For Gay Parents, a
Big Week in the Sun
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Robert Spencer for The New York Times
Stacey and Jessie Harris with their daughter, Torin,
and son, Zion |
By FRED A. BERNSTEIN,
nytimes.com on the Web, July 22, 2007
IN 1996, Tim Fisher and Scott
Davenport, a couple living in New Jersey, brought their daughter, Kati, and son,
Fritz, to Provincetown for a vacation. After a week of meeting other gay
and lesbian parents at the beach, they invited about 15 families to their rented
house for dinner. It was a magical event, Mr. Davenport recalled, at which
children of gay parents — many of whom didn't know other families like theirs —
suddenly felt less alone.
Over the next decade, the event — which came to be known as Family Week — grew
so large that by last summer a family parade seemed to stretch from one end of
Provincetown to the other. Among those working as volunteers were Kati and
Fritz, now teenagers. They had become used to Family Week's low-key style;
the annual highlights included a fish fry at the Provincetown Inn.
This year, Family Week has bigger fish to fry. R Family Vacations, a
company founded, in part, by Rosie O'Donnell, has taken over the running of
Family Week from the nonprofit Family Pride Coalition. And that means that
the whole event is being redesigned with more razzle-dazzle. “Rosie's idea
is that if we're going to do it, we have to be the biggest and the best,” said
Gregg Kaminsky, one of the three principals of R Family, along with Ms.
O'Donnell and her partner, Kelli O'Donnell. The fish fry, for example, has
been replaced by a circus-themed party, Mr. Kaminsky said. His tasks
include finding accommodations for the performers who will be on hand to provide
Broadway-style entertainment.
In a culture clash — between less and more — more seems to be winning. Mr.
Kaminsky said that R Family had not yet made a profit, and he acknowledged that
Family Week would not help that. “We'll be lucky to break even,” he said,
adding, “Rosie is very generous.”
Ironically, R Family had its genesis at Family Week. In 2002, the
O'Donnells attended the event with their three children. (They have since
had a fourth.) The oldest, Parker, then 7, was amazed to see so many other
same-sex couples with kids, said Mr. Kaminsky, a family friend. “He kept
pointing and saying, ‘Two mommies. Two mommies.' ” Within a year,
the O'Donnells and Mr. Kaminsky, a veteran travel executive, had decided to try
to offer other children the same opportunity. Their first trip was a
Caribbean cruise in 2004. Since then, R Family has offered half a dozen
trips.
There have been a few bumps along the way. When the first R Family cruise
arrived in Nassau three years ago, the ship was met by protesters carrying signs
denouncing homosexuality. Their loud taunts caused some children on the
ship to cry and induced Rosie O'Donnell to remain on deck — rather than enter
into what was certain to be a televised shouting match.
This year, the company avoided another shouting match — or worse — by canceling
a planned stop in Bermuda. In February, that country's leading newspaper,
The Royal Gazette, published the news that a ship chartered by R Family would be
visiting the island in July. A religious group said to represent some 80
Bermudian churches announced its opposition. Soon the letters column of
The Gazette had turned into a forum on homosexuality. By the time Ewart
Brown, the minister of tourism — now also Bermuda's premier — said he would be
happy to welcome R Family, the company had decided to substitute a stop in Port
Canaveral, Fla. “People save up all year for our trips, and they deserve
incident-free vacations,” Mr. Kaminsky said. But the flare-up had a cost:
some people who had signed up for the cruise — in part to see Bermuda — canceled
their reservations, he said.
And the company has had less luck running land vacations than cruises.
Though a weekend in Philadelphia in March was a modest success, the company
canceled plans for a trip to Albuquerque during International Balloon Fiesta in
October.
But Mr. Kaminsky is optimistic about the company's future. For one thing,
he points out, trips for gay parents attract many people who are not gay
parents. They include gay men and lesbians who don't have children but
like being around those who do. And they include straight friends and
relatives. Next March, R Family will be host to a cruise to the Mexican
Riviera in conjunction with Pflag — Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians
and Gays — which has chapters in 50 states.
There has also been an increase in the number of gay dads seeking out others
like them. “The first time we came to Family Week, three years ago, there were
maybe one gay couple for every 10 lesbian couples,” said Jason Charette, of
Windsor, Conn., who was in Provincetown last summer with his partner, Eric
Lazarus, and their daughter, Rebecca Lazarus, 12.
By last summer, the ratio seemed to be about one to three, Mr. Charette and
others observed. Among the gay dads in town was Cory Provost, from
Warwick, R.I. At the Provincetown Inn pool one afternoon, he watched as
his sons, Dashawn, 9, and Troy, 10, did jackknife dives into the pool, while
Troy's twin, Eva, floated in a rubber tube. “It's such a welcoming
environment,” said Mr. Provost.
The single gay dads in attendance included Howard Huberty, of Wilton, Conn., who
had become expert on pushing a double stroller — containing his 7-month-old
sons, George and Nick — down Provincetown's narrow streets.
But most of the parents were moms. Stacey Harris of Boston was crowded
into a restaurant booth with her partner, Jessie Harris, their son, Zion, 6, and
their daughter, Torin, 3. Ms. Harris said that Family Week gave children
like hers a chance to focus on “similarity instead of difference.”
All that conviviality comes at a price. The bigger the Provincetown
gathering has become, the more it has cost Family Pride to run. “We were
spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on Family Week,” said the
organization's executive director, Jennifer Chrisler, in a telephone interview,
“and it isn't our core business.” The size of Family Week, she said, was
making it hard for the organization to focus on education and advocacy around
the country.
Family Pride already had a partnership with R Family — providing seminars on the
company's cruises. During the Philadelphia weekend, Ms. Chrisler gave a
talk at the National Constitution Center. “When the Constitution was
written, as great a document as it was, it wasn't perfect,” she told the crowd
during lunch — a buffet that, in typical R Family style, seemed to provide more
food than the crowd could eat in a week. Family Pride will continue to
provide educational events at Family Week, which this year will begin on July
28.
Mr. Davenport, who was present at the creation, said he wasn't unhappy that
Family Week was changing. “Gregg and Kelli have been to enough Family
Weeks that I think they understand the magic,” he said.
Besides, Mr. Davenport (who now lives in Maryland) said, it didn't matter if
children who attended Family Week went to a fish fry or a circus. What
matters, he said, “is that they get to grow up knowing other families like
theirs.”
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