'Not better, not worse, just different'
The son of a trailblazing lesbian couple talks of growing up, fitting in, and, finally, speaking out
Having lived together for 27 years and having been the first gay couple to obtain a license to marry in Massachusetts, Marcia Hams and Susan Shepherd were standing in front of a minister at the First Church in Cambridge May 23, and, at long last, they were declaring in public the love they had been told cannot exist.
Alongside them was their son, Peter, who is 24, a senior at Merrimack College, and after all the years of political posturing and the months of wrangling about the Supreme Judicial Court decision, the ceremony seemed blissfully spiritual.
A day later, sitting at the kitchen table of the home in Cambridge where he's now living with his mothers, he described what it was like to grow from boyhood to manhood as the son of lesbians and to attend the wedding of his mothers. With gay marriage in its third week here, some attention has been focused on the impact on children and on the subtleties and complexities in the unusual family model that Peter Hams has lived with since infancy.
"It felt cool to be reminded how much they love each other," he said about the wedding of his mothers, "but at the same time, I was troubled, too, because I wondered: In a world with so many problems, why is everybody making a damn fuss because two people love each other? My mothers are not giving guns to terrorists, and they're not selling drugs to kids, and they're certainly not destroying the sanctity of anything, and so the thought occurred to me -- what the hell is wrong with people?"
Deciding to have a baby
Sue and Marcia were machinists at
"This was before the baby boom among lesbians," says Sue, "and we didn't even know any lesbians who were having a kid. Sure, there were doubts, but we knew that we could be good parents and we believed that the love we'd have for our kid would overcome anything."
The '70s was not an easy time for two women who worked in a machine shop, were active in union politics, and were openly gay.
"If you were a woman in the shop," says Sue, "the men assumed you were a lesbian or a whore, and so, one of the girls said, well, she'd rather be a lesbian."
Marcia and Sue thought they'd each give birth. Because Marcia was older, it was decided that she would go first, although as life turned out, they had only one child.
When Peter was born on Jan. 13, 1980, the waiting room at Beth Israel was crowded with friends, and as Sue recalls, everything seemed Donna Reed normal.
Boyhood
The Lynn neighborhood where he lived the first 10 years of his life was populated by what Peter calls ham-and-egg people, and he was aware from the beginning that his family was different. "Not better, not worse, just different," he says. "Every day, my family just put one foot in front of the other. They went to work and came home. They raised their kid. They helped with homework, drove to hockey games, and enjoyed hanging out with neighbors."
Peter's playmates, too young to be taught to hate, were indifferent to his family's dissimilitude, and so was Peter.
"I never questioned it. I had two moms who loved me, and because my friends thought it was fine and my parents thought it was fine, then I thought it was fine. It wasn't a problem."
That would change. Before Peter left for his first day at kindergarten, Marcia and Sue felt obliged to acquaint him with bigotry.
"He'd been living in a loving family," says Marcia, "a happy kid who hadn't seen hostility. We couldn't send him off naive, and so we had to introduce the idea that he might come across people who would think we were not a good family."
"OK, so we tell him other people have moms and dads," says Sue, "and suddenly you're into the birds-and-bees thing. So, where does he come from? Other kids are told, oh, mom and dad got married and had a baby, but we had to tell him, that's not the way it worked here, buddy."
Where's my dad?
At 6, when Peter asked about his father, he was told his father was a good man but lived far away.
That was not the truth, and it didn't satisfy Peter.
"It was not that I didn't like my family, but my friends had fathers in normal families, and I wondered where mine was."
Again, Marcia and Sue sat down with Peter, and this time they told him that his biological father was a friend of the family who worked at GE and was well known to Peter.
"It was a relief. I'd hung out at his house and he was awesome, so it was, well, OK, sure, cool, you know, like not a big deal, whatever.
"At first, I thought maybe he'd be a huge part of my life, but I realized that my two moms and me, that had always been my family, and that would continue to be my family. Marcia's my biological mother, and that bond is unbelievable, and Sue has been there my whole life and has raised me as much as my mom did. When my mom was at work, Sue was with me, and when Sue was at work, Mom was with me. So, I was lucky, because a lot of kids don't have two parents who love them."
So, what do we call Sue?
As biological mother, Marcia is Mom, but what about Sue?
"We didn't want him to be the only kid on the block to not know that people don't have two mommies," says Sue, "so I told him that, always, he could say who I am or not, and not to worry. I told him, when you're out there in the world, don't worry about my feelings, just take care of yourself."
To disguise the fact that he had two mothers, he told people that Sue was his aunt.
"You know you're different, but you don't want to be because you're a kid," says Peter. "I was guarded and worried about how kids looked at me.
"Did I feel guilty? Of course. Every time I said `Aunt' Sue, there was an inner struggle. When kids come from a regular family, they use one word to show how much a parent means -- father or mother. But I didn't have a word to explain who Sue was, so I began to hide a part of me. Over time, you get aggravated at yourself and disappointed in yourself, like you aren't living to your full potential, because what you want to say is, yes, of course, she's my other mother. At least, that's the way it should be."
It's traditional at the final hockey game of the season for parents of seniors to be introduced and invited to center ice for photographs and flowers. As a star hockey player in high school and now at Merrimack College, Peter wondered what to do at his final game next winter, for to invite Sue to center ice is to announce that Peter is the son of two lesbians.
A few months ago, at his final game as a junior, he watched the seniors and their parents gather to applause. Afterward, as his parents drove him back to his dorm, he leaned toward the front seat and said: "Sue, I want you to come out for senior night next year and stand next to me on center ice and be acknowledged."
Sue, at first, wondered if it was a good idea.
As she explains: "Sometimes, I say to myself, what are we afraid of? What are we afraid of? Are they going to beat me up? No. I'm afraid of only one thing, and that's whether it will hurt Peter. That's what I say to myself. How will it affect Peter?"
The hockey world
Competitive hockey is tough for everybody, but tougher for the son of lesbians.
By seventh grade, Peter was playing for a select team in Eastern Massachusetts, and he noticed that he was treated differently. While other players had fathers who lugged equipment to center ice and came into the locker room and helped tie skates and negotiated with the coach about their sons' prospects, Peter had to do nearly everything himself.
"Coaches want to deal with fathers, and it's burdensome not to have your dad in the locker room and to have to ask someone else's dad to tie your skates. My moms would sit in the stands and say `Great game,' but there never was conversation between the coaches and my parents, and no locker room rapport."
And so, by age 11, he was negotiating with coaches, managing his own career.
"I wasn't mad at my family or anything, but I was aware I was left out. My parents were strong enough to face the coaches, but it wasn't the culture, and that's hard to deal with, because when you're a kid, you want a thing done because it should be done and not because of a some culture that doesn't make sense."
Sue agrees. "We're convinced Peter could have got to this level [of NCAA hockey] sooner if it weren't for us," she says. "I know how these men's minds work. Men are afraid of women, and they're terrorized of us. Would you want Marcia yelling at you about hockey? No way."
Teen years
At home, Peter was learning lessons about equality within a family that made the male-dominated models of a generation ago seem Paleozoic.
"Relationships between men and women, especially in my generation, are changing, and in my family, my parents are equal. Both my moms are good at different things. My mom's real good at negotiating. If something needs to get done at school, she does it. Sue doesn't like to do that, but she makes sure things get fixed around the house, the computer or TV. And Sue talks hockey with me more than my mom, so my mom runs some stuff and Sue other stuff. It evens out."
By age 15, he'd become so adept at hockey that he was invited to leave Cambridge Rindge & Latin School for Tabor Academy, but the transition was difficult. He was dyslexic, and had to spend many more hours studying than his classmates did, and it was not lost upon him that most of his classmates came from homes with greater wealth, greater influence, and also a father as well as a mother.
Several times a week, Sue and Marcia drove 75 minutes to Marion to attend his hockey games or often to sit in his dorm and help with his homework. "If they had not done that," he says, "I wouldn't have made it."
But how would he break the news about his two mothers to his roommate, a wealthy kid from Newport R.I., who wore J.Crew shirts, khakis, and boat shoes and whose parents were doctors?
That September, for the first time, he sat down and explained to someone face to face about his family.
"I took a leap of faith. I said that my family was different. He didn't know what to say. I said that my parents were gay, and he said, `So?'
"It was an awesome relief, but then reality set in, and I said to him, `But you've got to keep this between you and me.' So, as much as you feel great that you told a buddy, the next thing out of your mouth is, `Don't tell anybody.' "
Why not?
"One reason that you're concerned about people generally is that you go to chapel and realize that religion hates your parents. And the people who say `fag' and `queer' and -- it goes on all the time, and every time you hear that, if you hold a secret, if you're in the closet or if you're the kid of a gay or lesbian relationship, it hurts. It chips away, and that keeps you from telling people."
Going public
When it was decided that Marcia and Sue would be the first gay couple in Cambridge to apply for a wedding license, Peter worried about publicity.
"I knew core friends would be cool, but I wondered how fellow students would react, and my mom said, `If you don't want to do this, we don't have to.' I said, `No, that's crazy, you should be first.' But I didn't want to be interviewed."
Marcia and Sue left early on Saturday, May 15, around midnight, to encamp outside City Hall in order to apply for the license in the first hour of Monday, the day gay marriage would become legal in Massachusetts.
Saturday morning, Peter brought them clean clothes, and when he returned from work that afternoon and saw camera crews, he worried because he was wearing a shirt that identified the hockey company where he worked and a hat that identified him as a player for Merrimack College.
He declined to be interviewed and retreated home to watch the Tampa Bay hockey game, flipping among stations only to find his parents being interviewed. "Well," he thought, "if people didn't know before, they know now."
The telephone rang. It was a request for his parents to be interviewed on the "Today" show.
"The one from New York?" he said.
Sunday night, when he arrived at City Hall, the crowd had grown to nearly 100, and after greeting his parents and friends, suddenly, there they were in front of him, the television cameras and microphones, and for the first time he faced the red light and talked about what he had kept largely secret all his life.
He said he was happy for his parents, that 27 years was too long to have waited, and it was great, at last, to have the same right and protection as other people.
"It was a load off my mind," he recalls. "I'd finally said it, and no matter what I'd felt before or what happened from now on, the past was gone, because I'd just told everybody that I'd grown up in a gay family and my parents were getting married."
Still, he was tense. A stranger tried to offer Sue an advertising leaflet, and she recoiled because, as she explained to her son, "I hope no one tries to shoot us."
When he walked out of City Hall, he was wary. "I'd read in history classes about the civil rights movement and that the first people who do anything like this were in the most danger.
"But then I had a chance to look around, and that's when I changed the way I think about life. What I saw was people cheering my parents and calling them heroes, and I saw something else -- all the kids, the children of gay and lesbian couples, and I said to my mom, `That used to be me.'
"Maybe their lives will be easier," he says, "especially if people like me are not afraid to speak out, because this is no longer about me. My time has passed. It's about them, and I know that somewhere there are kids who are like I was, and they're feeling alone because their lifestyle is different from everybody else's, and they don't know how to deal with it."
What's ahead?
Marcia, 57, continues as deputy director of Health Care for All, an advocacy group. Sue, 52, continues graduate studies at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell in industrial hygiene. Peter continues therapy to recover from surgery to replace a tendon severed in a game this year against Boston College, and in September he begins his final year at Merrimack College, his final year of NCAA hockey.
And they're all preparing for a second and larger wedding for Marcia and Sue Sept. 25.
Why a second ceremony? The first was held quickly, as Sue says, "because we're all a little nervous that maybe something bad could happen, what with Governor Romney trying every day to come up with a strategy against gay marriage. Many couples have done this -- held small legal rituals to be followed later by big weddings."
After the ceremony, the entire congregation of First Church in Cambridge will be invited to the YWCA for a potluck dinner, reception, and dance.
"And for our honeymoon," says Marcia, "we're going to Omaha."
Why Omaha?
"There's a hockey tournament there, and we want to see Peter play."
Jack Thomas can be reached at thomas@globe.com. 
