The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant (20 page)

W
hen we got home with one plastic car seat and red-and-black toys, I had a small panic attack. Besides what we bought in Portland with Melissa, and the flannel shirt we'd allowed ourselves to buy at Baby Gap, we had nothing we needed for the kid. No crib, no diapers, no bottles, no formula, no changing table. Nothing. This was our own fault, of course. Actually, it was my fault, since my fear of jinxing things led to the shopping ban. But with Melissa's due date only two weeks off, we had more bondage stuff in the house than baby stuff.

With the religious right threatening to go after the gay adoptions, I probably shouldn't mention the bondage stuff in our basement. Gay men with bondage stuff adopting little baby boys will give Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell screaming nightmares. I don't want to play into hands of my mortal enemies, but I shouldn't have to lie. In a corner of our basement, there was a box filled with nylon rope, some leather restraints, a paddle, and a blindfold. Some of these were gifts: when a sex-advice columnist has a birthday, he gets sex toys and you can't return sex toys. While bondage wasn't something Terry and I did—which is why the bondage stuff was in a box in the basement and not in our bedroom, where it was with my last boyfriend—I'm not going to lie and say I haven't done it. Or dug it.

Like a lot of people—Madonna comes to mind—I've been tied up with erotic intent, and I've tied others up. Bondage and SM aren't the depraved nightmare stuff the religious right fantasizes about; they're cops and robbers for grown-ups, with full frontal nudity and orgasms. And anyway, even if I wanted to deny
ever having been tied up, I couldn't. I've been writing about sex—and my sex life—for too long to cover it up effectively. (And there are those awful Polaroids floating around out there somewhere.) If having been tied up and fucked disqualifies people from having kids, how come no one wants to take Lourdes away from Madonna? In
Sex
, Madonna's pictured all tied up with lesbian SMers, male strippers, and Vanilla Ice, for Christ's sake. No one has suggested Madonna's an unfit parent—not because of
Sex
, anyway.

During our interviews with the agency, we were never questioned about our sex practices by any of the counselors. None of the straight couples I know who've adopted were asked about their sex practices either. The assumption is, I think, that if you're an adult without a criminal record or a North American Man/Boy Love Association membership you're capable of making a distinction between your sex partners and your children. I assume that Pat Robertson enjoys missionary position sex with his wife, but not with his daughters (if he has any). Like Pat, I am capable of making a distinction between my spouse and my kids. My straight mom didn't sleep with my straight brothers, my father never slept with his daughter, I've never made a pass at my brothers. Incest isn't something we Savages do.

Some straight people worry gay people aren't capable of making distinctions between appropriate and inappropriate sex partners. Since we reject the taboo against same-sex sex, the “reasoning” and the far-right fund-raising appeals go, we're necessarily inclined toward rejecting taboos against incest, necrophilia, and gerbils. There are sexual taboos that I am comfortable with, and have not only observed all my life but also done my best to shore up. I come down very hard on incest in my sex-advice column, and will continue to do so as long as I can crawl to my computer and type. But how can I convince someone who believes being gay means I want to sleep with all men, any man, alive or dead, any species, whatever his relation to me, that I've never been interested in having sex with my brothers? Or my father? And that I will never be interested in having sex with my son?

The religious right maintains that gay men who want to teach or lead a Boy Scout troop or be Big Brothers are somehow a
threat to children. The implication is that gay men who want to be near children, or adopt children, must want to fuck them. Forgive me if that's indelicately put, but it's the truth. This is the fear that led two states to outlaw gay men and lesbians adopting children (though one, New Hampshire, recently overturned its antigay adoption law) and made it nearly impossible for gays and lesbians to adopt even in states where it was technically legal. Like most gay men, I have a sense of humor about the lies told about my life.

What's funny about the whole evil disco-dancin' gay baby-rapist nightmare is that the truth of why gay men want to be dads is so much
more
disturbing. When I fantasized about becoming a dad, I didn't picture myself having sex with my children. No, in my dad fantasies, I saw myself going to work, making money, and coming home to Terry and the kid. I help the baby learn to walk and talk. Years later, I help him with his homework while I half-listen to Terry tell me about a PTA meeting. I wanted to be a dad so I could take my kid to ball games and McDonald's and on camping trips.

What the religious right fears most about gay adoption is not that we'll be bad parents, or that we'll have sex with our kids, or that we'll try to make them gay. What they fear is that we'll be pretty good parents. I've done drag. I did Barbie drag, dominatrix drag, nun drag, and glamour drag. Now I'm going to do dad drag. I pulled Barbie off pretty well, and I was gonna be good at this dad stuff, too. And that's what worried Pat Robertson. The more gay men and lesbians raise children, the harder it's going to become for the right to convince people that we're monsters. Once straights have seen boring gay parents at a PTA meeting bitching about class size and school uniforms (I'm in favor of smaller formers and mandatory latters), we're not going to seem so scary anymore, even if (like a lot of straights) we do have old bondage equipment in our basements.

Terry got on the phone with his mother. She'd been planning to bring the crib over the day before the baby was due. They were coming to Seattle for an antitobacco meeting, and because the heirloom crib couldn't be disassembled, she and Dennis were
planning on driving over the mountains in their six-blocks-to-the-gallon motor home. For the crib to arrive the day before the baby was due was cutting things a little too close, in, uh, my opinion, so Terry asked Claudia if they could bring the crib over sooner.

The next day, Claudia and Dennis pulled up in their motor home and carried in the heirloom crib. The crib I'd heard so much about was . . . pretty ugly. I'd been imagining something tasteful, something we might discover was worth a lot of money when the
Antiques Roadshow
came to town. Terry's family crib looked like something built from scrap during the Depression. It was covered with a thick layer of cracking white paint—you could smell the lead—and had large forties decals of pastel rabbits on the head and baseboard.

Terry's mom handed us a bag full of baby clothes she “just couldn't resist.” We had some tea. Claudia took our picture standing in front of the crib, and then she and Dennis climbed back in their motor home for the six-hour drive back to Spokane. Terry promised me the crib would look fabulous, “once we clean it up,” but even in the hour it had been in the house the crib had already started to grow on me, maybe because it was Terry's. When I pictured him in the crib, weighing seven pounds, and fourteen inches long, my heart melted. The crib was clunky and the decals were peeling, but who cared? The crib's history was its charm. We'd just have to get another one before the baby could roll over and chew the lead paint off the bars, but Terry's son would spend his first couple of months in the same crib Terry did.

I started picking through the clothes, and when I looked up at Terry he was standing over his crib, looking as if he might cry.

“My mom drove all the way to Seattle and back to Spokane in one day, so that her grandchild could have this crib. She's okay with this.”

And so she was, and so apparently was Dennis, who actually did the driving. My family loves to talk, but in Terry's family actions speak louder than words. This action—an expensive twelve-hour round-trip in a motor home on one day's notice—spoke very loudly.

Later that afternoon, I opened our front door and found a box the size of a washing machine sitting on the step. Inside was a
note from my mother. She'd sent “a few things” she picked up for the baby. Each gift was wrapped in tissue paper, and we didn't have to open any of them until after the baby came.

“That way, you won't jinx anything,” my mother's note read. “Set the box aside and unwrap the contents after you get home with the baby. This way, there won't be any jinx, and I'll sleep better knowing that my grandson isn't coming home to a completely unprepared house.”

“What do you want to do?” Terry asked.

“Set it aside and open everything when we bring the baby home.”

Terry pouted. Jinx or no jinx he didn't want to wait.

“We've got a crib in the house,” he argued. “There can't be anything in that box your mother sent more jinx-y than a crib.”

I relented.

We dragged my mother's box into the living room, and we dumped the baby stuff on the floor. There were bottles, onesies, baby clothes, blankets, pacifiers, and bibs. A day earlier, we were panicking because we had nothing we needed. Today, thanks to my mother and Terry's, we were totally set up.

My mom had sent four bibs. Two were a boxed set of matching “I Love Grandma” and “I Love Grandpa” bibs. The other two bibs were also from boxed sets. My mom had bought two sets, opened them, pulled out one bib from each, and packaged them back up. There was a note:

“I wanted to send you a matching set of ‘I Love Daddy’ bibs to go with the grandma and grandpa bibs (which I expect my grandson to wear at every meal!), but there weren't any ‘I Love Daddy’ sets. So I had to make one.”

The phone rang.

It was Saturday morning; Terry was at work and I was in bed reading the paper. I didn't get out of bed, but let the phone ring until our voice mail picked up. Whoever was calling would just have to wait. The Bill and Monica thang was unfolding, and as a sex writer I had a solemn duty to keep up with every salacious detail.
The New York Times
was using words the editors of the raunchy “alternative” papers I write for won't allow me to use. When I finished the paper, I headed for the bathroom, grabbing
the portable phone on the way. Boop, boop, boop; there was a message. When I heard Laurie's voice my heart and bowel movement both dropped. Melissa was at the hospital; Terry and I had to go to Portland right away.

Holy shit.

I called Terry at the bookstore.

“Oh, my God!” he screamed. “Oh, my God.”

We make a plan: Terry would call Michael, his manager, who had agreed in advance to cover for him if the “You're in labor” call came when Terry was at work. As soon as Michael arrived, Terry would run downtown and rent a car. In the meantime, I'd pack our clothes. We hung up, and I called Laurie. Melissa had been at the hospital since early that morning. She could give birth at any moment.

“You never know how it's going to go. It could happen right now, it could happen twelve hours from now. When can you get here?”

I told Laurie that we'd be at least three hours.

“I'll tell Melissa, but you should hurry.”

“We're on our way,” I said, “and since we're not there to do it for her, tell Melissa to demand all the drugs she's got coming.”

I called the Mallory in Portland and reserved a room, then left messages for Bob and Kate and Carol and Jack.

Ten minutes later, with a bag of clothes packed, I was sitting on the couch, waiting for Terry to drive up. Our place was a wreck. We'd sold our condo three weeks earlier, and then pretty much stopped keeping house. We had to be out of the place in four weeks, so we were not only going to be dads, we were going to be homeless dads. The pressing problem, though, was the mess. We're not neat freaks to begin with, and neither of us could see the point in keeping the place up after we sold it. We'd only be tearing it apart when we moved, so why bother? Now the mess mocked me, seeming to say, “You're not fit parents—just look at this place! You can't bring a baby home to live in this pigsty! It's a disaster area!” The mess's voice sounded a whole lot like my mom's.

But a messy home was better than no home—which was also a problem. We live in the land of the Microsoft Millionaires; once we sold our condo we couldn't find another place we could afford.
Every house or condo we looked at was bought out from under us by some Microshithead paying cash and bidding thousands of dollars over the asking price. By the time we did find something, it was too late: we had to be out of our old place a month before we could move into the new one. In a few days— barring BBD/BCM—we'd be bringing a baby home to a messy house that wouldn't be ours for long. This was not the plan. We were supposed to go into the pool, sell the condo, find a new place, and
then
get a baby! We'd expected to be in the pool at least a year, and we were going to be in a new place by then, settled and ready! No one said anything about getting a baby in eight weeks!

Emily and Rich, friends of mine from work, had offered us their basement for our homeless month, so we wouldn't be on the streets. And we did have a crib covered in lead paint, a car seat, two “I Love Daddy” bibs, six bottles, and the four-foot-high pile of baby clothes that our mothers, thankfully flouting the no-shopping order, “couldn't resist.”

Forty-five minutes into my panic attack, with my mother's voice still screaming in my head—“The bathroom! Look at the mildew on that shower curtain! Oh, my God, the sink! The baby will have malaria by the end of the week!”—Terry finally pulled up. It was Saturday morning, and the only car Budget had left was an enormous white van. It seated nine. We could have driven to Portland and adopted a Little League team. Terry stood in the living room, looked at the mess, and said, “We're not ready.” Then he picked up a camera and started taking pictures. He wanted the kid to see what we lived like before we brought him home. We tossed the car seat, our bag, a blanket, and some baby clothes in the back, and drove off.