Documenting gay dads: seven documentaries about gay fatherhood in North America

Daddy and Papa (2002).

Dir. Johnny Symons. Runtime: 57 min. Persistent Visions.

Paternal Instinct: The Road to Fatherhood is Not Always Straight (2004) Dir. Murray Nossel. Runtime 73 minutes. Two Spirit Productions.

We Are Dad (2005).

Dir. Michel Horvat. Runtime 68 minutes. Indie Pictures.

Beyond Conception: Men Having Babies (2006)

Dir. Johnny Symons. Runtime: 75 min. Persistent Visions.

Fatherhood Dreams (2007).

Dir. Julia Ivanova. Runtime: 55 min. Interfilm.

Preacher's Sons: Two Dads, Five Sons, Four Cities (2008).

Dir. Mark Nealey and C. Roebuck Reed. Runtime: 90 min.

The Guys Next Door (2016).

Dir. Amy Geller and Allie Humenuk. Runtime: 74 mins . Passion River Films.

Gay men started contributing to the 'gayby boom' in North America about a decade after lesbian women set it in motion. As one gay dad put it, 'In the seventies we were expressing ourselves sexually, in the eighties we were coupling up, and in the nineties we are having families' (quoted in Mallon, 2003: 29). By the beginning of the twenty-first century, filmmakers were documenting the various paths to what anthropologist Ellen Lewin calls 'intentional gay fatherhood' (2009: 23), as opposed to those who, in centuries past, would have had no options but to have children within the confines of a heterosexual marriage. The seven films described here present a wide range of gay dads, from those who adopt passels of the most at-risk, hard-to-place children (Horvat, 2005; Nealey and Reed, 2008), to wealthy couples who choose egg donors and gestational surrogates to produce 'designer' babies of their own (Symons, 2006).

Daddy and Papa (2002), a Sundance and Emmy award-nominated, 60-minute PBS documentary by San Francisco-based filmmaker, Johnny Symons, tells the story of four gay families, three of which (including his own) are interracial. The film is beautifully crafted and brimming with love. Not only is the issue of how gay fathers are perceived and treated by the straight world addressed, but so too is the awkward fit, at least for these pioneers, into established urban gay culture – for example, in the Castro District of San Francisco – and the ambivalence of gay men who leave that bohemian milieu for the suburbs. Also addressed is the internalized homophobia two of the dads confront when their son starts dressing up in a neighbour’s high-heeled shoes. The film shows parents, grandparents, and children grappling with so many social differences, one comes to see that sexual orientation is just one factor, and not necessarily the most important one, that shapes these lives. The children in three of the families are African-American boys. Two brothers, who were adopted by Kelly Wallace, a single, white, gay man when they were 2 and 3 years old, had been living in separate foster homes their entire lives. Johnny and his biracial partner (African-American and white) adopt an African-American toddler, Zach, and extend their new family to include the woman who had fostered him. African-American and a devout Christian, she was dubious of homosexuals but conceded that her wish that Zach would have a father had been more than met. When they got a call asking if they’d like to adopt his newborn half-brother, their family expanded again. Doug Houghton, a white, single, nurse practitioner in Miami, first met his son, Oscar, as a patient and raised him from the age of three, when his father abandoned him. Houghton was one of the plaintiffs in an American Civil Liberties Union suit against the state of Florida to overturn the ban on gay adoption put into place in 1977 as a result of the ironically titled ‘Save Our Children’ campaign headed by anti-gay activist Anita Bryant. The law was not repealed until 2015.

We Are Dad (2005) features another gay foster family in Florida during the period when the gay adoption ban was still in place. Steven Lofton and Roger Croteau were both pediatric AIDS nurses who first cared for a friend who was HIV positive, then adopted three HIV-infected African-American children, and several years later, two white brothers who had been bouncing around the foster system. One of the dads quit his job to devote himself to the family. When it was discovered that the oldest boy, whom they had been raising for 13 years, was no longer HIV positive he was deemed adoptable and – since homosexuals were forbidden from adopting in Florida – child services announced their intention to have their son adopted by others. The dads joined another couple in the lawsuit Lofton v. State of Florida, an unsuccessful attempt to overturn the law banning adoption by homosexuals. In 2010, a different suit succeeded in lifting the ban, which was found to be unconstitutional according to the state’s constitution. Although this is a compelling story, the film is poorly constructed. Much of the material is repetitive. There are too many clips of opponents of gay parenthood voicing their beliefs, and in this extraordinarily well-organized household, too many scenes of the children being told to tidy their room.

By 2004, surrogacy had become the method of choice for many gay dads of financial means. Paternal Instinct (2004) features Mark and Erik, two New York City professionals who have a marvellously loving 10-year relationship. This remarkably intimate film documents the process over 2 years as they make a family with a genetic surrogate. Like most surrogates in the USA (Berend, 2016, Ragoné, 1994, Smietana, 2017), Wen is married and has a child. For a year, the inseminations, done at home using a speculum and syringe, first by a friend and subsequently by Erik and Mark, result in disappointment – many months with no conception and then a pregnancy that ends in a heart-breaking miscarriage. Eventually, Wen gives birth to a healthy baby girl in a birthing pool, with both dads in the water holding her and each other. Wen, a witch and Unitarian congregant, engages in powerful rituals at key points – before each insemination, after the miscarriage, and when she relinquishes her ties to the baby in front of her Universal Unitarian congregation by cutting a red ribbon and tying it around the new fathers and their infant. After a period of 19 months, she gives birth to another child for them. Money plays an insignificant role in the low-tech, ritual-filled journey depicted here. When they meet for the first time, a fee of US$13,000 is agreed upon, 13 being Wen’s lucky number, and money is never mentioned in the film again.

Money plays a much larger role in Beyond Conception: Men Having Babies (2006), a film commissioned from Johnny Symons, the director of Daddy and Papa, by the Discovery Channel, which focuses on a couple who pursue gestational surrogacy, i.e., the eggs are purchased from one woman, and the gestating is purchased from another. Gestational surrogacy is far more common than genetic surrogacy in the USA, with 18,400 babies born this way between 1999 and 2013 (Blake et al., 2016). Of 40 gay-father families who participated in a recent study on surrogacy in the USA, 90% had used gestational surrogacy. The mean annual family income of the study participants was $370,000. Separating baby-making into these components introduces more opportunities for commodification and objectification of the women involved. The film’s synopsis captures the exploitative potential of this type of family-making:

Through the assistance of an obliging surrogacy agency, they set out to find the perfect womb and the perfect egg. They are matched with Jennifer, a vivacious lesbian mom who loves being pregnant and fantasizes about bringing someone else’s child into the world, and Jade, a 19-year-old who is donating her eggs for the fifth time. Blithely, the group sets off on a reproductive journey. (http://persistent-visions.com/films/beyond-conception/)

This film has a different tone than the others reviewed here – emotions are muted and more of it is filmed in clinical or other professional venues. Even in the scenes shot at home, the atmosphere is less lively, less loving than in the other documentaries. The dads deny the surrogate’s request to have her best friend present at the birth; when the first insemination does not result in a pregnancy, one of the dads complains to her about how much that failure cost them, '…like throwing a car out the window, a good car at that'. The teenaged egg donor, chosen largely based on her physical attractiveness, is paid US$8500, the surrogate is paid US$20,000. Together with legal and medical fees, the process is expected to cost these men US$80,000–90,000.1 During the next cycle, they bully her into agreeing to being implanted with three embryos when she has consistently been clear that her limit is two. All pregnancies pose risks for women, but gestating more than one fetus greatly increases the risk. The film does an excellent job of conveying the costs to the women involved: the egg donor who is so hyper-stimulated with hormones she produces twenty eggs and is put under anesthesia while they are harvested; the surrogate who must inject her belly with hormones to ready her uterus for implantation, and observes once she has given birth that the whole thing was more work and more painful than she’d anticipated, not to mention the emotional pain inflicted on her partner, Jenna. Jenna is a schoolteacher who is co-parenting Jennifer's two children from her previous heterosexual marriage, and very much longs for a child of her own. By the end of the movie, after multiple home inseminations and in-utero inseminations in a clinic, she is facing up to the fact she may never have children, while the dads are coolly discussing their thoughts about a third child and, once again, convey their dissatisfaction with their path to fatherhood.

Fatherhood Dreams (2007), like Daddy and Papa, tells the story of several families, and includes footage of two additional families as a special feature. The filmmaker, Julia Ivanova, who trained in Russia and emigrated to Canada in 1995, begins with clips of person-on-the-street interviews with people of various ethnicities in Canada about their view of gay parenting – everyone is either strongly for or against it. Asked whether they actually know any children raised by gay parents, the answer is uniformly ‘no'. The film then tells the story of three families. Given the prominence of parents and children of color in the documentaries, it is striking that in this film everyone is white. Randy and Drew, a married gay couple in Vancouver, had their wish to be parents fulfilled on Randy’s fortieth birthday. The boy they would adopt was given to them by the child’s 36-year-old grandmother who still had two of her teenaged sons living in the house, was raising her daughter’s first born, and fostering three. We do not meet Jack’s teenaged mother but do meet the 15-year-old biological father as he joins in watching home videos of Randy and Drew playing with Jack. The grandmother explains that she picked them because, if her daughter wants to become involved in his life in the future, she won’t have to compete with another mother. The second story concerns Stephen, a gay patent lawyer in Vancouver who is co-parenting his two daughters with a lesbian couple, one of whom is still legally his wife. In this segment, the filmmaker pressures his 4-year-old daughter to say whether she loves one of her mothers more than the other. The third family is still in the making. Scott, a single gay Canadian man, contracted with a married mother in the USA to act as a surrogate for him. Scott’s mother is thrilled; the surrogate’s mother is not. Filming takes place when the surrogate is near the end of her pregnancy with his twins. Scott admits to paying the surrogate more than the cost of her direct expenses, tipping the arrangement into the realm of commercial surrogacy (which is prohibited in Canada, whereas state laws vary in the USA), but he says: 'I don't ever want to purposefully break the law, but when I think things are wrong, are morally wrong, and don't align, and things exist on paper, I'm willing to actually move the boundaries if I have to. I will father a child, I will become a dad, and I will maybe make a change in the world because people will see that somebody has done it.' The surrogate, however, is filmed from the back, in silhouette, which certainly, perhaps appropriately, presents commercial surrogacy in an unfavourable light.

Preacher's Sons (2008), a film by Mark Nealey and C Roebuck Reed, tells the story of Greg Stewart, a minister with the Universal Unitarian church and his partner of 26 years, Stillman Stewart, a former social worker turned stay-at-home dad, and the five boys they adopted from the California foster system between 2000-2002. Shot over the course of 5 years (2002–2007), the filmmakers, who are fellow members of the Stewarts' church, shared the couple’s mission of 'promoting the adoption of at-risk children' by exposing viewers 'to the foster care crisis in America', noting that there are 100,000 children in the foster system ready to adopt (Deakin, 2009). The first child they adopted was a 3-year-old African-American who had been born with fetal alcohol syndrome and a cocaine addiction. A few weeks after his brother was born, they adopted him too. They also adopted a 7-year-old Latino boy who had had 15 previous foster placements and three failed adoptions and another pair of brothers, aged 7 and 6, who had been in 12 previous placements. Because of Greg’s job, this family had to move frequently and as a result, they were exposed to more homophobia and racism than they might have been had they stayed in California. Their Christian faith is foundational. Greg recognizes that not everyone could take on such a family – one must be 'called' to do this; Stillman believes he is doing what God had planned for him.

The most recent of the films, The Guys Next Door (2016), is a visually lush portrait of the expansion and interweaving of two families. Rachel, a happily married mother of three, was in her early 40s when she volunteered to make a baby for her old college friend, Erik, a psychotherapist, and his Italian husband Sandro, a writer.2 Erik wasn’t sure he was ready, but Rachel told him, if you want me to do this, the time is now. One of the filmmakers is a graduate of Bates College, the same place Rachel, her husband, and Erik studied, and she decided to make this film after having read about them in their alumni magazine (Laskowski, 2016). By this point, Rachel had borne them a daughter who they named after her, and was well into a second pregnancy for them. Rachel was motivated to be a gestational surrogate for them after seeing a TV program on obstacles to gay fatherhood. She felt that it didn’t seem right 'that she and her husband could so easily have children' while for gay men it was so difficult and presented such a financial hardship. Religion also plays a large role in explaining this surrogate’s motivation. In an interview with a Jewish magazine, she explains that for her, having children symbolizes 'the notion of tikkun olam, repair the world – my little part in helping to heal the world… It’s the ultimate tzedakah [charity]' (Sackett, 2015). The gendered division of household and parenting labour is an issue in this family. Both men were raised by mothers who chastised them for exhibiting feminine tendencies and neither wants to be identified as 'the mother'. But Sandro, who is a warm, loving, joyful parent, is left at home caring for the children with the help of his, at least formerly, homophobic mother-in-law, instead of with his partner, who is regularly away on business for days on end.

Most of the dads who feature in these films are exceptionally good parents, probably for the same reasons that so many heterosexual single-mothers-by-choice in the USA are (Layne, 2013), including the fact that their desire for children is great enough to overcome the obstacles that their circumstances present. As such, the films serve as a powerful defence for gay fatherhood. Not all the dads are perfect though – one seems more engaged with his career than with raising the children, another seems too concerned about physical attractiveness. This ‘warts and all’ approach serves to remind viewers that gay parents should not be expected to meet higher standards than heterosexual ones. The fathers portrayed in these documentaries share a number of social characteristics with the filmmakers who choose to tell their stories – residence on the East or West Coast of the USA, graduate-level education, middle or upper-middle class backgrounds. As such, they are relatively easily accessible as subjects, sometimes even already part of the directors’ social networks. Yet, contrary to conventional wisdom, according to a 2011 report, most gay parents in the USA are not like this. Instead they are disproportionately likely to be Southern, rural, people of colour, and living in poverty. Children in same-sex households are twice as likely to live in poverty as children being raised by married heterosexual households (Movement Advancement Project et al., 2011). In terms of total numbers, New York City, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area have the largest number of same-sex couples raising children, but the 10 states where gay couples are most likely to be raising children are Mississippi, Wyoming, Alaska, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kansas, Alabama, Montana, South Dakota, and South Carolina (Movement Advancement Project et al., 2011). In other words, as good a job as these seven films do of portraying a wide range of gay fatherhood experiences, there are still more stories to tell.