Alternative lifestyles affect family differently

As lawmakers across the land try to determine the legality of giving benefits to those who are with same-sex partners, I find myself reflecting on past relationships I had with friends caught in the middle of this lifestyle.

I am not sure why any one person is drawn to the same sex, whether it is a chosen life or a genetic trait. But we see this in our society daily.

My first experience with a gay man was when I was in second grade. He was a person of authority in my life and someone I really enjoyed being around. He was not like the other men I knew, exhibiting more feminine traits than masculine.

This was in the eighties when men and women alike wore purple and pink, had their ears pierced and wore gaudy jewelry. I never thought anything of his mannerisms. I didn’t know he was different from anyone else, nor did I realize this secret about him until much later in my life.

Later, while I was in high school, I saw the toll a same sex relationship took on the child of gay parents and, in a second situation, as a participating party.  

Two of my friends had gay parents. One of them had a gay mother, once married to my friend’s father only later to leave him to live with her lover. I remember the ridicule my friend got from people who knew of her mother’s lifestyle. She was not asked on dates because the boys assumed she was like her mother. Often she defended or denied her mother’s lifestyle to try to be “normal” like the other kids.

Another friend had a father who was gay and lived with his lover. Only a select few of us, her closest friends, knew of this. Her parents were married and had three children before her father said he could no longer live a lie. He left but stayed very involved in the family. Her mother remarried and the three parents had a united relationship when it came to family and the children, which made it easier for all involved.  

My senior year, another friend of mine came to a realization that he was gay.  He asked me to go to lunch with him one day, and when we got there he told me he had found someone over winter break. I asked when I would get to meet her, and was told I would meet “him” that weekend.

My friend was so scared, but seemed more confident than ever. I was the first person he had told, and it liberated him to share his news.

Over the next few years, he went through many significant others as most of us do.  He tried to mend a broken relationship with his parents, who on some level always knew his secret and shunned him at an early age for it.  And he found himself in a way many of us only hope to do so young in life.

I don’t understand the attraction to someone of the same sex and I never will.  However, I do understand being in love with someone so deep and having them love you the same way in return.

I am not the authority on what should be legal or what is right and wrong. The Bible is often cited in this debate to saying that it is wrong and unholy, but the Bible also says to love and not judge each other as we are all sinners.  

Children brought up in a gay household can learn remarkable tolerance for others out of necessity. Children brought up in a traditional household can express incredibly deviant behavior. Children in single parent households can be the most grounded individuals around.

I will not condone nor condemn those in same sex relationships. After all, it is not who raises the children. It is about how they are raised and that they are loved and taught to be tolerant of others while standing firm in themselves.

Former radio personality Carey DeBeaux, who  grew up in Rio Rancho, is now raising two sons with her husband Tim. Her column on family life will appear on a regular basis. Click here to contact her.