Out of the margins, into the mainstream

In a strange way, AIDS saved Fran Fifis's family.

Six years ago, her younger brother Leo, diagnosed with HIV, begged their parents to come spend what would be his last Christmas at his home with Fran and her family. The Greek immigrant couple - who had been estranged from their daughter for five years, since she'd divorced her husband and come out as a lesbian - arrived in Boston looking uncertain, but soon settled in around the tree with Leo and his male partner, and Fran and her partner Mary Cardaras, with their two young sons.

The family photo from that Christmas shows Ms. Fifis's father with his arms around his wife, children, and grandchildren; Ms. Cardaras and Leo's partner stand off to one side, "so if you wanted to cut, you could cut us right out of the picture," Cardaras says.

By this past August, a different image had emerged. In a family photo taken at Mr. Fifis's 80th birthday party, he and his wife stand amid a riot of children, grandchildren, and in-laws - with Fifis, Cardaras, and their children at the center. They're joined by Fran's older brother. He and his family had opted not to join the rest of the family at Leo's last Christmas.

Over the past three decades, America's attitude toward its gay children has evolved much the same way: gradually, sometimes painfully, one family at a time. But change it has, at a pace that has quickened perceptibly every decade. Surveys show public acceptance of gays underwent nearly a generation of change between 1990 and 1995 alone, and US court rulings have more or less kept pace.

It is a change catalyzed by an AIDS epidemic that shattered long-held silences within families, neighborhoods, places of work, and houses of worship. It's a change advanced by successful legal challenges; a change driven by a new generation of children with same-sex parents, some of whom are the products of new reproductive technologies, others the result of a dramatic rise in adoptions by gay couples. It's a change both reflected and incubated in American popular culture.

And it's a change born of an unexpected accidental intimacy, of gay sons and daughters as likely to surface among the nation's Cheneys and Gephardts as its Ginsbergs and DiFrancos.

"There is no turning back," says anthropologist Gilbert Herdt, head of San Francisco State University's National Sexuality Resource Center. "You can't do that in a democracy. Once [equal] rights have been bestowed [on gays] and there's a recognition that they're just, you reverse that at grave peril to the democratic process."

Not all agree. While most Americans would likely support reuniting divided

families and eliminating harassment, such convictions don't change the discomfort many feel with the reality of gay parenting and the prospect of gay marriage - a prospect made imminent by last month's Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling.

"The civil rights argument is a very, very compelling one," says David Blankenhorn, a marriage expert and father of three. "At the same time, everything I know, everything I have ever learned, says that children need a mother and a father."

A recent Gallup poll shows a split in opinion: 48 percent of Americans say gay unions "will change society for the worse"; 50 percent say they would be an improvement or have no effect.

Enough Americans are uncomfortable with the pace and trajectory of social and legal change that they've proposed constitutional amendments - both at the national level and in at least seven states - to bar gay couples from marrying.

Members of the gay community aren't uniformly happy either. Some are impatient with the pace of change; some fear America's newfound "acceptance" extends only to the most stereotypical and conformist images of gays and gay family.

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