-
Jennifer Chrisler
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
52 Jennifer Chrisler On the 2000 census, one in three lesbian couples in the United States identified as raising a dependent child in their home; for gay male couples, the statistic was one in five. It’s the kind of statistic that Jennifer Chrisler, the executive director of Family Equality Council, knows cold. “And,” she tells me the afternoon I meet her at Family Equality’s offices in downtown Boston, “a lot of those children are asking, ‘Why are they picking on us? Why do kids laugh at me in school? Why does my teacher do a family tree assignment with Mother and Father on the first two branches?’ They want to know why the world has to be the way it is. No parent wants to see their children feel different.” With a constituency of 45,000 families, Family Equality Council is the largest organization in the country whose sole function it is to protect the rights of gay families. Founded in 1979, the council began as a loose network of gay fathers who had previously been in heterosexual marriages and for whom coming out had meant being cut off from custody and visitation rights. “In the seventies and eighties,” Chrisler explains, “the culture around being gay often did not support or include children. If you were LGBT, there was an automatic presumption that you weren’t a good parent. These dads wanted to figure out ways around the 53 Jennifer Chr isler system so that they could maintain a relationship with their children and find other dads who shared their values.” Over the years, Family Equality Council expanded to include a far broader and more political agenda. “At our core we’re about LGBTQ parents, but we’re also about single parents and grandparents and family constellations that don’t fit the traditional heterosexist model of a married mom and dad raising their biological children.” The woman who has become the country’s leading advocate for nontraditionally headed families was raised in upstate New York in an “all-white, pretty much all-Protestant, working-class community,” a homogeneous world where weddings—heterosexual weddings— were a big deal. “My mother used to buy me wedding magazines. I would pore over them. I went through a phase in high school when I wanted to plan weddings. I was obsessed.” In 1988, when she entered Smith College, Chrisler supported— and here she lowers her voice to a whisper—George Bush. “It just goes to show that profound impact your parents have on you, your political views, your outlook on the world, your sense of what’s out there. My worldview was so narrow.” The quad where she lived was a bastion of “classic girls with their pearls.” One of her dorm mates had a debutant ball—“coming out in a whole different way,” Chrisler jokes. After an incident where Chrisler inadvertently made an ethnic slur—“I used a horrible, awful expression when I was talking about trying to knock down the price of something”—she began to question how educated she actually was. During her sophomore year, a campuswide protest over a racial harassment incident began to galvanize Chrisler’s thinking. “It absolutely changed me in terms of my views on social justice. I learned some fast lessons about privilege and race and religious discrimination .” In a matter of months, she had become the chair of a group that developed programs for students to talk about diversity and how to break down racial tensions. In the process, Chrisler met and fell in love with her “first mad, wild crush, a very out, loud, proud lesbian.” Though it was an unrequited love, she came out to her mother—and much later her father—“chipping away at who you know and having those conversations one by one by one.” She says that Smith was a great place to come out to your friends. “It was very affirming, incredibly supportive. I swear, they throw a party every time someone comes out there: ‘Ooh, another dyke on campus! Woo-hoo! Is she going to be a four-year kid or full-time?’” [3.237.46.120] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:53 GMT) After graduation, Chrisler stayed at Smith to complete a master’s degree, after which, in the summer of 1993, she moved to Boston. Hoping to do policy work around educational issues, she took a job with state senator Cheryl Jacques, one of the first open lesbians to serve in the Massachusetts...