When a Mom is a Dad: Overcoming Bias Against Male Nurturing
- © 2002 John Watkins and Tom Glaser

If you put twenty gay, bisexual, or transgender male parents in a room and ask them what it is like to be a child's primary care provider, brace yourself for the stories. At "When Mom is Dad," a session at the annual Rainbow Families Conference last year, the emotions ranged from amusement to frustration to outrage as participants shared their memories. Co-chair Tom Glaser recalled how a neighbor offered to be "the woman in little Elliot's life" shortly after his son arrived from Ukraine. Co-chair John Watkins remembered his encounter with a fundamentalist neighbor less than a week after he returned from Russia with his son Dmitri. The woman looked into his stroller at the sleeping one-year-old and then glared at John in unmasked horror: "What . . . you . . . .you've ADOPTED HIM! You can't possibly take care of him." A member of the audience recalled more fondly an encounter at Old Country Buffet, where he and a group of other gay dads were having dinner with their toddlers. A beaming octogenarian came up to the table and said: "What I would have given if my husband had known how to take care of a little child like that. Your wives sure are lucky!"

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