by Dan Savage
* * *
We took a break, then listened to a presentation about the mountains of paperwork we'd all have to do in order to adopt. We learned about the home study and the other hurdles we'd have to jump before we could join a pool of couples for birth moms to select from. Then two birth moms were shown in and took seats at the conference table. We'd been talking about birth moms all afternoon, so actually laying eyes on two of them was like having Madonna and Cher join us.
The paranoia that plagued me earlier in the day had subsided, and I was feeling pretty at ease. We'd had a chance to ask a few questions, make eye contact with the other couples in the room, and be taken seriously. I wasn't feeling like one of “the gay guys,” but more like one of nine wannabe dads. Until the birth moms opened their mouths.
“It was so important to me to find a family that would bring my child up a good Christian,” said one. “Yes, that was important for me, too,” said the other.
They said other stuff, too, stuff about finding adoptive couples they felt comfortable talking with, the amount of contact they wanted, how important it was to them to play a role in shaping their child's future, how wonderful it was to have a relationship with their child, how neither had ever doubted their decision, and how both regarded their biological children's adoptive parents as the “real” parents. None of that mattered, of course, because all I heard was that “Christian homes” were important, and important to both birth moms. Terry and I were wasting our time.
During the next break, Terry and I rented skates, tossed our shoes in a locker, and went around and around Lloyd Center's ice rink. We were quiet for a few minutes.
“Maybe we should go home,” Terry said. “We know lots of single lesbians. Let's see if one wants to be a surrogate mom. No birth mother will ever pick us.”
“Paying someone to be our surrogate mom will probably cost less than doing an adoption,” I responded. “Did you see the fee schedule?”
“I think we're kidding ourselves being here,” said Terry.
Before I could answer, Carol and Jack waved us over to the side of the rink.
“You two are so lucky,” Carol told us. Terry and I looked at each other, and then asked her what she meant. “You're so different! Everyone in the pool is exactly the same. Everyone's white, suburban, middle-class, and straight. You guys will stick out, birth moms are going to notice you in the pool.”
“Yeah,” said Jack. “You two will get picked before anyone else.”
DG Kids
If Carol and Jack were wrong—if we weren't picked right away or if we never got picked at all—Terry and I had other options. Talking with Bob and Kate made quick converts of us, and we'd come to view closed adoptions as unfair to birth mothers and adopted children. That meant traditional closed agency adoptions were out. But if we weren't picked by a birth mom in an open adoption, we would have to consider some other route to parenthood. We could do a foreign adoption, but we'd have to be “ discreet,” i.e., closeted, something neither of us do well. Or we could adopt an abused or neglected kid from the state, some poor kid languishing in foster care, and attempt to undo the damage done by the kid's biological family. We called this route, indelicately, our damaged-goods adoption option.
Without exception, children in the custody of the state were abused or neglected by their heterosexual parents. When straight parents beat, rape, or abandon their biological children, the state steps in. If the kids can't be returned to their biological parents, the state goes looking for homes for these kids. In adoption-speak, these kids are called “hard-to-place” or “special-needs.” They are hard-to-place because most couples doing adoptions want the same thing: the Great White Infant. Couples want a healthy baby, one without emotional and physical scars. DG kids are generally not healthy, often not white, and by the time their biological parents have been stripped of their rights, they're usually not infants. When Terry and I started talking about adoption, we concluded that—as shameful as it sounds—we wanted the same kid everyone else wanted. We weren't hung up on race, but we wanted that healthy infant.
But when you read in straight newspapers about gay couples who've adopted, it's almost always a damaged goods adoption: Good Gay Couple plays foster parents to Damaged Goods Kid, nurses DG kid back to health, and having grown attached, moves to adopt DG kid. GG couple saves DG kid from the system. The subtext? If not for the GG couple, this DG kid wouldn't have a home at all, so . . . if gay men aren't taking optimal babies (healthy white infants) from optimal homes (straight white parents), why not let the fags keep the baby? Gay men are damaged goods, too, so why shouldn't they settle for damaged goods?
Admitting we were just as selfish as every other straight couple trying to adopt wasn't easy. Besides the ease and relative rapidity, there were other perks to adopting the DG kid: First, it's tremendously good karma, and that has to count for something. Also, gay men are constantly told we're morally inferior, so any opportunity to claim a chunk of the moral high ground would be tempting. In addition to being told we're morally inferior, gay men are accused of being a danger to children. Adopting a child endangered by straight parents would allow us to refute that particular lie more dramatically than any citation of child abuse statistics demonstrating that it's straight-identified men who sexually abuse children, not gay-identified men.
Not too long ago, a Good Gay Couple made news in New Jersey. GG couple wanted to adopt Adam, a DG kid born addicted to drugs, with lung damage and heart problems. GG couple had been Adam's foster parents, and under their care, Adam made a remarkable recovery, and wasn't really a DG kid anymore. Then GG couple sued for the right to adopt Adam as a couple rather than going through the expense of doing separate single-parent adoptions. The court ruled in their favor, placing gay couples in New Jersey on the same legal footing as straight couples (which already was the law in Oregon and Washington, and other states). After their victory, “Good Gay Couple Adopts Damaged Goods Kid” stories ran in papers across the country.
Christian conservatives weren't pleased by the news about Adam, but it was difficult for them to argue that gays were a danger to kids when two gay men were fighting to adopt a kid no one wanted—especially a kid that had been so spectacularly endangered by his heterosexual parents. So when the anti-gay Family Research Council spat out a press release about Adam, there was nothing in it about gay men being a danger to children, or morals, or gerbils, or anything else. Instead, there was only a deep concern for little Adam.
“A child placed with two fathers will never be able to call out the word, ‘Mom,’ ” said FRC cultural studies director Robert Knight in the FRC's press release. While conservatives are typically opposed to the creation of new rights, the FRC read a brand new “right” into the Constitution: the right to a mommy. “The state is abrogating that child's right to a mother for the rest of his life.”
When Elizabeth Birch, head of the gay-rights group Human Rights Campaign, adopted twins, Jacob and Anna, with her girlfriend Hilary Rosen, the Family Research Council spat out another press release, this time complaining about children being denied their right to daddies. “Placing babies in a lesbian household deliberately deprives these children of a father's love. . . . What kind of image of manhood and fatherhood will little Jacob obtain being raised by two lesbians? How will little Anna, who will never know the love of a father, relate to men someday?”
There are many arguments Christian conservatives could make against gay adoption—Leviticus, Romans, Timothy—but the one they're opting to make these days is this every-child-has-a-right-to-a-mommy-and-daddy argument. Yet plenty of healthy children are raised in environments where they never get to call out “Mommy” or “Daddy.” Children are raised by their grandparents or aunts or uncles; they're raised by single dads and single moms. No FRC press release was issued when my next-door neighbor adopted a little girl who will never know the love of a father. The FRC isn't really all that interested in making sure every child has one parent of each gender.
They're interested in preventing gays and lesbians from enjoying any of the rights straight people take for granted, and, of course, raising money by scaring little old ladies in Omaha with nightmare visions of children brought up in creepy, queer single-sex environments: little Adam's play group meeting in a gay bathhouse; little Anna having her hair braided by shirtless wimmin at the Michigan Women's Music Festival.
Children adopted by gay or lesbian couples may not get to call out “Daddy” or “Mommy,” but they don't grow up in a single-gendered gay universe either. Gay men have mothers, sisters, and aunts; we have female friends, coworkers, and neighbors. Lesbians have fathers, brothers, and uncles, male friends, coworkers, and neighbors. Conscientious gay parents, like conscientious straight single parents, take steps to ensure their children have male and female role models.
Opposition to gays and lesbians becoming parents isn't about kids, of course, it's about politics. While it's currently illegal for gays and lesbians to adopt only in Florida, the Christian right has pushed for bans on gay adoption in Texas, Indiana, Utah, Oklahoma, and Arizona. Governor of Texas George W. Bush went on the record in support of a ban on gay and lesbian adoptions in Texas, saying he believed “a traditional home with a mother and a father present should be the first choice for a child in need of home.” At the same time Bush endorsed mothers and fathers, Jeanne Shaheen, governor of New Hampshire, signed a bill repealing her state's twelve-year-old anti-gay adoption ban. Undoing the gay adoption ban “was good for New Hampshire and good for our children,” Shaheen said. On gay adoption, America could quickly break down into slave states and free states.
Yet while gay adoption garners less support in public opinion polls than gay marriage, passing anti–gay adoption laws will be harder than passing anti–gay marriage laws. The Defense of Marriage Act, passed in 1996, prevented hypothetical marriages from occurring some time in the murky future. But gay adoption isn't hypothetical: gay men have been adopting children for years; lesbians have been adopting and making babies forever. The National Adoption Information Clearing House, a federal agency, estimates there are between six and fourteen million children being raised by gays and lesbians. A fight to ban gay adoption would not be over hypothetical children and optimal homes, but a fight over real children in real homes. The question wouldn't be, “How will kids do in gay homes?” but instead, “How are kids already in gay homes doing?”
The limited research that exists shows that kids with gay or lesbian parents are doing fine. They're just as well adjusted as kids with straight parents, just as likely to identify themselves as straight when they grow up, and just as likely to have positive relationships with other children. There isn't much of a measurable difference. Since gay men and lesbians don't have children by accident—it's hard to get drunk one night and do an adoption, or slip and fall into the stirrups at an artificial insemination clinic—all our kids are wanted kids, planned for and anticipated. All parenting experts agree that a wanted child is usually a loved child, and a loved child is a well-looked-after child.
In deciding to push ahead and do an open adoption—or try to, anyway—Terry and I decided against the DG adoption option. It takes a special kind of parent, we were told, to adopt a child with a physical or emotional disability. We weren't sure for how long the satisfaction of sitting on the moral high ground, knowing that we were better than abusive straight parents, would keep us going. There's always the chance you'll adopt a child who's fine, like Adam, or a child who can be repaired, but there's a chance you'll wind up with a kid past help, one who can't be fixed. We didn't want to start parenting at a disadvantage, not with our first kid. We didn't want to adopt a kid someone else had messed up. No, we wanted to mess up a kid all by ourselves.
And if we did an open adoption and went for that healthy infant, maybe Robert Knight and the Family Research Council would leave us alone. If their opposition to gays adopting is really just about depriving children of their right to a mommy and a daddy, Knight and the FRC could take some comfort in what Terry and I were trying to do. Whatever child we would adopt— provided we got picked—would have a relationship with his birth mom. He'd get to call out “Mommy,” and he'd know a mother's love. Knowing the FRC would be on our side made us feel a little bit better about pressing on with open adoption.
So what if we weren't going to be the Good Gay Couple? We were going to be a Selfish Gay Couple and go for that healthy infant, and if that made us assholes, well, we had a lot of company— most of it straight. I felt tremendously guilty about all of this, naturally, and reminded myself that even the healthiest of infants can become a DG kid in a moment. One fall from a swing, one moment alone in a bathtub, and we could find ourselves raising a child with severe disabilities. Should this happen, we would, like good parents, rise to the challenge. But we wanted to start even, though we knew there was no guarantee we would stay even.
Friends and Family
Telling friends and family that we'd decided to adopt was harder work than we thought it would be. We were unprepared for the most common reaction: “Why?” Instead of giving the long answer over and over again (lesbians, next-door neighbors, lawyers, birth moms, etc.), I'd just answer, “Because it's illegal to steal children,” or “We need a hobby.” I told a few friends the truth: “I want to get fat.” Now when people ask I say, “Buy the book.”
“Why?” is not a question straight people having kids are required to answer. Everyone understands why straight people have kids: they get drunk, they get naked, they get pregnant, and someone has to milk the goats or be the next King of England. You're having kids 'cause that's what straight people do. We don't call you breeders for nothin'.
Straights who don't want to breed, or are unable to do so, are the ones who have some explaining to do. My brother Billy, who doesn't want kids, has to explain himself to our mother three or four times a week. Mom had some therapy in the late eighties, which left her convinced that everything means something other than what it appears to mean. To Mom, the fact that her firstborn doesn't want kids of his own means something, and the obvious answer (Billy doesn't like children) simply won't do. If Billy doesn't like kids, it means Billy didn't like being a kid, which means he didn't like how he was raised, which means he must be angry with his parents, which means he needs therapy. Billy isn't at all unhappy and doesn't want therapy. But to therapy fans, personal happiness is not proof that someone doesn't need help. In the hands of a trained professional, my brother could discover that he is deeply unhappy.
Both Terry's family and mine are constituted almost entirely of straight people, but our families had different reactions to the news that we were setting out to become parents. I come from a large, loud, downwardly mobile, urban Irish-Catholic family. I have about two dozen aunts and uncles at any given time ( depending on who's divorcing whom at the moment). I have three thousand cousins, one useless grandparent, two brothers, one sister, two parents, two stepparents, three stepbrothers and -sisters, and hundreds of stepcousins. Letting all these people know I was going to adopt would take too much time and effort, so I told my mother and let her spread the word.
At first Mom was confused.
“What happened to the lesbians?”
I explained that the lesbians weren't sure if they wanted kids after all, and I didn't want to wait. My mother suggested we see a therapist, “to talk things over,” before we went ahead, and I assured her we'd be talking things over with the counselors at the agency. Fifteen years ago, when I told my mom I was gay, she didn't suggest therapy. She told me a joke. Our late-night exchange went something like this:
“Mom . . . I'm gay.”
“Really? Did you hear what happened to the woman attacked by two gay men in the park?”
“No, Mom.”
“One held her down, the other did her hair.”
She seemed to take the news rather well, but two days later she had a little breakdown. She'd always thought I would make a good father, and now that I was gay, I
would never get to parent (her verb, not mine). Luckily for Mom, she managed an office for a bunch of shrinks back then, and was able to get counseling gratis. Since my adopting undid the only thing that pains my mother so far as my homosexuality is concerned, she was thrilled by the news and started signing her letters “Grandma Judy.”
My brothers and sister and stepfather, Jerry, were also thrilled. Billy was mostly thrilled because the more kids his siblings have the less pressure he's under to breed. My sister Laura loves kids, and wants very badly to have kids of her own, but has yet to meet a man who meets her high Oprah-influenced standards. She's always dumping some very nice guy who worships the ground she walks on because he doesn't “love himself enough to be in relationship.” Until she meets the man who loves himself to pieces, I fear, Laura will remain single. My mom told her the news, and she promptly called Terry and offered to fly out and baby-sit whenever we needed her to. She was hoping we'd get a girl, and was excited about becoming an aunt.
Not that she wasn't already an aunt. My brother Eddie has a son named Mars. My nephew lives in Montana with his mother, Eddie's ex-wife. Eddie married during a short stint in the Air Force (hence Mars, for the Roman god of war). After the divorce, Eddie moved home to Chicago. Staying in touch with Mars has been difficult, and my mother doesn't get to see her grandchild as much as she would like. Eddie was happy for me and Terry, but he called up to warn us.
“You don't know what you're getting into, bro,” he said, laughing. “Kids are great, but man, they're a lot of fuckin' work.”
Terry's family seemed to have doubts, not that they would communicate those to us. While my family communicates too much and too loudly, Terry's family communicates too little. Terry was raised in Spokane, a small town with a large desert on one side and Idaho on the other. Like good Episcopalians, Terry's parents had two children and then stopped. Claudia, Terry's mother, remarried after his father died, and Terry's brother, Tom, joined the Promise Keepers not long after we met. Terry's relatives, in contrast to mine, are quiet, deliberate people, who think long and hard before they speak. Coming from louder, more opinionated stock, at first I found the funeral-parlor ambiance at Miller family gatherings unnerving. Having dinner with Terry's family is like having dinner in the “Modern Humans” diorama at the natural history museum: nobody says much or makes any sudden moves. While I've gotten used to it, the first time I met Terry's mother, her silence spooked me.