From:
THE NEW YORK TIMES
September 30, 2008
Gay Families Find the Bronx Is a Place to Call Home
By LISA W. FODERARO
It is a statistic surprising even to those it describes: Same-sex couples in
the Bronx are more likely to have children than those in any other New York
City borough, according to a study released last month, and perhaps more than
any county in the country.
For Ron and Greg Poole-Dayan, whose 7-year-old twins were born to a surrogate
mother, it’s a matter of geography. Their home in Riverdale puts them a bit
closer to family, as well as the Berkshire Mountains, where they go hiking.
For Carmen Quinones, a recovering addict and a substance abuse counselor with
four children, the Bronx offered an affordable haven when she got out of prison
14 years ago.
For Julian Rodriguez, it was never a question: He has lived in the borough
since he was 3. “I feel more comfortable because the demographic is more what
I’m used to, with my neighbors playing dominoes and the Spanish music,” said
Mr. Rodriguez, who has two daughters from a previous marriage. “I feel like I’m
at home with my culture.”
There may be as many reasons for same-sex couples to settle in the Bronx as
there are same-sex couples there — almost 3,000, according to a demographic
snapshot by the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy
at the University of California, Los Angeles. Forty-nine percent of those
couples have children. Many said they chose the Bronx for similar reasons as
their straight neighbors: affordability, space, racial affinity, familiarity.
The Bronx, home to 11 percent of New York City’s 26,000 same-sex couples — a
fraction of the borough’s 1.3 million people spread across 54 square miles — is
hardly a gay mecca (Rosie O’Donnell’s cruise line has yet to make Hunts Point a
port of call). Gay and lesbian couples generally do not gravitate there, as
they might to neighborhoods perceived to be more gay-friendly, like Park Slope,
Brooklyn, or Chelsea in Manhattan. In fact, many say there are fewer support
services, and more harassment, in the Bronx than elsewhere.
“The Bronx lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community has largely been a
hidden community for a very long time because of very real homophobia,” said
Lisa Winters, executive director of the Bronx Community Pride Center, the
borough’s only community building for gays and lesbians, which opened a decade
ago. “The Bronx is a very machismo borough, and it’s a very religious borough.
The religious institutions have a very strong foothold here, and they preach
from the pulpit that homosexuality is a sin.
“But the world is starting to change,” she said, “and the Bronx is finally
getting in line.” Indeed, a new church geared toward gays and lesbians, In the
Life Ministry, recently opened at Tremont and Westchester Avenues, and there is
a growing, if small, number of gay-oriented bars and businesses. Gary J. Gates,
a demographer and a senior research fellow at the Williams Institute, said the
Bronx stood out nationally as one of few places “where the percent of same-sex
couples raising children is virtually the same as different-sex couples raising
children..” In the Bronx, 55 percent of married couples are raising children
under 18.
Manhattan has the most same-sex couples, 10,000, or 38 percent of the total in
the city; 4 percent of them have children, according to the study, compared
with 41 percent of the borough’s married couples. About 21 percent of
Brooklyn’s 7,000 same-sex couples are parents; 53 percent of their straight
neighbors are. In Queens, there are 5,200 gay couples, 22 percent with
children, and on Staten Island, 29 percent of the 1,000 same-sex couples are
parents; in both of those boroughs, 51 percent of married couples have children.
Mr. Gates attributed the high rate of parenthood among Bronx gays to other
demographic trends: nationally, black and Hispanic same-sex couples are two to
three times more likely to have children than white same-sex couples, he said,
and the Bronx is 83 percent black or Hispanic. And given how expensive it can
be to raise a family in New York, the Bronx offers relative affordability.
“Media images of gay and lesbian people are very much in the ‘Will & Grace’
mode — white, male, urban and wealthy,” said Mr. Gates, referring to the
popular television sitcom. “One of the interesting things this report shows is
that in places like the Bronx, absolutely none of those stereotypes hold.”
‘One of Them?’
Mr. Rodriguez, the facilities director at Bronx Community Pride Center, grew up
in the South Bronx in a family of Dominican immigrants. At first, he thought
himself bisexual, and married a childhood friend. They had their first child,
Julie, 11 years ago, followed by a second daughter, Leanne, 9, who now spend
about half their time with Mr. Rodriguez and his partner, Joel Jusino. Two
years ago, he broached the subject of sexual orientation with his daughters.
“The curiosity started when she came to visit me at work, and Julie said,
‘You’re not one of them, are you?’ ” Mr. Rodriguez recalled. “I said, ‘What do
you mean — one of them? They’re people.’ She said she was just curious. Once I
saw that she was making pretty good observations, I told her, and then we both
told the younger one.”
Now, the girls regard Mr. Jusino as a second father. “They always play with
him, and he helps them with their homework,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “This summer
we all went to Florida to visit his mom, and we took the kids to Disney. The
fact that they are positive toward Joel is a blessing.”
Mr. Rodriguez, 35, said he could recall only a single incident of overt
prejudice, but it has stayed with him. It was two Octobers ago. He and Mr.
Jusino were walking with the girls around 8 p.m. on the Grand Concourse at
174th Street.
“I was being very friendly and touchy with Joel,” Mr. Rodriguez recalled, “and
people were saying, ‘Oh, look. They’re gay. They’re nasty.’ The girls heard
them and the older one looked at me and then looked back and gave them a nasty
look. She said, ‘Dad, just don’t pay attention.’
“It wasn’t like we were doing anything ridiculous,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “I just
had my hand over his shoulder. I’ve done that with some of my straight buddies.”
The partners left the South Bronx this summer for Harlem, not because of gay
bias, but because they got a deal on an apartment. But he still spends much of
his time in the Bronx, at work and his mother’s apartment.
“Harlem is very gentrified, and unfortunately there are not a lot of Spanish
people in our neighborhood,” he said. “I miss seeing my neighbors on their
stoop drinking coffee in the morning, asking me how I’m doing. It’s funny
because it’s just a borough away. But everyone is so fast. People don’t know
you the way they did in the Bronx.”
Battling Harassment
Ms. Quinones, 46, grew up in the East New York section of Brooklyn in the
1970s, and vividly recalls being teased for having lesbian parents. When she
revealed her own sexual orientation as lesbian at 16, she said, people in the
neighborhood “threw bottles at me when they would see me walking around with
the girl I was with.”
She went on to have four children with different fathers, and because of her
involvement with drugs and other issues, all of them were eventually removed
from her care. (Two were eventually adopted by foster parents.) Upon leaving
prison after serving a 10-year sentence for selling drugs, Ms. Quinones moved
to the Bronx.
Her fourth child, son Xavier, 10, was born after she started drug treatment..
“I met Xavier’s dad in early recovery,” she said. “They were saying that we had
to change our life. I felt I couldn’t be gay and be in recovery, and in the
process of that we all got hurt.”
Xavier was eventually taken from her, too, after he was beaten at age 3 by Ms.
Quinones’s boyfriend while she worked nights, she said. The boy’s biological
father now has custody, but Ms. Quinones takes Xavier every other weekend, as
well as for five weeks in the summer.
Ms. Quinones, who recently ended a four-year relationship with a woman, sees
the Bronx as hospitable to gays, although she said she does edit her persona in
public. “The people I hang around with are discreet lesbians,” she said. “I
never hold hands.”
Appreciating Acceptance
Ron and Greg Poole-Dayan, who were married in Canada and combined their last
names, endured their share of harassment after the 2001 birth of their
children, Elinor and Tomer, who were conceived using Ron’s sperm and Greg’s
sister’s eggs. Several times over a six-month period, they said, a group of
preteen boys from a local Catholic school taunted them as they pushed a double
stroller to the playground.
Finally, Ron, a marketing consultant, chased the boys and snapped pictures of
them. He then went to the school and spoke to an administrator. The abuse
stopped. “We decided we’re just not going to let it happen,” Ron Poole-Dayan
recalled. About a year ago, the couple said, one of the boys, by then in his
late teens, knocked on their door one night. He was visibly intoxicated and
claimed to be gay, saying he needed to talk. The men told him to come back when
he was sober, but he never did.
“We thought it might be a hoax, that he was being dared by his friends around
the corner,” Ron Poole-Dayan said. “But I think it was probably sincere.”
As the twins have grown, the Poole-Dayans said, they have felt increasingly
embraced by their Riverdale community. The Riverdale YM-YWHA, where Ron serves
on a committee, reworded its membership forms to read “adult No. 1” and “adult
No. 2” instead of “mother” and “father.” “We didn’t petition them,” he said.
“We just made the point that their forms were not appropriate for us, and a
year later they were changed.”
Relations with their neighbors, who are predominantly Jewish, have grown so
close that a few years ago, the couple put a gate in the fence that separates
their property from three other households (all with young children), allowing
for more spontaneous play. Some of the neighbors attended a recent
marriage-equality rally to show support.
“For us it has worked perfectly,” Ron Poole-Dayan said of the couple’s decision
to settle in the Bronx. “We wanted a place that had a lot of kids, and that was
more important than our finding a place with a lot of other gay parents.”
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