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May 14, 2006
From Pain, Family
Posted at May 14, 2006 07:05 PM in GLBTQ News .
A Special Report from the Hartford Courant
By TINA A. BROWN And ELIZABETH HAMILTON, The Hartford Courant
Photo Right: Spending a quiet moment at Tracy's apartment in Hartford are, from left, Tracy; Angie's daughter, Shawney; Angie, and Angie's niece, Monet. (Credit: PATRICK RAYCRAFT) Apr. 30, 2006
They tend to meet in moments of extreme emotional and financial crisis, in the midst of lives already ragged from abuse and despair. They come together in prison, on line at the methadone clinic, during coffee breaks at Narcotics Anonymous meetings.
They are poor, urban African American and Hispanic women in search of intimacy, love, safety and stability.
And they are increasingly finding those things with each other.
From California to Connecticut, lesbian couples of color are creating families - sharing money, homes, child-rearing, romance - in impoverished urban communities where few of the men are suitable mates and the traditional family structure has long since vanished.
For many of them, the experience of homosexuality comes relatively late in life and only after years of disappointing, often violent, relationships with men.
These women generally exist outside the political debate over civil unions and gay marriage, are historically undercounted by demographers and rarely appear on the radar screens of academic trend-spotters. But front-line social workers, church pastors, prison resettlement counselors and court and hospital personnel are increasingly familiar with the phenomenon.
For at least a decade, these professionals say, they've seen a growing number of women living openly as lesbians after being in prison, drug treatment and psychiatric hospitals. By committing themselves to each other, and to each other's children, the women are structuring families that mirror old-fashioned, two-parent households.
"There is just a basic human need that everyone has," said Maureen Price-Boreland, executive director of Community Partners in Action, a nonprofit prison rehabilitation program in Hartford. So many men in urban areas "are not really socialized to understand what it means to be in a nurturing, loving relationship where you take care of your significant other and your family."
The Rev. Antonio Jones, who leads an Atlanta congregation of black, same-sex couples, said his church has an active outreach ministry in that city's homeless shelters, where many of these women live.
The growing visibility of homosexuals in the heart of the Southern Bible Belt is particularly noticeable and has led to a growing debate among African American clergy in cities such as Atlanta, which is known as a black mecca for lesbians and gay men. And it has set off a firestorm in black churches, where some ministers blame homosexuality for destroying the black family.
But at Jones' church on Atlanta's Martin Luther King Boulevard, it is clear that the word "family" is more loosely defined. Two women attending Unity Fellowship church one Sunday morning held hands, showing off their red and burgundy fingernail polish when they weren't turning pages of a King James version of the Bible.
"Folks are looking for love. The sexual orientation of their new partners is less significant if they are receiving love, safety and support," Jones said. "That speaks to their brokenness, [which] comes with poverty, oppression and trauma."
Seven lesbian couples in the Hartford area, interviewed at length over the past year by The Courant, fit the profile described by these front-line observers.
All but one of the couples include a partner with a history of abusive relationships with men; in some cases they were sexually molested as children. Drug addiction and mental illness are common threads. At least one woman in every couple engaged in her first lesbian relationship after the age of 30.
Conclusions about this population as a whole are difficult to draw, experts agree, because African American and Latina lesbians are underrepresented in academic and government studies. And women of color historically have been less willing than their Caucasian counterparts to live openly as homosexuals because of cultural stigmas.
But U.S. Census Bureau data from 1990 and 2000, as well as dozens of interviews with state and national sources across a broad range of fields, indicate that this is changing.
Not only does the census show that the number of black and Latina same-sex couples increased at a greater rate between 1990 and 2000 than did the number of white and other minority couples, it also shows that the percentage of these couples who are raising their biological children far outstrips that of white lesbian partners.
The Courant's own analysis of the 2000 Census further shows that women who are living with same-sex partners are identifying themselves in some of the nation's poorest neighborhoods in states such as Connecticut, New Jersey, Texas, Georgia and Michigan. According to these findings, the neighborhoods with the highest percentage of same-sex female households in the five states also are neighborhoods with significantly high poverty rates.
Monica Taher, a media director for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, said she isn't surprised that census data show more same-sex minority female couples are raising their own children, indicating that many of these women are entering their first lesbian relationships at a later age.
"In the Latina community, homosexuality is still taboo. It's still hard to come out to your families," Taher said. "We have encountered many cases, many women, who got married to a man because of family pressure and they could not bring themselves to identify themselves as lesbians. They tried to do the right thing." [Read More]
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