Joshua Wayser, at right, and Richard Schulte, second left, shop at a street market with three of their six children, from left: Joey, 3, Isaac, 5, and Shayna, 7, in Los Angeles.
| credits: New York Times Service
The Schulte-Wayser family is like the Jetsons: a blend of midcentury traditional and postmodern cool.“One parent is the breadwinner, a corporate lawyer who is Type A when it comes to schoolwork, bedtime and the importance of rules.
The other parent is the self-described “baby whisperer,” staying home to care for the couple’s two daughters and four sons, who dash through their days as if wearing jetpacks.
Both parents know when rules and roles are made for subverting.
“We are each of us very maternal in our own way,” said Joshua Wayser, 50, the lawyer.
“I take my girls shopping, and I’m in charge of beauty and hair care.”
Wayser glanced at Richard Schulte, 61, his homemaker-artist husband, who was sitting nearby.
“Of course,” Wayser added dryly, “he doesn’t think I do a good job.”
Wayser, Schulte and their six adopted children are part of one of the more emphatic reinventions of the standard family flow chart. A growing number of gay men and lesbians are pursuing parenthood any way they can: adoption, surrogacy, donor sperm.
“There’s a gayby boom, that’s for sure,” Wayser said. “So many of our friends are having kids.”
Some critics have expressed concern that the children of gay parents may suffer from social stigma and the lack of conventional adult role models, or that same-sex couples are not suited to the monotonous rigors of family life.
Earlier studies, often invoked in the culture wars over same-sex marriage, suggested that children who lived with gay parents were prone to lower grades, conduct disorders and a heightened risk of drug and alcohol problems.“But new research suggests that such fears are misplaced.
Through a preliminary analysis of census data and other sources, Michael J. Rosenfeld of Stanford University has found that whatever problems their children may display are more likely to stem from other factors, like the rupture of the heterosexual marriage that produced the children in the first place.
Once these factors are taken into account, said Rosenfeld, author of “The Age of Independence: Interracial Unions, Same-sex Unions, and the Changing American Family,” the children of same-sex parents are academically and emotionally indistinguishable from those of heterosexual parents.
And two-father couples, in defiance of stereotype, turn out to be exemplars of domesticity. In her long-term studies of unconventional families, Judith Stacey, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, found that the most stable of all were those headed by gay men who had their children together.
Over 14 years, she said, “I was shocked to find that none of the male couples with children had broken up, not one.”
Stacey, author of “Unhitched: Love, Marriage and Family Values From West Hollywood to Western China,” attributed that success to self-selection.
“For men to become parents without women is very difficult,” she said.
“Only a small percentage are willing and able to make the commitment.”
There is no maybe about the gayby boom. According to the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, the number of gay couples with children has doubled in the past decade, and today well more than 100,000 same-sex couples are raising children.
Other estimates put the number of children living with gay parents – couples and singletons combined — at close to two million, or one out of 37 children under age 18.
Driving the rise in same-sex parenthood is the resonant success of the marriage equality movement, which has led to the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 16 states and has helped ease adoption policies elsewhere. In 2009, 19 per cent of same-sex couples raising children reported having an adopted child, up from just 10 per cent in 2000.
Gay parents are four times as likely as straight ones to be raising adoptees and six times as likely to be caring for foster children, whom they often end up adopting.
Some crave the fetters of DNA, and here women have an advantage. Many of the children of lesbian couples are the biological offspring of one of the women and a semen donor — who may be anonymous, a friend or the brother of the nongestating woman.
The Schulte-Wayser family started out unhyphenated, as the Waysers. The two men had broken up; Wayser was living alone in Los Angeles, his law career was in flux, and he was tired of obsessing about work.
“I thought, ‘I’ve got to do something else,’” he said.
“I had to come out to myself as a father.” His mother was thrilled, and she offered to pay the costs for a surrogate mother to carry a baby conceived with his sperm. Wayser said no.
“I wanted the clarity of having someone who didn’t share my genetics, who was completely different from me,” he said.
He met with an adoption lawyer in March 2000, and by June he had a newborn daughter, Julie.
Several months later, Schulte called to chat, heard Julie in the background and stopped by to meet her.
The baby reminded him of Don King, the boxing promoter.
“It was love at first sight,” Schulte said, and Wayser acknowledged, “I used Julie as bait.”
His old boyfriend took it.
“We were a couple again,” Schulte said. Or rather, he amended, “we were a family.”
He and Wayser later married in Malibu.
From 2002 to 2009, four brothers and a sister followed – Derek, AJ, Isaac (all from one mother), Shayna and Joey.
“That’s my line in the sand,” Wayser said.
“We’ve run out of room.”
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