Outing the census

It was a storybook Jewish wedding. The grooms picked out beautiful wedding bands and found a rabbi willing to marry a gay couple. They crafted a "brit ahavah," or covenant of love ceremony, by rewording traditional wedding prayers. They carefully chose words that would flow from Hebrew to English, and they had a "ketubah," a Jewish wedding contract created on colorful parchment by a non-Orthodox calligrapher in Canada. On the day of the ceremony, they each stomped on a glass, and they cried.

After spending their honeymoon in Provincetown, Mass., a tiny town on the tip of Cape Cod known for whale watching and bed-and-breakfasts, the newlyweds went home to their tree-lined neighborhood in Lawrence, Kan. When the census form arrived in their mailbox recently, Mike Silverman, 27, and David Greenbaum, 29, checked the "unmarried partner" box to describe their relationship.

"It's kind of awkward -- there's this kind of code word -- and there is no formal type of recognition by the government for this type of relationship," says Silverman, who knew which box to check only because several national gay and lesbian advocacy groups have started a campaign called "Make Your Family Count." The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, both based in Washington, D.C., and other organizations have been urging same-sex couples to declare their committed relationships on the census rather than check the "roommate," "other relative," or "other nonrelative" boxes. The Kansas City chapter of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) focuses on media coverage of the gay and lesbian community, but its members personally support the census efforts, a spokeswoman says.

The groups say this year's census will be the first time same-sex couples who live together can be accurately counted by the U.S. government. In 1990, the first year the Census Bureau added an "unmarried partner" choice -- for two unrelated people who share living quarters and have "a close personal relationship" -- many same-sex couples checked the "husband/wife" box instead. This confused the census computers, which simply changed the sex of one of the respondents, resulting in a severe undercount -- only 150,000 same-sex couples nationwide.

This time around, though, the Census Bureau has fixed the glitch, so when couples choose the "husband/wife" category, though both are of the same sex, that answer automatically will be changed to "unmarried partner." That, along with publicity efforts, should mean a more accurate count this time around, say representatives from gay and lesbian advocacy groups. But that's not the same as saying the cultural and political atmosphere for gays and lesbians will become more tolerant. "Somehow, I don't think (U.S. Sen.) Jesse Helms all of a sudden will see that there are all these gay couples out there and change his mind," says Silverman.

Ann Northrop, a member of the board of directors for the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, says part of the reason for 1990's undercount was that there was no organized push to make people aware of the "unmarried partners" option and that many gay and lesbian couples were unsure how to answer the relationship question. Others, she says, were afraid to mark that option because of rampant antigay attitudes.

"What was the world like 10 years ago?" she asks. "There were far more people closeted and utterly unwilling to talk about it. There are so many more gay people 'out and proud,' as we say, today." Northrop, who is single, wrote "lesbian" on the margin of her census form -- not because she expects her sexual orientation to be counted but to make a statement.

"I would say that this is a fantastic opportunity that can produce a gold mine of information, but it is still only a slice of our population -- those who are in relationships and live together," she says.

Nonetheless, hard data is the first step toward greater visibility for gays and lesbians, which could lead to favorable legislation and more legal rights down the road and help gay and lesbian leaders get a better picture of that community, Northrop says. "We need to examine stereotypes with real information. We need to stop running the movement on anecdotes and start running it on hard data," she says. "How many of us are there? Where are we? What is our income? How many of us are raising children?"

The Census Bureau, however, says that the "unmarried partner" designation is intended not as -- nor could it be -- a way to get an accurate count of gays and lesbians in the country but instead to gain better understanding of family units.

"It's not a (sexual orientation) question, it's more of a relationship question so we can better understand how people function as a unit, how they spend their time and resources together," says Martin O'Connell, chief of the fertility and family statistics branch of the U.S. Census Bureau, explaining that there is a vast difference between the behavior of a couple, who might, for instance, jointly buy a house or pool their finances, and that of two unrelated roommates who operate independently.