NOREEN: Gay family no different than other families

Susan Osorio and Connie Trujillo are focusing on their own family.

An openly gay couple, Osorio and Trujillo have two sons, 17-year-old J.D. and Niko, 16. They attend Sierra High School, where it fails to raise eyebrows that the boys are not sexual predators, serial killers and do not have a third eye in the middle of their foreheads.

The whole family routinely shows up at Sierra football games, cheering for the home team, and getting there in a Dodge Caravan minivan. J.D. is a senior who is an election judge. Niko is captain of the Sierra band's drum line, so Osorio and Trujillo supervise the band's booster club.

"We're pretty boring," Osorio said, describing a home life that revolves around the kids' activities. "It feels like we're always going one place or the other."

When it was suggested she and Trujillo are more like Ward and June Cleaver than some people might imagine, Osorio smiled and nodded.

Then she said: "The idea of the Cleavers is just ancient. The Cleaver household doesn't exist."

This is going to come as quite a shock to Wally and the Beave.

Gays raising healthy, well-rounded kids is nothing new to the American Psychological Association. Psychologist Charlotte Patterson summed it up on the APA's web site: "There is no evidence to suggest that lesbian women or gay men are unfit to be parents or that psychosocial development among children of lesbian women or gay men is compromised relative to that among offspring of heterosexual parents."

"What gets me is that people say gay people can't raise kids," Trujillo said. She and Osorio both have jobs. Like plenty of other middle-class households, they need two paychecks to make ends meet. Like any household, there is a division of labors between the parents.

It's all pretty ordinary.

"There's not some special club we need to belong to," Trujillo said. "Who is to give the classification of what is a traditional family?"

Socially, their friends are diverse. "More of our friends are straight," Trujillo said. "People might think differently, that if you're gay you just have gay friends."

Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family defines family and it does not include same-sex parents. James Dobson's Christian media empire opposes civil unions, gay marriage and the notion of gays as parents.

Focus on the Family rejects conclusions of many in the scientific community, including the APA and the American Academy of Pediatrics, which in 2002 endorsed gay couples' ability to adopt children.

How many gay households with children are there in our town? It's hard to know.

According to the 2000 census, 33 percent of female same-sex couples and 22 percent of male couples had a child under age 18. Because some in the gay community prefer to remain beneath the radar, statistics concerning gays are far from precise.

Osorio and Trujillo, both 38, have been together eight years.

They were joined in a commitment ceremony that carried meaning for them but has no legal weight in Colorado.

Niko said it's unfair his parents cannot be married. "I see it as a direct violation of church and state," he said.

Gays raising normal, healthy children is not conceptual. It's part of every community.

The Osorio-Trujillo household wouldn't be a Leave It to Beaver episode. It's far too real, far too ordinary.

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Contact Noreen at 636-0363 or noreen@gazette.com. He appears on Fridays on KRDO radio 1240 and KOAA TV channels 5/30.