The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant (4 page)

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.

W
e 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 could 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.

T
here'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.

Kids wouldn't keep us young, but they would keep us relevant, something other hobbies wouldn't do. If we had kids and they managed to outlive us, Terry and I would be hauled off to the dump when our time came by people who knew us and felt obligated to dispose of us.

So, kids.

Yes, I know: kids die, kids turn out rotten, kids grow up to be serial killers, kids abandon their parents, kids
kill
their parents. (Looking on the bright side, however, Jeffrey Dahmer's father did get a book deal out of it, as did a parent of one of the Columbine victims.) Adopted kids may decide their biological relatives are their
real
relatives and blow off their adoptive families. Kids are a crapshoot. But even if the only thing your kids give a shit about is getting their hands on your money or your Holden-Wakefield
end tables, even if all your kids want is for you to drop dead, at least someone is giving a specific sort of shit about you. And if you have more than one kid who wants your end tables, you can have fun drafting and redrafting your will.

Sometimes, late at night, I'd sit up and worry that we might be adopting to prove a point. Were we doing this because we could? On some level, I think, we were. It wasn't the sole reason, but even if we were only doing this to prove something to the world or to ourselves, there are worse reasons to have kids. Straight people all over the world have kids for those much worse reasons every day. They fall down drunk and get up pregnant.

The same impulse that drives grown gay men to walk around holding hands could be pushing us toward this. For same-sex couples, taking a lover's hand is almost never an unself-conscious choice. You have to think about where you are, whether you're safe, and you have to look. By the time you determine you're safe, you're not even sure you want to hold hands anymore. The genuine moment has passed, but you've invested so much energy and angst that now you can't
not
take your lover's hand. You wind up holding and the only reason you take your lover's hand is to prove that you can.

Wondering whether we were doing this “just to prove we can,” made us wonder about our motives. In that hesitation, the decision to adopt became more than “Let's have kids.” Public displays of affection for gays and lesbians are political acts, and what could be a larger public display of affection than the two of us adopting a kid together.

I had a secret reason for wanting kids, one I haven't shared with my boyfriend. It's not an easy thing to write, and I hope you'll understand why I'd rather you didn't tell Terry. I'm not sure how he would take it. I wanted to have kids because I wanted to get fat. Actually, I should say, I wanted to have kids because I'm
going
to get fat.

Good Gay Men are not supposed to be heavy (though some gay men are allowed to be “bears” these days, if they're furry enough). We're expected to do our sit-ups, watch what we eat, and show up at family and high school reunions looking fabulous
so that the girls can say, “What a waste!” and the boys can say, “What a fag!”

Staying fit is a crushing regimen, however, one that doesn't leave much time for anything else. In my twenties, I ran just far enough on treadmills and peddled just fast enough on stationary bicycles to stay fuckable. My fitness goal was to look good enough in clothes that I could get other people out of theirs. While my stomach looked flat enough with a shirt on, there was no six-pack under my slave-labor Gap-fag T-shirt. A two-liter bottle, yes, and one day soon, a keg. But a six-pack? Never. I was never enough of a gym queen to get comfortable getting naked in public. I never danced shirtless in a club or strolled around a bathhouse in a towel. I never even posed for porno Polaroids.

(Except on one occasion, when Polaroids were taken without my consent by a one-night stand. Since I didn't want them taken, I wasn't really posing for them. Sadly, I wasn't in a position to prevent them from being taken, if you follow my drift, and I didn't have the nerve to demand them back from from the scary freak who took 'em once I was, um, able to do so. These photos will probably surface after this book comes out, and my fitness to be a parent will be challenged by those who think kinky
=
crazy.)

Until I turned thirty, I made it to the gym at least three times a week. I fought getting fat long and hard, and when I went home for weddings and funerals the girls said, “What a waste,” and the boys said, “What a fag!” But since turning thirty, I hadn't managed to get my rear end into a gym very often. This was not good. My gene pool is filled with fat, and an extreme kind of fatness it is. My people do not get pleasantly plump. We Savages do not “fill out,” or “wear it well.” We balloon. My family is inclined toward obesity, to thighs so large we're forced to walk like mincing three-hundred-pound Japanese ladies, hefting one leg around the other with dainty criss-cross steps. Our guts grow to enormous proportions. We get so fat we can't be cremated. Dead Savages are soaked in a vat filled with a particular enzyme that breaks us down into our composite elements—beer, brats, and cheese— which are then packaged and distributed to food pantries all over the Midwest.

My boyfriend was unaware of my impending enormousness, and I had no intention of bringing it to his attention. Once he
was bound to my side by a web of car payments, shared possessions, and children, then I'd tell him what was in store.

Or I'd show him.

Unfairly, while I am destined to be fat, I am not in the least attracted to fat people. Not even to the slightly overweight. Lucky for me, my boyfriend is one of those hateful people who can live on deep-fried bacon, coconut milk, and crème brûlée and not gain an ounce. He could eat nothing but pork fat ten hours a day and you would still be able to count his ribs while he's wearing a parka. Terry is just skin and gristle stretched over beautifully proportioned bones. Naked, my boyfriend looks like a broad-shouldered Kate Moss with a dick. And this is how he is always going to look. His mother has the body of a twenty-year-old, and his grandmother looks pretty damn good for an eighty-year-old woman.

If Terry does gain weight, if he's got some recessive fat gene that blows up someone in his family every tenth generation, I will dump him. For while I am not destined to be slim myself, I do require slimness in lovers. Yes, I am a goose-stepping (good for the glutes!), black-shirt-wearing (so slimming!) body fascist. I believe people should have to get permits before they go shirtless in dance clubs, and that no one over the age of forty should go shirtless in public regardless of the shape they're in. One of the reasons I no longer attend gay pride parades is the inevitable belly-dancers-of-size contingent proudly heaving their guts down the street in a misguided effort to combat antifat prejudice. If one of these dancers were to drop dead from heat stroke, and sooner or later one will, her belly will go on dancing for half an hour after she hits the pavement.

I say these cruel things with full awareness that I will one day be heavy myself, for it is my genetic destiny. I would not make fun of black people or the disabled unless I woke up black or disabled one day. But I feel that I can in good conscience make fun of fat people, because I will one day be hugely fat. My family gets fat in middle age, so it could happen any day now. Every joke is just my sadistic way of adjusting myself to the future state of my body.

And when the pounds come my way, I don't want people— especially other gay people, who can be so cruel!—to look at me and say, “Wow, Dan really let himself go. Can't he get himself to a gym?” I want them to say, “Dan's priorities have changed. He
has children. He doesn't have time for the gym. He has more important things to do.”

That's why kids.

There's one more reason we decided to have kids early in our relationship, rather than waiting until we'd been together longer. And I'm afraid that, like having a hobby and getting fat, it wasn't a very good reason. But I want to be honest about everything that's shaped our decision.

I write a syndicated sex advice column. One day I was minding my own business, writing my column, when along came an agent, an editor, and a book publisher. They offered me a book deal, and I accepted. I signed a contract, and then I cashed an advance check with a lot of zeros before the decimal point. The problem with the book deal was that I didn't have the faintest idea what I wanted to write a book about.