What bothers her most, says Clark, is that Pearce's lesbian attorney, Diane Goodman, cited homophobic court precedents to prevail over her, in effect arguing against the legitimacy of lesbian families. "Because, dearly, justice was not going to happen." "What other choice did I have?" Clark says. Then she elicited public opinion on the matter, blasting first Pearce and her lesbian lawyers and then Bearse, who, according to Clark, footed Pearce's legal bills.
Growing desperate for legal claim to her daughter, Clark fought the gag order and succeeded in having it partially lifted.
She lost the first round in July when a judge denied her the right to be considered the girl's parent and also slapped a gag order on everyone involved in the case. Then, after Bearse came on the scene, says Clark, "I went from having my daughter half the time to every other weekend." While many lesbian couples neglect to spell out their understanding of mutual rights and responsibilities in advance, in this case, according to Clark, the couple had signed a coparenting agreement that "stated dearly everything that would happen in case of separation and that there was to be joint custody, equal rights.and that we had to live in proximity to each other." Clark says she even paid child support when the couple split up after their seven-year relationship ended. Cases like these have been little noticed, she says, in part because gays have avoided the topic, seeing it as "bad publicity." What many believe, Kendell says, is that "if we talk about the issue, then heterosexuals will see that we really don't take our families seriously."Īt the core of the Clark-Pearce custody debate, however, is how lesbians themselves view their own families-and whether those views can stand the tests of time and trouble. While the NCLR estimates that there are 25 to 30 lesbian-versus-lesbian cases working their way through the country's courts, Kendell points out that many more gay parents stop short of even trying to pursue visitation or custody rights. "The single greatest impediment to nonbiological parents' maintaining a relationship with their children is the fact that the legal system does not respect our relationships or consider our families to be `real' families," says Kathryn Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. Such questions have very real and practical, even heart-wrenching, implications for increasing numbers of lesbians and gay men. As a result of Bearse's "stepmother" status in the case, supermarket tabloids have scurried for the story, and two major gay organizations have been pushed to take sides.īy going public with her personal struggle, Clark hopes to draw attention to a larger issue: Until gay families are recognized by the courts, how can lesbians and gay men resolve the legal conflicts that inevitably arise? And if in the meantime the law is biased against the claims of nonbiological lesbian and gay parents, what is to prevent biological parents from using that bias to their advantage? It has captured broad interest for one reason: Pearce's current partner happens to be Amanda Bearse, costar of the Fox sitcom Married.With Children and a spokeswoman for the Human Rights Campaign, a gay lobbying group. While the issue has indeed, until recently, been little acknowledged by gay organizations and by the lesbian and gay press, Clark's case is changing all that. The "dirty little secret" Clark refers to is the growing incidence of such lesbian-versus-lesbian battles for custody or visitation rights in which "nonbiological" mothers such as Clark are generally left out in the cold by a legal system that does not recognize their relationship to the child. Clark and Pearce were scheduled to go to court January 27 to determine Clark's rights with regard to the 10-year-old girl they had been raising together. "It's like this dirty little secret in the gay community," charges Tena Clark, a record producer engaged in a lawsuit against her former lover, Dell Pearce. Retrieved from Ī high-profile case involving television actor Amanda Bearse exposes the moral dilemmas that can arise for broken gay families MLA style: "The parent trap." The Free Library.
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