Divorce, Reproductive Losses, and Other Queer “Failures”

When the first same-sex couple to marry legally in the United States, Hillary and Julie Goodridge, was feeling stressed from public attention, they didn’t want to seek couples’ counseling. Julie told NPR this past May, “It felt like too much of a risk.” They divorced a few years later. Their daughter Annie, who was 10 at the time, said in retrospect, “I felt like our family let everyone down.” Their situation highlights a long-time problem for the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups: the pressure to be perfect. Two new books, however, each look at topics often associated with failure—relationship break-ups and reproductive losses—in order to help LGBTQ people and our children better navigate them.

In Reproductive Losses: Challenges to LGBTQ Family-Making (Routledge), Christa Craven explains that the past few years, with renewed attacks on LGBTQ rights after previous gains, “have created more pressure than ever for queer people to marry, have children, and create public narratives of LGBTQ progress.” This means that “losses, challenges, and disruptions to stories of ‘successful’ LGBTQ family-making are often silenced, both personally and politically.”

Craven, a cultural and medical anthropologist at the College of Wooster, tries to break the silence by drawing on interviews with 54 queer people who experienced loss as gestational parents, non-gestational parents with gestational partners, or through adoption loss (when a child is reclaimed by their birth family before the adoption is finalized), as well as from her own experience with pregnancy loss. She observes that even for straight, cisgender people, reproductive loss is often hushed up in order to focus on “happy endings”; for queer people, the “deafening heteronormativity” of family-making literature creates a “‘double invisibility’ for queer family-making efforts that do not produce a ‘success story.’”

She disperses some of this invisibility by exploring the queer-specific nuances of how her subjects experienced grief, the support (or lack thereof) available to them, how they commemorated their losses and found resiliency, and the intersections of social class, race, and religion. Craven also makes a compelling argument for a communal response, which can help “combat the multiple cultural silences that surround reproductive loss, queer families, and queer ‘failure.’” To this end, Craven has launched a website, lgbtqreproductiveloss.org, to share further resources, stories, and images of how LGBTQ people have commemorated reproductive losses, from tattoos to physical memorials. Both book and website are must-reads for any queer person who has experienced reproductive loss or is supporting someone who has.

When it comes to relationship break-ups, too, we find similar pressure and silencing. LGBTQ Divorce and Relationship Dissolution: Psychological and Legal Perspectives and Implications for Practice (Oxford), edited by Abbie Goldberg, professor of psychology at Clark University, and Adam Romero, director of legal scholarship at the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School, offers more than 20 interdisciplinary and intersectional essays to break the silence. Goldberg and Romero note in their introduction that “Discourse on divorce and dissolution among LGBTQ people … was and remains almost nonexistent” despite, or perhaps because of, the heroic efforts to achieve marriage equality. And Katherine Allen, professor of human development and family science at Virginia Tech, observes in her essay, “Same-sex couples may have constructed a reality around being perfect, or normal, or just like everyone else. They may be unprepared for when that image shatters.”

The volume seeks to change that, with essays on the interplay of social stigma, economic status, gender identity, legal recognition, immigration status, child custody, and other factors on LGBTQ people and their families as relationships end. They cover not only break-ups of legal marriages, but also those of non-married couples, polyamorous people, and families with more than two parents.

While this volume is aimed at scholars, therapists, lawyers, and other professionals working with LGBTQ clients, much will also be of interest to anyone who has been involved in the fight for LGBTQ relationship recognition and doesn’t mind some (generally accessible) academic lingo.

As Annie Goodridge’s comment above indicates, though, the pressure to be perfect can impact our children as well. Aaron Dickinson Sachs, the grown child of same-sex parents, writes in LGBTQ Divorce and Relationship Dissolution, “Like members of many groups battling negative social perceptions, I felt unable to discuss the difficulty of my parents’ separation, fearing it would ultimately validate anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.”

Furthermore, it isn’t just parental break-ups that can stress our kids, but also the ongoing pressure to be high-achieving, fault-free testaments to LGBTQ parenting. Any problems, from academic difficulties to substance abuse, may be hidden or ignored. As Abigail Garner explained in her 2004 book Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is, “The fear that LGBT parents will be blamed and politically penalized for having less-than-perfect offspring forces these issues underground, isolating kids and families.”

For both our children’s sake and our own, then, let us be grateful to those who are sharing stories, conducting research, and providing resources around difficult issues that might look like imperfections—not to show that LGBTQ people are more flawed than anyone else, but to acknowledge that we are equally human.

This piece was originally published several weeks ago in my Mombian newspaper column. Last week, queer comedian Cameron Esposito shared her personal divorce story in the New York Times, and noted: “I guess in some ways this is what I was fighting for—the right to be queer and human, to have the privileges straight people enjoy, like the privilege to be imperfect and fail. My queerness lives within a larger history of adaptation over perfection.” Exactly. I encourage you to go read her whole piece.