Queer Moms and Our Sons

Nurturing Healthy Masculinity

How do queer moms parent their sons? The question isn't just "Are our kids okay?" explained Gail Marlene Schwartz, co-editor of a new book on the topic. "We feel like that's been established." Instead, the book goes further and asks whether queer moms have "something particular to offer in terms of nurturing healthy masculinity," Schwartz said in an interview.

U.S.-Canadian dual-citizen author Schwartz is parenting a 15-year-old son with her ex-wife and with Schwartz's nonbinary current partner. In "Boyhood Reimagined: Stories of Queer Moms Raising Sons" (Motina Books), Schwartz and her friend and co-editor Ada Malone, who has a 10-year-old son with her own wife, bring together essays and interviews by themselves and other queer moms to explore how they parent sons "in terms of being feminists, not just being queer women," Schwartz said. "If you've got two moms or one mom and you've got a feminist framework, how are those boys emerging? How is their sense of their own masculinity different? We think we have something to share."

Interest in queer moms and their sons is not new. Back in 1997, queer feminist author Jess Wells edited "Lesbians Raising Sons" (Alyson Books), a similar anthology of essays, but one focused on the challenges of that era. And work by various social scientists in the past few decades, as Schwartz and Malone note in their book, has given us research-backed confirmation that our sons are "more than fine," Schwartz said. But she feels that a new volume has more to add, as our understanding of gender evolves and as "cultural toxic masculinity" is on the rise.

Queer moms' perspectives can offer insights both to other queer families and to the larger progressive movement, she believes. "There's a self-consciousness and awareness that I think especially feminist, queer moms have, that is particular to being queer," she explained. "We've been outsiders. We have this understanding that if we want to create social change, we need to change. If we want to have healthy children, we need to learn healthy parenting practices, which are different than how we've been parented."

The parents featured in the book all self-identify as queer moms and feminists, and include lesbian, bi, and trans women who are parenting sons (and sometimes also daughters and nonbinary children). Through their stories, we see how mom-only households take "female strength as a given"; how these moms are teaching their sons about kindness and consent, about gender as a construct and as something fluid, and about intersectional identities.

Some of their sons tend to do stereotypically "boy" things; others are more gender creative. Interestingly, though, almost all of the moms spoke of their sons' need "to wrestle and to be physical," Schwartz noted. "It's not like the girls never had it, but the boys seem to have it a lot stronger." At the same time, she said, the moms were trying not to assume that a stereotypical trait was necessarily because of their child's gender. "It's so intertwined with socialization, I don't think you can really parse it out completely," Schwartz said. She herself "was a very aggressive kid and I needed to wrestle." Now, "I'm much more feminine than butch. How does that play?" she asked. The answers aren't always simple.

While the moms met their sons' need for physicality in a variety of ways, they did so alongside a focus on "honoring and nurturing emotions and emotional intelligence." All were "very committed" to having their sons accept "a wide range of emotional expressions and to not feel shame."

Schwartz stresses that point, that raising feminist boys doesn't mean denying or shaming their masculine traits. "If we're shaming our boys for being masculine, we're going to have a problem," she asserted. "I think we're seeing some of this in the demographic shift to the right, particularly among young men." She feels that a lot of queer and feminist moms are already trying to end shame about emotions and vulnerability, but that we still need to be more conscious about "shame around masculinity." She explained, "There are ways of being masculine that are positive," for people of all genders; sometimes we need aggression, for example. "The qualities in and of themselves aren't problematic. It's what we do with them."

"Raising people who understand and honor their emotional landscape is healthy, whether you're male, female, nonbinary, trans, whatever," she added. "Everyone can learn to do that," she said, but "It requires us to look at ourselves, and that's where it gets hard, because we have to do our own emotional work. And when we see qualities in our kids that we were shamed for, the knee jerk reaction is that shame."

Parents of all identities should understand, however, "that our kids come into the world, partially, as who they are," she said. Even if she doesn't always agree with her son's choice of activity or reading material, she said, "I need to enter into his world somehow and learn to relate across difference, and that's universal. That's something everybody can take and learn from."

While that may often be difficult, "If we don't attend to our boys' masculinity, other people will do it for us, and we don't want that. That's what's happening now," she insisted. Instead, "We need to figure out what is healthy, masculine, and we need to nurture that." With the experiences in "Boyhood Reimagined" as a guide, however, families of all types will be better prepared to make that happen.

Dana Rudolph is the founder and publisher of Mombian (mombian.com), a two-time GLAAD Media Award-winning blog for LGBTQ parents plus a searchable database of 1,800+ LGBTQ family books.