The organization provides support, advocacy, information and access to healthcare and services across upstate New York. The project director and faculty members say their collaboration will help families, lead to better pre-professional training and provide new avenues for research.

“Now the program will have a scholarly advisory team who can advise us on our programs and help us evaluate them and improve them,” says Claudia Stallman, project director. “The New York State Department of Health is requiring increased rigor in our approach to program planning and evaluation. Our collaboration with social scientists will ensure that we keep up.”

Her group has teamed up with Binghamton University faculty members in the past on conferences and training for healthcare providers. The move to campus will intensify their collaboration and provide new opportunities to work with Binghamton students.

“Many of our students and affiliated faculty want to connect our intellectual work with community engagement,” says Dara Silberstein, executive director of the transdisciplinary Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies program, which shares office space with the group. “Having this relationship is a natural flow from that. There’s a real connection between scholarship and civic engagement.”

The Lesbian and Gay Family Building Project works with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people considering adoption, surrogacy and other ways to start a family. The group publishes a provider directory and offers training for educators and health and human service professionals.

It also provides programming for parents and children. “We try to empower parents to advocate for their kids and see themselves as educators,” Stallman says.

Sean Massey, associate professor of women, gender and sexuality studies, says he sees the Lesbian and Gay Family Building Project as a resource for Binghamton’s professional schools. One key challenge the collaboration might address is a lack of cultural competency among providers and practitioners, he notes. Pre-professional training for nurses, psychologists and others may improve outcomes for families headed by lesbians and gay men.

“A lack of cultural competency among healthcare providers puts stress on families, so having this training early in their education is a form of health intervention,” says Massey, a social psychologist who has conducted research on modern prejudice and how it affects same-sex parents.

Susan Seibold-Simpson, an assistant professor of nursing with a background in public health, agrees. She says students working to become nurse practitioners receive training focused on race and ethnicity but often don’t learn as much as they should about the needs of lesbian and gay patients.

The Lesbian and Gay Family Building Project’s presence on campus may also help Binghamton build a research agenda related to LGBT parenting. Indeed, Stallman and several Binghamton faculty members are already developing a proposal for a National Institutes of Health grant that would support research related to minority stress and healthcare use.

“We can provide resources, and we can make sure the programs they offer are based on cutting-edge scholarship,” Massey says. “We can also learn from the practice we’re engaged in, and that can inform and stimulate our research.”

Members of the Interdisciplinary Research Group for the Study of Sexuality and Gender conducted a study of people’s reactions to the parenting behaviors of gay and straight parents. Their results showed a clear pattern of negative reactions from study participants toward a gay couple engaging in the same negative parenting behaviors as a straight couple.

Sean Massey and Ann Merriwether of Binghamton University and Justin Garcia of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University published the results of their study earlier this month in the Journal of GLBT Family Studies.

“We noted that when parents displayed favorable parenting behaviors like comforting an upset child, gay and straight parents were judged in a similar, positive manner,” said Massey, a research associate professor of women, gender and sexuality studies.  “However, if parents got frustrated — raised their voice or slapped their child on the hand — the gay parents were judged more negatively than the straight parents.”

This marked difference in the study groups’ reactions is significant, he said. While no parent is perfect, the researchers believe that holding gay parents to a different standard adds additional stress to the already stressful job of parenthood. It can also negatively affect their chances of adopting or becoming foster parents.

“We feel that it is very important for social workers and adoption counselors to be made aware of the effects of modern anti-gay prejudices and they need to educate themselves and develop policies that help protect against these potential biases,” Massey said.

There is a shortage of people stepping up to take in hundreds of thousands of children who are waiting for foster families or adoptions. The gay community could be a resource for many of these children, but this study indicates that if judged more harshly than their straight counterparts, gay parents are at a disadvantage.

“Raising awareness of these attitudes is a critical step in being able to utilize a potentially valuable pool of prospective adoptive and foster parents,” Massey said, “but it is also vital to improving the day-to-day lives of our families and our children.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics recently issued a policy statement supporting same-sex marriage and reiterating its support for the adoption of children by gay families. The researchers say that with strong support for gay marriage coming from the medical and psychological professional organizations, and with increasing support among the general public (58 percent of whom now support same-sex marriage), the next frontier for gay rights may be same-sex parenting.

Overt and hostile prejudice may indeed be diminishing, but Massey said biases continues to affect the lives of lesbians, gay men and their families. “Prejudicial judgments, however subtle, that serve to limit access of these families to potential support and resources ultimately harm today’s youths,” he said.