October 24, 2004
By SUSAN DOMINUS
Ry Russo-Young, a 22-year-old filmmaker and performer, has a lot to explain, starting with her name. It's Ry, just Ry, not short for Ryan, or a misspelling of Ray, or a nickname someone gave her as a child or a pretension she took on in her teens. Ry is simply a name that her mothers liked the sound of when they named her, an act of creativity as novel and yet, to their minds, as natural as the conception of Ry herself, a feat that involved the sperm of a gay man, the egg of a lesbian in love and one very clean glass syringe.
Earlier this year, over dinner at a small restaurant in the West Village, a few blocks from where she was raised, Ry was offering me a short lecture that she has been called on to deliver dozens of times, politely solving the puzzle that is her family for other people. She was explaining her name, explaining her mothers' relationship, explaining her older sister, whose name, Cade, also demands clarification. She was explaining how it is that she has no father, and when pressed further -- after all, everyone has a father -- she raised her eyebrows, dark and thick and finely shaped, just a little. ''You mean who's my sperm donor?'' she asked. I apologized -- ''father'' can be a loaded word for children of lesbian mothers -- but she shrugged it off with a small wave of her hand, her dark red nails flashing by. ''It's O.K.,'' she said. ''I'm not fussy about stuff like that.''
Ry has long dark hair, a slightly breathy voice and a hint of a tough-girl, New York accent. Tall enough that she has presence by default, she's a natural performer, inclined to stacked heels and deep red lipstick. On the subject of her parents, she is particularly confident in the quality of her material, and she unpacked the details at a leisurely pace. As for her own sexuality, she's straight, which she said she knows with increasing certainty with each passing year. ''Yeah, you know, I made out with a girl in high school,'' she said. ''I get an A for effort.''
If she has volunteered to talk frankly to a stranger about her family life, not to mention her sex life, it's because Ry knows she's one of a relatively limited number of adults who were raised from birth by ''out'' gay parents (as opposed to a parent who revealed he or she was gay after marrying and having kids). As more and more gay men and lesbians feel comfortable coming out earlier in their lives and the possibility of legalized same-sex marriage appears to be gaining ground in select states, Ry's experience may represent the future of gay households. Already, the 2000 Census reported that some 150,000 same-sex couples had children in their homes. If the last three decades of the gay rights movement focused on sexual freedom and acceptance, the next three decades seem destined to continue the current battle for the right to marry and, by extension, the right to be a parent.
Of course, even without the benefit of legal protection, gay men and women have been raising children for long enough and in large-enough numbers that they've become an acknowledged part of their communities. Schools in places like Los Angeles and Boston mount displays of famous gay figures and make sure the library includes books like ''King and King,'' about a prince who marries a princess's brother. A well-worn anecdote circulates in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a progressive neighborhood, about two gay men who were concerned when a little boy teased their child for having no mommy -- only to discover later that the little boy in question had two mommies. The story is funny precisely because it points to an antiquated anxiety, a fear from another era running up against the startling reality of this one.
In some pockets of the country, the atmosphere is now sufficiently safe for the older kids of gay parents, kids like Ry, to start speaking plainly about their childhoods, seeking each other out for support or activism. But at the very moment when the cultural environment seems secure, the political environment has become hypersensitive. A central argument advanced against gay marriage is that gay relationships have a corrosive effect on the institution of the traditional family. In that context, the children of gay parents are not just aspiring filmmakers, or dropouts, or Phi Beta Kappas, or cross-dressers, or serial monogamists. They're also a form of evidence in the political debate. How do the children of gay parents turn out, when compared with the children of straight parents, in terms of eventual marital status, income, psychological well-being? If gay couples give birth, seek to adopt or become foster parents, what kind of adult members of society will they produce?
Although definitive studies of these families don't yet exist -- the sample size is still too small -- that hasn't stopped states like Arkansas, Mississippi, Utah and Florida from passing laws to limit the rights of gays to adopt or to become foster parents. Policy makers on both sides of the culture wars are scrambling to find research to sway the debate: conservative groups like the American College of Pediatricians argue that kids raised by gay parents grow up sexually promiscuous and confused; advocates like the American Civil Liberties Union point to studies that suggest that the kids are as well adjusted as their peers, if not more so -- more resilient, more open-minded, more tolerant.
As for Ry, who acknowledges that she is a living, breathing result of a new social endeavor, she says she's more than happy to discuss how having gay parents shaped her, to the extent that she has figured it out. Truth be told, she seems to enjoy being her family's self-appointed chronicler, often referring back to her experience in her films and performances. She may not be a statistically significant sample, and her stories may sound like ancient history to the kids born to today's gay parents, many of whom are assimilating seamlessly in their communities. But as she points out, in some ways she knows more about the subject than the conservative policy makers seeking to raise concerns about gay parents, or the mostly gay psychologists looking to validate the perfect normalcy of gay parents' kids.
Ry, the daughter of trailblazing lesbians, has spent so much time under a magnifying glass that it's almost as if her feelings about her family -- and her own response to those feelings -- have been permanently magnified. Any kid who grew up with gay parents has probably given some thought, at least in fleeting moments, to how her upbringing shaped her personality, her sexuality, her gender. As an artist, Ry scrutinizes those thoughts, performing them live, blowing them up on-screen so that every nuance is beautifully represented and crystal clear.
''I'm an expert in this subject,'' Ry said as the meal drew to a close. ''And I didn't even have to lift a finger.''
Sitting behind a projector last April in the front row of a small theater in the East Village, Ry was looking apprehensive. Although her work has been shown at venues like the Turin Film Festival, she was now about to show a short film at a comparatively humble event called Avant-Garde-Arama. The festival's hosts, dressed in a look somewhere between bridal and bondage, were calling on audience members -- straight, gay, strangers, whatever -- to volunteer to be married onstage. It might have been great theater if anyone had, but no one did, and eventually the hosts introduced Ry, who started the projector rolling.
She had mounted three separate screens, and on each a different variant of the shower scene from ''Psycho,'' recreated in stark black-and-white flatness, played itself out: on one, the stabbing of the doomed Janet Leigh figure happened on cue, while in another, a second actress playing Janet Leigh turned the knife on her attacker and left him bloody at her feet. That vengeful Janet Leigh figure then seemed to step, naked and dripping, into the third screen, where she took her knife to Janet Leigh figure No. 3. The film was visually interesting and unexpected, a slasher film with a brain, and the audience responded with enthusiastic applause.
After a few more acts -- a nude dance, a rapper named Mint T. -- Ry's parents, Robin Young, 49, and Sandy Russo, 64, left their seats to meet Ry by the stage. Ry was dressed in vintage femme fatale, a black checked dress with fish nets and heels; her mothers wore jeans and glasses. Ry still looked uncomfortable, and Young and Russo (whom everyone calls by her surname) seemed less than enthusiastic, with shrugs passing for commentary. ''I don't think they liked it,'' Ry reported later. ''They're not into the violence-against-women thing, I guess.'' She'd been trying to comment on the hackneyed image of woman as victim, she said, but ''Moms,'' as she and Cade sometimes call their parents, apparently saw only the same old thing. She sighed heavily: ''Do you ever stop caring what they think?''
At the time, Ry was living with her mothers again, having moved back to New York after graduating from Oberlin less than a year before. The three of them were living in the duplex loft on Greenwich Street where Ry and Cade were raised, on the western fringe of the West Village, about as close as you can get to the Hudson piers that gave rise to the subculture of gay nightlife in New York. Ry can remember hearing, as a child, the cries of a male prostitute being beaten in an empty car lot down the road. Now the neighborhood, like so much of gay culture itself, is chic and thriving, with million-dollar town houses, a gleaming grocery, a high-end gym. Cade, who is gay and works as an AIDS educator, lives nearby, in a small apartment that her mothers own. The family seems exceptionally tight-knit, as if bonded by the psychic hazing they've endured over the years, the doubt that has hovered over them from the moment of Cade's conception.
Over dinner in their duplex a few nights after the screening, Young, a real-estate manager, and Russo, a legal-services lawyer and educator, offered the highlights of the family history. Ry had heard it all before, but she listened with the polite, even rapt attention appropriate for, say, a war story, even a familiar one. Her story, she knows, starts with theirs.
In 1979, within months of falling in love, Russo, then 38, and Young, then 23, decided to have a family together, having heard of other women doing the same -- ''like, these mythical, amazing stories,'' Young said. Russo and Young flew to San Francisco, where Russo would be inseminated. Using a syringe, sperm donated by a gay friend of a friend and the instructions on a mimeographed pamphlet circulating in the lesbian community at the time, she became pregnant on the first try.
When Russo and Young broke the news to Young's parents, referring to the future grandchild, Young's father said, ''Well, I guess you could call it that.'' Russo recalled the exchange with a kind of bitter humor. ''It was like we were having a dog or something,'' she said. Graying and solid, Russo stares through clear-rimmed spectacles with a focus so intense it's always unexpected when one of her frequent, wide smiles takes over her face. From the way she said ''dog,'' it was suddenly clear who was the source of Ry's old-school New York accent.
Young and Russo hadn't expected their families to support their decision to have a child, but they were surprised by how much their new role as parents distanced them from many in the gay community at that time. They had lesbian friends who cooed over the girls, but for the most part Russo and Young found themselves on a different path. ''For years, when we went to the beach over the summer, we'd be the only one with kids, hanging out with all these topless lesbians,'' Young remembered. ''They weren't used to dealing with the kids. If one of them was noisy, they'd be like, 'Can't you do something with her?''' About a year after Cade was born, Young became pregnant with Ry, using the sperm of a different gay man, also a friend of a friend. ''No one gay was having kids,'' Young continued. ''It wasn't something they could conceive of. It wasn't part of gay culture. It was not cool.''
Russo's usual affect is one of outrage, but Young's, by contrast, is mild amusement. She laughs now at the moments that were difficult then. Pediatricians hung up on them when they figured out the family arrangement. Other mothers looked at them oddly at the playground. More painful, they found they grew away from some of their lesbian and gay friends or noticed they'd been dropped. ''You know, we'd been part of this downtown, counterculture world,'' Young said. ''Once we had kids, our friends became other parents with kids. In some ways we no longer related to our lesbian and gay friends. But at the same time, we weren't fully accepted by the straight world.''
Ry doesn't recall any one light-bulb moment when she realized her family was different from others, and she went to a private school progressive enough that she wasn't taunted for being any different. No one bullied her; they simply denied the Russo-Youngs' definition of family. A lot of kids demanded to know which mother was each girl's ''real mother,'' a query the family made a policy of refusing to answer. ''We also had a lot of arguments with kids who said Cade and I weren't real sisters,'' Ry said. It still makes Russo mad: ''If they'd been adopted, no one would have said that,'' she said.
A dreamy child who always loved dress-up and theater, Ry spent most of her time with her best female friend, forming a friendship so close that, by middle school, other kids noticed -- and a few decided that the two must be lesbians. Ry barely picked up on it, hearing about it only years later from Cade, who'd heard the rumors. ''We just didn't care,'' Ry said. ''We really were in our own world, and we thought they were losers.''
Ry's mothers admit that even they thought for a while that Ry probably would grow up to be a lesbian. From the time she was a young kid, they joked about it with her, which sometimes made her uncomfortable, although now she says she thinks it's funny. ''You should see pictures of me from when I was in grade school -- braces, little shaggy helmet haircut,'' Ry said. She describes a favorite picture of herself at age 6 or so: ''I was obsessed with pink, but I wore pink corduroys lined with pink flannel and a pink denim shirt and pink Velcro glow-in-the-dark sneakers. I was really into these tough pink outfits, so it was like this cool little contradiction, like Rizzo'' -- the pink-clad bad girl in ''Grease.'' In general, Ry is less interested in victim politics than she is in gender construction: what all that pink was about preoccupies her more than how she felt when other kids teased her.
Cade came out of the closet to her mothers when she was 16, during a ride home to the city after a weekend at their country house upstate. Her mothers took it in stride; in fact, they didn't so much as turn around in their seats, which irritated Cade, she said, as much as if they'd reacted in shock. Cade had been the more femme of the two girls when they were younger -- Ry remembers Cade poring over Seventeen as if it contained a code she needed to crack -- but by the time Cade was 18, she was not only out, but also intent on owning it. She started wearing men's suits and cutting her hair so short that even her mothers protested.
Young and Russo later admitted to Cade that they, proud vanguard that they were, had briefly found themselves avoiding the topic of Cade's sexuality around people they knew. They were worried about what it would seem to say about them. Could it be used against them, or other gay parents? Had they, in fact, influenced Cade too much?
Cade, who previously dated boys, might have been offended by the suggestion, were she not wondering the same thing herself. ''Every guy I'd ever hooked up with told me I wasn't gay, that I just thought I was because my parents were,'' Cade said. ''Even after I came out and had been in a relationship for a year and a half, I still wasn't sure.'' She eventually had one last affair with a man, an experience that confirmed she was interested only in women. When she went to Smith College, she met other women who, like her, were lesbians and had been raised by lesbian mothers. In some cases, she said, those women faced mothers who actively disapproved, distressed that their children were living out conservative policy makers' most potent fears.
f the American College of Pediatricians or the Heritage Foundation wanted to make a case for limiting the rights of gay parents, they surely would want to start by demonstrating that the children of gay parents are themselves gay in disproportionately high numbers, or that the kids engage in other sexual behaviors that social conservatives like themselves consider undesirable. Gay activists, on the other hand, would presumably like to have research that suggests just the opposite. In today's politically charged research climate, however, it's almost impossible to get financing for inquiries into adolescent sexuality of any kind.
As it stands, most of the studies that do exist have focused not on sexuality but on ''functioning,'' a concept measured by the Child Behavior Checklist, a standard assessment form that has been applied to hundreds of thousands of kids around the world. The checklist, which is more than 100 questions long, asks about everything from children's social competence (compared with other kids, how well does your child play and work alone, and play with other kids?) to their problem behaviors (does your child wet his bed, is he cruel to animals, afraid to go school?). In 1996, Charlotte J. Patterson, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, asked 55 lesbians and 25 heterosexual women, all 80 of whom had had children via donor insemination, to fill out the questionnaire. The teachers of their children were asked to do the same. The results, which Patterson published in the journal Child Development in 1998, found no significant differences among the children. In an earlier study that Patterson published in 1994, about gender development in the children of lesbian parents, she interviewed kids about their favorite toys, their playmates and their activities, and concluded, after churning the data, that they made the choices conventionally associated with their gender.
The American College of Pediatricians, which was founded with the intention of preserving what it calls children's ''natural families,'' rejects this sort of data, declaring it too limited in scope to be meaningful. In response to a report on adolescent sexuality published in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the group delivered a sharply worded reply on its Web site: ''Same-gender 'marriage' is clearly a highly controversial cultural issue and represents a radical social experiment lacking unbiased research supporting its benefits or even its safety for both individuals and society as a whole.''
There's yet a third position in the debate about gay parents, one that argues passionately that there are differences, not to castigate gay parents for deviance but to embrace the uniqueness of being raised in a same-sex household. Around 1999, Judith Stacey, then a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, took a broad look at the bulk of research claiming no difference in kids of gay parents and rejected its claims that a parent's sexuality bore no influence whatsoever on his or her kids. ''That just didn't make sense to me,'' said Stacey, 61, and now a professor at New York University. A trim, animated woman, she sat, her feet tucked under her, on the sofa in her sunny apartment near the school's campus when I spoke to her in August. She has no quarrel with research suggesting that children of gay parents are as well adjusted as their peers, but she does contest the idea that there is no difference when it comes to sexuality. ''Every theory out there -- be it social constructionist, biological determinist, environmental or psychoanalytic -- would lead you to expect that a larger minority of children with gay parents will grow up not to be exclusively heterosexual. Even a genetic theory would lead you to that conclusion.''
Stacey analyzed 21 studies, including longitudinal research on adult children of lesbian mothers by the researchers Susan Golombok and Fiona L. Tasker. One statistic that she drew out revealed that of the 25 kids raised by lesbians whom the researchers were able to interview as young adults, 17 years after the study began, 6 who had been raised by lesbians said they had homoerotic relationships or experiences, compared with none of the 20 adults who had been raised by straight mothers. Sixty-four percent of the adults raised by lesbians had considered having a homosexual affair, compared with 17 percent of the adults raised by straight parents. Stacey and her co-author, Timothy J. Biblarz, concluded that the evidence, ''while scant and underanalyzed,'' seems to suggest the possibility that children of gay parents ''will be more likely to attain a similar orientation -- and theory and common sense support such a view.''
Given the small size of Golombok and Tasker's data set -- involving 27 single lesbian mothers' households and 27 heterosexual single mothers' households -- it's surprising how much attention their research and Stacey's analysis of it have received: Stacey's paper alone has been cited by both plaintiffs and defendants in cases governing gay adoption in Florida, Massachusetts and Oregon, among other states, as well as countries like Canada and Australia. Stacey now spends almost as much time testifying and being interviewed as she does researching.
Stacey freely admits that she wants to get ahead of the legal curve: ''My position is that you can't base an argument for justice on information that's empirically falsifiable in the long run,'' she said. ''If your right to custody is based on saying there are no differences, then research comes along and says you're wrong, then where are you?''
But Charlotte J. Patterson, the author of the studies suggesting that the children of gay parents exhibit no real differences, looks at Golombok and Tasker's study and considers a different finding: that the adults who were raised by lesbians were not statistically more likely to identify themselves as bisexual, lesbian or gay than adults raised by heterosexual mothers. And there was no difference between the two groups when it came to reporting attraction to members of the same sex, she notes. (The adults raised by gay parents, you might conclude, were merely more likely to act on that attraction.) ''There was something for everybody, politically speaking, in that study,'' Patterson says.
Although Ry is curious and thoughtful about her upbringing, she has never looked into the psychological studies, as if she already knew they couldn't capture what's interesting and complicated to her about her experience. ''I'm just sort of living my life, and I'm not really dying to know what people think about my psychological makeup,'' she told me. ''I'm not so worried about it, really. I hate that you even have to respond to the hypothesis that there might be something wrong with it. And that's so off-putting to me, I'm just turned off from reading the research myself.''
For about a year, as she was developing various film scripts and perfecting her live performances, Ry has worked at a West Village dress shop called Darling. Both campy and sincerely feminine, the shop, which suits Ry perfectly, is best known to downtowners for the repro Marilyn dress that's almost always featured in the window, a fan perpetually blowing its skirt up and out. ''Hello, Darling,'' Ry gets to say coyly every time she answers the phone.
When I met Ry for lunch in June, she had broken her elbow roller-skating, and she showed up at the restaurant where we were meeting with her arm in a sling, a look that compounded the whimsy of the rest of what she was wearing: a satin, patterned cowboy shirt, bright gold shoes, lacy beige hose and a miniskirt. When she walked in, there was a moment when it seemed as if half the room was staring at her, trying to decide what to make of this tall young woman with the sling and the gold shoes: was she a freak or a knockout? Ry threw her shoulders back and looked around as if she owned the place and was waiting for the host to recognize her. The moment passed, and the customers went back to their meals, the verdict rendered: another New York knockout.
There's something highly self-conscious about Ry's sense of style. It's a constructed form of femininity that's also confrontational and a lot like costume. (The woman who owns Darling, in fact, ran the costume shop at the theater program at the high school Ry attended.) Part of that look is run-of-the-mill hipster attitude -- girl in quotation marks, fashion as comedic foil. But part of her look also seems to be drawn from queer culture: flashy, defiant, intrigued by artifice. It doesn't come as a total surprise to find out that when Ry goes to the popular gay vacation destination Provincetown, Mass., with her mothers, as she does every summer, she identifies more, appearance-wise, with the drag queens than with the lesbians. One summer, just to play around, walking down the street in Provincetown, she started mimicking the drag-queen strut she'd seen her whole life, rolling off her toes, swaggering through her shoulders. She hadn't walked half a block before she successfully passed. ''I thought that was a woman!'' someone said to a companion as they walked past Ry.
Ry said she thinks a lot about passing. Sometimes she has the odd sense that she's passing for straight, even though she is straight. She can spot two lesbians walking down the street from several blocks away, so why can't they spot her as the daughter of two women just like them? Doesn't her family history transmit? Sometimes when she's with her boyfriend, she told me the first night we met, ''I feel guilty about how much privilege I feel as a straight couple, but I also love the privilege. It's like the kinetic energy from everyone around, just walking down the street -- you're young, you're beautiful, you are what we want you to be, go off and be happy, we want you to make it. It's like this fairy tale, when you contrast it to the homophobia -- my parents just hold hands, and they get funny looks. At the same time, it's like this nightmare to be totally absorbed into this stupid straight world.'' She made a face, half-sticking her tongue out. ''So at the same time, it's sad for me. I feel like I'm losing something else.''
Ry and Cade say that neither of them fully realized how stranded they felt in that in-between space until a few years ago, when they walked into a party in Provincetown for kids of gay parents -- and the feeling of isolation went away, like the white noise you notice only when it's finally silenced. The party was given by the organization Colage, an acronym for Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere, which now has 45 chapters in 31 states and Canada.
''On the one hand, Colage meetings are a place where kids can foster their pride in themselves and their parents with kids from similar families,'' says Beth Teper, executive director of the organization and a 35-year-old whose mother came out when Beth was 10. ''On the other hand, if kids do have some concerns, or they're angry or upset, they can come into a space that's real or authentic and say what they think. I think at first kids expect everyone's going to be like, 'Yeah, whoo whoo, isn't it great having gay parents?' because that's the only thing you hear kids saying in the media, or from their parents: 'Everything's hunky-dory.' But there are always going to be experiences they're not happy about. The trick is finding a place where you can share what you're not happy about, but with people who will understand and still not judge their family for it.''
It's at Colage meetings and in their confidential online chat rooms that the children of gay men and lesbians can confess the complicated thoughts they often have about their upbringings, thoughts they'd never have discussed growing up, least of all with their parents. One straight adult man I interviewed -- he wouldn't use his name because his mother is still in the closet -- offered a frank confession about why he was agonizingly slow, as he puts it, to act on his interest in women. ''I got one impression growing up,'' he says. ''Dad tries to kiss mom. Mom hates it.''
Sex is a common theme at Colage events, and so is the subject of kids' protectiveness of their parents. You might not tell your mother that someone at school referred to her with a homophobic slur, but you can tell other kids who have experienced the same.
For every kid who champions the brand-new world his gay parents have created, there's another one who sees his gay parents as so banal that they're not worth mentioning, or another who resents the way her parents' sexuality has become the central feature of her life. One young woman I interviewed, an academic in her late 20's who is still close with her out gay father, recently started dating a man who told her on their first date that he didn't believe gays should raise kids. She kept seeing him anyway, as if to prove she wouldn't let that one issue define her life, wouldn't use it as the litmus test by which she judged every person she encountered.
Stefan Lynch, 32, the first full-time director of Colage back in the mid-90's, served for years as an informal spokesman on behalf of kids of gay parents. (''Queerspawn,'' he calls them.) Lynch stepped out of semi-retirement from his life as an activist to reply to an e-mail message I sent him. He seemed interested in playing down how much those issues of alienation preoccupy his peers. ''Looking back on the movement of kids with gay parents, one of the things I regret is that we call our groups 'support groups,''' he wrote. ''Sure, we sometimes need support to deal with unfriendly schools, tensions around divorce, grief about parents with AIDS or breast cancer, but the support-group model implies that we have personal problems. I think that instead of an illness metaphor, we need an immigrant metaphor. Just as new immigrants banded together to negotiate a new culture while preserving the familiarity of their own, our groups are really mutual-aid societies. And like immigrants, the broader culture is strengthened by our influence.''
Lynch emphasized the liberating novelty of his upbringing, its power to pave new routes to a kid's sense of self. ''I'm a nurse,'' he wrote. ''I played competitive tennis and rode my bike across the U.S. Last week I canned five gallons of tomato sauce while crying to stories about the occupation of Iraq on the radio, then flirted with a cute woman at the corner diner.'' He continued: ''Boys raised in gay families can and do reform masculinity so that instead of being simply not feminine, it's positive. There's room for emotions. There's room for affection (even attraction!) for other men. And there's room for women as people, lovers, not a Mysterious Other.'' His e-mail message started out with a pronouncement that he sees as progress, and that conservatives may see as an indictment: ''One of the most powerful parts of growing up in a gay family is the opportunity, which not every child or parent takes, to transcend gender.''
One of Lynch's successors is Abigail Garner, a 32-year-old activist and the author of ''Families Like Mine,'' a sort of ''Feminine Mystique'' about the children of gay parents, articulating their pride and their struggles with homophobia but also the grievances they have with their families. Ry first contacted Garner after she was moved by a column Garner wrote in a publication for alternative families, and they began a correspondence. Ry allowed Garner to quote in her book from an e-mail message that Ry sent her, commenting on how being raised by lesbian mothers influenced her outlook on men.
''I got the book,'' Young announced when she came home one afternoon this past June. Ry was lounging on the couch in the TV room, hanging out with Meema Spadola, a documentary filmmaker who got to know the Russo-Youngs when she profiled them in ''Our House,'' a documentary about kids with gay and lesbian parents. Young stood in the doorway holding it out as Ry looked up from her vantage point. ''That's quite a quote,'' Young said to Ry.
''What do you mean?'' Ry asked, propping herself up on her elbow.
''You read it,'' Young said, handing it to Spadola. ''It sounds like she was raised by lesbian wolves in a lesbian wolf cave.''
Spadola read Ry's quotation out loud: ''It took me a lot of struggle to realize that I really was attracted to men, yet now it is really hard for me to deal with men as human beings, let alone sexually.'' There was more along those lines -- Ry was intrigued but ''repulsed'' by heterosexual relations, afraid of the ''sexist soul-losing domain of oppression.'' Her parting thought: ''I cannot understand or relate to men because I am so immersed in gay culture and unfamiliar with what it is to have a healthy straight relationship.'' As Spadola read, Ry appeared to be examining her own blood-red-painted, neatly trimmed nails, as if deciding what tack to take. She settled on defiant. ''So what?'' she asked. ''I think it's cool.''
''It's kind of cool,'' Young said, as usual, kind of amused. ''But all I can say is it seems like you've really gotten over that problem.'' Since she was 16, Ry says, she has had a string of sensitive boyfriends, each one of them more open and artistic than the next. There was Turner, who came and lived with Ry and her mothers just after Ry graduated from high school. Then there was the composer who accompanied her to Dublin for her semester abroad. More recently, she'd fallen for Tony, a music engineer who was so mature and understanding when Ry tried to break up with him that she realized how much she loved him after all, and was awaiting his arrival in New York that week.
Ry suddenly sat up straight. ''I think it's cool how critical I am of the heterosexual world,'' she said. ''It is sexist and gross.''
''Ry, you make it sound like you've never seen a man in your whole life,'' Young said.
Her daughter lay back down on the couch. ''I guess it was a little dramatic,'' Ry allowed. ''I was feeling isolated from men at the time. I don't feel like that now.'' She'd given the quotation a year or two before she'd met Tony, when she'd been single for a while, feeling lonely and unsure she could ''even pull off the straight thing.'' For Ry, one aspect of being raised by gay mothers is not knowing what to attribute to the travails of being a given age, or a woman, or a feminist, or a New Yorker, and what to attribute to the particular gaps and connections that come with having lesbian mothers.
Ry could find yet another source for her wariness about men by looking to the central drama of her childhood: a legal struggle with the man who donated his sperm to Young. When Ry was 9, her sperm donor, a gay lawyer from California named Thomas Steel, sued for an order of paternity, turning what had been an affectionate, intermittent relationship into a bitter, hostile one. From the beginning, for Russo and Young, it was a given that Steel would have no parental rights, although they made it clear he was welcome to visit the family and to get to know Ry and Cade. ''I mean, it wasn't like a parent at all, but he was affectionate, and I went along,'' said Ry, who saw him a few times a year starting when she was a toddler. ''Here was this really fun, big, tall man picking me up and telling me, 'Oh, you're so cute.' You know, that was fun. But I didn't rely on him for anything -- he was like an uncle you love hanging around with.''
When Ry's mothers refused to let Steel take Ry to California to visit his parents and grandmother, he filed for paternity, which would have granted him certain rights over decisions governing Ry's life. Despite Russo's law degree, she and Young had decided not to ask him to sign a document relinquishing his rights; at the time, they said, they suspected such a document could not have been honored, given the novelty of the issue. As the case made its way through the courts over the course of four years, the family suffered from the stress of the challenge: Young lost 20 pounds, and both women were swamped with legal fees and meetings with lawyers. Cade said she felt the burden of testifying to court psychiatrists about their family's dynamics, fearful that any wrong word would lose her her sister. Ry started having nightmares about the police coming to take her away.
To Russo and Young's dismay, a significant portion of their mutual friends sided with Steel. As groundbreaking as their family was, Russo and Young seemed to be taking an almost conservative view of parenthood, one defined by the number two. In the context of an era when gay men and women were just starting to try to recreate notions of family and community, their structure struck some of their peers as limited: if two parents were good, why wouldn't three be better? Wasn't Steel, indeed, both involved in Ry's life and a biological parent? Shouldn't that give him some rights?
Steel made significant legal headway before ultimately dropping the case, perhaps because he suspected he'd gone as far as he could, or because he realized the suit had already cost him Ry's affection. One of the last conversations he had before dying of AIDS (a fate that also befell Cade's sperm donor) was with his estranged biological daughter, then 16, who called him when she learned he was deathly ill. At times when Ry talks about Steel, a hint of a wistful tone creeps in; but in front of her parents, she's almost uncharacteristically tough. ''He was high on medicine,'' she said. ''He was saying, I'm sorry, I loved you, I never meant to hurt you, I always wanted to be your father. But after going through the case, I was rolling my eyes. You know, so now you want me to forgive you because you're on your deathbed.'' Ry then softened a bit. ''I mean, there was a time when I did care a lot about him,'' she said. ''Not as a father -- more like as an icon of a man.''
Ry's mothers may not have been heterosexual role models for her, but they've always encouraged her in her relationships with men, provided they approved of her choice. When she was 16, she fell in love with her first boyfriend but was unsure of where to take things. Several months into the relationship, there were a couple of weeks, her mothers recall, when she mooned around the house, talking around and about the relationship, seeming stressed out, uncertain, in need of counsel. ''Finally, my mom said, 'You should just go have sex with him,''' Ry recalled.
It's always a little awkward to have to ask Ry which mother she means; friends who know the family well can always tell from context. ''Russo,'' answered Ry, and then it seems obvious, the bluntness being the crucial cue. ''She just cut to the chase. You know, it wasn't like I actually asked her if she thought I should or I shouldn't, although that was what was on my mind. She was just really intuitive about what was really going on.'' Within a week, Ry had taken her mother's advice, and the relationship eventually developed into a relatively long-lasting one, at least on the teenage time line. (The two were together a year and a half.)
The story has become a favorite family chestnut, partly because of the way it embraces heterosexuality while upholding values Russo and Young pride themselves on, values they see as part of queer culture -- an openness about sexuality, a fearlessness communicated not just from friend to friend, but also, now, from mother to daughter. To Ry, the story signifies something slightly different. ''It was like I needed to ask their permission to have sex with this man,'' she explained to me. The issue for Ry wasn't sex -- it was sex with a man, which meant ''growing up and away from my mothers,'' as she put it. They gave their consent, with love and encouragement, but it seems to pain Ry that she felt, of her own accord, that she had to ask at all: ''I felt a little bit like I was betraying them. Like I was leaving them emotionally. I wasn't sure if it was O.K. with them. But then I got that O.K. and that made me feel relieved, like I could go ahead.''
Toward the end of June, as Ry was getting ready to move out of her mothers' apartment for good, she had a dream about a transgendered woman named Robin, who comes into Darling from time to time. Robin, Ry says, seems a little bit fragile, even broken, and Ry always goes out of her way to make sure she feels comfortable. In her dream, Ry was on a bus, and she was embracing Robin. It felt a little bit like being in love, she said, but there was nothing erotic about it -- it was more of a protective embrace. Still, even in the dream, she was wondering if she'd been wrong after all -- maybe she really was a lesbian.
The dream's haphazard logic slowly revealed itself, and it became clear that she was embracing Robin because they were in some sort of danger, and it was imperative, somehow, that she and Robin pass as straight. Looking back, Ry can't even remember if she was trying to pass as the man or pass as the woman, but she said she knew it was somehow her responsibility to pull it off. Although Ry reported the dream in almost vivid detail, she didn't have a lot to say about what she thinks it means. As for her mother's name also being Robin, she's pretty sure that's just a coincidence.
For most of her life, Ry has been both parent and child to her mothers, protecting them from the burden of bias she herself is spared, but needing their help, their imprimatur, to keep her connected to the gay community she grew up with.
When Ry spent her semester abroad in Dublin, she felt homesick for the United States, or at least for New York. She didn't care much for Dublin, but one night in particular stands out for her as the worst. She and her boyfriend at the time went to a gay bar that struck her as the only place she wanted to be that night, a place that promised to feel familiar in a certain way. It was a rainy night, and she and her boyfriend stood in line watching the gay men around them get in, while they did not. When Ry made a move toward the door, the doorman blocked her from entering. Ry got it -- that they didn't get it, didn't get her. She wasn't getting in. She got angry. Then she finally walked away, feeling cast out, estranged, a stranger. She stopped in the middle of the street and wept.
''You know, I feel like I'm somewhere in between queer and straight culture, wedged in this strange place, this lonely place,'' Ry told me. ''I can relate to both cultures, but sometimes I feel like I'm not belonging to either. But I'm O.K. with that. In fact, I wouldn't trade it for anything: it's given me such a unique perspective. It's like I have a sense of double vision, the ability to see things from many perspectives at the same time, in a way that's strange and beautiful. It lets you open little doors and look into a little world. It's a vantage point.''
Until recently, Ry considered ''The Middle Ground,'' a mixed-media piece she created, to be her most significant work. Everyone in the family shows up: her mothers are seen dancing in dreamy, soft-focus slow-mo, Cade needles Ry about her sexuality, Ry appears in a TV news clip filmed just after the judge ruled in her family's favor. Ry says that she and her sister have always felt watched; Ry took that sensation and used it, making art that other people watch about the feeling of being a specimen. For now, she's temporarily putting that piece aside, having decided that maybe she has exhausted the drama of her family story. Her next feature film is also about a family, but one that bears no relationship to her own.
When Ry finally moved out of her mothers' duplex, she chose to live in an apartment with her best friend from college -- a lesbian, as if Ry was transitioning slowly away from home. But as the summer wore on, and her boyfriend showed up in New York, the apartment seemed smaller and smaller. Ry and her friend decided the arrangement wasn't working, the friend moved out and, for the first time, Ry was living on her own.
Ry still sees her mothers all the time -- they live just a few blocks away, and they sometimes stop by Darling to hang out, or the mothers and daughters all run into one another at the favorite family restaurants, or deliberately get together. The four of them had dinner a few days after Russo and Young had held a successful fund-raiser for a transgender legal organization, and they were all in a good mood. Ry had been intrigued by a young woman at the party who looked like someone she'd want to befriend -- but because of the context of the party, she found herself wondering if there was an attraction there, rather than just an interest. By now, no one in the family takes those kinds of musings from Ry terribly seriously, but Russo asked who it was anyway. ''Oh, her?'' Russo made a face. ''She's terrible. Thank God you're not a lesbian.'' Everyone laughed.
Russo suddenly leaned back in her seat and looked around the table. ''You know, sometimes I can't'' -- here she used a profanity for emphasis -- ''believe it. We're sitting around the table with our two grown daughters.''
In some ways, Russo and Young's family turned out to be more conventional than the families of half the New York City kids Ry and Cade went to school with. For one thing, their parents are still together. ''You know, the older I get, the more I want to live up to what they have,'' Ry said. Cade added that it's rare to see a couple who have so much mutual respect after so long, or a couple for whom the parental duties were so equal throughout. ''It's not like we don't fight,'' Young said, looking a little embarrassed by her daughters' idealizing of their relationship, even as she clearly loved hearing it. That's the whole point of respect, Cade said -- knowing that you'll work it out.
Young and Russo exchanged a self-consciously sappy look. Russo started rubbing an eye underneath the clear-rimmed glasses. ''It's like our whole lives together have been this one big, messy, incredible experiment,'' she said. Then she broke out into one of her broad smiles, a look of pride mixed with amazement. ''And it worked.''
Susan Dominus, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about the widows of firefighters who died on Sept. 11.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times
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