parents in heterosexual families enjoy rights that are denied to the non-birth parent in a same-sex couple. “We are just like any other normal happy couple,” Megan says. “We’re upholding the sanctity of marriage, contributing to society, we own a house, we pay taxes, we’re raising a little pearler, we’re living a life that is so similar to heterosexual couples yet we are treated differently under the law. We still have to explain ourselves.” The stigma annoys her. “It’s as if there is something wrong with us. Families are going to keep changing. You can’t stop it happening, and the law has to keep up with this.”
Like every social institution, marriage has bent and stretched to accommodate waves of political reform and the rich diversity of modern life. We’ve got rid of betrothal; matrimonial vows of obedience; bans on inter-racial marriage; even the need to marry at all. Frank Bates, emeritus Professor of Law at Newcastle University, can’t see what’s wrong with another shift to account for the rise of same-sex relationships. Originally seen as a means of securing property rights, marriage became invested with romantic and emotional baggage in the 19th century. “There’s nothing magical about the Marriage Act – it’s just another piece of legislation,” says Bates. “We all know people who are part of long-term gay and lesbian couples whose commitment is as great as many married couples. If they want to formalise their relationship I can’t see any reason why it shouldn’t happen.”
Politicians against gay marriage tick off recent reforms ending discrimination of same-sex couples in the fields of tax, superannuation, Medicare benefits, Centrelink payments, child support, immigration. They believe gays and lesbians who live together are catered for already. Allowing them to marry would “diminish” the institution, they say. But the core of resistance to same-sex marriage is preference for the mother/father model of family life. Archbishop Peter Jensen believes “it’s demonstrable that the traditional model is better for raising children”. He welcomes an “informed moral debate” on the issue, but he’s not about to alter his view that conferring marriage on same-sex unions will lead us in slippery directions. Philip Ruddock agrees, saying of his opponents: “What they are really arguing is that the fundamental nature of our culture should change.”
It is changing already, with or without a walk down the aisle. Numbers of same-sex couple families are difficult to count. Census officials acknowledge underreporting. The University of Queensland survey found that 33 per cent of 742 lesbian couples have children who are their own or inherited from previous relationships, while 30 per cent plan on having children; 14 per cent of gay male couples have children and 11 per cent plan on having offspring. New technology and free market solutions to baby-making have subverted the template. Tales of creation are mind-blowing. Insemination is being done at home with syringes of sperm provided by friends or strangers; eggs and wombs are being sourced on the internet through the international fertility market; extended family members are responding in innovative ways.
Concerns at how these offspring will fare may not be resolved until a generation are well into adulthood. A US study that followed 78 children raised by lesbian mothers for 17 years reported last June that these adolescents demonstrated healthy psychological adjustment. But critics have challenged the veracity of these results. The academic arena is so heavily politicised that one Australian academic who has reviewed the scientific literature for state parliamentary reviews examining same-sex couple adoption now begs anonymity because of the abuse he’s copped for pointing out methodological flaws in the research. He believes work on the children raised in these families is embryonic and suffers from bad science and bias.
Little is known about the impact of donor anonymity on children’s welfare. Much depends on the individual personality of the child and the stability of their adult relationships. There is no rulebook; each couple devises strategies to suit their needs. Australian researcher Dr Ruth McNair shares a three-year-old son, Sam, with her lesbian partner. Sam knows the identity of the man who helped his mothers conceive. The man visits from time to time. Sam calls him by his first name. Eilis Hughes of the Melbourne based Rainbow Families Council says her daughter Drew enjoys frequent contact with the biological father she calls “Dad”. The Mok children can access the identity of their donor father when they turn 17. The Luiciani-Crouts say they have chosen anonymity to limit problems and confusion for their daughter. The Fergusons were concerned to avoid donor intervention down the track.
Same-sex couples can’t hide the story of conception. The children in these families often begin their inquiry at an early age. The Rainbow Alliance distributes literature portraying the diversity of families with kids being raised by one parent; by grandparents; by two men or two women. Dr McNair says her son, Sam, grew curious after reading conventional story books populated by Mums and Dads.
The couples I interviewed try very hard to bring a mix of genders into their family circle so that male or female family and friends counter the imbalance in their household. Megan and Leanne Ferguson held a “naming ceremony” for baby James where guests were invited to contribute to his lifelong education. “Leanne’s brother Grant is a carpenter who surfs and fixes cars. We can’t teach James everything. We’re going to use everyone in our lives,” says Megan.
Mark and Allan Luciani-Crout have encouraged Mark’s sister and Allan’s mother to become involved with Rani. The Moks say most of their friends are heterosexual couples. Cath says when Dougal and Maisie role play, “she’s the Mummy and he’s the Daddy”. Any confusion is met squarely. “How come Dougal has two Mums?” Cath was asked recently as she collected him from childcare. “I just said, ‘Families come in all shapes and sizes.’ I know it may become an issue with their peer group at school but I trust we can give them the tools to deal with it.”
Childcare centres and schools are recognising sexual diversity just as they must acknowledge different races and religions. When other children at Dougal Mok’s childcare centre busied themselves making gifts for their dads on Father’s Day, he was encouraged to make something for his Great Aunty. Intolerance is being tested constantly. Last year in Victoria, two girlfriends were banned from going as a couple to their Year 11 formal. The headmistress of another school, the Methodist Ladies’ College likened their exclusion to “the dark old days”. MLC is one of several Victorian schools supporting kids who come out of the closet.
“People have to change their thinking,” says Allan Luciani-Crout. “Marriage and parenting is less about gender and more about a couple’s commitment to the complex needs of each other and their children.” He came out at 16 and grew up wanting to marry. He remembers thinking when he first met Mark “what a great dad he’d make”. They’ve been together for 18 years. Having brought Rani into the world they now hope desperately that one of a limited number of frozen embryos being held for them overseas will deliver her a sister or a brother.
Allan’s mother, Mary, has been married for 40 years. She has embraced her son’s choices. Allan is the eldest of her three boys. When she first began to talk about her son-in-law friends were baffled. “Son-in-law?” they frowned. “Yes, my son-in-law,” she told them. “And Mark is my son-in-law,” she says in a voice that brooks no doubt.
Rodney Croome thinks extended family members may be the most potent weapon in the push for gay marriage. “Marriage creates bonds between partners and communities, families. It extends kinship.” He’s confident the straight relatives of gay people will change hearts and minds. “My 70-something mother would like gay marriage to happen,” he says. Initially uncomfortable when Croome came out 20 years ago, “now she’s fine. Whenever the issue comes up she talks about it. The really pleasing thing for her is that there are all these other women now at lawn bowls with gay sons. Her line dance instructor is a gay man who wrote a dance as a tribute to his partner who died. These are the exceptions that are overshadowing the rule and my mother is very, very talkative.”
In today’s Sydney Morning Herald there is a lovely piece about Stuart Gent and his daughter Lucy. It is wonderful to see such positive and life affirming articles on surrogacy particularly when they have gay men involved. What makes this one a little different than the usual is that Stuart is a single gay man. Congratulations Stuart – Lucy is beautiful and thank you for sharing your journey.
