One 'dad,' 2 moms: Gay donor or gay dad?
One 'dad,' 2 moms: Gay donor or gay dad?
By John Bowe
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: November 17, 2006
NEW YORK: R. describes himself as "a man in his 40s, voluntarily employed in the arts," a situation made possible, he explains, by a private family income. In an effort to become a parent of a sort, R., who is gay, agreed, 11 years ago, to donate sperm to a lesbian couple aspiring to pregnancy.
A few years before, R. had become friendly with a woman - white and upper class like himself - through the gay activist world. They weren't good friends, he said, "just friendly." The woman had a partner, a middle-class black woman, whom R. knew less well but who seemed solid. The couple decided that the black partner would become impregnated with a white man's sperm so that the baby would be biracial, reflecting the appearance of both mothers. They approached R. about being the donor. (Like all the subjects interviewed for this article, R. asked that his full name not be used - R. is his middle initial.)
It seemed like a good fit, R. said. "My life and my family background and my socioeconomic position kind of matched the profile of the nonbiological partner." R. and the white woman even looked somewhat alike.
R. had always loved being around kids, particularly his niece and nephew, whom he saw often. But like many gay men, R. never thought of himself as a likely candidate for fatherhood. He always felt that parents opting to raise a child alone were choosing a rocky road, and at the time, R. himself had no long-term partner. He did, however, have an ex-boyfriend who had started a donor relationship with two lesbians; it seemed to be going well. He quickly became taken with the idea.
Having a child of his own, he thought, would mean creating a relationship more intense and involved than what he had with his siblings' children. "I guess I felt that maybe I wanted to have some kind of more lasting relationships in my life," he said. "I said I was interested."
And thus began a series of conversations. R. made it very clear that he had no ambition to be a primary parent and that he was happy to renounce his parental rights. (The latter is crucial to many lesbian couples, allowing the nonbiological mother to adopt and protecting her bond with the child in the event of the death of, or separation from, the biological mother.) Nevertheless, R. saw himself playing a significant role in the child's life.
"I saw myself holding a baby," he said. "I wanted a child to be part of my life. I wanted to have a relationship with somebody that was in some sense unconditional, that wasn't subject to the fading whims of friendships. And I don't think it's because I was not finding commitment somewhere else. I wanted to develop a relationship where I was nurturing somebody in a consistent way. I wanted to show up and be part of a child's life in a significant way."
R. said his expectation was to see the child a few times per month. "No one said, 'That's a problem.' Everyone seemed to be on the same page." And so, according to R., "we went ahead and started to try to get pregnant."
Virtually every lesbian couple electing to use a known donor's sperm pursues one of two methods of artificial insemination. One is for the man to go to a clinic, have his sperm harvested and then passed to the mother, usually by doctor-assisted injection. The other, homier and cheaper course is commonly known as the "turkey baster" or "natural" method. After confirming that he was HIV-negative, R. and the mothers used a version of the second method. It could not have been easier, R. said with a shrug. Happened on the first or second time. Like, not a problem.
Since the 1970s, when gay men and lesbians began gaining wider acceptance, there has been a substantial increase in the number of children being reared by gay parents, both in the United States and abroad. According to the 2000 U.S. census, 34 percent of lesbian couples and 22 percent of gay male couples are raising at least one child under 18 in their home -- a large increase from the 1990 census.
Though precise breakdowns are hard to come by - demographers have yet to track all the different types of gay families - for many gay parents, the family structure is more or less based on a heterosexual model: two parents, one household. Heather may have two mommies, but her parents are still a couple. Then there are families like R.'s and his partners' that from the outset seek to create a sort of extended nuclear family, with two mothers and a father who serves, in the words of one gay dad, as "more than an uncle and less than a father." How does it work when Heather has two mommies, half a daddy, two daddies or one and a half daddies?
"People are in many cases redesigning 'family,"' says Judith Stacey, a sociology professor at New York University. Stacey has written about gay fathers, gay mothers, gay men who form family units with single lesbians, and lesbian couples who form households with one gay male father. "They want to have a relationship to children," she says. "And they want to be able to create whatever kinds of security and stability they can. They're drawing from all kinds of traditional forms, but at the same time, they're inventing new ones."
Primary among the reasons mothers to be choose to become impregnated by a known donor who remains part of the family is a reluctance to raise children in the shadow of anonymous heritage. As one donor dad, an East Coast lawyer named Guy, said, his lesbian co-parents "felt like it was important for their kids to know as much as they could about their story. When there's an anonymous donor, it's not always an ideal situation for the child."
As for why lesbians often choose donor fathers who are gay, Judith Stacey and others said that many preferred gay men for reasons of "solidarity." "They think that gay men will be more sympathetic, more amenable to agreements they might create and stick by," Stacey says. And they say they feel that gay men simply come with less baggage. Heterosexual sperm donors are more liable to marry and father children of their own, which has the potential of causing jealousy and competition among the children and their mothers.
While the role of the mother in gay co-parenting arrangements can be quite traditional, the father's is often part-time and ancillary from the first. Why would any man, gay or straight, choose a kind of fatherhood that would seem to curtail both its joys and responsibilities? In part, the answer has to do with the fact that a gay man's options are already somewhat limited.
Though gay men can and increasingly do become parents through adoption or by using surrogates, pursuing those avenues can be difficult. While some places allow "single people" to adopt, in practice it is often tough for gay men to do so. Surrogacy can be wildly expensive, easily costing $100,000 or more for multiple egg harvests, in vitro fertilization and the surrogate mother's expenses. Gay dads also said they had cherished the idea of fathering children with partners they knew and liked.
Frequently, gay men and women entering into co-parenting arrangements draft some kind of document that specifies participants' roles and responsibilities - the father's visitation schedule, how many kids everyone plans to have together, what happens if one of the partners moves, dies or becomes involved with a new partner.
Many agreements stipulate that the donor will waive his parental rights, allowing the nonbiological mother to become a legal parent. But generally, a donor may relinquish his parental rights only after the child is born. What if the father sees the child and decides he can't bear to part with her? What if the mothers decide he is wanted less than originally agreed? It is not unusual, in such cases, for custody battles to ensue.
According to Arthur Leonard, a New York Law School professor and an expert on sexuality and the law, families can draft as many documents as they want, but "in the eyes of the law a parent is either the biological parent or an adoptive parent or, in some jurisdictions, a de facto parent." Charged, above all, with looking out for the best interest of the child, judges are free to ignore even the most well-drawn documents.
A result is that gay donor dads must not only trust that their co-parents will abide by whatever agreements they have designed but also hope that as dads they have managed to adequately predict their own reaction to being a parent. As Guy, who has two children of his own with a lesbian couple, said: "A lot of guys can't do that. They think they can do it, but when the baby's born, they really can't."
In other words, a father-donor working with a lesbian couple must make peace with the fact that he just isn't going to be a TV dad, a heterosexual dad or a full-time gay dad. "Ideally," as Guy put it, you need to be "willing to accept that the baby has two parents, who are the two moms - and then there's you."
Donor dads maintain a different level of involvement with their lesbian partners and children. Some co-parents buy houses near one another and interact nearly every day. Others, like Guy and his co-parents, live a thousand miles apart and arrange visits or vacations together every few weeks or months.
Some always knew they wanted to be fathers. Before embarking upon the creation of his family, Mark, who works at a museum, spent years discussing the idea of being a co-parent with two lesbian friends, Jean and Candi. At first, he said, the tone was "'You know, wouldn't it be fun if we all had kids?' And then it kind of got more serious as time went on."
Mark and the mothers-to-be took the time to discuss every conceivable angle. They talked about their family backgrounds, how they had been raised, what they liked and didn't like about their upbringing. They wrote a document in which Mark was absolved of any financial role in the child's life. He agreed to put the child up for adoption by the nonbiological mother once it was born. Moreover, it was spelled out that the child would be brought up knowing Mark was the father and that Mark could visit as agreed upon.
At first Mark's role was circumscribed. But, he said, from the moment of birth, "things just got a lot nicer than that." Candi had a natural delivery, and as Mark described it to me, watching the process of birth had a transformative effect on him: "The excitement, the fear that maybe something could go wrong. And to watch the head crown - it was just exciting."
Mark, 48, Jean, 37, and Candi, 34, now have two children - Mark (named after his father) is Candi's biological son, and another boy, Joseph, now 7 months old, is Jean's biological son. Mark spends time with the kids once a week, sometimes alone, sometimes with his partner, Jeffrey, who is 36 and went to college with Candi, and sometimes with one or both mothers.
The relationship among the fathers and mothers has been a surprise benefit, he said, creating a brother-sister feeling. Despite the fact that the mothers are still financially responsible for the children, Mark has put them in his will. Each birthday and Christmas, he deposits a $1,000 bond for their education. Like any good father, he said, "I want to see them do well."
When asked if he ever ran into resistance about his less-than-conventional parenting arrangement, he told a story. He had taken the girls, as he calls his lesbian co-parents, to Wisconsin to visit his mother and his sisters. "My nephew" - his sister's son - "had a lot of questions. He was asking my mom, 'Why does Mark have two moms?' My mom was like, 'I didn't know what to say."'
Mark continued: "I guess in people's minds there's a kid's cartoon drawing of a family unit. Well, ours is the same thing. It's just that the characters have changed a bit. People make a lot out of it, but it's really quite simple: you've got four parents now instead of two. And they're all together."
Considering how many heterosexual parents are overworked, divorced or otherwise unavailable, he said, in the end he advised his mother what to say to anyone asking about little Mark: "Tell 'em he's lucky."
John Bowe is a writer based in New York. His book about modern slavery in the United States will be published next autumn by Random House.
By John Bowe
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: November 17, 2006
NEW YORK: R. describes himself as "a man in his 40s, voluntarily employed in the arts," a situation made possible, he explains, by a private family income. In an effort to become a parent of a sort, R., who is gay, agreed, 11 years ago, to donate sperm to a lesbian couple aspiring to pregnancy.
A few years before, R. had become friendly with a woman - white and upper class like himself - through the gay activist world. They weren't good friends, he said, "just friendly." The woman had a partner, a middle-class black woman, whom R. knew less well but who seemed solid. The couple decided that the black partner would become impregnated with a white man's sperm so that the baby would be biracial, reflecting the appearance of both mothers. They approached R. about being the donor. (Like all the subjects interviewed for this article, R. asked that his full name not be used - R. is his middle initial.)
It seemed like a good fit, R. said. "My life and my family background and my socioeconomic position kind of matched the profile of the nonbiological partner." R. and the white woman even looked somewhat alike.
R. had always loved being around kids, particularly his niece and nephew, whom he saw often. But like many gay men, R. never thought of himself as a likely candidate for fatherhood. He always felt that parents opting to raise a child alone were choosing a rocky road, and at the time, R. himself had no long-term partner. He did, however, have an ex-boyfriend who had started a donor relationship with two lesbians; it seemed to be going well. He quickly became taken with the idea.
Having a child of his own, he thought, would mean creating a relationship more intense and involved than what he had with his siblings' children. "I guess I felt that maybe I wanted to have some kind of more lasting relationships in my life," he said. "I said I was interested."
And thus began a series of conversations. R. made it very clear that he had no ambition to be a primary parent and that he was happy to renounce his parental rights. (The latter is crucial to many lesbian couples, allowing the nonbiological mother to adopt and protecting her bond with the child in the event of the death of, or separation from, the biological mother.) Nevertheless, R. saw himself playing a significant role in the child's life.
"I saw myself holding a baby," he said. "I wanted a child to be part of my life. I wanted to have a relationship with somebody that was in some sense unconditional, that wasn't subject to the fading whims of friendships. And I don't think it's because I was not finding commitment somewhere else. I wanted to develop a relationship where I was nurturing somebody in a consistent way. I wanted to show up and be part of a child's life in a significant way."
R. said his expectation was to see the child a few times per month. "No one said, 'That's a problem.' Everyone seemed to be on the same page." And so, according to R., "we went ahead and started to try to get pregnant."
Virtually every lesbian couple electing to use a known donor's sperm pursues one of two methods of artificial insemination. One is for the man to go to a clinic, have his sperm harvested and then passed to the mother, usually by doctor-assisted injection. The other, homier and cheaper course is commonly known as the "turkey baster" or "natural" method. After confirming that he was HIV-negative, R. and the mothers used a version of the second method. It could not have been easier, R. said with a shrug. Happened on the first or second time. Like, not a problem.
Since the 1970s, when gay men and lesbians began gaining wider acceptance, there has been a substantial increase in the number of children being reared by gay parents, both in the United States and abroad. According to the 2000 U.S. census, 34 percent of lesbian couples and 22 percent of gay male couples are raising at least one child under 18 in their home -- a large increase from the 1990 census.
Though precise breakdowns are hard to come by - demographers have yet to track all the different types of gay families - for many gay parents, the family structure is more or less based on a heterosexual model: two parents, one household. Heather may have two mommies, but her parents are still a couple. Then there are families like R.'s and his partners' that from the outset seek to create a sort of extended nuclear family, with two mothers and a father who serves, in the words of one gay dad, as "more than an uncle and less than a father." How does it work when Heather has two mommies, half a daddy, two daddies or one and a half daddies?
"People are in many cases redesigning 'family,"' says Judith Stacey, a sociology professor at New York University. Stacey has written about gay fathers, gay mothers, gay men who form family units with single lesbians, and lesbian couples who form households with one gay male father. "They want to have a relationship to children," she says. "And they want to be able to create whatever kinds of security and stability they can. They're drawing from all kinds of traditional forms, but at the same time, they're inventing new ones."
Primary among the reasons mothers to be choose to become impregnated by a known donor who remains part of the family is a reluctance to raise children in the shadow of anonymous heritage. As one donor dad, an East Coast lawyer named Guy, said, his lesbian co-parents "felt like it was important for their kids to know as much as they could about their story. When there's an anonymous donor, it's not always an ideal situation for the child."
As for why lesbians often choose donor fathers who are gay, Judith Stacey and others said that many preferred gay men for reasons of "solidarity." "They think that gay men will be more sympathetic, more amenable to agreements they might create and stick by," Stacey says. And they say they feel that gay men simply come with less baggage. Heterosexual sperm donors are more liable to marry and father children of their own, which has the potential of causing jealousy and competition among the children and their mothers.
While the role of the mother in gay co-parenting arrangements can be quite traditional, the father's is often part-time and ancillary from the first. Why would any man, gay or straight, choose a kind of fatherhood that would seem to curtail both its joys and responsibilities? In part, the answer has to do with the fact that a gay man's options are already somewhat limited.
Though gay men can and increasingly do become parents through adoption or by using surrogates, pursuing those avenues can be difficult. While some places allow "single people" to adopt, in practice it is often tough for gay men to do so. Surrogacy can be wildly expensive, easily costing $100,000 or more for multiple egg harvests, in vitro fertilization and the surrogate mother's expenses. Gay dads also said they had cherished the idea of fathering children with partners they knew and liked.
Frequently, gay men and women entering into co-parenting arrangements draft some kind of document that specifies participants' roles and responsibilities - the father's visitation schedule, how many kids everyone plans to have together, what happens if one of the partners moves, dies or becomes involved with a new partner.
Many agreements stipulate that the donor will waive his parental rights, allowing the nonbiological mother to become a legal parent. But generally, a donor may relinquish his parental rights only after the child is born. What if the father sees the child and decides he can't bear to part with her? What if the mothers decide he is wanted less than originally agreed? It is not unusual, in such cases, for custody battles to ensue.
According to Arthur Leonard, a New York Law School professor and an expert on sexuality and the law, families can draft as many documents as they want, but "in the eyes of the law a parent is either the biological parent or an adoptive parent or, in some jurisdictions, a de facto parent." Charged, above all, with looking out for the best interest of the child, judges are free to ignore even the most well-drawn documents.
A result is that gay donor dads must not only trust that their co-parents will abide by whatever agreements they have designed but also hope that as dads they have managed to adequately predict their own reaction to being a parent. As Guy, who has two children of his own with a lesbian couple, said: "A lot of guys can't do that. They think they can do it, but when the baby's born, they really can't."
In other words, a father-donor working with a lesbian couple must make peace with the fact that he just isn't going to be a TV dad, a heterosexual dad or a full-time gay dad. "Ideally," as Guy put it, you need to be "willing to accept that the baby has two parents, who are the two moms - and then there's you."
Donor dads maintain a different level of involvement with their lesbian partners and children. Some co-parents buy houses near one another and interact nearly every day. Others, like Guy and his co-parents, live a thousand miles apart and arrange visits or vacations together every few weeks or months.
Some always knew they wanted to be fathers. Before embarking upon the creation of his family, Mark, who works at a museum, spent years discussing the idea of being a co-parent with two lesbian friends, Jean and Candi. At first, he said, the tone was "'You know, wouldn't it be fun if we all had kids?' And then it kind of got more serious as time went on."
Mark and the mothers-to-be took the time to discuss every conceivable angle. They talked about their family backgrounds, how they had been raised, what they liked and didn't like about their upbringing. They wrote a document in which Mark was absolved of any financial role in the child's life. He agreed to put the child up for adoption by the nonbiological mother once it was born. Moreover, it was spelled out that the child would be brought up knowing Mark was the father and that Mark could visit as agreed upon.
At first Mark's role was circumscribed. But, he said, from the moment of birth, "things just got a lot nicer than that." Candi had a natural delivery, and as Mark described it to me, watching the process of birth had a transformative effect on him: "The excitement, the fear that maybe something could go wrong. And to watch the head crown - it was just exciting."
Mark, 48, Jean, 37, and Candi, 34, now have two children - Mark (named after his father) is Candi's biological son, and another boy, Joseph, now 7 months old, is Jean's biological son. Mark spends time with the kids once a week, sometimes alone, sometimes with his partner, Jeffrey, who is 36 and went to college with Candi, and sometimes with one or both mothers.
The relationship among the fathers and mothers has been a surprise benefit, he said, creating a brother-sister feeling. Despite the fact that the mothers are still financially responsible for the children, Mark has put them in his will. Each birthday and Christmas, he deposits a $1,000 bond for their education. Like any good father, he said, "I want to see them do well."
When asked if he ever ran into resistance about his less-than-conventional parenting arrangement, he told a story. He had taken the girls, as he calls his lesbian co-parents, to Wisconsin to visit his mother and his sisters. "My nephew" - his sister's son - "had a lot of questions. He was asking my mom, 'Why does Mark have two moms?' My mom was like, 'I didn't know what to say."'
Mark continued: "I guess in people's minds there's a kid's cartoon drawing of a family unit. Well, ours is the same thing. It's just that the characters have changed a bit. People make a lot out of it, but it's really quite simple: you've got four parents now instead of two. And they're all together."
Considering how many heterosexual parents are overworked, divorced or otherwise unavailable, he said, in the end he advised his mother what to say to anyone asking about little Mark: "Tell 'em he's lucky."
John Bowe is a writer based in New York. His book about modern slavery in the United States will be published next autumn by Random House.
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