Until 2015, when same-sex marriage was illegal in the United States, the “ideal” family structure featured a cisgender man and a cisgender woman at its helm. But independent of the law, same-sex family structures still existed, with many of those couples having and raising children.
Even after the legalization of same-sex marriage, there is still a visibility barrier when it comes to children of LGBTQ parents in mainstream media. We do not see them represented in the perfect middle-class family commercials or many sitcoms or movies.
Through a photo book, photographer Gabriela Herman, who is the product of LGBTQ parents, fought to tell the stories of the sometimes-invisible children who are raised in LGBTQ communities. Over the course of seven years, she has photographed more than 75 men and women across the country. Included with Herman’s photos are profound anecdotes of life as the child of atypical parents, ranging from funny to heartbreaking to inspirational.
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The Kids: The Children of LGBTQ Parents in the USA is now in bookstores and will launch at a signing event at Aperture Nov. 1. Herman chatted with The Daily Beast about her art process shooting this massive project and her personal experience growing up as a child of an LGBTQ parent.
Can you tell us about your upbringing with an LGBTQ parent?
I was in New England; I was in a private school. It was a very traumatic time in terms of the family breaking up. We had a mom and dad. Me and my siblings, we sort of had the perfect family. In terms of our childhood, it was very idyllic. Then, it came up that my mom was having an affair with this woman. The whole gay aspect was one that I had never heard of. No one else I knew had anything remotely similar. It was something that was hidden. I didn’t let any of my friends know. I just didn’t feel comfortable because it was such an anomaly kind of thing. It was difficult for a bunch of years. I had a rocky relationship with my mom. She ended up moving out and eventually moving in with the woman who she had the affair with. Now, they got married. Eventually, things in our relationship got better. We all have holidays together even till this day.
Would it have been different if she had an affair with a man?
If it were a man, I would have had more strength to talk about it with other people. People have divorced parents. A lot of kids at my school were kids of divorced parents and adopted in a divorce. I feel like I wouldn’t have been as alone as I was.
It seems like your experience is especially unique, but in reality there are families all over the United States who have LQBTQ parents. Yet, we are not discussing these family structures. Do you think your personal experience of feeling alone and not having the peer support you needed was a source of inspiration for this book?
Definitely! Today, things are very different. It’s really interesting, the people that I photograph, I definitely notice a trend or change from it being older people or people my age versus people in their twenties right now with very different stories just because it’s becoming more acceptable and more common, and not as much a shameful thing.
How did you decide to shoot the project?
This whole project, I ended up shooting from two scenarios. One is where you are raised from birth by two gay parents. The other is when you have a mom and a dad family structure and then one parent comes out, which is a different experience because it’s a rupture to deal with. I shot over one hundred and there are seventy-five that made it in the book. There have definitely been projects done before on queer families. There had been nothing done from the voices of kids who have been raised by gay parents, which is why I felt I had to do this.
What is your strategy for shooting? What were some deliberate art decisions that you made?
So for the photos, I knew that I wanted just them in the frame and link their story with that. I knew I wasn’t going to use any lighting equipment. I wanted all natural light, which I prefer visually. Because, I knew it was such an intimate thing, I was going through their homes, I just didn’t wanted to be distracted by setting up strobes ect… I just wanted them to feel as comfortable as possible, which meant no lighting.
In the beginning, I was asking people to think about the moment their parent came out or the moment they had the important conversation with their parent. I would use something from that moment as inspiration for the photo. For example, one of the girls had her dad came out to her over the phone so I had a phone in her shot. Another girl found out on a road trip with her mom, so I shot her in her car. The reference could be something just as simple as a color you remember from that moment. This other girl had her dad came out to her when she was in high School. She had this shirt that she wore that whole year and she brought it to the shoot. I stopped doing it at the end because it got sort of hectic and I was shooting a lot. I prefer to shoot their home environment, but sometimes it’s not possible and we just compromised on a different place.
How did you find your subjects? Did you consider diversity across race and age? How did you tackle inclusivity in your pool?
The first group of people I found through a non-profit organization that has chapters around the country that’s called COLAGE. They are the only national nonprofit that supports kids who have gay parents. After that, I posted to my Facebook and newsletter and it became a word of mouth kind of thing.
As for diversity, in the beginning it was hard to find people who were willing to be photographed and share their story. In the beginning, it was mostly New Yorkers who were raised all over the country who were activist and advocacy minded people affiliated with COLAGE. When the publisher asked me to shoot an additional fifty portraits, I wanted to keep in mind diversity, race, gender, family makeup, and geography. I shot anyone I found, but by the end, I was searching for very specific dynamics. For example, there are very few people who had two gay dads. So, I made a point to find a few more to include. I wanted a certain racial makeup as well. At one point, I had way to many white women from New England. So I had to make changes. A lot of people who didn’t make it into the book had great stories. I wanted to make sure I had as much diversity as possible. If there are five white women with lesbian mothers, I’ll maybe just include two of them.
What do you hope that readers will get from seeing these portraits and reading their stories?
Selfishly, the project has been so therapeutic, just to meet other people. Before I started this project, I didn’t know a single other person, who had gay parents. I was very much alone and never talked about it. So, I hope with the photos, I am able to reach other people who also have gay parents. The first round of the book is primarily to let children of gay parents hear from other people, hear that they’re not alone, and hear that they have they share the same experiences. I wish I had this book when I was younger. For the second audience, I would say it would be potentially for queer people who are thinking about raising kids or having other kids who would be able to read these stories and know what it would be like for their children. There’s obviously some positive and negative stuff. The third audience would be the general public because it’s awareness. It's a chance to hear from voices you haven’t really heard from and learn how different families are.
Is there anything unexpected that we should know about the book?
One thing is that I am in the book as well as my two siblings and my two step siblings. There are actually several pairs of siblings in the book. I’ve included at the bottom of the page who’s the sibling of who. I think it’s interesting because it’s the same story, but from two different perspectives.
Savanna was raised in Fountain Hills, Arizona, by her mom and stepmom.
My high school was an art school in Tempe, Phoenix, which is a good half-hour drive from where my town is. I would carpool with a good friend of mine, and her mother, surprisingly enough, is very conservative. It’s very strange to me that I love these people so much, and yet their mind-set can be very different from mine. She knows my parents. She loves my parents. We’ve been friends since second grade. So we were driving to school and we were listening to the radio, and I think it was the beginning of gay marriage becoming legal. They were read- ing this email that this woman had sent to somebody on the radio station, saying, “Who we need to worry about are the children of these gay people.” That was her email, and it was like, “We need to make that a priority. We just can’t let them be raised by these people.” And I got so angry, and they said, “If you have any comments, please call in—we want to hear you.” And I kept calling and calling, and my friend and her mom were like, “Keep doing it! Keep calling!” I finally got through, and I just went off. I couldn’t even tell you what I said. I was like, “I am a child with gay parents, and I am truly appalled at this email. No one needs to feel sorry for me. My parents are amazing.”
GABRIELA HERMANNiko was raised in Newton, Massachusetts, by his dad and mom who came out when he was 11.
I grew up with a mom and a dad until I was about eleven, when my parents got divorced. A few months after that, my mom came out that she was gay and that her partner was this woman, Robin, who we had known for the majority of our life. She had worked with my mom. We had been family friends. I was the baby, and I didn’t really understand what was going on. It didn’t really register with me what it meant and what challenges my mom was facing in life. It certainly didn’t dawn on me to what extent my family was going to be labelled or judged by the rest of society. Since then, society has changed a little bit, made everything a little bit more accepting. I can distinctly remember being in therapy and the therapist saying, “How do you feel that your mom is gay?” And I didn’t even know what that meant, so it was basically speaking Chinese to me. I was too young. So I kind of was just like, “Yeah, it’s cool.” I had no idea. Then, for the longest time I remember thinking that being gay meant that your family breaks up. To me it was, “Okay, Mom is moving out.” I think Mom being gay had way less of an effect than us not being a family anymore. To me that’s really what it was. This thing we had grown up with, in my eyes, was totally perfect. We were extremely privileged, white suburban kids going to private school, summering on the vineyard. This perfect environment all of a sudden came crashing down.
GABRIELA HERMANZach was raised in Waltham, New York, by his adoptive two moms I was born in New Orleans.
I was born in New Orleans. My mother was sixteen. Patricia— she’s Vietnamese. My father, Charles, was seventeen. He was black and Spanish. I was adopted by Barbara and Kim, so I have two moms. As Americans, we’re pretty quick to put people in a box or judge them, whether it’s about having two moms or what your race or ethnicity is. I had less trouble with having two moms and more issues with finding myself in terms of race and ethnicity. People said stuff about my moms, but I made it clear that if you want to talk smack . . . I called people out the first couple times. The first time that I had a real issue with having two moms was in third grade, because prior to that, everyone was like, “Oh, my God, Zach is so lucky. He has two moms. I’m so jealous.” I think for little children, that whole concept of being lesbian or gay, it’s like, “Whatever.” Honestly, I feel like sometimes parents worry about that too much for their children. They’re so afraid of what the world has in store for them. At that age, I remember people used to ask, “Why are you black and they’re white?” or “Why are you Asian?” I remember saying, “I’m adopted.” For a lot of kids, for what they understood of adoption, that was good enough for a long time.
Gabriela HermanMolly was raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, by her mom and dad who transitioned when she was 14.
It was the spring before I turned fifteen when my dad came out to us as transgender. My mom knew, and had known for a long time, since the beginning of their marriage or a year or two into their marriage. My dad came out to me, my sister, and my cousin. She brought us into the kitchen, and we all sat down and had a conversation about it. But it was just like, “You’re what? What does this mean?” It was the eighties, and it had not been on Oprah. We’re from a very progressive, liberal Democratic family, but this just seemed so bizarre. I think that’s what happens. Especially around transgender issues, people are fine with it in theory, and then it gets really close to them, and they’re like, “Oh shit! This is for real and I’m uncomfortable.” My dad lived as a white man in America for about fifty years, and there’s a certain level of privilege and egotism that just naturally goes along with that, and that doesn’t really change. My parents split up probably a year after. By that time it was clear my dad was going to transition. When she would come to see us, she would still be dressed as a man but there would be differences like her ears were pierced or her nails were painted. My dad’s given name is Austin and Austin was going away, and Vivian was emerging. I remember that I was in college, and I decided to see my dad dressed, and I told my mom and my sister at dinner. I was like, “I’m going to see Dad dressed.” And they were like, “What? Why are you going to do that?” And I was like, “Well, I just feel like I have to. This is the way he is now. It’s moving forward.” I know it was really hard for my mom. It broke up their marriage. It was very disruptive to my family. I don’t know that there’s a way around that. I think one of the things that’s hardest for me is that it became clear after a while that my dad felt like she couldn’t fully be her- self and be in our family and be a part of our family. That’s really painful to feel because you want the people that you love and the people that you are close to to be able to fully be themselves and recognize themselves, and you want to be able to see them and recognize them as who they are.
Gabriela HermanMalina was raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico, by her two dads.
My dad is a lawyer in assisted reproductive law. He started an organization called Growing Generations, where he helped other gay fathers and lesbian couples have children through surrogacy. I was introduced to a community there, where there were a couple of other kids like me, but I was usually the oldest, at least, who had been born through assisted reproduction because I was one of the first people born through assisted reproduction to two gay dads, that we know of. My dads tried for ten years to have me. They went to adoption agencies. They had been together for twenty years at that point, and it took them ten years to finally have me. Back then, the science was so bad with IVF and assisted reproduction. They had twelve eggs, and they had spent so much money in trying to put this together. They would try three at a time, because back then, you would try three at a time. Now, you would get triplets if you did that. But none of them worked until there was one left and it was, according to the doctor, a shitty egg. It had, like, a crack in it or something, and my dads said they were going give up having children if it didn’t work. And it took, and that little crappy egg became me. That’s the story of how I was conceived. Having gay dads has been one of the most rewarding things I could have asked for. Of course, there have been challenges for me, but it’s given me a perspective on the world that is so hard to find. I’ve been entrenched in a community that is so compassionate and so loving, and I’m also part of a civil rights movement where a bunch of people are coming together to really fight for what they know and believe in. I’ve been an advocate as a child of LGBTQ parents to speak on the behalf sometimes of families that have long been stigmatized.
Gabriela HermanJaz was raised in Webster, New York, by her mom and later her stepmom.
I have two moms. My mom was married to a man, and when I was about two, they were in the middle of getting a divorce when my dad passed away. Then my mom went through this very difficult time where she had a lot of mental health problems, and I was babysat a lot by my aunts and I lived with my grandma for a little bit. My mom got help, and I think she slowly realized that a lot of the issues she had were resulting from her not accepting that she was gay. She decided to explore that, and she met her now wife, Tammy, in an AOL lesbian chat room. I remember I wasn’t quite okay with it. It wasn’t the fact that she was gay that bothered me. It was the fact that I had to share her, and I felt like, “Oh, I’m not enough for you.” Tammy came to visit us, and I thought she was really cool, and eventually my moms like, “We’re moving to upstate New York with Tammy. We’re getting married.” And I was like, “What?” We were in a small town outside of Rochester that was not liberal. I was the only kid that I knew in my elementary school that had gay parents, and I was mortified. I don’t want to say I was ashamed, but I never admitted it to somebody else. It just seemed like this big, dark secret. One of my best friends growing up who I’m still very close with—she wasn’t allowed to sleep over for a while, and then when her parents finally said that she could sleep over, her mother took my mom aside and was like, “You can’t kiss in front of my daughter.” And I was just blown away. The funny thing is her parents couldn’t care less now, but because they had never associated with gay people before they were afraid it was going to damage their child’s psyche or something. People started realizing how awesome they were, and that took a lot of pressure off of me to feel like I had to defend them. I think a big turning point for me was when I was probably fourteen, and my mom and Tammy and I went to a theme park, and I asked Tammy, “Is it okay if I call you Mom sometimes?” And she started crying and it was so sweet. What sealed the deal for me was knowing that I had two people who loved me unconditionally and sup- ported me and took the time to try and understand what I was going through. A lot of people, no matter what kind of parents they have, aren’t lucky enough to be in that situation. And once I stopped being so self-centered, that’s when it sort of was like, “Oh, my God, I’m the luckiest kid in the world.”
GABRIELA HERMANJaime was raised outside Chicago by her mom and various partners.
Jaime I was fifteen when my lesbian mom came out of the closet. I feared her for being gay for the first few years. I had inter- nalized society’s images of gays as being gross pedophiles. It took me time for me to trust her again as my mom. I started believing she would hit on me as her daughter. Of course, it never happened; it’s ridiculous what beliefs and prejudices we get from mass culture. My mom is now a therapist for late-blooming lesbians. She coaches them as they come out to their families. She was the first gay person that I knew. All throughout elementary, middle, and high school I never met another gay person. I had grown up with liberal ideas: tolerance, equality, justice, respecting diversity. But once I had to confront someone who is different from myself in my own home, it was harder to reconcile than I had believed. I started to have an eating disorder. I was closed in. I kept everything to myself. When I was twenty, I came out as bisexual to my mom, and we became close. She told me, “I’m glad that you are allowing yourself to explore your sexuality. I wish I had done the same when I was younger. But then, of course I wouldn’t have had you or your brother or your dad, and I can’t imagine life without all of you.” I fell in love with a woman. It was unrequited. I had tried to rule out being queer for the longest time. I wanted to be heterosexual to prove people wrong that gay parents have gay kids. It was difficult. I tried to like only men, but I can’t help it. Was I born this way? Was I bred this way? It’s a mystery. My mom always treated me very much like an adult as a kid. We were friends, and it worked well for us. My mom claims we had a significant conversation when I was about ten. She insists this conversation happened. She’s like, “We were driving to Saint Louis.” She tells me all the details; I was like, “Oh wait, you’re a lesbian? What?” She’s like, “You got angry. You were upset about it.” I’m like, “I have no recollection of this.” I have a very good memory. Maybe I blocked it out. I remember even in preschool telling kids that I didn’t have a dad. Everybody was like, “Where’s your dad? Why don’t you have a dad?” I’m like, “Well, a doctor helped my mommy have me, and I don’t have a dad.” “Well, you have to have a dad.” “I don’t have a dad.” I actually got in a fight with a kindergarten substitute teacher who insisted that I must have a dad, because everyone has a dad. We were making Father’s Day cards, and I was adamant that I did not have a dad. She didn’t believe me.
Gabriela HermanErica was raised in Redding, Connecticut, by her dad and mom who came out when she was 15.
I was fifteen when my lesbian mom came out of the closet. I feared her for being gay for the first few years. I had inter- nalized society’s images of gays as being gross pedophiles. It took me time for me to trust her again as my mom. I started believing she would hit on me as her daughter. Of course, it never happened; it’s ridiculous what beliefs and prejudices we get from mass culture. My mom is now a therapist for late-blooming lesbians. She coaches them as they come out to their families. She was the first gay person that I knew. All throughout elementary, middle, and high school I never met another gay person. I had grown up with liberal ideas: tolerance, equality, justice, respecting diversity. But once I had to confront someone who is different from myself in my own home, it was harder to reconcile than I had believed. I started to have an eating disorder. I was closed in. I kept everything to myself. When I was twenty, I came out as bisexual to my mom, and we became close. She told me, “I’m glad that you are allowing yourself to explore your sexuality. I wish I had done the same when I was younger. But then, of course I wouldn’t have had you or your brother or your dad, and I can’t imagine life without all of you.” I fell in love with a woman. It was unrequited. I had tried to rule out being queer for the longest time. I wanted to be heterosexual to prove people wrong that gay parents have gay kids. It was difficult. I tried to like only men, but I can’t help it. Was I born this way? Was I bred this way? It’s a mystery.
Gabriela HermanCaroline was raised in Newton, Massachusetts, by two moms.
My moms are big old dykes and have been ever since I can remember. I went to the 1993 March on Washington, I grew up going to Gay Pride every year, a lot of my parents’ friends are queer, and their straight friends are really down for the cause. The people who are closest to being a father figure in my life are the gay men that are my parents’ best friends. I definitely grew up in a queer community. The famous story in our family is that my little sister Jing—she’s the best—she cried the first time she saw straight people kissing because she was so confused. She was probably four or five years old. I’m queer. None of my other siblings are, to my knowledge, but they all get read as queer. I find that whenever I meet someone who has queer parents, I’m really excited about it and they’re really excited about it, and I find that a lot of people my age who have queer parents have never met anyone else. Of course, I know lots of queers who have kids, so it’s this funny thing where the idea of queer family is very prevalent in my community, but people my age who have queer parents, not so much.
GABRIELA HERMANAdrian was raised in Pembroke Pines, Florida, by his dad and mom who came out when he was in college.
One Thanksgiving, I came home from college and there was this other woman living in the house. My dad had already sort of moved out at that point, maybe a couple months prior—I knew, by then, my parents were getting divorced. So it was like, “Is this a friend?” We didn’t really talk about it explicitly. I think she just confirmed that, “Yes, there’s a woman here and we’re a thing,” without actually saying it. I didn’t know if I was walking on eggshells or walking on a bombshell. Maybe she wasn’t ready for it, or maybe, in retrospect, I wasn’t completely ready for it. It’s hard to say how I felt then. It wasn’t a bad feeling. I didn’t feel betrayed, I didn’t feel deceived, but I also wasn’t over the moon either. I think I needed to take a step back and really process it. There was drama once it became more widely known in our family, and it damaged a lot of relationships on both her side of the family and on my dad’s side of the family. My parents are immigrants—my mom is from Jamaica, and she’s the matriarch of that side of the family since her older sister passed away. On my dad’s side of the family, we have Jehovah’s Witness and black immigrants. Add all that to the mix. I now have come to realize maybe she had to keep it a secret, because if she didn’t, then what ensued would have happened when I was much younger. Maybe she waited until I was in college, where she felt like, “All right, now he’s away and doing what he needs to do, then maybe it’s time for me to live my life.”
GABRIELA HERMANBrian was raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, by his dad and mom who came out when he was a baby and his stepmom.
My mom and her now wife, Julie, sat me down when I was probably twelve. They were like, “We want to talk to you about what this relationship is, and what you mean to it, and what our family is,” and all that kind of stuff. I was pretty cool with it. I wasn’t surprised by anything that she was telling me. It’s just that I had never really put it into words like that. I’d never really used language to identify how this relationship was different from other ones. But I remember some kind of shift happened inside me because, in Oklahoma, gay is synonymous with bad. Just anything that you don’t want is gay, or was at the time, so I knew that there was something pretty radically different about my family, and it was a little difficult. There was never any intention to obscure the truth, but I didn’t sit my friends down and be like, “My mom’s gay.” I think that really worked to my advantage because my mom is just really lovely, and so is her partner, and my friends picked up on that and cared about that way more than they cared about their orientation. I had a lot of friends over who had probably never had any kind of interaction with somebody they knew was homosex- ual, and especially for it to be this warm, mothering person who just wants to feed you and hear about what happened during your day and all that. On hindsight, I think I can say that maybe pushed some people a little farther down the path to acceptance. I think it was known through- out the school that “Bryan’s mom is gay, but Bryan’s mom’s house is also a cool place to go.” So that’s just what it was.
GABRIELA HERMANHope was raised in New York City by her two dads.
My gay dads were really involved with every school I went to. They knew my friends’ parents, were friends with them, sat on every PTA, and came to every event. Basically they were already out to the school community, and people knew them and loved them, and so I didn’t have anyone messing with me at school. In terms of friends, everybody was pretty relaxed. Sometimes they might have a question, or some- times they might say, “That’s so gay,” without understanding how disparaging that was, but nobody teased me about it, nobody made me feel ashamed, nobody made me feel other. I knew that there were other structures of families because I would see my friends’ families and my aunts and uncles, and I knew that people had something called a mother that I didn’t necessarily have, but I didn’t really think that I was in the minority. I wondered about my birth family, and my birth mother in particular, what type of person she was, but in terms of my own development, I don’t feel like I suffered because of it. I feel like I had other role models to look to. I think that my parents did a fantastic job of helping to raise me to be a strong woman, but in terms of that question about where I came from—sometimes I still wonder about that, and then other times it just kind of disappears in terms of its importance.
GABRIELA HERMAN
