Writer and assistant professor of English, Robert Lopez was raised by his mother and her female partner. His story about growing up without the gender cues most of us take for granted is vitally important and especially relevant now as America debates whether or not same-sex marriage benefits children.

Lopez relates his journey from his “lesbian mom’s trailer,” to college, to the “gay underworld,” to cleaning out the Bronx apartments where men died of AIDS, to marriage to a woman and his commitment to “concern myself first and foremost with my children’s needs, not my sexual desires.”

Lopez says most people with same-sex attraction “don’t realize what a blessing it was to be reared in a traditional home” where gender mores were learned naturally.

This story is a must-read. Lopez writes with wisdom, passion, and poetry. He has first-hand experience of growing up in gender confusion.

As America debates pro-gender marriage versus anti-gender marriage, it is crucial to remember it is not just about sexual orientation. Marriage is about gender, where biology and sociology intersect.

Excerpts from The Public Discourse:

After my mother’s partner’s children had left for college, she moved into our house in town. I lived with both of them for the brief time before my mother died at the age of 53. I was 19. In other words, I was the only child who experienced life under “gay parenting” as that term is understood today.

Quite simply, growing up with gay parents was very difficult, and not because of prejudice from neighbors. People in our community didn’t really know what was going on in the house. To most outside observers, I was a well-raised, high-achieving child, finishing high school with straight A’s.

Inside, however, I was confused. When your home life is so drastically different from everyone around you, in a fundamental way striking at basic physical relations, you grow up weird. I have no mental health disorders or biological conditions. I just grew up in a house so unusual that I was destined to exist as a social outcast.

My peers learned all the unwritten rules of decorum and body language in their homes; they understood what was appropriate to say in certain settings and what wasn’t; they learned both traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine social mechanisms.

Even if my peers’ parents were divorced, and many of them were, they still grew up seeing male and female social models. They learned, typically, how to be bold and unflinching from male figures and how to write thank-you cards and be sensitive from female figures. These are stereotypes, of course, but stereotypes come in handy when you inevitably leave the safety of your lesbian mom’s trailer and have to work and survive in a world where everybody thinks in stereotypical terms, even gays.

I had no male figure at all to follow, and my mother and her partner were both unlike traditional fathers or traditional mothers. As a result, I had very few recognizable social cues to offer potential male or female friends. … Gay people who grew up in straight parents’ households may have struggled with their sexual orientation; but when it came to the vast social universe of adaptations not dealing with sexuality – how to act, how to speak, how to behave – they had the advantage of learning at home. Many gays don’t realize what a blessing it was to be reared in a traditional home.

Life is hard when you are strange.

When I got to college, I set off everyone’s “gaydar” and the campus LGBT group quickly descended upon me to tell me it was 100-percent certain I must be a homosexual. When I came out as bisexual, they told everyone I was lying and just wasn’t ready to come out of the closet as gay yet. Frightened and traumatized by my mother’s death, I dropped out of college in 1990 and fell in with what can only be called the gay underworld. Terrible things happened to me there. I am a bisexual Latino intellectual, raised by a lesbian, who experienced poverty in the Bronx as a young adult. I’m perceptive enough to notice that liberal social policies don’t actually help people in those conditions. Especially damning is the liberal attitude that we shouldn’t be judgmental about sex. In the Bronx gay world, I cleaned out enough apartments of men who’d died of AIDS to understand that resistance to sexual temptation is central to any kind of humane society. Forty-one years I’d lived, and nobody – least of all gay activists – had wanted me to speak honestly about the complicated gay threads of my life. If for no other reason than this, Mark Regnerus deserves tremendous credit – and the gay community ought to be crediting him rather than trying to silence him.

How ironic that gay rights activists that encourage kids to come Outright and who sponsor the Day of Silence to combat prejudice are now trying to silence scientific inquiries such as the Regnerus study and people with street cred such as Robert Lopez.

Do yourself a favor and read Lopez’ entire gripping story at The Public Discourse.

Defend pro-gender marriage.

Frances Kelly lives in Vermont and writes for Homegriddle and Conjugality.