Growing Up With Mom and Mom : Raised from birth by trailblazing lesbians, Ry Russo-Young has the outlook of a generation that has come of age between gay and straight cultures

S. Dominus

Ry Russo-Young, a 22-year-old filmmaker and performer, has a lot to explain, starting with her name. It's Ry, just Ry, not short for Ryan, or a misspelling of Ray, or a nickname someone gave her as a child or a pretension she took on in her teens. Ry is simply a name that her mothers liked the sound of when they named her, an act of creativity as novel and yet, to their minds, as natural as the conception of Ry herself, a feat that involved the sperm of a gay man, the egg of a lesbian in love and one very clean glass syringe.Earlier this year, over dinner at a small restaurant in the West Village, a few blocks from where she was raised, Ry was offering me a short lecture that she has been called on to deliver dozens of times, politely solving the puzzle that is her family for other people. She was explaining her name, explaining her mothers' relationship, explaining her older sister, whose name, Cade, also demands clarification. She was explaining how it is that she has no father, and when pressed further -- after all, everyone has a father -- she raised her eyebrows, dark and thick and finely shaped, just a little. ''You mean who's my sperm donor?'' she asked. I apologized -- ''father'' can be a loaded word for children of lesbian mothers -- but she shrugged it off with a small wave of her hand, her dark red nails flashing by. ''It's O.K.,'' she said. ''I'm not fussy about stuff like that.''Ry has long dark hair, a slightly breathy voice and a hint of a tough-girl, New York accent. Tall enough that she has presence by default, she's a natural performer, inclined to stacked heels and deep red lipstick. On the subject of her parents, she is particularly confident in the quality of her material, and she unpacked the details at a leisurely pace. As for her own sexuality, she's straight, which she said she knows with increasing certainty with each passing year. ''Yeah, you know, I made out with a girl in high school,'' she said. ''I get an A for effort.''