The Gayby Boom - Christine Thomas

First of all, welcome to the Gay-Straight Alliance of the University of West Florida! We are by far one of the most active, involved, and enthusiastic organizations on campus, and I for one cannot wait to swing into high-gear with GSA this semester.

A new element of GSA this year will be our informative and opinionated weblogging series, featuring the splendiferous James Goodson as our resident vlogger and myself, Christine Thomas, providing the text-based blogs. We will have a new informative, controversial, and/or relevant topic for you every Tuesday on our GSA website, so be sure to check out what we've been up to every week!

So, let's get into it. Last Sunday, James gave me a call to see what we'd be weblogging about this week, and he mentioned something called the "Gayby Boom." As we are wont to do, we began giggling about gay babies being born with rainbow hair and over enthusiastically escalating our conversation to include the gaybies learning choreography before they could walk. After our ruckus quieted down a bit, I realized that James was serious about this topic. There really is a phenomenon known as the Gayby Boom. Whodathunk?

In sociopolitical jargon, a "gayby" is a child of a homosexual couple, either born to them through artificial insemination or acquired through the adoption process. The Gayby Boom came about after the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, when there came a sharp increase in the number of gay parents having children (abcnews.go.com). Today, there are 270,000 children living with same-sex parents, and about twenty percent of same-sex couples are raising their gaybies.

"Critics of same-sex marriage say [gaybies] will grown up shunned and sexually confused" (CNN.com). Dale O'Leary, author of "One Man, One Woman: A Catholic's Guide to Defending Marriage," says "A baby is not a trophy -- the child's welfare has to be considered. These children are more likely to experiment with same-sex relationships. They're more likely to be confused and hurt." Ironically enough, O'Leary admits that he does not personally know any same-sex parents or children of same-sex parents. The misunderstanding seems to lie in the fact that too many people are talking about the Gayby Boomers-not enough people are talking to them.

I served as a flower girl for the first time at the age of eight, at the wedding of my mother's best friends Jane and Bonnie. At the time, I had no idea that Bonnie's three children were actually gaybies; I simply thought it was neat that they had two mommies. Today, I know a handful of gaybies at UWF, and I can attest to the fact that they are no more or less screwed up than those of us who were raised by heterosexual parents.