Post-Heterosexual Father Blues

Balancing Being A Dad & A Daddy

Photos by Aleksandr Popov & Juliane Liebermann via Unsplash

This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter focused on the late blooming queer experience, the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.

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A late-blooming friend of mine recently vented to me about his involvement with the kink scene. 

He wasn’t complaining about the community itself; he and his newlywed husband are involved in everything from pup play and rubber to bondage and chastity. They go to conventions and meetups all over and he enjoys connecting with folks and talking about something that has helped him fully express his queerness. 

He also has children from a prior marriage to a woman and he loves them dearly. And that is what gives him pause about this part of himself.

“I love that community but struggle since I don’t see it as compatible with having kids,” he said.

It’s a sentiment I understand. Despite a supportive wife and great friends, I still feel like I need to live a double life, to keep my authentic yet “sordid” queer self separate from my role as a parent. And when I do begin to let them mingle—like when I go to meet up with a vers top after dropping a kid off at theater rehearsal and before I have to pick them up or perusing potential underwear purchases on my phone as they sit on the floor watching Creature Cases—I find myself asking, “am I a bad parent?”

Parenting is already hard. Look online at Reddit or Facebook or other social spaces and you’ll find plenty of groups for parents, for mothers, for fathers, where people share their joys of having children but largely come to vent, to seek guidance, to find support. And there’s guilt, too—over spending too much time in the office, over letting kids’ screen time get out of control, over just not wanting to play with your kids when they want to.

Queer parents face additional challenges from how to bring a child into a queer family, navigating the daily and existential struggles of queer parenting and its perception by others, particularly within the queer community. As essayist Michelle Tea wrote in a piece for Buzzfeed:

The possibility of having children was raised only to highlight how absurd that would be, such as when my roommate joked about having a mini me to send to the corner store to fetch us a 40. 

And within all those queer parents are a small subset of folks like me and my friend—those who lived heteronormative lives, marrying someone of the opposite gender and having kids, before acknowledging and embracing our queerness.

Research around queer families has grown but there are still a lot of gaps—much of the most recent data has focused on queer folk who intentionally pursued having children while being openly queer. And most of those study participants or subjects have been gay or lesbian. Bisexual, transgender and non-binary parents remain relatively unstudied, as do those who have previously lived straight lives.

There was a 2021 paper in the Journal of GLBT Studies where a handful of divorced or separated white men in the United Kingdom who had come out as gay after living straight lives were interviewed. In past research, men such as this were dubbed post-heterosexual gay fathers (PGHF). Even before diving into what those men had to say about their parenting experience, the researchers noted that they faced a lot of hurdles, even compared to other queer parents.

...intentional gay fathers are more likely than PGHF to be friends with other gay fathers and lesbian parents, to feel the LGBT community is supportive of them as a parent, to feel that having children brought them closer to their family…Whereas PGHF occupy a marginalized status within gay parenting communities and face more challenges than intentional gay fathers in coming out and forming positive identities as gay fathers.

“I Was Just Fed Up Of Not Being Myself”: Coming Out Experiences Of White British Divorced And Separated Fathers, Victoria Clarke and Eóin Earley

The researchers identified some common themes among what the study participants said—the impossibility of being openly gay because of the stigma it carried in their families and communities; the eventual realization that they could no longer ‘live a lie’; the relief of realizing that even for those whose marriages ended, their children still accepted and loved them.

But even after embracing themselves and finding support among family and friends, they still struggled to reconcile their two identities of father and gay man. Despite the world becoming more accepting of queer identities, some still faced prejudice from other straight fathers who believed the long disproven belief that their own kids would become queer or be sexually abused by a gay man. And gay men weren’t necessarily more understanding.

Rob reflected on gay men’s perception of his situation: “It looks a bit strange from the outside, ‘oh god he’s gay, he’s got three kids, he’s walking down the street with his partner, but he’s got three kids in tow, what’s that?’ sort of thing.”¹

James reflected that from the perspective of some gay men: “One of the bonuses of being a homosexual is not having kids and that complexity.”

In discussing their findings, the researchers further described how this split identity continued to impact these fathers even after they embraced authenticity. 

They are weighed down by the baggage of commitment and responsibility (to and for their children) and are therefore less authentically gay…the men’s spoilt (gay) identities lead to a loss of social status; in this instance, in the gay world.

Hell, it seems to even affect those who aren’t raising kids. Per a response to a Quora question asking “What is the hardest part about being a gay parent that straight parents don't have to deal with?”:

I am not a gay parent. I am a bi uncle. I know that I need to keep things hidden in my house and out of sight. To include photo albums. My nephews have gotten used to knocking before entering, and scheduling visits before they come over. It is kind of weird because I have friends that just stop by unannounced and they just come by and use the pool or the hot tub sometimes. My oldest nephew asked me and my brother why can’t we just come over like uncle Jay’s friends. And we just tell them that I have projects that I am working on with some friends. Or they had to schedule to come over but I just forgot. So, those things are weird I guess.

Is this conflict my friend and I and other late-blooming parents feel all about the “appropriateness” of queer culture for children? I don’t think so. Just like mainstream culture, there are things that are appropriate and not. Kids attending family-friendly Pride events or going to a drag queen story hour is no different than them attending a Veterans Day parade or sitting on Santa’s lap every Christmas. On the other hand, no reasonable person, queer or not, thinks minors should be at a kink convention nor should they be allowed into a strip club, regardless of the performers’ genitals.

Rather it seems similar to the guilt and shame generated by the perceptions people have of parents who take vacations without their kids or maybe spend a long night at the bar from time to time. We’re “absconding” our responsibilities as parents to indulge ourselves, be that wiling away nights in Vegas or spending a session in a sling. Researchers of that 2021 study even found the divorced and separated gay fathers they interviewed projected a similarly derived disdain for other gay men.

The men’s perception of the gay community was rather negative, they viewed gay men as shunning commitment and long-term relationships in favor of transient sexual encounters: “I do find the gay community, it is quite sad in many ways. It lacks something. I find the gay community is…oversexed, unthinking, male teenager, who can’t grow up…It always seems to be about the next fast shag. Y’know, it’s about the trivial thing (Richard). Furthermore, a lack of caring responsibilities often meant gay men “become very selfish” (Richard) and irresponsible, qualities diametrically opposed to those required of (good) parents. James similarly commented that “there are narcissistic tendencies within most gay men, and that’s expressed with the body beautiful, and the gorgeous house…and doesn’t go any deeper than the surface.” 

A year ago I took a trip to a conference of sorts for a group of men who were or are married to women but now identify as queer—be it gay, bi, or billion hues in between. I had looked forward to the event and in no small part because I planned to meet Harry in-person for the first time. However, I came in with some guilt, as it was the weekend of my oldest’s birthday party. It’s bad enough that I was missing my own child’s birthday for something so…about myself, but that I was living it to my wife to handle it made it worse. But we’d discussed it and she said it was fine and my daughter didn’t seem bothered by it. 

Then, on my first night away, I had a call from my wife: our oldest had become incredibly ill, so much so that she took her to the emergency room. So the party was off but my wife asked that I come home as soon as I could from the conference. And inside me I felt pulled in two directions: I should be a good father and go home and help. I also wanted to experience this rare opportunity to connect with other men like me as well as time with Harry.

In the end, Harry and I did have an amazing, if brief, time together, and I got to bond with other men at the conference. I still got home a few hours earlier than I had initially planned. And weeks later I was the one flying solo managing my kid’s rescheduled birthday party as my wife was out of town for a conference related to her work.

I’m not sure how we post-heterosexual parents move past our guilt and shame for taking time to express our queerness. I suppose it needs to come with time and intention. Therapists counsel people pleasers to not feel guilty for doing things just for themselves. Similarly, we late-blooming parents shouldn’t feel bad for finding ways to meet the needs of our queer selves in between our kids’ athletic practices and birthday party invites or taking a weekend to mingle with folk who share our predilection for studded leather or water sports.

Maybe I should just reframe one of the things I so often heard as a new parent, “sleep when the baby sleeps.” Through those early years, this sounded insane. There was so much I couldn’t get done when the baby is awake and so the first thing I wanted to do when the kid was down was tackle the kitchen or laundry or the billion other things that needed to be done. But that only added to the exhaustion with relatively little payoff from getting chores done.

Or perhaps it’s as simple as remembering that I was a whole person before I had kids and that whole person still gets to live, too, especially since that whole person never got to live before.

1. To be fair, the study participants also experienced interactions with gay men who were accepting or even envious of their position as fathers and ability to pursue gay relationships, described as “having their cake and eating it, too.” And this is more my experience, especially given that I am frequently viewed as a “daddy” as an older man. In fact, I’ve regularly had men become MORE interested in me sexually when they learn I have kids as it turns them on that I have sired children. Which feels a little…weird. But who am I to yuck somebody else’s yum?