Gay Men Choosing Parenthood

Gerald P. Mallon

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9780231508377
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Gay parenting is a topic on which almost everyone has an opinion but almost nobody has any facts. Here at last is a book based on a thorough review of the literature, as well as interviews with a pioneering group of men who in the 1980s chose to become fathers outside the boundaries of a heterosexual union—through foster care, adoption, and other kinship relationships.

This book reveals how very natural and possible gay parenthood can be. What factors influence this decision? How do the experiences of gay dads compare to those of heterosexual men? How effectively do professional services such as support groups serve gay fathers and prospective gay fathers? What elements of the social climate are helpful—and hurtful? Gay Men Choosing Parenthood challenges a great deal of misinformation, showing how gay fathers from different backgrounds adapted, perceived, and constructed their options and their families.

	One The Journey Toward Parenting

How does one become a dad? Men who have a female partner usually do it the traditional way—through a sexual encounter that, nine months later, results in a birth. In the vast majority of opposite-sex couples the woman becomes the primary caregiver. The man may be involved as a helper to his coparent, changing a diaper or getting a bottle ready or learning how to fasten the baby seat into the backseat of the car. But when the baby gets sick, the mother is who stays home from work. When the child goes to the doctor, the mother accompanies him or her. Even after a few decades of feminism, child rearing is still the domain of women in U.S. society. Popular movies and television shows regularly depict fathers as awkward, clumsy, and uncomfortable in the role of nurturer. And while we see exceptions to this stereotype, by and large fathers focus on supporting the family financially and are available as adjunct nurturers to their young children. Mothers are the ones who make decisions about the child’s diet and nutrition, clothing, social activities, and even schooling.

Families created by adoption are different in many ways from birth families (Blau 1993; Brodzinsky, Schechter, and Marantz 1993; Lancaster 1996; Melina 1998; Pavao 1998). In many cases adoption was the second-choice route to parenthood for couples who struggled for years with infertility (Turner 1999). And although pregnancy and birth often include unexpected developments, most birth parents are following a known course, one that their own parents, siblings, friends, and relatives probably also took. Adoption, on the other hand, is far less predictable, described by many as a roller-coaster experience. The anticipatory joys of impending parenthood that a pregnant woman and expectant father experience are not shared in the same way by adoptive parents, who are dealing with a legal system, paperwork, and screening processes. They must go through home studies, social workers, lawyers, judges, and state laws, and sometimes international laws, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the FBI, travel to a foreign country, and a variety of other factors. Those are the gestational landmarks for all adoptive parents, regardless of sexual orientation, and the gay dads in this study experienced them too.

However, gay dads have a very different trajectory in many respects because of often palpable interference by their families of origin, the gay male community, the child welfare system, and society at large, all of which tell them that they are not appropriate, fit, capable, or responsible primary parenting material.

The gay men in this study are a unique group of male caregivers. They stand out even from other groups of gay men. The gay dads are men who, for many different reasons, have chosen to be involved, nurturing, primary caregivers, in many ways more like mothers than what U.S. society would readily identify as fathers. As one dad said:

In many ways I am more than just a dad. I’m a man, but I am kind of like a mom too! You have to be able to play baseball, but you have to be able to be tender and to cuddle and to be gentle. That’s not something that most men, even heterosexual men who are dads, are socialized to do. But we have to be both dad and sometimes mom.

Pioneers in Gay Fatherhood

All the men interviewed for this study became dads in the late 1980s, a time when many—including gay people themselves—did not consider or believe that being a gay parent was possible. With little information about how to do it, they had to create their own support networks and figure out how to navigate the system. Lesbian pioneers from the 1970s had had children through alternative insemination or had children from previous, opposite sex, marriages, but finding reliable information about adoption, surrogacy, and foster parenting was difficult for many lesbians and gays. And only a handful in the community were brave enough to create families with known sperm-donor dads or multiple-partner parenting (parenting situations with two women and a donor dad who participates in the child’s life or two dads and a surrogate mother who participates in the child’s life). Small support groups started to form through word of mouth, and more formal networks were created, such as the Gay and Lesbian Parenting Coalition and Lavender Moms.

Today one of the largest and most active lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) parenting support programs is part of the LGBT Community Center in New York City. Center Kids, as it is called, had modest beginnings. One of the men whom I interviewed for this study was at the original Center Kids picnic and remembers this occasion as a determining event in his journey to becoming a parent.

By 1988 there was Center Kids, and that was a group of about twenty-five people who met in September 1988 in Central Park at a picnic. This event was amazing. There were all of these parents with their kids in the park—they had a traditional family picnic with food, drinks, and games. But what was more interesting than the actual picnic was what it represented to us.

There were some people who had children already and a number of people who were interested in becoming parents. So attending that gathering was an amazing thing, just unbelievable. For us, 1988 was the year that we said that’s when we would really start pursuing having a child. It was amazing because that was the point where we were thinking about starting, and that’s exactly when we found out about this group. It was really through the guy we had met, who had already adopted a child. Kevin had heard about this Center Kids gathering, and he called us up and said, why don’t you go down?

At the picnic we met a bunch of people and we were dying to talk to them and ask, ‘How did you do this?’ Looking back, we were half-expecting them to say, ‘Oh, all you do is call person X, and they’ll hook you up with lawyer Y, and they’ll give you a baby.’ It was a little disheartening that there didn’t seem to be one clear pathway to becoming a parent because every single person had a different story. Some created families through relatives, some went through a public agency, and they seemed like they waited forever. Others reported going through private agencies. A few people had gone the foster care route and had foster kids, and then the children were taken away (not because of being gay but mostly because of issues having to do with racial matching), then they tried again—those early people that seemed to have a very, very difficult time. It became clear to us that there was a very broad spectrum about how people had gotten their kids. It was all totally confusing, and it was a bit overwhelming. No one had a clear answer of how you go about it, and everyone recalled that the journey toward becoming a parent was kind of bumpy and rocky.

A lot of them were men—I’d say more than half. Maybe because it has always been easier for lesbians to pursue parenthood because they can have their own biological kids. This group of people at this first picnic was important because you made contact with these people, and even though they didn’t give you one way of doing things, they gave you a number of contacts that you can make, and most of all they gave you hope that this could really happen!

Terry Boggis, now the director of Center Kids, was one of the original organizers of the picnic and was one of the parents who approached the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center in Manhattan and arranged for meeting space there. In 1989 the group, which took the name Center Kids, became a program of the center, and in 1993 the Ben and Jerry’s Foundation gave a small grant to hire a part-time Center Kids administrator to handle the mail and phone calls. As more funding became available through various donors, Boggis became the full-time director of Center Kids.

In a recent interview (Markowitz 2002) Boggis reflected on the twin phenomena of gay men choosing to parent and the crisis in foster care in the late 1980s:

What happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s was that boarder babies were being abandoned in hospitals. These were children who were born to drug-compromised, often HIV-positive mothers and left in the hospital, but could not legally be called abandoned because the mothers would come back every so often to see them. Some of the infants had HIV. The hospitals were just not set up to house newborns that were often underweight and sick and needed a lot of care. Administrators were trying to find adults to care for them, but these were the children who were almost unplaceable. Many potential foster parents had AIDS phobia or couldn’t handle the level of care the babies needed. It occurred to some in the foster care and adoption field that gay men might be willing to care for these babies. This was a crack in the door. Gay men started to say, “Maybe I could become a parent if I could approach it this way, if I could open myself up to a child with major health challenges.”

After a time, gay men found they could adopt through more conventional processes—adopt healthy infants, toddlers, school age children and adopt them permanently This happened because of the changing culture. The adoption world became more enlightened and more open to gay men. At least in New York, gay men started to pursue permanency in creating their families, and for the most part moved away from temporary foster parenting and focused on adoption.

I only know of one gay man who wanted to adopt a child and has not been successful after several years of trying, and this is in all the years we have been running Center Kids. Maybe if you live in Fargo, it’s a different story and I suspect it is-but here in New York, I never have any hesitation saying to a man who wants to be a father, “You absolutely are going to be able to do this.” (The only obstacle might be something in his background [that] he’s not disclosing, like a criminal record, or emotional, physical or financial issues that would be barriers for any adult, straight or gay.) But I also tell men that there will be moments of challenge—hostile social workers, or a long waiting period to adopt. (14)

The Desire to Become a Father

Although many gay men do not become fathers, and may not have the desire to, the men I interviewed felt such a compelling urge to become dads that they were willing to pursue their dream despite the lack of precedent, the lack of support, and the lack of opportunity. So rare was the idea of gay men becoming fathers by choice that one father equated it to travel to a far-off planet:

Just the thought of being gay and functioning in society was strange enough. So the thought of being gay and having a child, it was just, like, having a thought of going to Jupiter. It was just something you didn’t even consider—it wasn’t even a possibility. So by the mideighties many of us were reaching that middle-age point; we were a bunch of baby boomer gay people, and we were all independently arriving at the same place at the same time, and I think that’s what motivated the change.

Another dad offered this analysis of his desire to parent:

There is a certain amount of freedom in not having children, and it certainly encroaches on a lot of disposable income. When this happened, it was also right in the middle of a time when gay life was being revalued anyway because of surviving the AIDS crisis. I don’t think parenthood is a priority to most gay people. It’s not right or wrong; I just don’t think normally that most people would consider [parenting to be a] traditional [part of] gay life. Whatever that is, I’m not sure what it is, I’m not sure there’s a mold.

The phenomenon of gay men choosing to parent occurred at a specific point in the development of the gay movement, when creating families began to be valued. One dad observes: “In the seventies we expressed ourselves sexually, in the eighties we were coupling up, and in the nineties we are having families.”

Another dad expressed similar sentiments:

It wasn’t that we all met at once and said this is what we wanted—it was just somehow we all reached that same point at the same time and then found each other. It was before AIDS was killing us off, so there was a lot of us reaching that age and wanting to create families—some of us wanted to adopt. At that time, adoption was really almost the only option—you couldn’t even think about things like coparenting or surrogacy.

At that point too, there were a few books coming out about the topic, mostly dealing with lesbians, including one or two female couples that had kids. The gay male fathers’ groups were composed of dads who had been married before and had kids or who were currently married and not out to their kids. Being gay men who wanted to become dads by choice and not via heterosexual marriage, we were a very different group. So there weren’t really any role models for us.

The families of gay men also had strong feelings, which echoed the developmental trajectory, as Bill recalled: “When I came out, I was in my thirties, and when I told my mother that I was gay, she said, ‘But you will never have children and you always liked children and worked with them.’ And I said, ‘But I will have children,’ and she said, ‘Well, how are you going to do that?’ And I didn’t know, but I knew that I would have children.”

Some men noted that their longing to be parents stemmed from their own positive experiences with family, but the assumption that gay men would not parent was a source of grief, as Don noted:

I come from a very intact two-parent home, and family has always been the center of our lives, and my parents, being the very good parents that they were, instilled in us the value of family. Family was always very important.

When it was clear to me that I was gay, there was a sadness that I could not have children and the coming-out process for me was not [so much] about people knowing I was gay [as] it was more about losing the idea of having children.

Another interviewee reconciled the desire to become a parent with living life as an openly gay man:

I came out when I was twenty-four, but previous to that I always wanted children. I’m one of seven, all my siblings have tons of kids, and I just always had in my head that I was going to have children. I just always wanted to have children. Then, when I came out at twenty-four, I thought, you know, I guess I’m not having kids. I didn’t really think twice about it. It didn’t cross my mind to get married and have children. I thought I’m not doing that, I’m not living a big lie or whatever, but that’s what it felt like to me when guys got married to have children and fulfill that parenting desire.

So I just got totally into my career right afterwards, and then [I got] very active in the gay community. I never heard of people having children as gays and lesbians; I never heard of that.

Another interviewee recalled his grief about not being able to become a parent and identified the life event that helped him see that he could indeed become a father:

Well, it was something that I had always wanted, actually. It was probably the only problem I had with being gay . . . that I couldn’t be a parent. At least that was what I thought. But that changed when I was working in L.A. and a friend was there, and a friend from college and she was ill. She asked us if her son could stay with us until she got better. Her son was just sixteen months old. We were so excited, and he stayed with us for about nine months. When his mom got better, he went back home with her and at just about the same time that we moved to New York. His leaving left this huge, huge void. So we decided to fill that void by trying to adopt a child of our own.

For many men, meeting another gay man who chose to be a father was a transformative experience: “So when my friend Ben adopted his first child and I spent time with him and his partner, I realized that I could do it, and it opened up a whole new world to me.”

For others, a similar realization occurred when they met lesbian moms:

Well, this woman came in the store that I owned, and she asked for the most natural baby formula. Sally was her name, I still can’t remember her last name right now, but all the baby formulas were junk, and the most natural, healthiest way to go is to breast-feed. When I told her that, she said, “Well, I can’t do that, I just adopted.” And I said, “I thought you were single?” She said yes, and I said, “Singles can adopt?” She said there’s a group here in the city, NYSCAC, New York State Council on Adoptable Children. And I said, “Oh!”

It was just all happening in this one conversation where these little clicks kept going off in my head. I asked: “Is there any men in this group?” And she said there’s two in it and that they adopted one child already and the other guy is about to get a child. So then I said, “Are any of them gay?” And she said, “Well, I don’t know for a fact, but I think they’re both gay.” So then she said, “You should come to a meeting.” And the next month ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Introduction: Gay and Lesbian Parenting—an Overview
• 1. The Journey Toward Parenting
• 2. Creating Family
• 3. Community Responses to Gay Dads
• 4. Gender Politics and Gay Male Parenthood
• Appendix: Field Experience in Retrospect
• References
• Index
• About the Author