BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism From the Pages of Bitch Magazine

by Lisa Jervis

  This conflict is familiar to many groups battling for civil rights: Is the best strategy to assimilate with mainstream culture, or to try to radicalize it? Often, the urge is to downplay difference and therefore avoid conflict. But the fact is, queer parenting is itself a paradox. It’s both conventional and radical, a gesture toward joining mainstream culture and a way to transform it. The 2002 documentary Daddy & Papa sums up this perspective in the voice of Johnny, a gay man who adopts two sons with his partner: “My most revolutionary act would be the most traditional thing in the world.”

  Most media representations of queer parents eschew this paradox and emphasize the seemliness of their subjects. It’s almost as if, having decided to focus on one freak factor, those shaping the stories feel compelled to keep everything else (race, class, gender, family structure, sexual practices) as bland and unremarkable as possible.

  The parents in the Lifetime movie What Makes a Family, HBO’s dyke drama If These Walls Could Talk 2, Showtime’s Queer As Folk, the ubiquitous Friends, and the Cinemax documentary He’s Having a Baby are, for instance, overwhelmingly Caucasian. And the problem goes beyond quantity and into quality: Most portrayals of queer parents not only underrepresent parents of color, they downplay the ways that race can complicate the lives and choices of queer parents and their kids. This deficiency is unnervingly apparent throughout the documentary He’s Having a Baby, which follows a white father, Jeff Danis, as he adopts a Vietnamese son. Danis decides early in the film that he wants to adopt a child from abroad but fails to make a peep about the issues inherent in cross-cultural and cross-racial adoption. Instead, his concerns are shown to be shallow to the point of absurdity. To wit: “The pictures of kids from China and Guatemala were very cute,” Danis reports, “but the one from Cambodia, the kid wasn’t that cute. So I’m like, Oh, God, what if I don’t get a cute kid? He has to be a cute kid. Or at least kind of cute. He can’t be ugly. I can’t have an ugly kid.”

  Then there’s the third segment of HBO’s If These Walls Could Talk 2, which stars Ellen DeGeneres and Sharon Stone as Kal and Fran, two Southern California dykes with a pronounced case of baby fever. The most bizarre moment in this short film comes when Fran proposes to Kal, “Maybe we should think about having an ethnic baby. Ethnic babies are so beautiful.” It’s hard to discern the purpose of this racist comment. Is it meant unproblematically? Or perhaps to show that queer adoptive parents are susceptible to the same foibles as straight ones? Hard to say; the issue is not discussed any further.

  Apart from being overwhelmingly white, most pop culture queer parents are extraordinarily well-off. Neither Fran nor Kal, for example, appears to be employed. However, they live in a large, well-appointed house, drive an SUV, and apparently have no concerns about undertaking a project whose dollar-suckage per month will run them somewhere between a car payment and a mortgage. Sitting in their kitchen next to a brushed-aluminum refrigerator, among yards of glowing blonde-wood cabinetry, they get on the phone with a sperm bank. Kal’s end of the conversation goes like this: “We want it. Yes. We want it. All of it! All of it! How much is it? Wow. Okay, whatever.” Just to put this dialogue in perspective, sperm banks charge between $150 and $300 for a single vial. Apparently, these dykes are in a position to order thousands of dollars’ worth of jizz without thinking twice about it.

  The narrative struggle of the film focuses solely upon whether Fran and Kal are able—biologically—to get pregnant. Although they’re shown making multiple attempts, expressing frustration at their lack of success, and finally stepping up their efforts by visiting a fertility specialist, all of this is untrammeled by financial constraints. The audience can cheer wholeheartedly for them without having to consider difficult questions such as: Do Fran and Kal have health insurance? Can one of them cover the other through domestic partnership? Does their policy have implicit penalties for using donor sperm (for instance, a required twelve-month waiting period in which they must try to get pregnant before any coverage kicks in)? What options are open to the gals if they can’t afford that nice fertility specialist—or the sperm from the sperm bank in the first place? How much does second-party adoption cost, and is it even legal in the state where they live? What safeguards can they put in place if Kal can’t adopt Fran’s baby, and how much would the legal fees for those safeguards run?

  Admittedly, Walls 2 would be as dull as dirt if it addressed every one of those questions. But the film avoids the topic of money to such an extreme that Fran and Kal seem to exist in a sunny, airbrushed paradise where tanks of frozen sperm, helpful medical professionals, and surgical procedures simply appear for the taking. And this omission, in turn, allows the heterosexist policies and laws that are built into our medical and legal systems to go unnoticed.

  On the nonfiction side, He’s Having a Baby once again disappoints. Potential dad Jeff Danis, who is “gay, nearing 50,” is a Hollywood (do I sense a pattern?) talent agent who has discovered a sudden longing to have a child. The opening scenes of the film are taken up with luscious shots of his home, which includes an in-ground swimming pool, abstract sculptures, and enough square footage of hardwood floor to play roller hockey. Much of the film’s action takes place in his BMW, from which he conducts impatient, agenty conversations on the phone while driving from adoption interview to adoption interview. A later sequence shows his partner, Don, mulling over the idea of having a child. It’s hard to tell whether the directors meant this montage cynically or not, but it’s framed as a series of pensive shots of Don and Jeff on vacation, each with a subtitle to identify the posh locale: Saint Barts. Palm Springs. The Hamptons. Big Sur. When Jeff eventually gets on the telephone to inform the adoption agency which of two Vietnamese orphans he wants, the conversation sounds disturbingly as if he is purchasing a piece of real estate: “I’m going to go for Lam Xuan Chinh … Karen, thanks so much, I’ll be back in touch with you real soon. Let’s put a hold on Lam Xuan Chinh.”

  Child-as-property vibe aside, these representations of free-spending queer parents are problematic in that they simply don’t mention the issue that is uppermost in so many would-be parents’ minds: How the fuck am I going to afford this? When parents get pregnant for free (i.e., sperm meets egg without any further complications), money tends to become an issue after conception. But for queers, money is often a barrier to getting sperm near egg in the first place. Inseminating with sperm from a sperm bank costs—depending on where you live and what kind of specimens you want—between $300 and $1,000 a month. This might be manageable if one could count on getting pregnant immediately, but the average number of tries before conception, using frozen sperm, is between six and twelve. Adoption is still pricier, usually costing between $10,000 and $20,000. And surrogacy costs the most of all, generally coming in at more than $30,000. Even if you’re lucky enough to go the cheap route—that is, your situation in some way allows you to conceive “naturally”—you’re probably still looking at legal fees for items such as a donor agreement and/or second-party adoption.

  Some representations include glancing references to the price of queer parenting; for example, in Daddy & Papa it’s mentioned that adopting hardto-place foster children is less expensive than private adoption or trying to adopt a more “desirable” (i.e., young, white, healthy) baby. But the most common approach is simply to ignore money as a factor. Asked by an Advocate interviewer why more gay men don’t have children, actor and parent B. D. Wong responds, “I guess a lot of gay people have issues with their parents, and that must color their ideas about whether they want to be parents or not.” Well, sure—but might it also be that they don’t have $10,000 lying around?

  Perhaps because the production of offspring by queers so rarely involves sexual intercourse, media representations of queer parents seem positively obsessed by the issue of where the baby comes from. The swell of media attention accompanying the gayby boom focuses not on queer parents who already have children, or queer stepparents joining existing families, but queer people wh
o are making or obtaining children (usually babies). In other words, what you will see on television, in film, and in print is the procurement of babies by queer parents. If you’re a thirty-seven-year-old mother of two, you’ve just left your husband, and you’re trying to coordinate babysitting schedules with dating your first girlfriend, not to mention the issue of coming out to your kids—well, there are plenty of you out there, but your story’s not going to show up on Queer As Folk.

  In his Advocate interview, B. D. Wong delivers the apotheosis of this attitude: “There are no accidental kids of gay parents. Every single gay parent passionately wanted to be a parent.” Oh, really? Did you ask the single dyke on food stamps who has three kids from a former marriage? Or the gay man who just came out to his two teenage kids? Wong’s comment assumes that gay parenting involves a predetermined order of events: First, be gay; second, decide to parent; third, become a parent. Scenarios in which the order of these steps may be shuffled are erased.

  Not that people who come out after having children didn’t want their kids, but let’s remember, not all children of queer parents sprout magically in a petri dish. Some of them are already hanging around the house, asking, “What’s rimming?” However, most stories about queer parenting center on a single glimpse: the moment of becoming. It’s as though the plot arc of TLC’s A Baby Story—pregnancy, baby shower, birth, next episode—has taken over the queer-parenting narrative. Sometimes there are variations—in adoption stories, the peak moment is not birth but the first contact between parent and child—but the central focus remains the same: a money shot, with baby as climax.

  This obsession with getting the goods, and the simultaneous downplaying of living with the result, again seems to stem from an impulse to make things as “normal” and as unqueer as possible. The parents in these portrayals mouth platitudes that align them with depressing heteronormative myths, such as the belief that a potential parent should feel empty and lonely without a child. “Without [parenthood],” mourns Danis in He’s Having a Baby, “I feel very empty. Without it, I feel very incomplete.” The next shot shows him walking sadly on his treadmill, while in the background we hear the opening bars of “You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Loves You.”

  But there’s more going on. In this film, a baby seems to be merely another acquisition to go with Jeff’s treadmill, artworks, and potted palms. Thus children become yet another means by which queers are folded into a larger consumption-oriented, and hence less radical, American culture. If queers have Subarus, house payments, even our very own “Rainbow” Visa card, how threatening can we be? I wish I could say that queers are resisting this consumer-driven image of parenthood, but the recent appearance of the glossy magazine And Baby, aimed at same-sex parents and laden with advertisements for products, does not seem to indicate that we are.

  THE PUSH TOWARD NORMATIVITY ISN’T SIMPLY SOMETHING that is thrust upon queer parents by a homophobic media empire. In some cases, it’s an impression that queer parents themselves seem eager to embrace. For instance, a 1996 People magazine article arguing that queer (excuse me, “gay or lesbian”) families are “so different, so much the same” presents a gay father, Ron Frazier, whose description of his and his partner’s decision to parent enthusiastically endorses People’s safety-insameness angle. “We weren’t stereotypical gays,” he explains. (He doesn’t elaborate on what “stereotypical” might mean, but we can assume Frazier and his partner refrain from cranking “It’s Raining Men” to earsplitting levels on school nights or wearing feather boas to the Stop-n-Shop.) “So when people saw that we were just two ordinary men, they realized there was no cause for alarm.” People certainly isn’t going to call our attention to the problems with this viewpoint; it’s too busy assuring us that it “helped” (helped what?) that Heidi Frazier’s dads “live their day-to-day lives in relative anonymity.”

  This issue is more complex than simple avoidance. The People article points to an ongoing problem faced by queer parents: Like oil and water, queerness and parenting seem to resist blending. “Becoming a parent was the straightest thing I ever did,” a friend wrote me when she found out I was working on this article. As writer Mary Martone, a queer new mom, argues, “Babies make lesbians disappear.” She describes herself as a “big, short-haired gal,” but notes that the social stigma she usually encounters tends to evaporate when she’s with her small daughter. At those times she’s often placed into some acceptable social narrative—for example, that she has a husband who happens to be somewhere else. The usual view of parents tends to adhere to the logical syllogism “If parent, then straight,” as well as its corollary, “If queer, then not a parent.”

  Although Frazier and his partner, Tom, have lost some of their gay friends because of their mutual commitment to fatherhood, parenting has trumped sexual preference as the governing social factor in their lives. “Now our friends are mostly heterosexual couples,” says Frazier. Regardless of how common this phenomenon is (many areas have relatively few other queer families to befriend), it’s outrageous that this loss is marked not as an isolation that Ron and Tom must live with but merely as something that “doesn’t seem to have bothered them much.”

  Now, I’ll be the first to say that hanging out with straight folks is not a horrible fate. The point is that queer parents are being forced to make an either/or choice. Without a doubt, we need more varied representations of queer parents in the future. But we should also pay attention to the grain of truth in the portrayals we have: that queer parents are simultaneously thrust inside and kept out of mainstream culture. The queer parents in TV shows, films, articles, and books whom I admire are those who can acknowledge the paradoxes they live with, those who give me some insight into what life is like when such paradoxes must be negotiated every day. I laugh when Johnny and William, the new dads profiled in Daddy & Papa, question the politics of acquiring a Volvo station wagon. I’m pleasantly surprised to find a portrayal of a disabled queer parent in the Lifetime Original Movie What Makes a Family. And I feel relief when folks like Patrick Califia and Matt Rice remind me that pervs are parents, too. These are the kinds of queer-parenting lives I want to see: messy, complicated, flawed. They don’t simply announce that queers can be parents; they queer the institution of parenthood itself.

  Mother Inferior

  How Hollywood Keeps Single Moms in Their Place

  Monica Nolan / FALL 2003

  AT THE SEVENTY-THIRD ACADEMY AWARDS IN MARCH 2002, four out of five of the Best Actress nominees were honored for playing single moms: Unwed mother Juliette Binoche brought happiness to a small town by making its residents candy in Chocolat; Ellen Burstyn went nuts as the pill-popping mom of a heroin addict in Requiem for a Dream; Laura Linney struggled with child care, a bad love affair, and her fucked-up brother in You Can Count on Me; and Julia Roberts triumphed (at the box office, at the Oscars, and on the screen) as the eponymous heroine of Erin Brockovich.

  Brockovich was sold to viewers as the true story of a feisty trampy-dressing, smack-talking, pink-collar single mom who brings corporate giant PG&E to its knees for poisoning the environment—and, incidentally, picks up a million-dollar bonus on the way. It was an inspirational, particularly American success story (do good and get paid for it) and presumably a vindication for single mothers everywhere, especially all those trashy-looking ones with kids by more than one father.

  Certainly Erin Brockovich was an improvement over early cinematic single moms, who first existed as “fallen women” transgressing the moral code by having extramarital sex and abandoning—or being forced “for their own good” to abandon—their children. These films hinted at the mostly unacknowledged economic realities of women, who had fewer chances to be self-supporting outside marriage. Movies like Madame X (remade five times between 1916 and 1966) and Stella Dallas (also remade multiple times, most recently as the 1990 Bette Midler vehicle Stella) focused on the unfitness of the single mom, emphasizing that her sacrifice in giving up her children resulted in the
improvement of the kids’ class status.

  In the 1940s and ’50s, when wartime taught women that they could be economically successful on their own, and as divorcees and widows became more common, Hollywood switched gears. Single moms, here transformed into the dreaded “career women,” were now messing up not their kids’ economic chances but their psyches. The most spectacular example was the 1945 classic Mildred Pierce, in which Mildred kicks out her deadbeat husband and builds a successful restaurant chain, only to have one daughter die and the other turn into an amoral murderess.

  It wasn’t until Ellen Burstyn hit the screen in 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, as an aspiring singer with her young son in tow, that single motherhood became a place of possibility rather than pathos. Other women’s lib–influenced films like 1977’s The Goodbye Girl and 1978’s An Unmarried Woman followed; an upbeat ending to the single mom’s story was now an option. Yet the evolution of the American family on film is more roundabout than it is a straight line of progress. After all, the flippedout single mom in Carrie came between Alice and An Unmarried Woman; Mommie Dearest and The World According to Garp were made only a year apart; and single moms have sacrificed all for their children as recently as 2000’s Dancer in the Dark. The recent plethora of single moms on celluloid is less a case of progress than an indication of the incredible amount of interest and anxiety centered on the rising number of female-headed households.

  As we watch films grapple with the problems of working mothers, mothers having sex, and, most important, absent fathers and the implications for raising children, there are a number of surprises. Films that are hailed as showing the “real” single mom, surviving and triumphant, often conceal conflicted feelings about working moms and children raised without fathers. Romantic comedies aimed at a female audience are full of conservative subtexts as well as laughs, while in the genres typically thought to appeal to men—action, horror, sci-fi—there has been an explosion of single-mom heroines in stories that send a radical yet unmistakable message: We’re better off without Dad.