How We Raised Two Adopted Sons as a Gay Couple

What it was like to raise our kids during changing times.

We met in Boston in 1986 and quickly cut to the chase. One of us indicated that he planned to adopt a child, since he had known he wanted to be a parent since the age of 12. The other shared he was HIV positive and had never thought about the possibility of parenthood.

Fast forward through a brief romance, moving in together, marching in front of then-governor Michael Dukakis’ home to oppose an intolerant foster care policy, and then turning to foreign adoption options. It is now 31 years later; we have raised our two adopted sons from Cambodia and now are enjoying being grandfathers to two granddaughters. The journey in many ways is very different than the one we had envisioned, but it is ours, and we are in equal measures humbled, proud, a bit bruised, and ultimately contented. 

As far as we are concerned, whoever coined the phrase “Practice makes perfect” clearly was not a parent. We have made our share of mistakes—as did our parents and their parents and so on throughout history—but we haven’t been terrible parents. Sometimes it was the thing we swore we would never say to our child that we did say in the heat of the moment. Sometimes it was something of our own creation that was equally hurtful or certainly not very helpful. Sometimes it seemed like we didn’t have better options.

Now that our sons are adults (ages 19 and 30) the challenges they present are vastly different from when they were younger (not surprisingly), and we are sometimes at a total loss for how to react or what to say. We try to remember the maxim that if you openly disagree with something your child is doing he will tend to cling all the more tightly to that behavior. And as parents of children from another culture, we have always had to consider whether our perspective is objectively “right” or only makes sense from the standpoint of the lens with which we see the world. Biological parents sometimes say their children are so different from themselves that they swear the child must have been switched at birth. We held no expectations that our children would look like us or act like us, and they haven’t disappointed.