Mark and his partner Eddie are two gay men living in the Lismore area who are full time foster carers to a 12- year-old girl, Sally*. She has been in their care for the past eight years and their DoCS case worker recently suggested it would be in everybody’s best interest if Mark and Eddie were to adopt her.

But at the moment it is not possible for a same sex couple to adopt a child in NSW. In this case Mark would have to become the adopted father, leaving Eddie with no legal rights or recognition.

However the situation may change. The NSW Minister for Community Services, Linda Burney, recently announced a Standing Committee on Law and Justice will conduct an inquiry into whether the adoption laws should be amended to include same sex couples.

Mark said for them, being able to adopt would be analogous to a long term de facto couple deciding to get married.

“People say you don’t need a piece of paper, but when you do it, it does make a difference in some way.

“It would protect her legal rights in what she can inherit from us... she will inherit our property and assets. If the legislation changes we’d do it straight away,” he said.

Mark said having a child of his own was something he had felt strongly about for some time.

“I think it’s a far bigger issue for women, but for me I really felt that biological urge to become a father. You can’t fight nature and I thought ‘if I stay gay I’m not going to have kids’.

In Sally’s case, her biological father is dead and her mother has drug and mental health issues. She still sees her mother at least four times a year.

“We generally have extra visits on birthdays and Mothers Day,” Mark said.

Sally now appreciates the love and the home that Mark and Eddie have provided, but it wasn’t always the way.

When she was about five years old they showed her a book about a gay marriage and had “that” conversation with her.

“Oh my God, are you gay?” was her initial response.

And then the penny dropped again in her five-year-old brain.

“Oh my God, is Eddie gay too?”

“They don’t understand what it means at that age, but they’ve heard the word,” Mark said.

And for Sally it was a word that came loaded with negative connotations.

But over time Sally’s attitude has changed and she is now looking forward to the possibility of being adopted.

“She’s had security and stability (here) for eight years, which is not what she’d had before. She sees this as her home, she sees her future here,” Mark said. “I think she sees it (adoption) as a way of keeping her place here. There is always that small chance DoCS could decide to move her somewhere else. This would provide her with more stability... And she’s aware of the legal side of things too with adoption being in her benefit in the long run.”

Entering the discussion from a different point of view is Sunni Dawson, who was brought up by a lesbian couple; one of whom was her mother.

“My parents broke up when I was about nine or 10 and my mother then started a relationship with another woman,” Sunni said. “She always knew she was a lesbian and married my father on the instruction of her Minister at the time, who said that if she married a man she would forget all about other women.”

However the logic of the church didn’t prevail with Sunni’s mother’s attraction to other women proving too strong.

“As a child it was hard to get used to that idea. I thought it was wrong because the church told me it was wrong. It took me a few years to get used it, but I loved my mum. My mum was wonderful and her partner (Vyv) was a very kind and wonderful person, but it was hard to conceptualise... It was scary to tell people at school. She was just ‘the woman who lived with us’, or ‘a friend who stayed in the spare room’.”

Sunni said there was a huge element of denial for many years because of society’s reaction and the fear of what people might say. However she doesn’t believe that should be an impediment for same sex couples who want to adopt.

“Kids will pick on other kids for any number of reasons; whether it’s if they are fat, or ugly or they didn’t play volleyball or whatever... You need to change the law and then society slowly changes. When I was really young you still used to call kids ‘wogs’ and ‘abos’ and that’s awful. No-one should ever be called that and it took until the Racial Discrimination Act and all those sorts of things for it to filter through, so I think this is the first step to enable that to happen.”

Sunni is now 30 and works as a solicitor with a community legal centre and believes her experience growing up with two lesbian parents significantly shaped who she is today.

“It’s really helped me to feel a lot more open and see how people can feel disadvantaged in society from a whole range of different perspectives. I feel a lot stronger as a person from it.”

She said her relationship with her father was quite strained because of his religious convictions.

“He thought my mother was going to hell and I was too because I was living in sin (with them).”

She now has a good relationship with her father, but said she never felt like something was missing in her life without a dad.

“Not at all, I didn’t feel like I needed a father and have always had good relationships with men. My partner of five years is a man, I have a great relationship with him and have men as friends, so I don’t feel like it has affected my relationship with men at all,” she said.

“I had a great relationship with Vyv and it grew over the years. She helped with homework and did all of those things a parent does... to the point that I decided to change my name when I went to uni. I put my mother’s last name as my surname and I put Vyv as my middle name. I wanted to change it to reflect my upbringing and (show) that I was proud of them as parents.”

Sunni is also in favour of changes being made to the adoption laws in NSW.

“A family structure doesn’t need to be mum, dad and two kids to be a family. You can have a family with a single mum, or a lot of kids live with their grandparents. As long as you’ve got someone who loves you and cares for you and appreciates you... I think that a kid just needs to be loved and cared for in an appropriate way.”