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Family matters
Gay couple share the joys and anxieties of raising a teen-age girl.
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Photo by NATALEE WATERS
Trista Martin, 14, jokes around with her dad, Mark Martin, while she waits to go to her first homecoming dance.
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By LISA APPLEGATE
THE ROANOKE TIMES
Against his better judgment, Mark Martin asks one more time.
"OK, who is going to pick you up tonight?"
Trista Martin, his daughter, sighs heavily. Wearing a flowing blue dress with spaghetti straps and matching high-heeled shoes, Trista is ready for her first homecoming dance by 4 p.m. She has to wait more than an hour for her ride, and she's not quite sure who will be driving. Her dad isn't helping matters at all.
She explains slowly -- as if her dad might have gone daft since the last time she explained -- that Jeremy, her friend and date for the evening, probably will pick her up. But if he doesn't, then another friend will. After the dance, she'll go to a party at her cousin Nancy's house.
And no, she isn't sure how she'll get to the party, but she's working on it, OK?
Trista is 14, a freshman at William Fleming High School, and a quintessential teen. She can be insightful, emotional, angry, enthusiastic, mature, insecure. At the moment, she is most of those things.
Jeremy, her date, is filling in for Trista's former boyfriend, who dumped her just before the dance. Looking down at her fingernails, polished blue to match the dress, she says she's glad it's over between them.
"Oh, I see," says her father. "So that's why you were crying in your room the other night?"
Like any parent of a teen, Martin is usually puzzled over, occasionally worried about and often amused by his daughter. Like any teen, Trista is often annoyed with her father. Plus, she has a step-parent.
Trista lives with her gay father and his partner, Michael Sitton. Sitton plays a major role in Trista's life, including now, when he walks into the den with camera in hand. He takes a few shots of Trista slumped on the couch, then asks her to come into the living room where the light is better.
The attention, the anticipation -- it's all too much for Trista. Still wearing her blue party dress, she takes a walk with a friend. They amble down the sidewalk in their Northeast Roanoke neighborhood, made up mostly of two-story homes, well-kept lawns and seasonal decorations.
Martin figures Trista's plans may change again, possibly requiring him to be a chauffeur. So he waits on the couch, reading a novel. Sitton puts his camera away and smiles at the whirlwind of family life he never expected to get swept into.
"You know, we complain about how crazy things are around here, but in a few years, she'll be gone," Martin says to Sitton. "It'll just be the two of us, and we'll have that empty nest syndrome."
Trista and Mark Martin and Michael Sitton may live in the same house, but are they a family?
If a family means helping with homework and negotiating curfews, then they definitely fit the bill. If it includes a mother and father -- though not necessarily living together -- they qualify.
If a family requires heterosexual parents, then they miss the mark.
But Martin and Sitton, who have been together six years, know they meet their own definition of family: "It's the people that live in your home that love you, support you and share your life with you," Martin said.
The three admit they never expected to be in such an unusual family. It took some getting used to, especially for Sitton.
Quiet and composed, Michael Sitton teaches music theory and piano at Hollins University, plays with the Roanoke Symphony and often performs recitals both in America and abroad.
During graduate school, when he accepted that he was gay, Sitton also accepted a life where he could find love, but -- unfortunately -- not children.
He grew up in a conservative religious family. As a teen, he remembers watching a holiday commercial depicting a "proper" family with a husband, wife and children.
"It was very painful because it felt like I was shut out of that experience forever," he said.
Still, when he met Martin and Trista in 1994, Sitton hesitated. His life involved staying up late to practice on his Steinway, not waking early to drive a child to school.
A year after they met, though, Sitton bought a two-story brick home with extra bedrooms.
Considering where his life seemed to be heading, Martin is even more amazed at his present circumstances.
An archaeologist for the U.S. Forestry Department, Martin is compact, muscular, with a full beard and easy smile. He is the outdoorsy jock who spends his free time riding a bicycle along the Blue Ridge Parkway and his summer vacations fighting forest fires out West.
Martin was also raised by conservative parents who, he said, "had a negative opinion" of anyone different from them.
So he buried his belief that he was gay and focused on the benefit of a heterosexual relationship: having a family.
In college, he met and married a woman with a 9-month-old son named Josh, whom he adopted. Five years later, Trista was born.
Mark was thrilled to be a father, but the marriage was falling apart.
"It all came to a head" one evening, as Martin drove home from work. Earlier that week, he and his wife, Anne Martin, had marked their 10-year anniversary with a fight. He pulled off the side of the road and considered suicide.
"I was torn between ending it all and confronting who I am, and what it would mean, putting my children through that. And then that quiet little voice we all have said, 'Live the truth.'"
That night, he found a small apartment near his home and told his wife he was gay.
Martin knew that he had to tell his children, who were 4 and 9 at the time, in a way they would understand.
"I said that there are some people who are attracted to members of the same gender. There are some men who love men, and some women who love women. I'm a man who's attracted to men, and that's the reason that I was splitting with their mom," he said.
Trista said she remembers that explanation, and thought at the time, "Well, everybody should love everybody."
When she was 8, she made her usual wish in front of a cousin: "I wish that Mommy and Daddy would get back together."
"And then my cousin was like, 'Uh, dude? That's just not going to happen. Your dad is gay,' " Trista said.
That was the first time she truly understood what her father had tried to explain years before. She didn't mind that her dad had boyfriends. Like most kids going through divorce, she just wanted her parents back together.
"I honestly don't know why," she said. "They fought all the time. I guess it was ’cause I didn't want things to change."
Anne Martin said it was difficult to end the marriage, but she is pleased to see her former husband happy.
"The moral implications of being a homosexual is between him and God," Anne Martin said. "He's doing a lot better than a lot of other parents. He's a good person, very responsible."
After the divorce, Trista lived with her mom near Lexington. But as she finished fourth grade, Trista's parents decided she needed more challenging schools. Once Mark Martin was settled in Roanoke, living with Sitton, Trista moved in, too.
Trista wears her dark hair short, her jeans bell-bottomed.
At school, she says, she is in the "non-clique," meaning she's not a jock or a prep or a punk. Her friends mean the world to her, as do playing her keyboard and writing poetry. She joined the ROTC this year, and is thinking about joining the Air Force.
When she talks about her family, she is confident and direct. She has never hidden her father's sexual orientation.
"Most of my friends are like, ‘I don't care,' and that's what I look for in friends," she said.
Boys have the hardest time with it. One boy has told her repeatedly that she is going to hell because of her father.
"My dad wants to write a letter to my teachers about him," she said, "and I'm like, 'He's an idiot. He doesn't deserve that much attention.' "
But sometimes it has been hard to ignore her peers. In middle school, a group of kids teased her, and often it was about her gay father. They accused her of being a lesbian and sometimes pretended to spit at her.
But in high school, people are more accepting, and Trista is proud when she says, "I'm like, the little civil rights activist." Last fall, after one person was shot to death and six were injured at Roanoke's Backstreet Cafe, a bar frequented by gay people, Trista volunteered to help organize vigils.
"People I didn't know would walk up to me in school and say, 'Hey, where's that vigil tonight?' It was really weird . . . but really cool," she said.
Last year, she demanded her father take her to a gay-rights march in Washington, D.C.
"I was raised with the attitude that [being gay] isn't an issue," she said. "There's got to be something worth fighting for in every generation. This is close to me, but even if it weren't, I think I'd still be involved."
Mark Martin is proud of his daughter's sense of social justice, and her independent thinking.
That doesn't mean they don't have the same power struggle that many parents and teens experience.
"She'd say we're overprotective," Martin said, "so that must mean we're doing a good job."
Trista is expected to attend their church, Christ Episcopal, where she usually serves as an altar attendant.
When schedules permit, Sitton and Martin both go to teacher conferences and school performances. Usually, they said, parents are friendly and supportive; teachers and principals are, too.
The couple worry about Trista's grades. Before high school, she easily earned A's; now, in Fleming's challenging International Baccalaureate program, Trista's grades have dropped.
Sitton, in particular, worries. As a teacher, he said, he sees Trista wasting her potential. Though he takes a back seat when it comes to important parenting matters, Sitton still picks her up after school, makes sure she remembers doctor appointments, asks her to please turn down the Nine Inch Nails CD.
Trista struggles even more than most step-children, because she has no societal definition for Sitton. Why should she have to listen to someone who isn't even a formal step-parent?
"Michael and I have had our clashes," she said, "but I respect him for trying."
Her mom is pleased with Sitton's performance.
"Look at Michael. Let's see . . . He works at Hollins, he's educated, plays with the symphony . . . Is this a bad role model? I don't think so," Anne Martin said. "She's benefited by all that."
The three schedules conflict often. Mark is up early, Michael practices piano in the evenings, and Trista loves to hang out at the mall. Once a month, they try to go out for dinner as a family. Mark and Trista sometimes go to the symphony when Michael is playing.
Since their commitment ceremony in 1998, Sitton and Martin have shared finances and saved together for Trista's college fund. They had to design a living will that would cover issues married couples don't have to think about, such as the right to visit during hospital stays.
Still, they know they are luckier than many gay couples who struggle over custody issues. For a man who never planned to be a father, Sitton is quite content.
"The high water mark for me was this last Father's Day," Michael said. "She gave me a tie . . . That's just the classic Father's Day gift, you know?"
On her 14th birthday, while she eats bundt cake made from scratch by Sitton, Trista proudly wears new flannel pajamas adorned with blue smiling Cheshire cats. "Alice in Wonderland" is one of her favorite stories, she explains as she points to her matching slippers.
"It's what she asked for," Martin said, shrugging his shoulders. Trista is teetering between being a kid and becoming an adult, between cozy slippers and high-heeled dance shoes, and Martin is treasuring the time he has left.
From a storage box upstairs, he brings down "Lambykins," the blue stuffed lamb that Trista received on the day she was born. He passes around black-and-white photos of Trista as a girl, with long black hair, dark eyes and the same sweet smile.
Father and daughter laugh about her former pet goat, Sunshine. Sitton tries to hide a smile as they recount the first time he came to visit Trista at her mom's home, the time Sunshine climbed onto the hood of his brand new Saturn.
How is this family different from those with heterosexual parents?
"Better fashion advice," Trista quips. Then, seriously, "They've shown me that it doesn't matter who you love, as long as they're good for you."
Trista can list many branches of her family: Her friends, her mom and brother, her dad, Michael's family.
"I guess family is a group of people that honestly care about each other," she said.
When asked if she has that kind of family, she smiles. "Yeah. I do."
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