Biology and Medicine in the Memoirs of Five North American Gay Dads Who Adopted in the 1990s

Gay men who adopted started publishing memoirs about their experiences earlier than did those who used surrogacy to achieve fatherhood (1995 v 2006) (Layne, 2018, Layne, 2019b), reflecting historical trends in gay fatherhood. North American gay men joined the gay-by boom about a decade after lesbians did. As one gay dad recalls, in the 1990, organizations for would-be gay parents ‘were overwhelmingly female’ (Green p.35, see also Morgen p.203). This first generation of gay men who became fathers outside of heterosexual relationships had come out in an era when the assumption was, ‘Gay men didn't have families’ (Savage p.22).

When, in the 1990s, some began to start families on their own or with partners, adoption was a primary route to parenthood. Though in the intervening decades, surrogacy has become a popular route to fatherhood for many gay men who can afford it, domestic adoption1 is still the most, frequent path to parenthood for North American gay men.

The American anthropologist, David Schneider, famously described the system of American kinship, one constituted by blood and law ([1968] 1980: 23, 27), marriage or adoption being examples of the latter. As Judith Modell, an anthropologist of adoption notes, in the US adoption is assumed to be based on contract not birth, law not nature (2002: 2). Hence one tends to think of adoption as a non-biological way to get a child, but the memoirs of five North American gay men who adopted in the 1990s illuminate many ways biology and medicine, if not specifically reproductive biomedicine, shaped their reproductive lives.

The adoptions of this first generation, coincided, not coincidentally, with the AIDS epidemic. One of the memoirists credits the epidemic with the widespread lack of interest among gay men at the time: in 1990, ‘the subject of family was simply not high on gay men's political agenda. AIDS was sucking up most of the energy and money (not to mention the bodies) available to an increasingly exhausted community’ (Green p.35). Ellen Lewin (2009: 22), posits that the epidemic may ‘have fostered a new interest in monogamy [and] domesticity’.

The impact of AIDS on the authors' social lives and work is evident: Andy was left with ‘a ghostly address book’ (p.9); Ken and Sam ‘lost more friends than [they] could count’; Sam's medical practice came to be largely devoted to caring for people with HIV, as did Ken's clinical psychology practice, and Ken served on the advisory board of a community AIDS group (Morgen p.5).

AIDS affected other gay dads even more directly. In 1987, David, a Canadian entrepreneur met Nick, a Jesuit priest taking time off from his doctoral studies at Yale. On their first date Nick revealed that he had HIV and David pledged to see him through it. Nick's doctor had given him a year, but he was able to cross the border to Buffalo to participate in an ATZ trial which extended his life. Between 1987 and 1992 the couple attended funerals of 37 friends who died of AIDS, all under 40 (p.72). By 1994, Nick had full blown AIDS. Nick retired, they married and bought a lake house they converted into a bed and breakfast.

Nick and David had begun the search for child together, but Nick succumbed in 1995. Three years later David was approved as the first openly gay man to adopt internationally by the Canadian authorities. While waiting for the paperwork to be completed so he could go to India to adopt a 4-year old boy he would name after Nick, David got a call from a local organization asking if he would host a woman with AIDS and her son, since the US would not let her fulfill her dying wish of taking her son to Disneyland. After having spent the weekend with them at the lake and learning about David and his new partner's plans to adopt a child whose health was uncertain, she asked if they would adopt her son. The result was, at age 44, after years of striving to start a family, David adopted two four-year-old Orphans Born Worlds Apart (McKinstry, 2018).

AIDS not only affected would-be fathers and birthmothers, but the children available for fostering and adoption as well. As Jesse explains, the reason NY state allowed an openly gay man to adopt in 1990 was ‘not the result of a new… commitment to the needs of parentless babies,’ but because of the explosion in the 1980s of the numbers of wards of the state AIDS produced. At some NYC hospitals nearly 5% of newborns were testing positive for HIV; between 1988 and 1989, the number of children in NYC needing foster care doubled (p.15, 16). A program was launched to encourage gay men to foster babies with AIDS, who, at that time, had a life expectancy of under two years.2

The fact that gay men were willing to care for these children opened doors for fostering and adoption in many states, albeit, mostly of hard-to-place, older, children of color, sibling sets, and those with special needs, what one of the memoirists, the nationally syndicated sex columnist, Dan Savage, ‘indelicately’ calls the ‘DG (damaged goods) kids’ (p. 55). Indeed, gay dads are more likely than any other family type to have a child with a physical or mental disability.

The boy who David Gerrold, a science fiction writer in LA, first fostered then adopted in the early 90s as a single parent, had been abandoned by drug addicted parents, suffered emotional and physical abuse, was in 8 foster homes in 8 years, and in addition to believing he was a Martian, had so any problems (severe ADHD, signs of fetal alcohol syndrome, and an unproven capacity of forming deep emotional attachments), many advised him against adopting him.

In 1994, before they met, Jesse's husband had adopted a newborn son whom two heterosexual couples had declined. The birthmother had once been a heavy drinker, had herpes and ulcers, and tested positive for cocaine, marijuana, prescription antidepressants and the baby had tremors (Green p.58).

Melissa, ‘a street punk…homeless by choice’, was seven months pregnant when Dan and his partner Terry were contacted by their adoption agency in Oregon. She had been turned down by another couple because they were concerned that she drank and took drugs during the first four and a half months of her pregnancy (Savage p.100). They agonized over the risk of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome but decided to commit themselves to this baby no matter what.

Gayness has come to be recognized as a cause of ‘social infertility’. In 1997, when Dan and Terry attended an open adoption seminar in Oregon, each straight couple told their heartbreaking story of infertility. When it was their turn, Dan said ‘I'm Dan and this is Terry and as you can see, we have some fertility issues of our own’ (p.24). The problem, as one gay dad puts it, is how to ‘make omelets without eggs’ (O'Donnell, 2015:61). Adoption is a frequent way of overcoming same-sex infertility.

Several of the memoirists tried other more biologically engaged methods too. Two of the memoirists describe protracted discussions and negotiations with lesbian friends about creating a family together. In 1989, prior to meeting Jesse, Andy agreed to help a lesbian couple make a baby with whom he would have a relationship but no legal rights. The ultimately fruitless enterprise went on for two years, cost him several thousand dollars and a great deal of effort. Every other week for six months he deposited sperm at a sperm bank. Then each month, after having been retested for HIV, he hauled a tank of liquid nitrogen containing some of his frozen samples to the home of a forty-year old lesbian he had known since high school. When a pregnancy did not ensue, he discovered that he was sub-fertile because of a testicular artery, but before he could have it surgically corrected the women had abandoned him as future father and picked someone else (Green p.10–11). Dan, too, was involved in negotiations with a lesbian couple and a single lesbian about the terms of baby-making with them before he met Terry. The women wanted to be the primary parent/s but to have him involved. It was just what he wanted at the time, but all the arrangements fell through. Two years after meeting Terry they started exploring ‘lesbian-free baby options. Which [to them] meant adoption’ (Savage p.31).

Two other adoption memoirists also explored surrogacy. David McKinstry provides few details of his foray into surrogacy other than that it took place in California because commercial surrogacy is forbidden in Canada and that he ended up wasting a lot of money.

Ken and Sam, clinicians in Maryland, pursued traditional surrogacy and open adoption simultaneously. (They knew other gay doctors who had attained children by ‘using insemination’ i.e., traditional surrogacy.) Ken's account highlights how similar these traditional surrogacy and open adoption can be. In 1992, after several surrogacy and adoption arrangements had fallen through, they decided on Claire, as a genetic surrogate. She was 29 years old, college-educated, divorced, the mother of four (ages 2–9) who owned a home in a working-class neighborhood in central Pennsylvania, 120 miles from their home in Maryland. They arranged for her to meet with a psychologist, lawyer, and obstetrician, who was an old friend of theirs. When she was okayed by all three, they made plans for insemination--their fresh semen would be ‘co-mingled’, then ‘spun down to a small pellet, reconstituted with sterile solution and placed on Claire's cervix within an hour of producing it’ (Morgen p.126). The decided on this method for romantic as well as practical reasons and because they agreed that this would ‘be the only natural way of deciding who would be the biological father’ (Morgen p. 93). She wanted them to be in the room during the insemination, which would take place at 6 pm in the doctor's office, then they'd all go out to dinner and the theater.

The night before ‘I-Day,’ Sam got a call from the lab where he had sent a blood sample of Claire's to be tested for HIV, pregnancy and syphilis. She was pregnant (p.128). This discovery floored them; they worried she had been trying to trick them into thinking the baby was theirs in order for them to pay for a pregnancy that had been a mistake, but ‘it did not take them long to acknowledge that all [they] really wanted was a child, no matter how he or she came’ (p.128). They switched gears and embarked upon an open adoption with her. Rather than using private lawyers, they decided to use an adoption agency which represent both their interests. They picked one located in the District of Columbia, because it had a non-discrimination law that covered sexual orientation. Claire was willing to receive her prenatal care by the same obstetrician even though this was a long trip for her; she preferred the anonymity it provided, compared with going to the doctor in her small home town (Morgen p. 133). The intended fathers joined her for each prenatal appointment and then took her out to eat afterwards. In between appointments they stayed in touch by phone. Early on, they agreed when she reached the final two weeks of her pregnancy, she would hire someone to look after her children and move in with them.

At 39 weeks gestation, her doctor agreed to induce delivery. The next morning, they arrived together at the hospital. Ken fumbled with the camcorder ‘trying to get a good shot without intruding.’ When it was time for her to push, he positioned himself at the end of the bed, her left leg on his left shoulder, he supported her left thigh with his left hand and held the camera in his right (p.189, 190). Claire spent the night in the hospital alone with Simon and the next day they parted--she back to her life and the dads, at last, home with their son. They all met again at her 6-week follow-up appointment with her doctor and went out to eat together again as they had done so often. She reiterated her offer to help them make a sibling for Simon.

In the other open adoption, the birthmother decided that she did not want the dads in the delivery room. Dan and Terry arrived ten minutes after she had delivered. In Oregon, women are legally allowed to stay in the hospital 48 h after giving birth, and so despite the urging of the maternity nurse to leave sooner because of her relatively easy labor and delivery, this homeless girl opted to stay the full period. The dads understood that if she went through with the adoption, this would be her only chance to spend time with her son ‘as a full-time mom.’ (p.194).

If their adoptions are closed, dads-to-be do not have the same opportunities to participate in the pregnancy and delivery but this does not stop them from imagining it. Jesse likened the experience of preparing for adoption to that of being pregnant and organized his memoir by using the stages of pregnancy--fertilization, gestation, birth, afterbirth. When he got the letter saying that they had been legally approved for adoption, he was finally, as the agency put it themselves, ‘expecting’ (Green p.47). The agency told him that a wait of nine months was standard, ‘just as if it were a real pregnancy. He should remain in a state of perpetual readiness for something that could at any time’ (p.44). He also likened expecting to HIV testing, something he was familiar with; Even though ‘they seem utterly different… there is much that binds them; the test, the wait, then the momentous results’ (p.108). Jesse makes other pregnancy--adoption analogies: ‘instead of a sonogram, an adoptive parent undergoes a home study; a picture not of the place the baby comes from but where he will be going’ (p.45). He describes fathers-in-waiting who gain weight along with their pregnant wives and explains his partner Andy's decision to get a tattoo of a cherub with a banner holding his name own name, Andrew, as an effort to experience physical pain and a changed body, while the woman he has nicknamed Conception was gestating his child (p.52).

Ken also mused about the changes he was experiencing during Claire's pregnancy: I was becoming more emotional as we got closer to the birth. What next? Was my belly going to swell up in sympathy?’ (Morgen p.153). David Gerrold, frustrated with how long it was taking him to be placed with the boy he had chosen to be his son, complained ‘I'm so tired of being pregnant. Thirteen months is long enough for any man!’ (2002: 27).

In a previous piece based on the memoirs of gay dads who used gestational surrogacy (Layne, 2019a), I flagged an apparent preference for boys (10 of the 12 babies were boys) and considered the ethics issues of using preimplantation genetic diagnosis to achieve this end. In the five first-generation adoption memoirs reviewed here, eight out of eight children adopted were boys. As in the surrogacy memoirs, the norm is two boys, but whereas twins are most common in surrogate families, they are not found in any of the adoption memoirs. In the public system adoption and the closed agency adoptions the fathers requested sons (Gerrold, Green). In one open adoption, the sex of the fetus was known before the dads were offered the baby (Savage); in the other, the sex was not known but the memoirist had a strong preference for his first child to be a boy (Morgen); he gives no details on how it came to be that his second child was also a son. In the one international adoption, McKinstry explains that India had prohibited ‘single men, Indians or internationals, from adopting daughter’ because ‘too many wealthy businessmen from Thailand and Saudi Arabia had come to India over the years to adopt little girls who ended up working in the sex trades’ (p. 17). His other, nearly simultaneous, adoption of a Canadian boy was initiated by his mother who was dying of AIDS after she learned that David was going to be adopting another boy of a similar age.

One notable difference between these and the surrogacy memoirs is that three these gay dad adoption memoirs are written by professional writers (Savage, Green, Gerrold).3 As a result, in addition to providing valuable ethnographic material, they are well-crafted and a pleasure to read. Together they paint a detailed picture of what it was like for these ground-breaking dads during that unique moment in history. In North America, laws governing and attitudes towards homosexuality transformed so quickly, second-generation gay dad adoption memoirs tell markedly different story, and this will be the subject of my next piece in this series (Layne, 2020).