Urban flight

April 1997

Urban flight

Gay moms and dads are making their homes in the burbs for - what else? - better schools
by Stacie Marinelli

As their son approached school age, Somerville residents Cindy Marshall and Kathy Pillsbury had a decision to make: stay in the city or move to the burbs? "I had lived in Somerville for a long time but we needed more space, we didn't have a backyard," Marshall says. But as Marshall notes, "There's so many factors that you have to weigh when you decide where to live." And tops on the list for lesbian-and gay-headed families is whether or not there are there other families like theirs already in the neighborhood. "We didn't want to be total pioneers," she says.
Aware that Newton is gaining a reputation as a friendly place for lesbian families, Marshall and Pillsbury attended a brunch organized by a lesbian-mothers' group and met others who'd made the move -- and were happy with the decision. "That helped us feel comfortable," she says. So comfortable that the couple moved to Newton with their four-year-old son about a year ago. "We wanted to be in a place where we would be accepted and our child would meet acceptance in his school situation," Marshall says. "There are no guarantees no matter where you are, but Newton has a reputation for being liberal."
Marshall and Pillsbury are on the leading edge of a new trend in urban flight: queer moms and dads who relocate to the suburbs for better schools and, in some cases, the sense of community that can't be found in a city. By attending PTO meetings, renting Pocahontas, and visiting the pediatrician, they're quietly changing attitudes about lesbians and gay men in ways that passage of domestic partnership legislation simply can't.
Having children, for instance, makes it about as easy to remain closeted as it is to be invisible. Brian, a Concord dad who (with his partner, Bernie) has legally adopted one child from the state and is in the process of adopting two more, recalls an awkward moment at the hairdresser's when his seven-year-old son told the woman cutting his hair that he loved his "dads."
"She stopped for a moment before asking, `Oh, you have two dads?' " remembers Brian, who asked that his last name and the real names of his foster sons not be published, since those two adoptions are still pending. "And he said, `Yeah.' And then I felt it happen -- they all turned around to look at me."
And Nancy Gill and Marcelle Latourneau of Bridgewater remember the day they brunched with their daughter at the local eatery, Bob's Big Breakfast. When they both ordered for four-year-old Tyan, the waitress seemed confused. "She asked, `Who's the mom?' " Gill recalls. "So I said, `Tyan has two moms.' And she went, `Ooooh.' "

By most accounts, the first lesbian- or gay-headed families in the suburbs were divorced parents who came out after having children. A slow -- and more deliberate -- drift to suburbia by lesbian and gay couples who chose to start families together began about three to five years ago, says Jenifer Firestone, founder of Alternative Family Matters.
"The lesbian baby boom started around '88 or '89, and now that their children are old enough to go to kindergarten, lesbian moms are thinking about moving for a better school system," she says. The surest sign of that is how the mailing list for Conceptions, Firestone's newsletter for lesbian- and gay-headed families, is changing: "The sections for Newton and Brookline just get larger and larger, and Jamaica Plain gets smaller."
Yet another indication that gay families are leaving the queer-friendly neighborhoods of Somerville, Jamaica Plain, Cambridge, and the South End for the picket fences of suburbia is that more and more women seeking donor insemination at WomanCare (where 70 percent of such clients are lesbians) have addresses outside Route 128. In January alone, lesbians seeking insemination at WomanCare came from Framingham, Winchester, Newton, Worcester, Sharon, Stoneham, and the Cape, according to practice administrator Lorie Miller. And at the Fenway Community Health Center, which has offered donor insemination to lesbians since 1983, 39 out of 55 lesbians currently inseminating live outside Cambridge and Boston, according to spokeswoman Myrna Greenfield.

Gay families move outside the city for the same reasons as straight families: green space, good schools, and, often, better housing values. Andover realtor Jeannette Belben, who's recently sold several homes to lesbian mothers, says that the phenomenon of gay and lesbian parents looking to buy in the suburbs has become something of a trend. And it's not hard to see why. Many suburban towns offer lots of house and land for much less money than a home in the city. And some parents say that they feel more comfortable sending their kids to suburban schools than to urban ones.
Brian and his partner, for instance, moved to Concord because of its excellent public schools. It turned out be a good choice: when they took in a child born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Concord schools assigned a tutor to work exclusively with their son, allowing him to remain in his regular classroom full-time -- a luxury most urban schools could not afford.
Other suburban parents have simply decided to make their homes in the same types of neighborhoods they grew up in. "We talked about having children from day one, and we never thought of living in the city," says John, a Newton native who now lives in Milton with his partner, Cliff, and their two sons. (John and Cliff asked that their last names not be published in order to protect their children's privacy -- "[Being gay] is not their issue," Cliff says of three-year-old Zachary and one-year-old Kyle.) The two were already living in the suburbs when they decided to have their sons through a surrogacy arrangement with a mother in another city. While being the only openly gay fathers around has its strains, both say they enjoy the quieter pace of a suburban lifestyle. And when Cliff, who's home full time with Zachary and Kyle, starts to feel isolated, he calls up a lesbian friend who's home full time with her child.

Regardless of how (or where) the family ends up in the suburbs, finding a progressive school and getting teachers, administrators, and classmates to accept a child from a gay family is crucial to making the move successful. Out in Ashland, Karen Ahlers and Michelle Blair, who co-parent six-year-old daughter Kyle with Ahlers's ex-lover, visited their daughter's preschool teacher with age-appropriate books about gay families, such as Anna Day and the O Ring (which follows the daily adventures of a little boy, his two moms, and their dog) and Belinda's Bouquet (about a chubby girl who learns to value herself at the home of her best friend and his two moms). Ahlers and Blair, along with most other parents interviewed for this article, say that they've found most principals and teachers to be supportive. Trouble occasionally arises, they say, when straight parents get upset by a child's news of a classmate with a "different" kind of family.
That's why Brian prefers "to have control of the spin on these things." Brian and his partner have gone into their sons' classrooms and answered questions about their family. Being open in the community helps ensure that his kids grow up in a place "where people don't look at us as fags or queers, but as two guys who adopted Scott, Ryan, and Joseph," he says.
Outreach doesn't end in the elementary school, however. Some parents have found that a good old-fashioned open house is a great first step in getting to know the neighbors -- and letting the neighbors get to know them. When Ahlers and Blair organized an open house for their Ashland home, over 40 neighbors showed up. During the next few months, they received five invitations in return. "Sometimes I don't give people a lot of credit, but I have been proven wrong in case after case," Ahlers says. "People have been really kind to us."
Nancy Gill and Marcelle Latourneau have also been pleasantly surprised with the way people have responded to them as parents. "When Marcelle was pregnant, I told a couple of close work friends [at the Brockton post office]," Gill recalls. Even though it wasn't Gill who was having the baby, the "news went through the building like wildfire," she says, and co-workers surprised her with a baby shower.

Not everyone is packing bags for the suburbs, however. Julie and Hillary Goodridge (they took Hillary's grandmother's maiden name as their last name when they decided to have children) are Jamaica Plain homesteaders. "We made a conscious decision to stay in Jamaica Plain," says Hillary. "It was a hard decision; a lot of our friends have moved to Newton."
The key to the Goodridges' choice to stay in the city with their daughter, one-and-a-half-year old Annie, is diversity. Julie recalls several days spent in Newton babysitting for friends during the height of their 'to move or not to move' discussions. "I remember walking out of the house in the morning [to wait for the school bus] and looking at all the other moms on the street who were doing the exact same thing -- well-to-do white women who, you know, everybody does the same thing all the time -- and I thought, 'Oh my God, I think I'd rather die,' " she says.
It's a not-too-different spin on the reasons many straight families give for staying in the city. In fact, the choices lesbian and gay parents are making about where they raise their children aren't so different from those that straight parents have been making for decades. The big difference is the impact those decisions will have on the broader community. As Brian, the Concord dad, puts it: "I know that we're modeling for kids who are gay in that school. There's a fifth grader there who's going to come out some day, who will think back and remember that kid who had two dads, and realize we were gay."
Stacie Marinelli is a freelance writer living in Cambridge.

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