Steven LaChance Blog

To be a gay father raising three children in the nineties was to live in quiet. Only the closest people to me knew the truth, because protecting my children mattered more than my own openness. I came out at twenty-nine, but even then it was carefully measured, told only to those who needed to know. The rest of the world got a version of me I edited for their comfort and for my children’s safety.

Relationships happened in shadows. I had moments of love, people who mattered deeply to me, but in the end those relationships could never stand fully in the light. Some ended not because the love wasn’t real, but because I couldn’t commit openly. To let people know was to risk exposure, and exposure meant the possibility of my children being judged, ridiculed, or even taken from me. That was the constant calculation. Will this put my kids in danger? If the answer was yes, then love had to be left behind. That is a grief I carried in silence.

It was harder because of where we were. This wasn’t New York or San Francisco. This was middle Missouri, a small town where everyone knew your business and difference was never forgotten. You could not count on understanding. You could not trust that teachers, doctors, or judges would be fair. In fact, the law was against you more often than not. Through the nineties, many states still allowed custody to be denied solely because of a parent’s sexuality. In 1993 the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the removal of a child from their mother because she was a lesbian. These cases weren’t rare. They were warnings whispered in our community. Every gay parent lived with the knowledge that their truth could be used as a weapon.

And public opinion at the time was stacked against us. A 1994 Gallup poll found that only thirty-three percent of Americans thought gay people should be allowed to adopt. Two-thirds of the country believed we were unfit by definition. That number hung in the back of your mind every time you filled out a school form, stood at a soccer game, or walked into a parent-teacher conference. You were outnumbered, and you knew it.

The AIDS crisis had left a permanent stain on how society saw gay men in particular. By the early nineties, fear and stigma were still rampant. Leaders like Jerry Falwell were still declaring that AIDS was God’s punishment. Anita Bryant’s crusade of the late seventies had already planted the narrative that queer people were a danger to children, and that idea never fully went away. It trickled down into sermons in small churches, into offhand remarks at diners, into schoolyard taunts. My children didn’t need to be targets of that prejudice, and so I learned to hide in plain sight.

But the hiding took a toll. It meant isolation. There were no support groups in my town. No internet communities to lean on at two in the morning. No safe spaces to share stories with other fathers like me. You kept your truth in your pocket like a heavy stone and smiled through the weight of it. You went to work, you made the meals, you tucked your children into bed, and all the while you knew that the real you was living in silence.

And yet, love kept me moving. The love for my children outweighed every sacrifice. They didn’t see me as anything but Dad, and that was the only title I needed. Looking back, I realize how much of that time was about survival, but also about hope. I hoped my children would grow up in a world where being gay didn’t mean being unfit to parent. I hoped they would never have to hide their truth the way I did. I hoped that families like ours would one day be recognized not as contradictions, but as proof of love’s strength.

That was life in small-town Missouri in the nineties. It was love lived fiercely behind drawn curtains. It was relationships that never had the chance to flourish because openness was out of the question. It was fear woven into every decision and isolation shaping every day. And yet, it was also resilience. Because through all of it, I raised my children with the fullness of my heart.

Now I look around and I see things sliding back in that direction. Different faces, different laws, but the same old rhetoric dressed in new clothes. Once again queer people are being painted as threats to children. Once again books are being banned and classrooms censored. Once again politicians are turning our lives into battlegrounds.

I do not write this because I want pity. I write it because I know the cost of silence. I know what happens when a society decides that fear is easier than acceptance. I know what it does to children who grow up hearing that their families are wrong. I know what it does to parents who love with everything they have but cannot live in the truth of who they are. I know it because I lived it.

And that is my warning. We cannot go back. We cannot allow another generation to be forced into closets and shadows. We cannot let politicians use children as shields while stripping away their futures. Because every law written in hate, every sermon built on fear, every whisper in a small-town diner comes with a cost that is paid in human lives. I saw it once from the front lines. I will not be silent while I see it rising again.