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[Michael Poll/The Summer Pennsylvanian] Closing keynote speaker Dr. Nanette Gartrell receives an award of appreciation from Director of Penn's LGBT Center Bob Schoenberg on Tuesday.

Gay rights advocates took the next step in their fight for equal rights by presenting academic research about children in same-sex households earlier this week.

The University's Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center and advocacy organization Family Pride sponsored the "Real Families, Real Facts" academic symposium, which took place Monday and Tuesday at the Radison-Warwick hotel in Center City and drew 160 participants.

The symposium was designed to showcase academic work and research about gay and lesbian parents and their children and to foster discussion and future research.

Scott Davenport, a former co-chair of Family Pride and a funder of the symposium, said that Americans need to understand same-sex families in order to support them.

"We believe that an important component of the reason why gay people shouldn't be denied the right to marry... is because there are all these gay and lesbian headed families," Davenport said. "The problem is that the general public doesn't know enough about what a gay or lesbian family looks or feels like."

The opening keynote speaker was Dr. Susan Golombok, a psychology professor from the University of Cambridge in England.

Golombok's speech kicked off the symposium by highlighting the history of research on gay and lesbian families for the past thirty years.

Bob Schoenberg, the director of Penn's LGBT Center, said that the work presented at the symposium showed that same-sex parents are similarly qualified to raise children as heterosexual couples.

"Hard social research has been used to counteract false accusations such as, 'LGBT people don't make good parents' or 'the kids of LGBT parents don't end up as well-adjusted,'" Schoenberg said. "This was shown by research at the symposium not to be the case."

Family Pride communications consultant Cathy Renna highlighted the need for additional research.

"There really is a lot more research that is needed ... because of the misinformation put out there by the religious right," Renna said. Same-sex families are "something many Americans and people around the world don't understand. We have to show people who we are and one of the key facets of that is credible, scientific research."

Renna said that Family Pride was committed to long-term research that focuses on men and women raised by gay and lesbian parents in their later stages of life.

According to Davenport, Family Pride approached the University about co-sponsoring the symposium 18 months ago because it recognized "Penn's strong commitment to the gay and lesbian community."

The organization also "recognized from the beginning that it is important to have academic partners in this endeavor," Schoenberg said.

Davenport, who with his partner has a 14 year old and a 16 year old, has been a long-time advocate of same-sex families. He and his partner have worked to show their peers that their family is happy and normal by offering to host parent-teacher meetings for his children's elementary school and volunteering in the classroom.

"The single most important dimension of having someone who is non-gay be supportive of gay rights is knowing someone who is gay," Davenport said. "And having knowledge of gay families is the same thing -- it demystifies in such a personal way that people quickly become converted."

The symposium was ended by the closing keynote speaker, University of California psychiatry professor Nanette Gartrell, who discussed her long-term study of lesbian mothers and the challenges she has faced in her quest to continue her research.

Renna said that both keynote speakers' work served to humanize same-sex families.

Gay and lesbian parents are "thrown around like a political football," she said. This research "takes our families out of the abstract."

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