other thing about my April Fool’s jokes. They have an uncanny tendency of coming true.
4
Can We Borrow Your Lady Parts for Nine Months?
W hen it comes to the requisite baby-making equipment, vaginas are further down the list than you might imagine. As long as Drew and I had clean criminal records and a checkbook, we could start the process of becoming parents. What baffled and terrified us was the process itself. I had no idea what would happen between now and the day an Elmo-loving munchkin started clomping around our house in Crocs. My mind tended to wander toward the darkest possibilities.
I’d read plenty of books and feature articles about gay parenthood, but for the most part, they were propaganda, designed to convince Middle America that gay families were Just Like Everyone Else. “Doug and Waldo remember the day little Leticia Rose came back with them to their Park Slope brownstone. With a pink bow on her nearly hairless head and the tiniest pair of shoes Prada makes, she was doughy, she was perfect, she was theirs .” Yes, but was Leticia Rose born addicted to PCP? How many arms did she have, more or less? Was some sixteen-year-old girl from Idaho bawling her eyes out back at the maternity ward of New York Methodist while Doug and Waldo were parading Leticia Rose (nee Beyoncé Miracle) around Brooklyn in a Moses basket?
The stories tended to focus on the happy endings, but I had a feeling that what came before was hardly fairy-tale material. War, poverty, drugs. Adopted babies had some badass backstories. Drew and I assumed foreign adoption would be the quickest and easiest way for us to go, if not the most cheerful. We’d jet off to another continent to score some sad sack kid who’d been orphaned because Ethnicity A was determined to rid the world of Ethnicity B or because a misreading of some well-meaning religious book made a band of heavily armed basket cases think women who bared their elbows were put on Earth for sport hunting. As much as I wanted to be a dad, there was something disconcerting about the prospect of finding ourselves in the “win” column of a genocide. Would we start rooting for international strife? Bloodshed in the Congo? Time to call our travel agent!
It turned out the Third World was more afraid of Drew and me than we were of them. There tends to be an inverse relationship between the size of a country’s orphan pool and their tolerance of gay rights. Even in the most depressed places on Earth, there’s a feeling that unwanted babies are better off languishing in a killing field than thriving in West Hollywood. It was hard to get too upset about it. The less gay-friendly a country is, the more trouble they seem to have providing clean drinking water for their people and staving off diseases that were eradicated decades ago. Go tackle tuberculosis, Cambodia. We’ll work on gay adoption in a few years.
That meant Drew and I could either wait for a new genocide to spring up somewhere more gay-friendly—C’mon, Denmark!—or we could focus instead on domestic adoption. Plenty of gay couples find their offspring in America’s Third World, the places in the Midwest and the Deep South where abstinence-only education and ever-tighter restrictions on abortions are producing unwanted babies by the bucket load. You could argue that Rick Santorum had created enough gay families to fill one of Rosie O’Donnell’s cruise ships from stem to stern. Finally, a reason to vote Republican.
Best of all, domestic adoption for gays has its own bible, Dan Savage’s book The Kid . It’s a moving, hilarious, and somewhat unsettling account of how Dan and his boyfriend Terry adopted a baby from what he describes as a “gutter punk,” a young homeless drifter and occasional addict who struggled to keep her shit together for nine months for her fetus’s sake. It was exactly the gritty, candid true story I’d been dying to hear. There was no sugarcoating. This is what we had to look
4
Can We Borrow Your Lady Parts for Nine Months?
W hen it comes to the requisite baby-making equipment, vaginas are further down the list than you might imagine. As long as Drew and I had clean criminal records and a checkbook, we could start the process of becoming parents. What baffled and terrified us was the process itself. I had no idea what would happen between now and the day an Elmo-loving munchkin started clomping around our house in Crocs. My mind tended to wander toward the darkest possibilities.
I’d read plenty of books and feature articles about gay parenthood, but for the most part, they were propaganda, designed to convince Middle America that gay families were Just Like Everyone Else. “Doug and Waldo remember the day little Leticia Rose came back with them to their Park Slope brownstone. With a pink bow on her nearly hairless head and the tiniest pair of shoes Prada makes, she was doughy, she was perfect, she was theirs .” Yes, but was Leticia Rose born addicted to PCP? How many arms did she have, more or less? Was some sixteen-year-old girl from Idaho bawling her eyes out back at the maternity ward of New York Methodist while Doug and Waldo were parading Leticia Rose (nee Beyoncé Miracle) around Brooklyn in a Moses basket?
The stories tended to focus on the happy endings, but I had a feeling that what came before was hardly fairy-tale material. War, poverty, drugs. Adopted babies had some badass backstories. Drew and I assumed foreign adoption would be the quickest and easiest way for us to go, if not the most cheerful. We’d jet off to another continent to score some sad sack kid who’d been orphaned because Ethnicity A was determined to rid the world of Ethnicity B or because a misreading of some well-meaning religious book made a band of heavily armed basket cases think women who bared their elbows were put on Earth for sport hunting. As much as I wanted to be a dad, there was something disconcerting about the prospect of finding ourselves in the “win” column of a genocide. Would we start rooting for international strife? Bloodshed in the Congo? Time to call our travel agent!
It turned out the Third World was more afraid of Drew and me than we were of them. There tends to be an inverse relationship between the size of a country’s orphan pool and their tolerance of gay rights. Even in the most depressed places on Earth, there’s a feeling that unwanted babies are better off languishing in a killing field than thriving in West Hollywood. It was hard to get too upset about it. The less gay-friendly a country is, the more trouble they seem to have providing clean drinking water for their people and staving off diseases that were eradicated decades ago. Go tackle tuberculosis, Cambodia. We’ll work on gay adoption in a few years.
That meant Drew and I could either wait for a new genocide to spring up somewhere more gay-friendly—C’mon, Denmark!—or we could focus instead on domestic adoption. Plenty of gay couples find their offspring in America’s Third World, the places in the Midwest and the Deep South where abstinence-only education and ever-tighter restrictions on abortions are producing unwanted babies by the bucket load. You could argue that Rick Santorum had created enough gay families to fill one of Rosie O’Donnell’s cruise ships from stem to stern. Finally, a reason to vote Republican.
Best of all, domestic adoption for gays has its own bible, Dan Savage’s book The Kid . It’s a moving, hilarious, and somewhat unsettling account of how Dan and his boyfriend Terry adopted a baby from what he describes as a “gutter punk,” a young homeless drifter and occasional addict who struggled to keep her shit together for nine months for her fetus’s sake. It was exactly the gritty, candid true story I’d been dying to hear. There was no sugarcoating. This is what we had to look
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