rooter@well.UUCP (Brian Mavrogeorge) (08/14/85)
Thought I would take a minute to introduce myself. Have been using a system in Sausalito CA and was excited to recently learn of newsnet and the net.motss section. Too bad the previous poster didnt suggest some new topics after decrying what was here. I skipped the AIDS articles. Living in San Francisco we are pretty well taken care of on the AIDS front in terms of progress in discovering causes and cures. I was very interested in the articles on Massachusetts and child care having gone through the adoption process here in San Francisco as an openly gay couple. In case readers didn't know, there have been gay and lesbian couples in San Francisco who have adopted children. And there is an active support group for those parents. But that doesn't mean its easy street. The foster care section in San Francisco still drags their feet. For them it isn't so much a gay or lesbian issue as much as it is every social worker wants to hold on to the kids hoping that next week there will be that "ideal" couple that will present themselves and the child can be placed with them. As well all know those "ideal" couples exists only in glossy pages consequently the kids remain in foster homes while the social workers play out their games. An issue that hasn't been broached here so far and which Iam interested in is the gay/lesbian religious scene. Iam particularly interested in those who choose to remain in their particular denomination and work from within for change as I opted not to do that and am active in an MCC congregation. Contrary to what some people see, I see a resurgence in religious activity and feeling across the whole spectrum of religious life. Admittedly I probably have a biased view. ANd what I find even of more interest is that altho the mainline denominations have done a good job of dumping on gays and lesbians, many of us retain our spirituality. Another topic I find of interest is the question of monogamy and its applicability to gay people. I rememeber a few years back reading in a newspaper an editorial stating that being gay meant being freed from all those sexual hangups and stereotypes of our parents - that the idea of marriage was no longer relevant. Well I personally have been in a monogamous relationship for 20+ years and just like my parents celebrated that relationship with a religious ceremony so the editorial didn't ring true to me. But since then I have read a couple of studies pre-AIDS and post-AIDS that seem to indicate that the gay relationship is quite different from the heterosexual one and that the question of sexual fidelity is also quite different. Perhaps that is due more to the sexes involved as I would suspect sexual fidelity for lesbians is close to the heterosexual model. I don't know. Would be interested in comments. Having been out for many many years to family, work, etc. I have strong feelings about the Rock Hudson affair - revolving around the opportunities he had to break the gay stereotype for middle America. Opportunities he missed. So in conclusion - Im very glad to have found all of you and hope to have some interesting times here. In regards to the Boston/California split, perhaps its because UNIX is bicoastal and has no real following in the hinterlands... :-)
davet@oakhill.UUCP (Dave Trissel) (08/16/85)
[] In article <133@well.UUCP> rooter@well.UUCP (Brian Mavrogeorge) writes: > Having been out for many many years to family, work, etc. >I have strong feelings about the Rock Hudson affair - revolving around the >opportunities he had to break the gay stereotype for middle America. >Opportunities he missed. At first I was really pissed off at how Rock had tried his best to delay the spreading of the word that he had AIDS. But I calmed down somewhat after I saw the large volume of magazine and TV articles which have appeared - most of them non-judgemental. Let's face it. His career would have been stopped in its tracks. If things get hot we can always move to another employer (or town) if need be. But a public figure doesn't have that option. One positive step is that people may begin to wonder just how many gays have actually been around them all along. So I'm a little ambivalent about it now. Maybe in the future it will be easier for other public entertainers to come out. BTW, Newsweek's first page has an update on Natrilova's (sp?) ex lover. Really great. She says it doesn't bother her in the least calling herself a lesbian - no different than calling herself a women or mother. -- Dave Trissel Motorola Semiconductor Inc. Austin, Texas {ihnp4,seismo}!ut-sally!oakhill
hxe@rayssd.UUCP (Heather Emanuel) (08/18/85)
Brian Mavrogeorge casually mentioned something in his article that is of great interest to me and would, I think, be of great interest to the rest of the net: > I was very interested in the articles on Massachusetts and child care > having gone through the adoption process here in San Francisco as an > openly gay couple... Does this mean that you and your mate have, personally, adopted a child? If so, perhaps you could post a few more details both on the legal/paperwork side of it and on the emotional aspects of it. There was a series of postings in net.kids a while back on a man's impressions of adopting a Korean boy; I looked forward to them daily as a slice of life right out of a personal journal. Maybe I'm off base here, but I think these might be the kind of personal *and* political ideas that people are saying they'd like to see here. It sort of reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from "Torch Song Trilogy" where the man is (yet again) arguing with his mother, this time over the adopted son. The mother is complaining about the boy's exposure to the gay 'lifestyle': SON: Mom, he's gay. MOM: He's only been here six months!!!! SON: He CAME that way! MOM: NO ONE comes that way!!! SON (shaking his head and muttering): I'm not going to touch that one... Guess you had to be there.... Anyway, Brian, I'd be interested in your experiences with an adoptive child, if I understood your article correctly. -- --Heather Emanuel {allegra, decvax!brunix, linus, ccice5} rayssd!hxe -------------------------------------------------------------------- I don't think my company *has* an opinion, so the ones in this article are obviously my own. -------------------------------------------------------------------- "Ain't life a brook... Sometimes I feel just like a polished stone" -Ferron
rooter@well.UUCP (Brian Mavrogeorge) (08/21/85)
About 7 years ago we began attending the San Francisco Metropolitan Community Church. The minister and his lover had adopted a baby boy. The adoption had been private - the mother was a lesbian who knew the adoptive parents and it was all handled through attorneys. That started my spouse and I thinking about the possibility of having children. Both of us come from large families - 6 children in my family and 10 in his and we both have strong "family" feelings. About a year later the minister and other gays and lesbians who had children appeared on a local tv program and that convinced us that we would start the process and see what happened. So I went to the City Social Services Department and started the application process for adoption. In the written parts of the application it appeared as if I was a single man but during the interviews with the social worker it became apparent that they were looking for two parent adoptions. It was made abundantly clear that two parent applicants had better chances at a successful adoption than singles. At that point I told the social worker that indeed it was a 2 parent application and in my viewpoint the unit had exactly the strengths he was looking for. I also invited him to our Holy Union (wedding) in a few weeks. The process also includes a series of meetings with other prospective adoptive parents covering the whole range of child raising issues. We joined a group consisting of 5 heterosexual couples, two single women (neither a lesbian), and us. It was an interesting experience for all concerned. Over the span of the meetings we found the social agency and the classmates to be extremely supportive and one meeting was spent exploring the issue of gay adoptive parents. The cruel reality of life was however, that all those people were matched with children at the end of the classes and we were not. Another group was formed and all those people were matched but we were not. At that point our classmates organized a letter writing campaign and demanded a meeting with the Director of Social Services. Concurrently with that another gay people had applied for adoption. One of the people was experienced with nursing and the other worked in a child care center. While they could hesitate on our "qualifications" the other couple's were impeccable. As luck would have it, that couple was matched with a child who has now been officially adopted by them. After that adoption the agency cooled on our application and no other gay couples were in the pipeline so to speak. The agency's adoption staff went through a 100% turnover. Two years went by with us being on an emotional rollercoast -- will they call this week? maybe next week?. We completed all the forms and were certified as foster parents also. We waited. We hoped. After 2 1/2 years a social worker called to see if we were still interested because he had noticed our file and it was pretty old. (We had gotten lost in the shuffle, he said. Homophobia, I thought). A week later he called to see if were interested in adopting a fetal-alcohol syndrome child. No firms offer - just wanted to know if there was interest. My spouse and I talked it over and decided that we didn't believe the worker and it was time to climb down off the roller coaster. So we told him no. We never heard again. Summary - we didn't personally get a child but were able to be support people for another gay couple as they went through the process. Our initial contact spurred the agency to have some internal training on sexual minorities and training, we helped at least 5 couples work through some gay bias. It still hurts not succeeding. I kid my spouse every once in a while about reaching 40 with a barren womb. Sometimes its a remark with a hollow ring.
ped@mtuxo.UUCP (p.davidson) (08/22/85)
REFERENCES: <133@well.UUCP>, <977@rayssd.UUCP> I too would be interested in hearing about any homosexual attempts or successs at adoption. I tried once.