'We Are Doing Just Fine': The Children of Australian Gay and Lesbian Parents Speak Out

This article foregrounds the public voices of children of gay and lesbian parents in Australia. In doing so, it contributes to scholarship about these children but its focus is one that has been only partially explored. It begins by showing how children's welfare continues to be the ground on which both homophobic and pro-gay public discourse stakes territory. The article documents the emergence in Australia, since the early 2000s, of a new self-defined subject position, evident in a range of Internet sources. The article analyzes the ways in which the voices which speak from this position are both constituted by the pro-gay discourse and also speak back to it. Three themes are identified and analyzed: resistance to the binary opposition of the child at risk versus the prospering child, responses to heteronormativity and homophobia, and the “love makes a family” discourse. While the children of gay and lesbian parents are not immune to the public discourses that create them as objects of debate, attention to their self-consciously political voices reveals that they also resist the norms of the pro-gay position (and the homophobic position) and begin to create space for a more diverse picture of their lives.