When David Kuefler and his husband took their sons to Disneyland for Christmas several years ago, a “nice southern American woman” spit on them. Other amusement-park visitors taunted the same-sex parents while they were on vacation.

“That was brutal. That was really brutal,” Kuefler, who owns the environmental-consulting firm Junxion Strategy, told the Georgia Straight. “But you know, that’s the exception. Confrontation is often someone trying to understand something but not being able to articulate it well. We’ve had a lot of people inquire [about his family relationships]. A lot of people make note of us, but not from a place of negativity, but from a place of inquiry. And that’s good, I think.”

Nothing like the Disneyland-spitting incident has ever happened to them in Vancouver, Kuefler said. Sure, when he takes his husband, Peter ter Weeme, their two teenage sons, and adopted Vietnamese-Canadian daughter out for dinner, they get stared at. “We’re conspicuous,” he explained. But overall, Kuefler said, Vancouver is an ideal place for a nontraditional family. They’re not rare anymore. In his son’s class, he pointed out, five out of 20 students are being raised by same-sex parents.

Kuefler, who is president of the Adoptive Families Association of B.C., isn’t the only queer parent who thinks B.C. stands out internationally in its acceptance of queer families. Outside the province, LGBT parents still face discrimination.

For example, on July 11, presumptive U.S. Republican presidential candidate John McCain told the New York Times he does not support queer adoption. “I think that we’ve proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no, I don’t believe in gay adoption,” McCain said. Four days later, his campaign issued a clarification after he was blasted by human-rights groups. The statement said states should be able to decide on the issue individually, and that McCain believes adoption by same-sex parents is preferable to “the alternative”—not being adopted.

In Canada, B.C. was the second province to explicitly permit queer adoptions (after Ontario), back in 1995. But even today, same-sex adoption laws are a patchwork across Canada, according to the 2007 Library of Parliament publication “Sexual Orientation and Legal Rights”. Alberta maintains a prohibition of same-sex adoptions, though some private agencies have placed children with queer parents, according to the Planned Parenthood Association of Edmonton’s Web site.

Internationally, as Kuefler found out, no country that Canada has an adoption agreement with explicitly allows same-sex adoptions. In fact, in 2006, China started screening potential adopters for age, obesity, and homosexuality. When Kuefler and his husband went to Vietnam to pick up their daughter, Chloe, they met other gay couples adopting there, as that country allows single-parent adoptions.

“It [the prevalence of same-sex parents] was something that was pretty obvious to anyone who chose to look,” he said. “But it’s a decision by particular adoption facilitators and officials just simply to not ask those questions.”

Closer to home, the president of Queer Families of the Lower Mainland told the Straight that she chose to live in Vancouver over Seattle, based on this city’s acceptance of same-sex parents.

“You know, fundamentally, our day-to-day lives would still be pretty good there,” said Rachel Rose, a Dunbar-based poet and mother of three, aged nine, five, and six weeks. “But I don’t want to have that kind of anxiety, where one day we’ll be allowed to marry and the next day it will be revoked, or whether our rights will be revoked.”

During the 1990s in Washington state, voters narrowly defeated a handful of antiqueer referendums aimed at banning same-sex couples from adopting, keeping LGBT teachers out of schools, and keeping sexual orientation from becoming a “protected category”, similar to race and age.

Vancouver has room to grow, however, according to former SFU master’s student Michelle Walks. Her anthropology thesis is based on 10 interviews with local same-sex parents. In an article she wrote while at the university, “Breaking the Silence: Infertility, Motherhood, and Queer Culture”, Walks notes that misunderstandings still abound in B.C.’s medical system.

The absence of fertility clinics for same-sex partners, the routinely missed diagnosis of polycystic ovarian syndrome (which affects 38 percent of lesbian women and 14 percent of heterosexual women), and social differences between same-sex and heterosexual couples in the “entitlement to motherhood” narrative all set infertility issues apart for lesbian couples, her paper notes.

Though Kuefler feels most Vancouverites treat his family as they would any other family, he explained that queer families face inherent challenges that heterosexual families do not. For example, in Kuefler’s case, since neither Papa nor Daddy shares a gender with their daughter, they’ve found a group of women to mentor her.

“I really believe that a community does raise the kids, and sometimes with gay families you just need to be a little more intentional,” Kuefler said. “And I think the more people a kid knows loves them and cares about them, the better that child is.”

In B.C., 570 same-sex couples have kids at home, representing less than one percent of the overall couples-with-kids population, according to Statistics Canada’s 2006 census. Among male couples, about two percent have children living with them. Twenty percent of female couples have kids at home.