by Dan Savage
I look back at Dr. Finger and say, “Look, dig in, would you? I can take it.”
And he's in . . . and he's past the sphincters, he's going deep . . . this way and that . . . and he's on my prostate . . . and he's out! It's over in less than ten seconds. He pronounces my prostate slightly larger than normal—wear and tear?—but healthy, nothing to worry about. While I get dressed, Dr. Finger fills out the form I brought with me from the agency: “Dan is in excellent health and would make an excellent parent.”
Oh, incidentally, while I was in the hospital that summer when I was fourteen, recovering from surgery for my stress-induced ulcers, Chicago had a cold snap. The temperature fell to the low fifties. The furnace kicked in. I never saw my Playgirl magazine again.
The Susan Scenario
According to the agency, it was possible for a couple to go from seminar to pool in eight weeks if they were diligent about getting their paperwork done. We were not diligent. We kept our appointments with Ann, but the stack of paperwork sat on my desk, slowly disappearing under newspapers and magazines. It was on my desk because Terry felt paperwork was my responsibility, “since you're the writer.” In the end I even wrote Terry's autobiography.
It wasn't until six months after the seminar that we turned in the next-to-last bit of paperwork and, shortly after Thanksgiving, sent off a package to the agency, along with another large check. Our backgrounds and finances and prostate glands had all checked out, and our meetings with Ann together and alone had gone well. Phase one of the adoption process, the paperwork, was almost over. Phase two, the wait, was about to begin.
We had only one thing left to do before we entered the pool. Well, two things: we had to write our “Dear Birthparent . . .” letter, and we had to write another large check.
Terry, as I've mentioned, didn't want anything to do with the paperwork. But there was some stuff he had to do alone and some stuff we had to do together. We had to write detailed family health histories, and there were forms to fill out about what level of “special-needs risk” we were willing to accept. I didn't want to make that call alone; but for months, we would say, “We have to get this stuff done,” then never actually sit down and do it.
With the rest of the paperwork, the problem was me. Getting letters of recommendation from our neighbors, for example, was a major stumbling block. We tried to beg off, explaining to the agency that we were urban people. The suburban couples the agency usually dealt with might be on speaking terms with their neighbors, but we were not. (Especially not with the one who'd asked to borrow a cup of sperm the day we moved in.) We'd lived in our courtyard apartment building for almost two years, and had made no effort to get to know our neighbors. We couldn't just ask them to write us a letter of recommendation.
We pleaded our case to Ann, who agreed that requiring a letter of recommendation from a neighbor might not be fair to urban people. She checked with the agency, but we had no choice. A letter of recommendation from a neighbor was required by law. There are things only the people living next door to you know. Letters from friends and relatives in far-off cities only tell the agency and the state that your friends and relatives like you. My mom wouldn't know if Terry and I shot guns off at night or sold crack out our back door, but our neighbors would. I sat down and wrote a note to our neighbors begging them for this favor. “All you have to do is write, ‘Dan and Terry do not sell crack or shoot guns,’ put your note in the enclosed stamped, pre-addressed envelope, and drop it in the mail,” I wrote. “We'd be eternally grateful.”
In the middle of the night, I stuffed my notes, along with envelopes and stamps, in our neighbors' mailboxes, and slunk back into our apartment. I didn't want to risk having to talk to our neighbors, and I wasn't sure any would take the time to vouch for us: Terry and I weren't exactly Mr. and Mr. Congeniality. Some of the folks in the building had little barbecues and impromptu dinners, and when we first moved in, we had to deflect a few invitations. We weren't interested in dorm living, and soon the invitations stopped. Now we crossed our fingers, hoping someone would do the neighborly thing, which was more than we'd ever done.
Seven of our neighbors wound up sending in letters, six more than we needed. We were the first couple in agency history to get seven letters of recommendation specifically noting that the people in question did not deal crack out their back door.
* * *
There was no waiting list at our agency. Once your paperwork, home study, and “Dear Birthparent . . .” letter were done, you were in. Some adoption agencies limited the number of couples in their pools to better the odds for couples who'd been waiting a long time to adopt. Our agency was committed to “maximizing the number of choices available to each birth mother,” so there was no limiting the number of couples in the pool.
The final hurdle we had to jump was the “Dear Birthparent . . .” letter: five hundred words and a picture with which to introduce ourselves. We'd been warned at the seminar and by Bob and Kate that the letter would be the most difficult part of the paperwork, and when I finally sat down to write it, I learned they were right. What did we want to say? We'd been told in not so many words that a good birthparent letter could get you picked right away, and a bad one meant languishing in the pool.
The pressure was intense.
Once the letter was written, we would have it laid out on agency stationary, print five hundred copies, and deliver it to agency HQ in Portland. The agency didn't let birth moms pick adoptive parents for their babies until they were at least six months pregnant. Birth moms met with counselors and discussed all their options, including what help was out there if she wanted to keep her baby. If, after all these initial counseling sessions, the birth mom wanted to go ahead and pick a family, a special “Dear Birthparent . . .” book was assembled just for her.
Unable to get started on the letter, I called Bob and asked for his advice.
“You know, people worry too much about the birthparent letter,” Bob said. “They say most birth moms flip through their books and wind up selecting adoptive parents without reading the letter at all. They take one look at a picture and say, ‘That's them.’ It's like they have a picture in their heads of the parents they want for their kid.”
Bob's advice did not set my mind at ease. How many birth moms had a picture in their heads of two gay men? Who was going to look at Terry and me and say, “That's them”?
We'd been given an old “Dear Birthparent . . .” book at the seminar, and when I finally sat down to write our letter, I dug it out from under the stacks of paper on my desk and started flipping through. Everyone was so white, so middle-class, and oh so straight-looking that I felt as if I was back on Lloyd Center's ice rink. Maybe this was a waste of time. Talking with Ann during our home study made us believe this actually might happen; she was so upbeat and positive. But after five minutes looking at the pictures in our “Dear Birthparent . . .” book, I was having doubts. Maybe we should've gone to China, or offered a female friend the money we were paying the agency to have our bio-kid.
This was truly a waste of our time.
If looking at the pictures filled me with doubt, reading the letters themselves filled me with despair. Like the couples in the pictures, the letters were all remarkably similar. He worked; she didn't, or didn't plan to once the baby came. He liked to tinker on the car; she liked to garden. They lived in a big house in the burbs. They had a dog. And almost everyone seemed to be a close friend of Jesus Christ. “We are both Christians,” read one letter, in a passage that could have been lifted from any of them. “And we're active in our church. We feel our faith affects the way we view other people and makes us more patient and understanding. Our children will grow up in a Christian home which emphasizes Christians values and faith.”
What were Terry and I going to say? “We're both cynics, we're active in our bedroom, we believe Stephen Sondheim is a genius, have faith in Björk's next CD, and sometimes walk past churches?” Both birth moms who spoke at our seminar pic
ked couples who shared their faith in Jesus Christ. Judging from them and from the letters in front of me, birth moms were going to take one look at our picture and flip past us without bothering to read our agonized-over letter. So why bother?
There was one same-sex couple in the book we'd swiped. The two women didn't blather on about Jesus, and Ann told us they'd been picked. Another couple in the book, straight, did a fair amount of spiritual blathering, a lot more than any of the Christian couples, but it was of the New Age variety: “We believe that we are one with the earth goddess, and that we are all on a mystical journey.” Even this couple had been picked.
These were good signs, Ann assured us. We would be picked, too, “but not until you get that birthparent letter done.”
We'd known going in that the agency had yet to do a successful placement for a gay male couple. There was one gay couple that got through all the paperwork, wrote all the checks, got into the pool, and was picked by a birth mom. Bob and Kate told us about them months earlier. Then at the last moment, after the baby was born, their adoption was “disrupted.”
It turned out that Ann had worked with the men, too, and we brought it up during our final home-study meeting. Ann made a concerned face and dipped her head to one side.
“It was sad,” she said. “The birth mother changed her mind, and the couple went back into the pool for a short time.” Ann didn't remember all the details. “They seemed pretty angry about the whole situation, and it was sad for everybody.”
The two guys whose adoption had fallen through happened to live in Seattle, and when they heard that Terry and I were thinking about adopting, one of them called me at work. Doug wanted to warn me about the agency. Their adoption fell apart when the birth mom's mother, a practicing Catholic, talked her out of giving her baby to a gay couple. Birth moms have the right to change their minds, but if the birth mom wavers after the baby is born, an agency counselor is supposed to be on hand to walk her through the original decision to place the child for adoption. The agency respects the birth mom's right to change her mind, and drills it into adoptive couples that they must respect that right. But immediately after the baby is born, most birth moms have a moment of doubt, and may forget the reasons why they didn't think they could keep their baby. The agency is supposed to be there to remind them.
Doug told me that no one from the agency showed up when their birth mom's mother burst in screaming about Jesus.
“She gave birth at home, not in a hospital, and we were in town at a hotel. She'd already called us and said, ‘Your son is healthy, he's beautiful.’ She said she would call the next day, and then . . . nothing. We tried to get someone from the agency to come down, but no one did.”
Doug and his boyfriend had made the mistake of filling their house with baby stuff, decorating a nursery, and having a baby shower. After their birth mom told them “their” son was beautiful and healthy, they called their friends and families to announce they were dads. When they came home without the baby, they had to get on the phone again, calling everyone they knew to tell them they weren't dads after all. Some of their friends had already sent gifts, and they dreaded the mail coming. And they had to walk past the empty nursery every day.
“It was like we had a child and he died. It tore us both apart, and our relationship didn't survive.” Six months after the adoption was disrupted, Doug and his boyfriend broke up.
This was a very bad sign.
With bad signs outnumbering good, I was unable to write our “Dear Birthparent . . .” letter. Instead of sitting at the computer writing the letter, I sat at the computer surfing porn sites. I even shelled out cybercash for an AVS (adult verification system) I.D. so I could get into some really naughty web sites. Getting an AVS made me a geek in my boyfriend's eyes, but the temptation of restricted web sites jammed full of dirty pictures was too much for me to resist. As I shortly thereafter discovered, most restricted web sites were full of photos I'd already found on nonrestricted web sites, so I could have saved myself the money and the geek status.
When I wasn't in front of the computer surfing porn sites, Terry and I would sit in bed and talk about the baby. One night, he rolled over and gave me a sad look. “I want to name our baby after my dad.”
I had thought of some names, too, but what could I say in response to that? I wanted to name the baby Morris, after my dead cat. But the beauty of Daryl, Terry's father's name, was that it would work for a boy or a girl. I gave in without a fight. Since Terry got the first name, he let me pick the middle one. I chose Jude or Judith, for my mother. Daryl Jude or Daryl Judith.
D.J.
It worked.
The last name was more problematic. Would it be mine, since I was writing the checks? Terry's? How about D. J. Miller-Savage? Or Savage-Miller? We put off making that decision.
Of course, there would never be a D.J. without a birthparent letter, which I was making no progress on. We did make an appointment to have pictures taken. In the photo we chose, we're sitting side by side, looking at the camera. Just like the lesbian couple we'd seen in the “Dear Birthparent . . .” book, we aren't touching. Most of the straight couples, by contrast, are draped all over each other in the “Dear Birthparent . . .” book.
So with all our paperwork done, our pictures taken, a name picked out, and our checks cashed, the only thing we were waiting on was the letter. We were waiting on me. But I couldn't write it.
“What if the one woman who would consider giving her baby to a gay couple is sitting in the agency's office right now?” Terry said, one night in bed. “What if we end up not getting a baby because we didn't get our letter in soon enough for her to see it? Write the damn letter!”
I got out of bed and sat down in front of the computer, determined not to get up until I finished the letter.
It was a very long night.
Someone once told me that when I was having trouble writing, I should get a clear mental image of one very specific person. Then I should write as if I were speaking to that person, and the words would come. Now when I'm stuck, I picture a person and . . . the words come.
But I couldn't picture a birth mother, and the words didn't come. I sat down in front of my computer determined not to get up and not to surf porn sites, until I finished. Trying to picture the girl I was writing for was impossible. My mind's eye had a hard time conjuring up the girl who'd turn a page in her “Dear Birthparent . . .” book, find a picture of me and Terry, and shout, “Yes, of course! Fags! I want to give my baby to fags!”
The girl who picked us would have to be politically progressive, not acutely Christian, and she'd have to be inconveniently pregnant. I could picture all that; I've known plenty of nice knocked-up hipster girls. The problem was, whenever I pictured a politically progressive, not acutely Christian girl who found herself inconveniently pregnant, it was hard not to picture her at an abortion clinic with her feet up in stirrups. Unable to conjure up a mental image of a birth mom who would choose life and fags, I started surfing through porn sites.
Nothing was coming. So to kill time, I wrote the definitive anti–“Dear Birthparent . . .” letter. Putting this letter in the “Dear Birthparent . . .” book would ensure that Terry and I would never get a kid. Of course, we'd already been told very few birth moms actually read the letters, so what would it matter if we turned in a fake?
Dear Birthparent,
We are Terry and Dan. Yes, we are both men, and we would like to adopt your baby! If you have a problem with homosexuality, please know that we have a problem with teenagers who go out, get themselves knocked up, and then think they can sit in judgment over others. We have been with each other for three months. We hope to adopt a baby soon, as gay relationships don't usually last longer than six or seven months.
We are both atheists.
Dan is an overworked, undersexed sex-advice columnist. He is writing a book about adopting a baby, but we promise we're not doing this just for the fourteen-figure advance. Dan is fifty-nine years o
ld, has heart trouble, smokes three packs a day, and will be the sole means of support for our little family.
Terry is seventeen years old and emulates Martha Stewart in every possible way, including Martha's emotional distance and passive-aggressiveness. After the baby comes, he plans on working a few hours a week in a bookstore that sells a great deal of homosexual pornography.
We live in a cramped apartment filled with dangerous and sharp-edged tchotchkes perched high atop unstable shelving units purchased at an Ikea seconds sale. We have a funky Brady basement, and a killer sound system that will blow our baby's head off if we're not careful! In our kitchen, Terry bakes pies and cookies in effort to make Dan so fat no other gay man will want him.
Our home is near a large park frequented by homosexuals in search of anonymous sexual encounters. There our child will enjoy many hours of unsupervised play. Most of our friends are in the music industry and addicted to hard drugs. They are all very excited about baby-sitting! As most of them use only heroin and not dangerous hallucinogenics, the odds that one of them will pop the baby into the microwave are pretty low.
Dan will be too busy to say hello to the baby until he is old enough to fetch his morning New York Times. Terry will be the primary caregiver, and not letting the baby die will be Terry's top priority! Allowing the baby to die would reflect badly on gay men everywhere, including those gay men in the park having anonymous sex, and would harm the sales of Dan's book. Especially if the baby died during the book tour.