Gay Men and Fatherhood: Expanding Masculinity and Challenging Heteronormativity

Adam McKee

This project examines gay men’s desires for and experiences with parenthood. The research draws on data gathered through 25 semi-structured, in-depth, interviews with a sample of 37 gay men who became parents through nonheterosexual means. Engaging with queer theory and the life course paradigm, I explore gay men’s parenting desires, gay fathered families encounters navigating a heteronormative social world, and fathers’ experiences balancing family and work. According to the study’s data, cultural, geographical, and historical contexts intersect with structural changes and unique events in the life course to influence gay men’s parenting desires. These contexts and structural changes helped reignite parenting desires for nearly half the men I interviewed, men who once viewed the identities of gay man and father as incompatible, by signaling that society was coming to a point where these desires were becoming acceptable. For other participants, men whose parenting desires never wavered, these contexts and structural changes made them think that American society was at point where gay men becoming parents was acceptable and laws were in place that made it possible. Fathers and their children’s experiences navigating a heteronormative world revealed the ways in which gay fathered families can “queer” the family and education (Oswald, Blume, & Marks, 2005; Oswald, Kuvalanka, Blume, & Berkowitz, 2009). These encounters challenged the public’s heteronormative conceptions of what qualifies as a legitimate family and heteronormative binaries surrounding gender, sexuality, and family. Finally, social class influenced each of the dominant strategies participants employed to achieve work-family balance as their middle- and upper-class careers allowed them to scale back at work and the funds to pay for childcare or the funds to have one father stay home full-time. Gender also benefited participants as they seemed to escape the pressure and demands women face stemming from the intensive mothering model (Hays, 1996; Lareau, 2003). Freedom from these pressures coupled with fathers’ work-family balance strategies, helped them “queer” traditional gender norms and experience less conflict in balancing family and work than has been found in prior research relying on nationally representative samples (Schieman, Milkie, & Glavin, 2009).

Gay Men and Fatherhood: Expanding Masculinity and Challenging Heteronormativity

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