Gay Families Find the Bronx Is a Place to Call Home
The New York Times
By Lisa W. Foderaro
September 29, 2008

It is a statistic surprising even to those it describes: Same-sex couples in the Bronx are more likely to have children than those in any other New York City borough, according to a study released last month, and perhaps more than any county in the country.

Julian Rodriguez, left, and his partner, Joel Jusino, at a relative’s home with Mr. Rodriguez’s daughters Leanne, 9, left, and Julie, 11.

Ron Poole-Dayan, left, with his partner, Greg Poole-Dayan, reading before bed with their twins Tomer and Elinor, 7, at home in Riverdale, the Bronx.

For Ron and Greg Poole-Dayan, whose 7-year-old twins were born to a surrogate mother, it’s a matter of geography. Their home in Riverdale puts them a bit closer to family, as well as the Berkshire Mountains, where they go hiking.

For Carmen Quinones, a recovering addict and a substance abuse counselor with four children, the Bronx offered an affordable haven when she got out of prison 14 years ago.

For Julian Rodriguez, it was never a question: He has lived in the borough since he was 3. “I feel more comfortable because the demographic is more what I’m used to, with my neighbors playing dominoes and the Spanish music,” said Mr. Rodriguez, who has two daughters from a previous marriage. “I feel like I’m at home with my culture.”

There may be as many reasons for same-sex couples to settle in the Bronx as there are same-sex couples there — almost 3,000, according to a demographic snapshot by the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. Forty-nine percent of those couples have children. Many said they chose the Bronx for similar reasons as their straight neighbors: affordability, space, racial affinity, familiarity.

The Bronx, home to 11 percent of New York City’s 26,000 same-sex couples — a fraction of the borough’s 1.3 million people spread across 54 square miles — is hardly a gay mecca (Rosie O’Donnell’s cruise line has yet to make Hunts Point a port of call). Gay and lesbian couples generally do not gravitate there, as they might to neighborhoods perceived to be more gay-friendly, like Park Slope, Brooklyn, or Chelsea in Manhattan. In fact, many say there are fewer support services, and more harassment, in the Bronx than elsewhere.

“The Bronx lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community has largely been a hidden community for a very long time because of very real homophobia,” said Lisa Winters, executive director of the Bronx Community Pride Center, the borough’s only community building for gays and lesbians, which opened a decade ago. “The Bronx is a very machismo borough, and it’s a very religious borough. The religious institutions have a very strong foothold here, and they preach from the pulpit that homosexuality is a sin.

“But the world is starting to change,” she said, “and the Bronx is finally getting in line.” Indeed, a new church geared toward gays and lesbians, In the Life Ministry, recently opened at Tremont and Westchester Avenues, and there is a growing, if small, number of gay-oriented bars and businesses. Gary J. Gates, a demographer and a senior research fellow at the Williams Institute, said the Bronx stood out nationally as one of few places “where the percent of same-sex couples raising children is virtually the same as different-sex couples raising children.” In the Bronx, 55 percent of married couples are raising children under 18.

Manhattan has the most same-sex couples, 10,000, or 38 percent of the total in the city; 4 percent of them have children, according to the study, compared with 41 percent of the borough’s married couples. About 21 percent of Brooklyn’s 7,000 same-sex couples are parents; 53 percent of their straight neighbors are. In Queens, there are 5,200 gay couples, 22 percent with children, and on Staten Island, 29 percent of the 1,000 same-sex couples are parents; in both of those boroughs, 51 percent of married couples have children.

Mr. Gates attributed the high rate of parenthood among Bronx gays to other demographic trends: nationally, black and Hispanic same-sex couples are two to three times more likely to have children than white same-sex couples, he said, and the Bronx is 83 percent black or Hispanic. And given how expensive it can be to raise a family in New York, the Bronx offers relative affordability.

“Media images of gay and lesbian people are very much in the ‘Will & Grace’ mode — white, male, urban and wealthy,” said Mr. Gates, referring to the popular television sitcom. “One of the interesting things this report shows is that in places like the Bronx, absolutely none of those stereotypes hold.”

‘One of Them?’

Mr. Rodriguez, the facilities director at Bronx Community Pride Center, grew up in the South Bronx in a family of Dominican immigrants. At first, he thought himself bisexual, and married a childhood friend. They had their first child, Julie, 11 years ago, followed by a second daughter, Leanne, 9, who now spend about half their time with Mr. Rodriguez and his partner, Joel Jusino. Two years ago, he broached the subject of sexual orientation with his daughters.

“The curiosity started when she came to visit me at work, and Julie said, ‘You’re not one of them, are you?’ ” Mr. Rodriguez recalled. “I said, ‘What do you mean — one of them? They’re people.’ She said she was just curious. Once I saw that she was making pretty good observations, I told her, and then we both told the younger one.”

Now, the girls regard Mr. Jusino as a second father. “They always play with him, and he helps them with their homework,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “This summer we all went to Florida to visit his mom, and we took the kids to Disney. The fact that they are positive toward Joel is a blessing.”

Mr. Rodriguez, 35, said he could recall only a single incident of overt prejudice, but it has stayed with him. It was two Octobers ago. He and Mr. Jusino were walking with the girls around 8 p.m. on the Grand Concourse at 174th Street.

“I was being very friendly and touchy with Joel,” Mr. Rodriguez recalled, “and people were saying, ‘Oh, look. They’re gay. They’re nasty.’ The girls heard them and the older one looked at me and then looked back and gave them a nasty look. She said, ‘Dad, just don’t pay attention.’

“It wasn’t like we were doing anything ridiculous,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “I just had my hand over his shoulder. I’ve done that with some of my straight buddies.”

The partners left the South Bronx this summer for Harlem, not because of gay bias, but because they got a deal on an apartment. But he still spends much of his time in the Bronx, at work and his mother’s apartment.

“Harlem is very gentrified, and unfortunately there are not a lot of Spanish people in our neighborhood,” he said. “I miss seeing my neighbors on their stoop drinking coffee in the morning, asking me how I’m doing. It’s funny because it’s just a borough away. But everyone is so fast. People don’t know you the way they did in the Bronx.”

Battling Harassment

Ms. Quinones, 46, grew up in the East New York section of Brooklyn in the 1970s, and vividly recalls being teased for having lesbian parents. When she revealed her own sexual orientation as lesbian at 16, she said, people in the neighborhood “threw bottles at me when they would see me walking around with the girl I was with.”

She went on to have four children with different fathers, and because of her involvement with drugs and other issues, all of them were eventually removed from her care. (Two were eventually adopted by foster parents.) Upon leaving prison after serving a 10-year sentence for selling drugs, Ms. Quinones moved to the Bronx.

Her fourth child, son Xavier, 10, was born after she started drug treatment. “I met Xavier’s dad in early recovery,” she said. “They were saying that we had to change our life. I felt I couldn’t be gay and be in recovery, and in the process of that we all got hurt.”

Xavier was eventually taken from her, too, after he was beaten at age 3 by Ms. Quinones’s boyfriend while she worked nights, she said. The boy’s biological father now has custody, but Ms. Quinones takes Xavier every other weekend, as well as for five weeks in the summer.

Ms. Quinones, who recently ended a four-year relationship with a woman, sees the Bronx as hospitable to gays, although she said she does edit her persona in public. “The people I hang around with are discreet lesbians,” she said. “I never hold hands.”

Appreciating Acceptance

Ron and Greg Poole-Dayan, who were married in Canada and combined their last names, endured their share of harassment after the 2001 birth of their children, Elinor and Tomer, who were conceived using Ron’s sperm and Greg’s sister’s eggs. Several times over a six-month period, they said, a group of preteen boys from a local Catholic school taunted them as they pushed a double stroller to the playground.

Finally, Ron, a marketing consultant, chased the boys and snapped pictures of them. He then went to the school and spoke to an administrator. The abuse stopped. “We decided we’re just not going to let it happen,” Ron Poole-Dayan recalled. About a year ago, the couple said, one of the boys, by then in his late teens, knocked on their door one night. He was visibly intoxicated and claimed to be gay, saying he needed to talk. The men told him to come back when he was sober, but he never did.

“We thought it might be a hoax, that he was being dared by his friends around the corner,” Ron Poole-Dayan said. “But I think it was probably sincere.”

As the twins have grown, the Poole-Dayans said, they have felt increasingly embraced by their Riverdale community. The Riverdale YM-YWHA, where Ron serves on a committee, reworded its membership forms to read “adult No. 1” and “adult No. 2” instead of “mother” and “father.” “We didn’t petition them,” he said. “We just made the point that their forms were not appropriate for us, and a year later they were changed.”

Relations with their neighbors, who are predominantly Jewish, have grown so close that a few years ago, the couple put a gate in the fence that separates their property from three other households (all with young children), allowing for more spontaneous play. Some of the neighbors attended a recent marriage-equality rally to show support.

“For us it has worked perfectly,” Ron Poole-Dayan said of the couple’s decision to settle in the Bronx. “We wanted a place that had a lot of kids, and that was more important than our finding a place with a lot of other gay parents.”