Ticking All the Wrong Boxes? Gay Parents and the (Im)possibility of Being Right

Abstract

This chapter explores interviewees’ routes into parenthood and the confirmations, denials and complications involved in achieving and affirming parental status. While lesbian and gay parents’ ‘creative’ routes into parenting have been evidenced as innovative, even revolutionary, this perhaps sidelines more ‘normative’ pathways, as well as their disruptions and discontinuities (Weston, 1991; Stacey, 1996; Weeks et al., 2001; Agigian, 2004). Many interviewees (36) had children in previous heterosexual relationships and spoke of the ‘inevitability’ of this (heterosexual) route (Evans, 2006; Gillies, 2006), as well as ongoing complications in negotiating and refusing this inevitability. Here, possibilities and predictabilities intersected with classed transitions; what interviewees imagined for themselves and what others imagined for them, still, compellingly constructed around heteronormativity. Yet middle-class interviewees articulated their ‘coming out’ experiences as enactments of determination and confident self-actualisations, breaking with the past. Working-class interviewees, in general, spoke of the inevitability of ‘messy’ routes and were unlikely to position themselves as autonomous, reflexively aware actors, defining themselves against institutional, familial and even ‘community’ expectations. Notably, those who had children by alternative means (such as assisted insemination or adoption) were mostly from middle-class backgrounds.