Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by
increasing our sensitivity to the particular details o fthe pain and
hum iliation o fother, unfam iliar sorts ofpeople. Such increased
sensitivity m.akes it more difficult to m arginalize people different
from ourselves by thinking “They do notfeel as we would, ” or “There
must always be suffering, so why not let them suffer? ” This
process o fcoming to see other human beings as “one o fus” rather
than athem ” is a m atter o fdetailed description ofw hat unfam iliar
people are like and o fredescription ofw hat we ourselves are like.
richard rorty, Irony, Contingency and Solidarity (1989)
n t r o d u c t i o n
This was a law developedfo r the purpose o fensuring thatpeople
can carefo r theirfam ilies. It’s inappropriatefo r a senator to
cheapen the m eaning o ffam ily by sayingfam ily is a “fill in the
blank. ”
KRISTI HAMRICK, SPOKESPERSON FOR THE FAMILY RESEARCH
COUNCIL, COMMENTING ON NEW JERSEY SEN. ROBERT
Torricelli’s decision to voluntarily extend some of th e
PRO VISIO NS OF T H E 1 9 9 3 FA M ILY AN D M ED ICAL LEAVE A C T TO
LESB IA N AND GAY M EM BERS OF HIS ST A FF (w W W .glin n .C O IIl
March 13, 1997)
As I write these words, a cultural debate in the United
States rages over the status of lesbian and gay families,
most notably in the struggles over lesbian and gay marriage,
as well as in the struggles to gain “domestic partnership”
benefits. Much of the current debate about
lesbian and gay families stems from the threat that such
families are perceived to pose to the dominant organization
of family practices in contemporary Western so-
cieties (Mohr 1994; Stacey 1996). However, a pervasive sense of crisis in the
— American family has existed throughout much ofAmerican history (Skolnick
1991; Coontz 1992), and the national debate concerning lesbian and gay
families is but the latest grist for the mill. This sense offamily crisis pervades the
political efforts to block lesbian and gay people from attaining legal marriage
and the benefits of domestic partnership. The sense of crisis, and the rhetorical
overkill that accompanies it, not only makes it difficult for political debate
to focus on the everyday realities of lesbian and gay families but insures
that many people will both understand such families in stereotypical ways
and impede efforts to improve the quality of lesbian and gay family life. The
quotation at the beginning of this chapter from Ms. Hamrick denies the possibility
that lesbian and gay families exist, much less acknowledges that they
should enjoy any land of cultural recognition.
y The debate over the cultural place of lesbian and gay families rages not
only among the predominantly heterosexual, mostly male, affluent European
Americans in the centers of economic and political power but within
the various lesbian, bisexual, and gay communities as well. It remains an open
question in the minds of at least some lesbians, gays, and bisexuals whether
“marriage” is worthy of the political capital it will take to achieve it, or even
worthy at all (Eskridge 1996; Polikoff 1993; Ettelbrick 1989; Sullivan 1995).
And the same rhetorical overkill that characterizes the national debate also
permeates the lesbian, bisexual, and gay communities. William Eskridge,
a gay-male proponent of same-sex marriage, in a rhetorical flourish conceives
of same-sex marriages as a move from “sexual liberty to civilized commitment”
(1996). This formulation implies the presence of some uncivilized
menace in the present lives of lesbian and gay families. Don’t believe it. For
while many lesbian and gay families face difficulties in their family lives, difficulties
often resulting from heterosexism and homophobia, the notion of
some uncivilized phantom dwelling at the heart of such families is demonstrably
false. Actual lesbigay families, like most other American families, face
the struggles of balancing work and family commitments, of managing the
stresses and strains ofwaxing and waning sexual desires, of maintaining open
and honest communication, of fighting over household responsibilities, and,
most frequently, of simply trying to make ends meet. The latter point deserves
much more attention, for if any phantom lurks in the lives of lesbian
and gay families, it is their inability to achieve financial security, the foundation
of a happy, communicative, and stable relationship (Voydanoff 1992).
< - /' 1 /
4 INTRODUCTION ,
INTRODUCTION 5
This is a study of “family life” among a group of fifty-two lesbian and gay
families (twenty-six female and twenty-six male). This study provides an ethnographic
and empirical account of how lesbians and gay men actually construct,
sustain, enhance, or undermine a sense of family in their lives. Rather
than an excursion into the frequently symbolic politics of gay marriage,
or into the debates about the liberating possibilities of lesbian, bisexual, or
gay-male sexuality, this work explores the seemingly ordinary terrain of everyday
life within and among lesbigay families. I use the terni[lesbigay, which is
coming into wider use, because it includes lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men,
all of whom participate in the families I studied. O f the fifty-two adult
women participants, two consider themselves bisexual, as does one of the
fifty-three adult men.
In this study I reflect upon the details of everyday life in the households of
lesbigay families, and explore the relationship of such detail to the actual experience
of and creation of family in the lives of lesbigay people. The participants
in this research, similar to many other citizens, use the term family in
diverse and often contradictory ways. At one moment a participant will conceive
of family as a legal and biological category, a category that they reject,
and might even define themselves as over and against. In a different place and
time that same participant will conceive of family as a way of behaving and
will reject the formal understandings of family in favor of an understanding
that emphasizes the labors involved and not the socially sanctioned roles.
And at yet another place and time that same participant will embrace the legal
and biological definitions of family with the hopes of achieving lesbigay
inclusion into those categorizations (for example, advocating lesbigay legal
marriage or attempting to secure custody of a child on the basis of biological
linkage).
In my analysis the crucial element for defining what or who constitutes a
family derives from whether the participants engage in a consistent and relatively
reciprocal pattern of loving and caring activities and understand
themselves to be bound to provide for, and entitled to partake of, the material
and emotional needs and/or resources of other family members. I understand
family as consisting of people who love and care for one another.
This makes a couple a family. In other words, through their loving and caring
activities, and their reflections upon them, people conceive of, construct,
and maintain social relationships that they come to recognize and treat as
family (Schneider 1984). In this sense a family, any family, is a social con-
INTRODUCTION
struction, or a set of relationships recognized, edified, and sustained through
human initiative. People “do” family.
This research ponders the deceptively simple activities that constitute
s love and care, activities that frequently go unnoticed in most families, including
most lesbigay families. These may entail trips to the store to pickup
something special for dinner, phoning an order to a catalog company for
someone’s birthday, tallying the money owed to friends, sorting the daily
mail, remembering a couple’s anniversary, finishing up the laundry before
one’s spouse returns home, maintaining a photo album, remembering the
vegetables that family members dislike, or attending to myriad other small,
often hidden, seemingly insignificant matters. Decidedly not insignificant,
these small matters form the fabric of our daily lives as participants in families.
Moreover, the proliferation of these small matters produces a stronger
and more pervasive sense of the relationship(s) as a family, both in the eyes
of the participants and in the eyes of others.
) Conceiving of them as labors of love, people customarily romanticize
many of these domestic activities (Abel and Nelson 1990) and fail to recognize
them as forms of work that consume the time and energy of those who
do them (Jones 1985; Romero 1992). The reality that families consist of a
multitude of often small, frequently unrecognized, laborious acts of caregiving,
in addition to some set of codified roles (for example, mother, father,
spouse, brother), tells us something else about why Kristi Hamrick’s comments
are so problematic. The notion that family cannot consist of a “fill in
the blank”— that is, person(s) of one’s choosing— contributes to concealing
the labors that actually produce and sustain a family, any family. Emphasizing
formal roles, a common tendency of family politics, family policy, and
family law, detracts from the more basic reality that various forms of work
dwell at the heart of family life.
Suggesting that various forms of work constitute the sum and substance
of family life raises a number of questions about how to define work. While
many citizens hold work in the highest regard in contemporary American society,
viewing it as the answer to many of life’s most fundamental questions,
as well as the elixir to a host of life’s problems, the question of what constitutes
work eludes easy classification. Commonsensical notions of work often
appeal to distinctions between productive and unproductive work, pleasant
and unpleasant work, between producing and consuming, between the
things we do for money and the things we do for love, or between activities
INTRODUCTION 7
we are willing to pay for and those we are not. Such categorical distinctions
tell us much more about how we value particular forms of work, and who
does them, than they tell us about the actual characteristics of that work.
In contrast to these commonsensical notions, many sociologists make a convincing
case that the idea that work consists of some quintessential meaning
that transcends political and cultural context is untenable (Becker 1963; du
Gay 1996; Hughes 19 71; Urry 1990). For example, if I were to provide cleaning
services twenty hours a week for an hourly wage, and over the course of
subsequent revisits I begin a relationship with my wealthy employer, fall in
love with him, begin a relationship with him, and eventually move into that
very same house where I continued my cleaning work, nothing will have necessarily
changed in the content of that cleaning work but it is highly unlikely
that I would continue to receive a wage for my labors, and I would quite possibly
conceive of my cleaning work in new ways. In mainstream economic accounts
of work, as I made that transition from paid worker to unpaid lover, I
also shifted from being productive (that is, contributing to the gross domestic
product) to unproductive. Such a scenario makes it patently clear that we
need a social and an interactional conception of work, one emphasizing its
socially constructed character.
Vantage Points: Situating Myself
M y preoccupation with work and family matters reflects the confluence ofmy
personal biography with my intellectual pursuits. M y own experiences with
work and family life have left an indelible mark upon my understanding of domesticity.
I am an openly gay, Euro-American, educated, and affluent male. In
contrast to my adult life, I grew up in a working-poor, female-headed, singleparent
family. Through much of my childhood, in order to make ends meet,
my mother worked nights as a bartender. There were periods where she could
not get enough hours and our family had to turn to food stamps and welfare.
I remember fighting intensely with the older of my two younger sisters over
who would pay at the checkout counter because we both wanted to avoid the
stigma that came with using those food stamps. We also received free lunches
at school, although these lunches were not quite as free as one might believe.
Our school principal thought it important that we learn the value of earning
our keep, so, in the fourth grade, several other poor kids and I had to clean the
INTRODUCTION
dining hall during the second half of our lunch hour. This included emptying
the garbage cans into the dumpster. In order to do that, we had to drag the
cans by all of the other lads on the playground over to the dumpster. One can
well imagine the shame that I felt. Pile on top of these experiences the reality
that I knew, and other kids seemed to know, that I was somehow “different”
(gay) by the time I was ten years old, and one can appreciate the ferocity ofmy
effort to escape such a life. I wanted to avoid stigma so badly that I would steal
lunch money from my mother’s inebriated customers at the bar. By the end of
the fourth grade I had finagled and charmed my way into an illegal (in violation
of child labor laws) after-school job at a flower shop where I could earn
that lunch money. Such experiences fueled an intense desire within me to escape
the working class and, for the most part, I have. None of this is to deny
the importance of social-structural dynamics (job opportunities, educational
opportunities, gender and racial privileges) that facilitated my escape, but it
is to acknowledge the particular experiences that motivated me and subsequently
influenced my perceptions of the world.
M y childhood also taught me a great deal about domesticity. M y mother’s
work as a bartender required her to work nights, which meant that she increasingly
came to rely on me to keep the house going in her absence. We
occasionally had baby-sitters, but they were frequently unreliable, and they
rarely did any domestic work. By the time I was eleven years old, I knew how
to do laundry, iron, clean, cook, baby-sit, and shop. Such experiences provided
knowledge of things that most boys never come to know. It meant that
, much of the invisible work that women do became quite visible for me. M y
mother greatly appreciated these contributions, and I suspect that set the
stage for me to question the widespread devaluation of domesticity. In some
ways I was experiencing a nascent version of the second shift as an elementary-school
kid. Each day I went to school until 3:oo P.M., to my paid job from
3:30 to 5:30 (which I held for three years), and then to my unpaid job at 6:00;
my mother had to be to her shift starting at 6:00. In addition to my schoolwork
each night, there was a meal to cook, cleaning activities, groceries to
buy, and getting my sisters to take baths and get into bed. I would call my
mother at work each night at around 9:00 to report that all was running
smoothly and that my sisters were in bed.1
As I entered into my own adult family life, I brought a set of skills and an
understanding of domesticity that most men do not have, including most gay
men. I have spent much of the past fifteen years both participating in the
INTRODUCTION 9
everyday life of my own gay family, and those of others, and reflecting upon
that participation as a budding sociologist. Over that period of time I came
to realize just how problematic family life can actually become, especially
for those gay men, bisexuals, and lesbians who wish simultaneously to pursue
family, career, and community. I found myself increasingly identifying
with and understanding the stresses and strategies heterosexual women use
in their relationships to negotiate multiple commitments, to work, family,
and community. I also found myself coming out of the domesticity closet. As
the following pages reveal, gay or bisexual men who do domestic tilings, and
lesbian or bisexual women who do not must carefully manage such information
in order to avoid the stigma associated with violating widely held expectations
about domesticity and its assumed links to gender. These expectations
persist even if concealed by ideological commitments to egalitarianism
among most straight, bisexual, lesbian, and gay people.
Vantage Points: Intellectual Traditions and the
Study of Domesticity
M y intellectual concern with domesticity appears at the intersection of three
distinct lines of theory and research. First, my analysis is informed by a
feminist-inspired literature exploring the paid and unpaid work of caring
performed mostly by women but occasionally by men (Fowlkes 1980;
Hertz 1986; Weskott 1986; Tronto 1987; Di Leonardo 1987; Abel and N elson
1990; DeVault 1991; Diamond 1992; Glazer 1993; Gerstel and Gallagher
1994). Like the mid-August San Francisco tourist peering through the fog,
attempting to discern the contours of the Golden Gate Bridge, this literature
strives to discern the expansive structure of the work of caring. This caring
work is often hidden by the fog of gender ideology, by “official” definitions
of what constitutes work, and by the persistent devaluation of women, and
the forms of work associated with them (Kessler-Harris 1990; Kemp 1994;
Lorber 1994). This same fog envelops much of the work of loving and caring
within and among lesbigay families. Even much of the newer literature
exploring caregiving is restricted to care within traditional families.
The second line of thought relevant to this study emerges from the sociological
literature exploring the relationship of paid work to family life. This
literature investigates the division and organization of domestic labor within
IO INTRODUCTION
heterosexual families and includes the field-defining works of Komarovsky
(1953; 1962), Lopata (1971), Oaldey (1974), Stack (1974), Bernard (1982),
Cowan (1983), Finch (1983), Gerstel and Gross (1984), FenstermakerBerk(1985),
Rollins (1985), Flertz (1986), Smith (1987), Di Leonardo (1987),
Daniels (1988), Coltrane (1989), Hochschild (1989), DeVault (1991), Romero
(1992), and Glazer (1993). All of these scholars paid particular attention,
either empirically and/or theoretically, to exploring the breadth and depth
of domesticity^ and to integrating domesticity into social analysis and theory.
The work of these scholars provided me with the “sensitizing concepts”
(Blumer 1954) t^lat guided my fieldwork among lesbigay families and informed
the kinds of questions asked of participants in the semistructured
interviews (see appendix A).
Central among these sensitizing concepts are those that illuminate much
of the invisible work of domesticity, including concepts like feeding work
(DeVault 1991), kin work (Di Leonardo 1987), interaction work (Fishman
1982), consumption work (Weinbaum and Bridges 1976), emotion work,
(Hochschild 1983), and household status presentation (Collins 1992). These
novel conceptualizations of work provide a wider and more inclusive understanding
of what constitutes work encouraging us to recognize the political
and economic factors that come into play in the process of defining what
constitutes work worthy of wages and/or compensation (Zaretsky 1973;
Tilly and Scott 1978; Collins and Gimenez 1990; Diamond 1992). Much of
this kind of work remains invisible because individuals either are unaware of
its presence or they lack a yocabulary for naming the activities that consume
their time and energy. Some of this work is intentionally invisible for a variety
of reasons. Sometimes making this work more visible might lead to conflict
within the relationship. At other times the invisibility of such work contributes
to the perception of its natural or normal status, or in other words,
one didn’t really need to work at it.
Moreover, many scholars have identified a persistent and vigorous effort
to hide, and belie, the actual division of domestic labor and/or the extent of
that labor (Hochschild 1989; Romero 1992; Glazer 1993). Hochschild discovered
the use of “family myths” (1989, 19), which are myths intended to
veil the actual unequal division of labor yet simultaneously affirm the basic
equality of the relationship. Hochschild’s discovery led me to wonder if such
myths might exist within lesbigay families as well. They do. When I first began
the exploration of domesticity among lesbigay families, I was perplexed
l 'é ■,
INTRODUCTION
by the public responses to my inquiry. M y field notes capture dozens of
social occasions where couples, upon learning about my research, began to
smile, giggle, laugh, and/or tease one another. Most of those occasions also
ended with a clear public affirmation of die basically equal division of domesticity
among those couples. Somethingwas very strange about this. Why,
if a basically egalitarian division of labor prevails in these families, should
raising the topic provoke smiles, nervous laughter, teasing, and public affirmations
of equality? Because lesbigay families are neither as egalitarian as
they would like to believe nor as we would prefer that others believe. This,
of course, does not make lesbigay families pathological or dysfunctional or
exceptional. It makes them rather ordinary.
Finally, a third line of research and theory influencing my work consists
of the cross-disciplinary literature exploring lesbian, bisexual, and gay relationships
and family life. A review of the research into the domestic lives of
lesbigay families reveals the presence of a somewhat odd, historical pattern
in the findings. Assuming the reliability of findings, lesbigay families before
the mid-1970s lived rather different family lives than they did thereafter.
The question of whether a behavioral change or an ideological change took
place deserves closer attention, but let me describe the historical distinction
that exists in the research.
Social-scientific research efforts in the 1950s and 1960s examined gay and
lesbian couples and concluded that one of the members of a gay or lesbian couple
took on the “masculine” role while the other member took on the “feminine”
role (Bieber 1965; Ellis 1965; Haistand Hewitt 1974;Jensen 1974). Such
a pattern conformed to the classical sociological distinction between “instrumental”
and “expressive” roles within the family articulated by Parsons and
Bales (1955), who argued that such a distinction of roles constituted an efficient
division of labor within the family and provided for the well-being of all
members. For Parsons and Bales, women in heterosexual families usually play
the expressive gender roles, taking care of nurture, maintaining personal relationships,
providing emotional solace to men who spend their days in the male
sphere of competition and practical achievement. Within this model men
play instrumental roles characterized by pragmatic concerns with sustaining
the family economically. This Parsonian model also fits the stereotypical
butch/femme hypothesis that many people used to assume characterized gay
and lesbian relationships (Tripp 1975). In this model the butch partner plays
the instrumental roles while the femme partner plays the expressive roles.
12 INTRODUCTION
Into the 1970s the butch/femme model held sway. Haist and Hewitt
(1974), using a multiple-choice questionnaire with two hundred gay men,
found that most gay-male couples conformed to the butch/femme hypothesis.
Jensen (1974), interviewing thirty-four Euro-American, coupled lesbians
in three Western states, found a similar pattern among lesbians. Both studies
investigated the division of domestic labor and included this division in
the butch/femme conception with the performance of most forms of domestic
labor conceived of as femme.Jensen included a relatively extensive list
of household tasks (house repairs, dish washing, groceries, vacation planning,
bill paying) and emotional tasks (who praises spouse, tells spouse about
day at work, sees spouse’s point of view), and asked respondents to indicate
who routinely performed each task.Jensen concluded that “the results of this
research lend support to the assertion that female homosexuals adopt differentiated
sex roles when they set up quasi-marital relationships” (1974, 366).
While research from the 1950s to the early 1970s confirmed the instrumental/expressive
distinction within gay and lesbian couples, empirical work
in the subsequent decade fundamentally challenged such a model. Studies in
the 1970s and 1980s discovered gay and lesbian couples often exhibit significantly
more egalitarianism and less role-playing than heterosexual couples
within intimate relationships (Saghir and Robins 1973; Harry and DeVall
1978; Bell and Weinberg 1978; Blumstein and Schwartz 1983; Harry 1984;
McWhirter and Mattison 1984; Lynch and Reilly 1985; Kurdek 1993).
These scholars found that the division of domestic labor within gay and lesbian
couples reflects a basic egalitarian impulse. Harry (1984) asserts that this
egalitarianism emerges from several social factors, including the rejection
of the dominant heterosexual model of marriage, the fact that partners in
gay and lesbian couples receive the same gender-role socialization, and the
rather small income differences that exist between partners in gay and lesbian
couples. Arguing in favor of an equality model, Blumstein and Schwartz
(1983) suggest that because gender roles do not serve as the institutional basis
for the division of household labor in gay and lesbian couples, unlike their
heterosexual counterparts, gay and lesbian couples must negotiate household
labor. They assert that this negotiation leads to relatively egalitarian relationships.
If inequality exists in gay and lesbian families, Blumstein and
Schwartz found that it emerges as a matter ofhappenstance or asa resultofmodeling
their relationship on marriage (1983, 323-25; emphasis added).
In a similar fashion, Bell and Weinberg reported in their 1978 study that
INTRODUCTION 13
less than 10 percent of the gay-male couples in their sample divided household
labor in a “sex-typed fashion.” They base this finding on results from
face-to-face interviews with approximately 1,000 lesbians and gay men of
whom 334 currendy were in relationships. The interviews consisted of a long
survey with mostly closed-ended questions. Among the few questions pertaining
to domestic labor, the researchers asked the following: “If coupled,
who does the household shopping?” to which respondents could answer:
“partner,” “shared equally,” or “respondent.” The interview also asked: “If
coupled, does your partner do all the ‘feminine’ tasks?” to which respondents
could answer yes or no. Based on responses to several of these kinds of questions,
the researchers concluded that couples usually share domestic work.
While much of this social science literature from the 1970s and 1980s affirmed
the presence of a great deal of equality within lesbigay families, some
of these same scholars detected partial evidence of inequality within some
lesbian and gay-male couples, though usually only when significant income
and/or age differences exist among family members (Harry and DeVall 1978;
Blumstein and Schwartz 1983; Caldwell and Peplau 1984; Harry 1984,
1988). McW hirter and Mattison (1984) apparently found some evidence of
a butch/femme pattern in older, gay-male couples who they suggest “have
assumed the gender-related patterns as a consequence of their upbringing”
(1984, 231). Faderman (1991), a social historian who conducted hundreds of
in-depth interviews with lesbians, confirms the existence of butch/femme
role-taking patterns among older lesbians but notes a decline of the pattern
in the 1970s. However, over the past few years, Faderman detects the reappearance
of the butch/femme model among younger lesbians, although the
new butch/femme practitioners seem more versatile and reject the “naturalness”
of such roles that many lesbians felt in earlier decades in the twentieth
century (1992, 264).
While Faderman indicates a recent change among lesbians from the
insistent egalitarianism of the 1970s, at least in ideology, most social science
literature in recent decades leads to the conclusion that younger lesbigay
families exhibit a relatively egalitarian ethic in their relationships, unlike the
“older” couples who lived in a more homophobic world where sex-typed behavior
emerged in gay and lesbian couples. Overall, this literature suggests
the presence of a great deal of equality with only occasional glimmers of inequality,
or as Peplau and Cochran assert in their review of recent empirical
research, “the majority of relationships develop roles similar to friendship—
INTRODUCTION
with expectations that partners should be similar in age and equal in power
and should share responsibilities fairly equally” (1990, 344).
M y research findings stand in bold contrast to this more recent literature.
In fact, my empirical findings strangely—and depending on one’s perspective,
perhaps disturbingly—resemble the .work of the earlier generation of
scholars. A number of factors contribute to this marked discrepancy in findings.
First, unlike much of the recent research, I base my analysis upon both
in-depth interviewing and upon ethnographic observation of the everyday
lives of multiple lesbigay families. This dual methodology reveals that a
chasm exists between what many of my participants report during in-depth
interviews and what they actually do in their day-to-day lives.
Moreover, unlike much of the recent research, I interviewed participants
in lesbigay families separately yet consecutively. This prevented the development
of “seamless” accounts so common among joint interviews with couples
(Aquilino 1993). This interview strategy results in significant discrepancies
between partners in their portrayals of domesticity. Given the depth of
the interview schedule, I conducted the wide majority of these interviews on
Saturdays spending the morning with one partner and the afternoon with the
other. Li the early evening I would meet with both to gather the remaining
information, including the square footage of the house, photos of the grocery
list, the living room, and of the inside of the refrigerator, a look at the
calendars, the budget, and a list of financial transactions for the last week.
Separate interviews with partners resulted in contradictory accounts of
many aspects of domesticity. There were also many contradictions between
what the interviews elicited and what I observed in the field study. Such contradictions
point to the importance of recognizing that powerful ideological
pressures influence participants’ answers to questions about domestic work.
Other researchers have noted this phenomenon as well. The research of
Hochschild (1989) among heterosexual families parallels my findings. She
revealed a persistent tendency among heterosexual couples to assert equality
through appeal to myths that hide unequal divisions of domestic labor (1989,
19 -2 1, 43-49). N ot only does a similar dynamic exist among lesbigay families,
but it may even be stronger. Let me briefly review some of the possible
reasons for this.
First, many gay men opt for quite traditional masculine images for themselves;
these men often draw clear distinctions between themselves and
highly effeminate gay men. Flow might this affect the portrayal of domestic-
INTRODUCTION J 5
ity within the household? Joseph Harry found that in gay-male couples, most
individuals held that they “dominated” decision making in the couple (1984,
67). Apparently, individuals resisted acknowledging that they may hold a
subordinate position in the relationship. Clearly, gay liberation has fought
extensively against notions of the effeminate man, and a hypermasculinity
came into existence in the American gay-male community over the past few
decades to combat this notion (Humphreys 19 71; Kleinberg 1992). In a recent
study in Australia, Connell found that most gay men embody quite traditional
patterns of masculinity: “In this sense, most gays are Very straight’”
(1993, 746). Gay men in my study often deny that they hold more of the responsibility
for domestic work than do their partners, even when it is not
true, and they fiercely declare allegiance to egalitarianism.
In parallel fashion, the extensive impact of the feminist critique of the heterosexual
family has taken root among many lesbian families. Many lesbians,
familiar with the extensive inequalities that exist in heterosexual relationships,
perceive of lesbian identity as a way of escaping the dynamics of -----
inequality. Among some lesbians there also exists a significant ideological J
commitment to egalitarianism, especially among the baby boomers. As
Faderman observed, beginning in the 1970s, an intense critique of butch/
femme roles for lesbians developed within feminism, and it became politically
incorrect for lesbians to affirm such roles (Faderman 1992). This dynamic
prevents many lesbian families from even acknowledging that any
kind of differentiation takes place within the family unit, much less that some
inequality might exist. Yet I found both differentiation and inequality in the
domestic lives of many lesbian families, including among the baby boomers.
Furthermore, partners in many lesbigay relationships work together to
camouflage the actual divisions of domesticity and to prevent threats to the
gender identities of their partners, particularly for women who do little domestic
work and for men who do a lot. Countless examples of this dynamic
appear in the pages that follow. Lesbigay people, particularly those exposed
to higher education, are quite aware of the politics of social research, and I
suspect this influences their responses to social researchers, including me. —V
I recall my own experience as an undergraduate, when my first partner and
I were asked to participate in research conducted by the psychologist,
Lawrence Kurdek (1988b; I993)-2We each filled out long survey forms multiple
times over the course of many years. As I reflect back on those occasions
now and talk to my first partner about them, we both have come to realize
16 INTRODUCTION
that we shared an overwhelming concern about what the world was thinking
n about gay people. We were young gay men, in the midst of an epidemic, under
attack from right-wing political forces, and craving our place at the table.
We portrayed our relationship in the reigning ideals of the era— equal, compassionate,
balanced, and stable. In fact, it probably wasn’t quite as ideal as
we portrayed it.
Perhaps we were unique. M y subsequent research suggests otherwise. We
were actually a lot like many families (both gay and straight), organizing our
domestic life around our jobs with the resources (time, energy, money) available
to us and strenuously avoiding the potential for stigma from others in
how we portrayed and understood our family life. We also knew that we were
^tokens, meaning that others would draw conclusions not only about us as individuals
but about other lesbigay people as well, based upon their appraisal
of us. We harbored a deep-rooted concern about the public image of our
community.
While a concern with the public images of the lesbigay community might
well influence how lesbigay families portray themselves to the outside world,
the possibility also exists that the social and historical context has shifted dramatically
in the last two decades, and that this contributes to different empirical
findings. Some of those researchers who found pervasive equality in
the late 1970s among lesbigay families asserted that one of the primary reasons
for this was the rejection of the model of heterosexual marriage for
lesbigay relationships (Blumstein and Schwartz 1983, 323-25; Harry 1984).
Lesbian and gay marriage is now all the rage. This suggests something has
changed. Perhaps the more conservative cultural climate encourages the lesbigay
families of today to organize dieir family lives in more traditional ways.
Finally, I suspect one of the central reasons for this discrepancy in findings
results from distinct conceptualizations and measurements of domesticity.
Unlike much of the previous research, I define domesticity broadly and avoid
the reduction of the complex dimensions of domesticity into simple and narrow
concepts. For instance, rather than reducing the processes of providing
meals to a few questions about who cooks or who buys groceries, I instead observed
and asked for details. In the next chapter, I explorefeeding work (DeVault
1991) in lesbigay families, and as that chapter will show, reducing feeding
work to who cooks actually conceals more than it reveals about meal
preparation. Many participants “cook” meals—meals conceived of by their
spouses during their morning break, meals consisting of grocery items bought
INTRODUCTION ï?
by their spouses during their lunch hour on dishes bought and washed and put
away by their spouses. And these conceptions of what to have for dinner often
subsume within them extensive rosters of knowledge about what spouses
like and don’t like to eat, about nutritional and dietary concerns, about family
finances, of inventories of the food products at home in the cupboards and
on the shelves at the local grocery store. So while someone may spend forty
minutes cooking a meal, someone else may have spent hours enabling the
cooking of that meal. Much of this labor will be hidden from view by asking
who cooks. Too many of the recent studies of lesbigay families ask too few
questions about domesticity, conceptualize that domesticity too narrowly |
and ask questions that invite participants to portray their relationships in nor- i
mative terms. Many of these same studies blithely accept verbal portrayals of
domesticity without giving consideration to the ways in which that portrayal
reflects complex personal and political strategies for the participants.
Caring and Domesticity among Lesbigay Families
Many aspects of domesticity, from tending to the sick to planning an evening
meal, involve care. Much of contemporary opinion about domesticity assumes
that women, either by nature or by nurture, intrinsically care for others
(Chodorow 1978; Gilligan 1982). Care, in this widely held view, becomes
an aspect of one’s personality, often a component of a woman’s femininity.
This expectation, or perhaps more accurately, this imperative (Westkott
1986), that women care creates innumerable problems for lesbigay families.
It creates problems because the assumption that care intrinsically dwells
within the personalities of women, and less so among men, transforms the
men who do more caregiving in gay-male families, and the women who do
less caregiving in lesbian families, into gender deviants. The violation of these
gender expectations, a violation that must occur for lesbigay families to exist,
creates the potential for stigma, and it creates the need to manage such stigma.
Despite all the rhetoric of the modern era about the fluidity of gender expectations,
and the praise of men who nurture or of women who pursue
male-dominated careers, the stark reality remains that many if not most people
are not comfortable with violating gender expectations. One will see this - ">
with great clarity when looldng at the lives of lesbian women on maleoriented
career ladders or looking at the lives of gay-male “homemakers.”
18 INTRODUCTION
\
These women and men, as well as their friends and families, construct elaborate
accounts to explain their identities to themselves and to others. The
men struggle with issues of self-esteem and selfrworth. The high-powered
career women struggle with feelings of guilt about their lack of involvement
in domestic matters. In the pages that follow I investigate the work involved
in managing such stigmas, including the management of the feelings and
emotions that such stigma generates among lesbigay family members.
In contrast to the view that care or caregiving exists as an intrinsic aspect
of personality, particularly of female personality, I will show that care is the
product of caring behaviors, behaviors often structured by organizational
and institutional needs and expectations. Those who engage in caregiving
become known to others as caring personalities, and so I do not conceive of
caregiving as some inherent aspect of womanhood. Male nurses and male
flight attendants seem to me excellent examples of individuals who learn to
care because the organizational context where they work expects them to do
so. And even if heterosexual males in these professions seem to care in a more
masculine way, in order to avoid the stigma associated with other people
conceiving of them as gay (Williams 1989), the fact remains that they must
engage in caring activities. There no doubt exists a strong cultural expectation
that women should engage in caring activities— even women in highpowered
careers must confront this expectation—but acknowledging that
expectation is distinct from the assertion that caring dwells within women.
Men care, and they sometimes develop nurturing, caregiving identities, depending
on the expectations that others hold of them and the expectations
they hold of themselves. Men in gay-male families serve as vivid reminders
of this social fact because without their caring activities, their families would
crumble. And even in those cases where their families are literally crumbling,
as in the case of family members dying from HIV-related illnesses, the caring
activities of gay men proliferate and flourish.
Even so, much of the caregiving that transpires in lesbigay families remains
hidden and frequently devalued. In so many respects, we do not possess vocabularies
or typologies that capture the experiences of those who engage in
domesticity. Many lesbigay family members find it difficult to talk about domesticity,
not only because of the potential for stigma among the men who do
it and the women who don’t but also because they are not sure where to start
or how to say it. They know that these experiences eat up their time and energy,
but how does one express these experiences? Dorothy Smith, in The
INTRODUCTION 19
Everyday World as Problematic, explores the disjunction that prevails between
the actual experiences of domesticity and the officially mediated accounts produced
by legitimate authorities ofthose experiences. In my observations oflesbigay
households, and in my own experiences with domesticity, much of the
work eludes parsimonious description. There is no easy way to express the experience
of simultaneously waiting at home for a refrigerator repair person,
conceiving of a dinner plan, answering a phone call from a telemarketer, envisioning
a recreational activity for the weekend, noticing a spot on the carpet in
the hallway, dreading a visit with someone at the hospital, worrying about the
cost of the refrigerator repair and coming up with a plan to pay for it, all while
sitting in one’s home office working on a project that is due in a few days. Many
of these discrete experiences and innumerable others constitute domesticity.
All of them can occur simultaneously. Yet in official conceptions these experiences
become “housework.” Conventional measures of housework might
capture the waiting at home for the repair person, or the time spent actually
cleaning the carpet, but not the mental process of monitoring die carpet, or
the anxiety of figuring out how to pay, or the dread of visiting the hospital, or
the mental effort of thinking about dinner options in light of schedules, expenses,
supplies, and the desires of family members. A valid measurement of
housework requires much more attention to detail, a more rigorous effort to
make visible the often invisible dimensions of domesticity.
The Work and Family Lives of Lesbigay People
In recent decades, social scientists established a substantial literature concerning
the influence of one’s paid employment upon the character and extent
of domestic work in heterosexual families, much of it relevant to lesbigay
families, but rarely applied to them. For instance, Janet Finch’s M arried
to theJob (1983) explores the impact of particular occupations upon the organization
of domestic life. Finch shows us the enormous variations in the
extent and character of domesticity depending upon the character of one’s
paid employment, and she reveals the ways through which heterosexual
women often become incorporated into their husband’s occupation. To read
the extant literature on lesbigay families one would barely receive any hint
that the character of one’s paid employment greatly influences how much
and what land of domestic work happens in lesbigay families.
20 INTRODUCTION
When looking at the occupational identities of lesbigay family members,
and the influence of those identities upon domesticity, some notable patterns
do emerge. For instance, lesbigay professionals (physicians, attorneys, optometrists,
therapists, ministers) who serve lesbigay clientele, in contrast to
those who serve predominantly heterosexual populations, dwell in families
thick in domesticity. This thickness results from greater resources and from the
use ofthe private residence as a place to serve or entertain one’s clients. This impacts
the various forms ofdomesticity in differentways. For example, these professional
households follow more rigorous standards of household cleanliness.
They entertain more often than others do. They maintain more elaborate
friend and family connections. While occupation influences the extent and
character of domesticity, it also significantly influences the division of domesticity.
Those individuals in higher-status, higher-paid occupations do less domestic
work than do their partners. Those individuals with flexible work hours,
who work at home, or who face shorter commutes do more domestic work than
their partners do. In chapter 5 1 explore the complex set of questions related to
the division of domesticity. Some research asserts that lesbigay families organize
domesticity on the basis of choice or on the basis of individual interests
(McWhirter and Mattison 1984; Harry 1984). This research leaves unexplored
the question of context, the ways in which choices reflect the available options,
and the ways inwhich interests develop over ones’ individual life course, and the
life course ofthe relationship. The reflections ofthose individuals who have had
multiple relationships, and who have witnessed the changed character of their
own domestic responsibilities across those relationships, testify to the importance
of context in matters of choice and interest.
Equality, Egalitarianism, and Fairness
The traumas o fthe sixtiespersuaded me that my generation’s egalitarianism was a
sentim ental error. I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency
liberates; egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens, camille paglia, Sex,A rt,
and Am erican Cidture (1992)
Equality, efficiency, and happiness do not necessarily coexist well with one
another. Achieving equality certainly slows things down. In the pages that
follow it will become clear that many lesbigay families have opted for efficiency,
not for equality. However, to suggest that they have “opted” for this
INTRODUCTION 2 1
belies the importance of considering the social and economic contexts that
frame their individual and familial choices. Emphasizing the “chosen” character
of focusing on domestic matters or upon career must be tempered by
attention to context. As chapter 5 will show in detail, those family members
who gravitate toward domestic involvement often do so under circumstances
that constrain their choices. The fact that they have come to like or even to
love their circumstances does not detract from the reality that they have not
achieved equality. Even so, many of the individuals who might recognize the
inequalities within their relationships also consider their circumstances fair.
One can theoretically argue that fa ir can mean different things. It is conceivable
that a lesbigay family might consider the domestically involved
partner’s contribution as the equivalent to the contribution of wages, wealth,
or prestige. But it is more often the case that these family members are trading
in different currencies, for very few consider domestic contributions the
real equivalent of cash, assets, and prestige. And as I will suggest in the concluding
chapter, the fact that individuals are trading in different currencies
becomes patently clear if lesbigay relationships end.
The foregoing comments should not be understood as suggesting that lesbigay
families are unique in this respect. They are not. In ways strikingly similar
to heterosexual families, the character, extent, and division of domestic labor
reflects the impact of influences well beyond any given relationship or
household. The character of work-family relations in an industrial and consumer
capitalist economy sets the stage for how households will be organized
and what labors will take place within those households and which ones will
take place outside. Any discussion of the equity and fairness of a given household
arrangement must not lose sight of this broader context. For instance, a
few lesbigay families will achieve greater parity in their relationships through
relying on the poorly paid labor of undocumented workers who clean their
house, tend their garden, and do their laundry and other domestic tasks. Any
discussion of equality within such a family must make clear that it is an equality
premised upon on a broader pattern of inequality.
The Organization and Method of the Study
The organization of this study reflects my interest in creating a pool of participants
that would allow me to both capture the diversity of lesbigay fami-
22 INTRODUCTION
lies and to make meaningful comparisons with much of the current literature
investigating domesticity in American family life. To draw a sample for this
study, I used four selection criteria: (i) participants identify themselves as
gay, bisexual, lesbian or queer; (2) participants dwell together in the same
residence; (3) participants identify themselves as a family or couple; and
(4) participants have dwelled together for two years or more. I set a minimum
of two years together because I wanted to focus on established patterns of domesticity.
As McWhirter and Mattison (1984) found, in the early stages of a
relationship, when romance intoxicates the partners, even cleaning the bathtub
may be a time ofjoint activity and joyous celebration. I wanted to look at
families after the initial romantic veneer fades.
Concerned with reflecting the class, race, occupational, and age diversity
of lesbigay families, my approach to identifying participants took several
years to carry out. I used a snowball sampling technique, asking individuals
to provide the names of other potential participants. As Beirnacki and Waldorf
(1981) assert, snowball sampling serves as an ideal method for locating
individuals who tend to keep a low profile.
I carried out the snowball sample in two steps. First I located initial participants.
I made these contacts through lesbigay organizations, clubs, religious
communities, cafés, computer chat lines, bars, laundries, dance clubs,
gyms, and other public sites. The second step of the snowball sample involved
the initiation of referral chains. I established referral chains by asking
the first participants to name other people who possessed the salient characteristics
for participation in my research. Unfortunately, my initial referral
chains produced a mostly middle- and upper-middle-class, predominantly
Euro- and African-American sample with a strong presence of male Asian
Americans. In order to gain access to working-class lesbigays, as well as
to contact Latino/a- participants and Asian-American lesbians/bisexuals, I
needed to make initial contacts and begin referral chains using strategies that
would provide me better access to these populations.
I did this in two ways. First I became involved in a labor caucus of one of
the lesbian and gay political clubs. For the most part, those involved came
from unions affiliated either with city and/or state government, as well as
those affiliated with hotels and restaurants. These union activists provided
me with excellent leads to lesbigay people in the working/service class. I dealt
with the initial dearth of Latino/as and Asian-American women by becoming
a participant at two ethnically identified dance clubs, one predominantly
INTRODUCTION 2
Asian and one Latino. After several months of regular participation in these
settings, I came to know and be known by a variety of mostly men. These
men became “gatekeepers” (Atkinson and Hammersley 1993, 74-79) for
me, and facilitated initial contacts to lesbigay families that I could not otherwise
have contacted. The Asian men, mostly Chinese and Vietnamese, that
I came to know provided me with links to Asian lesbian families. Similarly,
the Latino men provided links to both male and female Latino/a lesbigay
families.
The Participants
My analysis draws on in-depth interviews with fifty-two families3and upon
weeklong field observations of eight of the lesbigay households (four male
and four female). Much ofthe fieldwork took place during the weeklong time
periods when I would dwell with the families I was studying. If I could not
spend the nights (usually because of inadequate space), I would arrive at the
same time that the first morning alarm clocks went off and begin my obser- ^
vations at that time. I usually carried a small notepad and wrote down activ- (
ities as they occurred. Whenever someone was home, I would try to be there.
I also asked participants to keep track of any domestic activities they con- —
ducted at work, like phone calls to friends and family or making arrangements
for some sort of service for the house (picking up dry cleaning, house
painting, carpet cleaning, or tree trimming). I asked each family how they
might respond to my presence for aweeklong period, and I chose families on
the basis of their receptivity. There is nothing particularly representative
about these families other than they appeared the most receptive to such observation.
I had to cajole and beg several of them. I paid each family for my
food expenses and took each family out to dinner. Clearly, the families that
were the most receptive were families with whom I shared similar demographic
characteristics. I also participated in the lives of numerous other
families through accompanying them in their domestic activities. Instead of
livingwith them I would tag alongwhile they conducted their domestic affairs.
For instance, I went grocery shopping with fifteen individuals and four cou- /
pies. I went to the laundry with three individuals and one couple. I went
shopping for furniture and other consumer products with seven individuals
and two couples. I went shopping for holiday gifts with four couples and six
24 INTRODUCTION
individuals. Throughout the research I attempted to observe families engaging
in their domestic lives in whatever way I could. I was particularly interested
in observing domesticity and listening to their reflections about their
participation while they performed domestic tasks.
Characteristics of the Participants
One of the crucial distinctions that prevail among lesbigay families in terms
of the character and extent of domesticity is the family’s socioeconomic context.4As
I will show, social class distinctions appear more significant to domesticity
than are odier distinctions like gender and ethnicity or race. However,
because gender, race, and ethnicity are often conflated with class in
American society, people often make the mistake of thinldng of class-related
differences as the product of gender or ethnic/racial differences (Steinberg
1989; Epstein 1988, 116). While few in number, the families of more affluent
lesbians or more affluent African-, Latino-, Asian-American families,
when compared with the family lives of poorer Euro-American males, reveal
a great deal about the salience of class distinctions to family life.
There are three distinct class groupings of lesbigay families in this study:
working/service, middle, and upper middle class (appendix B, table Bi).
Overall, household incomes range from $24,000 to $230,000 per year, with a
median household income of $58,500. This income figure might seem high,
but it must be understood in context. The San Francisco Bay Area is the most
affluent metropolitan area in North America— a circumstance driven by the
Sillicon Valley and its place in the new world economy. The cost of renting,
and of owning property, in the Bay Area far exceeds that of any other metropolitan
area. The San Francisco Tenants Union reports that in 1997 the average
monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city was $1200,
while two bedrooms rented for $1700 (San Francisco Independent, 15 Apr.
1997, 13). Median annual household income in the six counties of the Bay
Area hovers just under $50,000. Over one million households in the Bay Area
earn $50,ooo-$75,ooo a year, and another one million earn over $75,000 (San
Francisco Examiner, 16 Feb. 1997, W 21). Put another way, those Bay Area
households earning below the national median household income, as reported
by the U.S. Census in 1990 ($29,943), number about 1.5 million. The
roughly four million remaining households in the Bay Area earn more, and
INTRODUCTION 2 5
often substantially more, than the median national income. By national standards,
Bay Area residents, including lesbigay residents, are quite affluent.
However, comparing Bay Area lesbigay residents with heterosexual ones reveals
something quite different.
In this context, the lesbigay families of the Bay Area appear to mosdy fall
into the middle class. However, one should not generalize from lesbigay
families to the wider lesbian, gay, and bisexual communities of the Bay Area,
many of whom are single, younger, living in multiple-adult households, and
probably less affluent than those in relationships. According to the Census
Bureau lesbigay families who live in San Francisco proper live for the most
part in the working- and middle-class neighborhoods of Castro, Upper M arket,
Western Addition, Bernal Heights, Inner Mission, and Hayes Valley
{San Francisco Examiner, 12 Sept. 1993, 10). Relatively few lesbigay families
reside in the more affluent, and predominantly heterosexual, neighborhoods
like the Marina, Russian/Nob Hill, Pacific Heights/Sea Cliff, Presidio
Heights, Laurel Heights, Twin Peaks, Forest Hill/St. Francis Wood, and
Ocean View. For instance, the Census Bureau reports that 15,008 households
live in Pacific Heights, a wealthy, mosdy Euro-American enclave in
San Francisco. O f those 15008 households, 235 are same-sex households, or
about 1.5 percent (ibid., 10). According to the same census data, the greatest
number of lesbigay families actually live in the Western Addition, a densely
populated, mixed-income neighborhood not known for its affluence. The
census estimates that one in twenty-seven households, or 835 of the 22,815
households in the Western Addition, is a same-sex household (ibid., 10). One
in four of the families I studied dwell in the Western Addition, including
many of the less affluent Euro-American males, as well as many of the Asianand
African-American lesbigay families. Overall, most lesbigay families in
this study dwell in relatively spartan apartments, five in more socially and
economically “marginal” (that is, between more affluent and poor districts)
city neighborhoods, or in distant suburbs, resolutely defy the stereotype of
gay affluence, and seem to represent the average and range captured by the
census data.
In terms of ethnic and racial identities, of the 108 participants in the research,
63 were predominantly Euro-American, 15 Latino/a-American, 15
Asian-American, 13 Black/African-American, and 2 Native American (see
table B4 in appendix B for further sample characteristics, and table B9 for
ethnic/racial identities of particular participants).5 The wide majority of
2 6 INTRODUCTION
Euro-American participants migrated to the Bay Area from somewhere else,
while the great majority of Latino/a-, Asian-, and Black/African-Americans
grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. The influence of racial and ethnic
identities upon domesticity eludes parsimonious analysis. Such identity influences
some aspects of domesticity in some families but not in others. Understandings
of who constitutes family are a case in point. Notions of extended
or “chosen” kin, and the stereotype that some racial/cultural groups
value family more because they maintain large, extended families, impact
how some lesbigay-family members portray their family life, but not necessarily
the kind of family life they lead. For example, I will show that many
of the African-, Asian- and Fatina/o-American lesbigay families maintain
stronger connections to “biolegal”6relatives, but this may simply be a function
of the fact that many of their biolegal relatives also live nearby. Chapter
4 considers these issues in greater detail.
Domestic Diversity
Lesbigay family life takes many forms. Within this study I capture some of
the diversity that exists among such families, particularly in terms of class,
ethnicity/race, and occupation. Flowever, there are multiple expressions of
lesbigay families that this study does not capture. For instance, this is a study
of urban lesbigay family life, and so does not capture the experiences of lesbigay
families dwelling in small towns, midsize cities, or in rural communities.7
Furthermore, as previously noted, San Francisco is somewhat unique
among North American cities in that the urban core is not in economic decline.8This
limits some comparisons with other urban lesbigay populations.
This also impacts the urban/suburban distinctions that exist among lesbigay
families in the San Francisco Bay Area that I discuss later. For instance, many
Bay Area suburban lesbigay residents would like to live in the central city but
economic costs prevent it. Moreover, I did not study lesbigay families where
members live separately, either in the same region or even in another city.
N or did I study lesbigay single-parent families. Most of the families in this
study consist of two adults, although one gay-male family consists of three
adults. Children dwell with five of the families, although not always on a fulltime
basis. For instance, one gay-male couple shares custody of a child with
INTRODUCTION 27
one of the partner’s ex-wife. The ex-wife lives in a suburban community, and
the child shifts from one household to the other.
While I did not and could not capture the full diversity of lesbigay families,
the methods used resulted in class, ethnic, race, gender, and occupational
variation. I do not claim to have a representative sample. I suspect,
based on what I know about several of the lesbigay families that turned me
down for interviews, that my sample is more economically affluent and economically
independent. One family turned me down for fear that exposure
might endanger the unemployment benefits that one of the members receive.
Another, a Latina couple, turned me down because, as one of the
women put it, “I can’t risk my mother finding out right now, because I need
her help to make ends meet, and I never know when she might stop by.”
Overview
I have organized this work on the basis of the different kinds of domestic
work that occur in lesbigay families (for example, feeding work, kin work,
consumption work, and housework). This organizational strategy reflects
my commitment to providing lesbigay families themselves, and those who
study them, with a more accurate and extensive vocabulary for talking about
those family experiences. In chapter 1 1 explore the processes and labors involved
in feeding the lesbigay family, utilizing DeVault’s typologies to make
sense of feeding lesbigay families, and reflects on some of the unique dimensions
of feeding in the lesbigay context. In chapter 2 I pursue housework, articulating
a narrower conception of what constitutes housework, yet exploring
that narrower conception in much greater depth. In chapter 3 I explore
kin work by pursuing the question of who constitutes legitimate family in the
eyes of lesbigay people and what forms of domesticity come into play in
the creation and maintenance of that family. I address questions recendy
brought to the fore by anthropologist Kath Weston’s provocative work Families
We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. M y work brings a sociological perspective
to these questions, emphasizing the significance of socioeconomic
context to how lesbigay families both think about and construct family life.
In chapter 4 I examine consumption work. Often mistaken for leisure, frequently
invisible, and always time consuming, consumerism eats up more
INTRODUCTION
and more of Americans’ time (Schor 1992). I reflect on the character of consumption
work, the ways in which it has become central to family life, the
distinct forms of work involved in doing consumption, and the importance
of socioeconomic context to understanding consumption activities among
lesbigay families. In chapter 5 1 examine the division of labor in lesbigay families,
focusing on the different patterns that division of labor takes, as well as
the factors that appear to influence the division of labor. There I will reflect
on the myths lesbigay families use to make sense of and to portray the division
of labor in their homes. It is true that some lesbigay families achieve a
great deal of “equality” in their domestic lives, but that often does not occur
in a vacuum; rather, it occurs under a set of unique social and economic conditions.
And the achievement of that equality does not correspond with a
general sense of satisfaction with family life; in fact, just the opposite can
happen. In the concluding chapter I reflect on the significance of this study
for public policy debates, including those pertaining to domestic partnership
and to lesbian and gay marriage.