The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant

by Dan Savage

  The next day, he showed me parts of Amsterdam I would never have found on my own; then he walked me back to my hotel, gave me a kiss, and said good-bye. I never saw him again, and I don't remember his name, but it was a beautiful experience. And certainly not one unique to gay people; heterosexuals have been known to get laid now and then while traveling, too. But this experience was made easier for both of us by certain assumptions we shared as gay men. On the basis of where we met, we knew about how long this relationship was destined to last (ten hours), what we were “into,” and on what terms we would part.

  My Amsterdam affair wasn't an experience I was prepared to deny or denigrate in an effort to make myself better parental material in the eyes of the agency, the court, or my mom. But I did know that by becoming a parent I was limiting myself, cutting myself off from similar experiences in the future. But who said I had to become a hypocrite, too? I inhaled all sorts of things: men, makeup, drink, drugs. Could I be honest about these experiences, treasure their memory, and still be a good parent? I thought so.

  Terry and I wanted to adopt; we didn't want to hide or lie about who we were. But we did realize the kid meant no more Amsterdams, not for a while. Terry and I had talked about having a three-way sometime (actually, I talked about it, Terry listened, nothing happened), but once we had a kid in the house, it was unlikely we ever would. When sexually adventurous straight people go through this (the loss of certain sexual possibilities), I think it's called settling down. Probably, neither of us would ever have a good ol'-fashioned big-gay-slut phase again. I got sad when I thought about that, because I'd enjoyed my last couple of slutty phases quite a lot.

  What else were we giving up? Well, it looked as if we were never going to make it to a circuit party. And if we ever did use recreational drugs again, it would have to be on a vacation, with the kid at home with my mother. For years, I'd indulged myself (once you've gone and kissed boys, there isn't anything you're afraid of ), and I'd lived to tell the tale. If we got a kid, I'd be giving indulgence up, and so would Terry. So there were losses inherent in adoption for Terry and me, too, and perhaps we'd end up doing some grieving. But unlike the straight couples in the room, we chose this loss; it was not imposed on us.

  The True Feminist Man

  We weren't immune to the “dream” of our own bio-kid. Long before we found ourselves in a room full of straight people grieving our infertility, we'd looked into having bio-kids. Unlike the folks sitting at the table with us, however, we only wasted a little bit of time, and practically no money.

  I'd started thinking about a bio-kid before I even met Terry, which was partly why we'd decided to go ahead and adopt even though we'd been together a relatively short time. Terry almost married into kids the day we met, so why not? The adoption process takes at least a year, so if things didn't work out we would have broken up long before we got the kid, calling a halt to the “lifelong” adoption process before it was too late. But if things were still going strong, the kid would arrive right around year threeish, which seemed like a reasonable time to start a family.

  When I met Terry, I was in the middle of tense baby-making negotiations with three different lesbians. Two were a couple, one was single, and all were my kinda dykes: tough, smart, no-bullshit types, each with fully functioning senses of humor and just the right glaze of cynicism to take the edge off their people-united-can-never-be-defeated politics. All three wanted to get pregnant, none wanted to go the sperm-bank route, and all wanted to have a dad around. The lesbians would be the primary parents, but I would be “involved.” And down the road, if things worked out, we'd make some brothers and sisters.

  It was just what I wanted at the time. I was single and couldn't be a full-time or even a half-time parent, so the offers were very tempting. Sweep in, play dad, sweep out. Poopy diaper? Hand the kid to a lesbian. And since I like lesbians more than I like gay men, the idea of making babies with lesbians—and forming a large, happy, extended queer family—appealed to me politically.

  So I talked with both Lesbian Couple and Lesbian Single. And talked. And talked. And talked.

  This was my first personal experience with lesbian deep-process, and I can't say I cared for it. I especially didn't like how powerless the whole thing made me feel. Waiting for other people to make their minds up about something I was ready to do is not my idea of a delightful way to spend a year. But I couldn't force the issue, as that would have made me an asshole, and I understood that the decision had more serious consequences for the lesbians than it did for me, so I was willing to wait. For a while. I did my level altar-boy best to be patient as the talks dragged on. And on. And on.

  As I soon learned, all three lesbians had approached me at the “beginning of their decision-making process,” and none of them were even sure they wanted to have kids. They were “exploring” the possibility of parenting. Why they needed my balls along on their explorations, I don't know. If this was a purely hypothetical exercise, why not a hypothetical sperm donor? Lesbian Couple wasn't even sure who would be impregnated, though they were pretty sure they were going to take that step. They'd been together ten years, and parenting was the only new territory they could explore together. But then the talk of kids, the future, and the rest of their lives made mortality a little too palpable, I guess, and soon they were talking about breaking up.

  Lesbian Single seemed closer to making a decision, but she was talking to another potential donor-dad. Even if she went ahead with the baby, I might not get to jerk off into her Dixie cup. I'm tall, with dark hair and eyes, and I look a lot like Lesbian Single herself. Her other potential donor, whom I met, was four feet tall and had white-blond hair. Apparently the Lesbian Single was having some difficulty deciding whether she would bring a tall, dark, handsome child into this world, or an albino dwarf.

  Thinking one of these two scenarios was bound to pan out, I informed my delighted mother that she would have another grandchild within a year. Six months later, with talks still dragging on, I told my mother to forget it. Soon I was having a feeling, though because deep down I am a Catholic and not a lesbian, I didn't share this feeling with anyone. The feeling was resentment. Why had they bothered to approach me before they made up their minds? Why didn't they wait until after they'd come to what we boys like to call a decision before bringing me in?

  While this was going on, I explained my frustrations to another lesbian friend, who didn't know any of the women involved. She was unsympathetic. “That's what it's like to be a woman,” she told me. “You're learning what it's like not to have any power.” I should embrace my powerlessness, she felt, and learn from it. When I told her I was thinking about adoption instead, she accused me of running back to my male privilege after a small taste of powerlessness women have had to endure for all of recorded human history.

  “Your willingness to access your male privilege,” she told me, “proves you're not really a true feminist.”

  “But,” I protested, “I'm a feminist because I don't think anyone should have to put up with powerlessness—not women, not men, and certainly not me.”

  “The true feminist man,” she corrected me, “would accept his powerlessness in a situation like this, and make a small payment on the enormous karmic debt men owe women.”

  Back at the negotiating table, things were getting ugly. Lesbian Couple had found out that I'd talked to Lesbian Single about doing for her what they had asked me to do for them (beat it, fill a Dixie cup, beat it). Because deep down I'm really Dan Quayle, Lesbian Couple was my first choice. Working in a day care for a couple of years left me of the opinion that two-parent homes are better than one-. But I talked to Lesbian Single, too, because I have a hard time saying no to people, especially lesbians, and I was hedging my bets. If things didn't work out with Lesbian Couple, I would go with Lesbian Single. It wasn't my first choice, but I reasoned that the kid would still technically have two parents, although in separate apartments. If Lesbian Single and I ever found partners, the kid coul
d have four. Besides, the last time I talked with Lesbian Couple, they were thinking about breaking up. Why shouldn't I talk to Lesbian Single?

  Lesbian Couple didn't see it my way. They hadn't broken up, that was just one option among many, and they were examining all their options during their decision process. While it was okay for them to examine all their options, it wasn't okay for me to examine all of mine.

  Luckily, Lesbian Couple was angrier with Lesbian Single than they were with me. Lesbian Couple had let it be known on the Lesbian Grapevine that they had approached me about my sperm. Apparently, Lesbian Single knew they had dibs on my balls and had approached me anyway, fully aware that my balls had been spoken for. Add to this psychodrama the fact that Lesbian Single had once attempted to seduce half of Lesbian Couple away from the other half, and soon we were having meetings to process our anger and hurt feelings around these secondary issues, which delayed any further progress on processing our feelings around the primary issue, which was, as I understood it, the production of a human infant sometime before all three lesbians hit menopause.

  While all this was going on, I met Terry and fell in quick, decisive, boyish love. Soon after we started dating, we had a conversation about kids. Reproduced for you here is a complete and unabridged transcript of that conversation, so that it may be contrasted with the discussions characterized above.

  Dan: “You need to know I'm thinking about having kids.”

  Terry: “I love kids.”

  When the lesbians fell through, Terry and I started to examine our lesbian-free baby options. Which meant adoption.

  But I had one more chance to embrace the role of powerless sperm donor and true feminist man. When Terry and I moved into an apartment together, our new next-door neighbor—whom neither of us had met—slipped a note under our door. She'd seen us moving in and wondered if either of us had ever thought about being a dad. Apparently, watching us heft Terry's ten-thousand-pound couch into our apartment convinced her we had the right genetic stuff. She'd been looking for a sperm donor for some time, none of her straight male friends were interested, and so she thought she'd take a chance. Would we be interested?

  Thinking it odd to be asked by a complete stranger to make a baby, I immediately agreed to meet and discuss the matter. We had breakfast with our new next-door neighbor, and talked. She was straight, she was single, and she wanted kids. Straight Single didn't know us, but still, wouldn't it be great? We'd all be living next door to each other, the kid would have access to Mom and Dad, and I would have daily involvement, though she would be the sole legal guardian. She'd been trying to get preggers for some time and had done the frozen-sperm thing with no luck. Picking up the sperm, carrying it to the doc, climbing into the stirrups—the whole insemination thing was leaving her cold. And it wasn't working.

  So after her last unsuccessful trip to the fertility doc, Straight Single decided she needed fresh spunk, and she needed it now. She was almost forty-five. If we were going to do this, it would have to be soon. While it would be nice if we could all get to know each other first, waiting a year might make it impossible for her to have a baby at all. This was a rush order. Before we left, we agreed to meet again and talk some more, this time over drinks.

  When I got out of her apartment, and thawed out a bit, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being sold a health club membership. The line about not being able to wait to get to know each other before we created a lifelong, everlasting bond was a little high-pressure. On the other hand, meeting someone who wanted to put a rush order on my sperm was a nice change. After a year spent talking to three lesbians who probably couldn't have agreed to rush out of a burning building, Straight Single's impatience had appeal. And I liked the idea of living right next door to the kid. Maybe with a drink in her, our next-door neighbor would seem less like a health club sales associate.

  But there would be no next meeting. I had to cancel our first date to drink. Then I had to cancel our rescheduled date. Straight Single was a woman in a hurry, so she withdrew her offer and decided to adopt instead. Things were a little strained after that, as if we were living next door to a jilted lover. Eventually, Straight Single adopted a baby girl from China and moved away, and we were both happy for her and more than a little relieved.

  Months later, we ran into Lesbian Couple at a Lesbian Event, a women's basketball game. They'd heard the news about us deciding to adopt. They congratulated us, but they were a little hurt that they hadn't heard the news from us directly, and hoped we could get together sometime and have a little conversation, to bring closure to the discussions we'd had more than two years ago about making a baby. Lesbian Couple was still thinking about kids, and was still thinking of me as their potential sperm donor. The news that my balls had been yanked off the market came as something of a shock.

  The Real Reasons

  There's a question I've been dodging.

  Why were we having a kid? Or kids, plural, I should say, because Terry and I—younger brothers, remember—believed children should have siblings to torment. So, why kids? We were HIV-negative gay men living in America at the end of the twentieth century. Barring some social or economic disaster (like a Steve Forbes administration), we had a long, prosperous DINK future spread out before us. (That's “Double Income, No Kids,” our by-default consumer demographic.) Remaining DINKs meant a future of travel, parties, cheap-if-not-meaningless sex, health clubs, and swank homes. Why would any gay man in his right mind trade DINKdom for dirty diapers?

  “The middle age of buggers is not be contemplated without horror,” Virginia Woolf is reported to have observed. I don't believe there's anything horrid about middle-aged gay men ( provided they don't join men's choruses or the North American Man-Boy Love Association, watch Deep Space Nine, or display teddy bears in little leather harnesses in their living rooms). Nevertheless, at about age thirty, I began to contemplate my impending middle age with a degree of horror. What was I going to do for the next forty or fifty years? It didn't take me long to conclude I would need more in my life than money and men. I would want something meaningful to do with my free time, something besides traveling the world collecting Fiesta Ware and intestinal parasites.

  So, kids.

  Once upon a time, people had kids out of a sense of obligation to family, species, and society; and since they lacked birth control, most sexually active folks weren't in much of a position to prevent themselves from making babies. We've got birth control now, at least in most places, and we've got access to abortion, at least for now. While some couples feel pressured by their families or churches to have kids, for a large number of people in a large part of the world, having children is optional for the first time in history. Why do people have kids today? It's not to do the species a favor: the largest threat to our survival is our out-of-control breeding. The reason people in general (by which I mean straight people, since people in general are straight) have kids today is to give themselves something real and meaningful and important to do. Having children is no longer about propagating the species or having someone to leave your lands to, but about self-fulfillment. Kids are a self-actualization project for the parents involved. A lifelong Outward Bound. Something for grownups to do, a pastime, a hobby.

  So why not kids? Gay men need hobbies, too.

  Our other options as gay men at the end of the twentieth century—how to occupy our time over the next thirty years— were not at all appealing. Terry and I had, basically, three choices:

  Option 1: Stay in the Game. Keep going to bars, and parties, and clubs, keep getting laid, keep drinking, keep taking drugs. This option leads, inevitably, to our breakup over some humpy young thing, who would in turn dump us for a humpier younger thing. Eventually we become a couple of fifty-year-old fags hanging out in gay bars full of men too young to care that we, you know, Marched on Washington in '93. To compete with and compete for the annual crop of just-out twenty-one-year-old gay boys, we have to go under the knife again and again, until we are
so much scar tissue stitched to scar tissue. Then we die. Our corpses, drug- and silicone-contaminated superfund sites, are denied a decent burial. Distant relatives come to town, crate us up, and haul us to a toxic-waste incinerator.

  Option 2: Go Places, See Shit. We stay together and spend our DINK dollars traveling the world. We take a lot of pictures, collect a lot of junk, have a lot of sex with the locals. Provided we don't succumb to Alzheimer's or some as-yet-undiscovered sexually transmitted disease, we have our memories to keep us company when we're old and gray. Then we die, our memories dying with us. Distant relatives come to town and haul us and everything else—photo albums, postcard collection, STD meds—off to the dump.

  Option 3: Mr. & Mr. Martha Stewart. We buy a house and direct the passion we used to devote to sex to the renovation and decoration of our little manse. We spend the last years of our lives combing junque stores, yard sales, estate sales, and auction houses for that authentic Victorian/Edwardian/Art Deco/Fab Fifties nightstand/hall table/mirror/dinette set that will finally complete our beautiful-but-sterile home. Once we find it, our local news-paper's Sunday magazine does a photo spread of our to-die-for home. Then we die. Distant relatives come to town, sell the house and the furniture, and donate our ancient bodies to science.

  I was already planning on having kids when I met Terry, so I'd already thought through all of this. After I walked Terry through what I saw as our options, he agreed that they were pretty depressing. Each ended with distant relatives coming to town and disposing of our remains in a tremendously unsentimental manner. And everything we would have DINKed so hard for—our possessions, our memories, our hair systems—would be busted up and thrown away. Mortality is unsettling, and the more we thought about having kids the more sense they made as hedges against depressing, lonely deaths. We didn't want to be anybody's forgotten old gay uncles.