by Dan Savage
Kids wouldn't keep us young, but they would keep us relevant, something other hobbies wouldn't do. If we had kids and they managed to outlive us, Terry and I would be hauled off to the dump when our time came by people who knew us and felt obligated to dispose of us.
So, kids.
Yes, I know: kids die, kids turn out rotten, kids grow up to be serial killers, kids abandon their parents, kids kill their parents. (Looking on the bright side, however, Jeffrey Dahmer's father did get a book deal out of it, as did a parent of one of the Columbine victims.) Adopted kids may decide their biological relatives are their real relatives and blow off their adoptive families. Kids are a crapshoot. But even if the only thing your kids give a shit about is getting their hands on your money or your Holden-Wakefield end tables, even if all your kids want is for you to drop dead, at least someone is giving a specific sort of shit about you. And if you have more than one kid who wants your end tables, you can have fun drafting and redrafting your will.
Sometimes, late at night, I'd sit up and worry that we might be adopting to prove a point. Were we doing this because we could? On some level, I think, we were. It wasn't the sole reason, but even if we were only doing this to prove something to the world or to ourselves, there are worse reasons to have kids. Straight people all over the world have kids for those much worse reasons every day. They fall down drunk and get up pregnant.
The same impulse that drives grown gay men to walk around holding hands could be pushing us toward this. For same-sex couples, taking a lover's hand is almost never an unself-conscious choice. You have to think about where you are, whether you're safe, and you have to look. By the time you determine you're safe, you're not even sure you want to hold hands anymore. The genuine moment has passed, but you've invested so much energy and angst that now you can't not take your lover's hand. You wind up holding and the only reason you take your lover's hand is to prove that you can.
Wondering whether we were doing this “just to prove we can,” made us wonder about our motives. In that hesitation, the decision to adopt became more than “Let's have kids.” Public displays of affection for gays and lesbians are political acts, and what could be a larger public display of affection than the two of us adopting a kid together.
I had a secret reason for wanting kids, one I haven't shared with my boyfriend. It's not an easy thing to write, and I hope you'll understand why I'd rather you didn't tell Terry. I'm not sure how he would take it. I wanted to have kids because I wanted to get fat. Actually, I should say, I wanted to have kids because I'm going to get fat.
Good Gay Men are not supposed to be heavy (though some gay men are allowed to be “bears” these days, if they're furry enough). We're expected to do our sit-ups, watch what we eat, and show up at family and high school reunions looking fabulous so that the girls can say, “What a waste!” and the boys can say, “What a fag!”
Staying fit is a crushing regimen, however, one that doesn't leave much time for anything else. In my twenties, I ran just far enough on treadmills and peddled just fast enough on stationary bicycles to stay fuckable. My fitness goal was to look good enough in clothes that I could get other people out of theirs. While my stomach looked flat enough with a shirt on, there was no six-pack under my slave-labor Gap-fag T-shirt. A two-liter bottle, yes, and one day soon, a keg. But a six-pack? Never. I was never enough of a gym queen to get comfortable getting naked in public. I never danced shirtless in a club or strolled around a bathhouse in a towel. I never even posed for porno Polaroids.
(Except on one occasion, when Polaroids were taken without my consent by a one-night stand. Since I didn't want them taken, I wasn't really posing for them. Sadly, I wasn't in a position to prevent them from being taken, if you follow my drift, and I didn't have the nerve to demand them back from from the scary freak who took 'em once I was, um, able to do so. These photos will probably surface after this book comes out, and my fitness to be a parent will be challenged by those who think kinky = crazy.)
Until I turned thirty, I made it to the gym at least three times a week. I fought getting fat long and hard, and when I went home for weddings and funerals the girls said, “What a waste,” and the boys said, “What a fag!” But since turning thirty, I hadn't managed to get my rear end into a gym very often. This was not good. My gene pool is filled with fat, and an extreme kind of fatness it is. My people do not get pleasantly plump. We Savages do not “fill out,” or “wear it well.” We balloon. My family is inclined toward obesity, to thighs so large we're forced to walk like mincing three-hundred-pound Japanese ladies, hefting one leg around the other with dainty criss-cross steps. Our guts grow to enormous proportions. We get so fat we can't be cremated. Dead Savages are soaked in a vat filled with a particular enzyme that breaks us down into our composite elements—beer, brats, and cheese— which are then packaged and distributed to food pantries all over the Midwest.
My boyfriend was unaware of my impending enormousness, and I had no intention of bringing it to his attention. Once he was bound to my side by a web of car payments, shared possessions, and children, then I'd tell him what was in store.
Or I'd show him.
Unfairly, while I am destined to be fat, I am not in the least attracted to fat people. Not even to the slightly overweight. Lucky for me, my boyfriend is one of those hateful people who can live on deep-fried bacon, coconut milk, and crème brûlée and not gain an ounce. He could eat nothing but pork fat ten hours a day and you would still be able to count his ribs while he's wearing a parka. Terry is just skin and gristle stretched over beautifully proportioned bones. Naked, my boyfriend looks like a broad-shouldered Kate Moss with a dick. And this is how he is always going to look. His mother has the body of a twenty-year-old, and his grandmother looks pretty damn good for an eighty-year-old woman.
If Terry does gain weight, if he's got some recessive fat gene that blows up someone in his family every tenth generation, I will dump him. For while I am not destined to be slim myself, I do require slimness in lovers. Yes, I am a goose-stepping (good for the glutes!), black-shirt-wearing (so slimming!) body fascist. I believe people should have to get permits before they go shirtless in dance clubs, and that no one over the age of forty should go shirtless in public regardless of the shape they're in. One of the reasons I no longer attend gay pride parades is the inevitable belly-dancers-of-size contingent proudly heaving their guts down the street in a misguided effort to combat antifat prejudice. If one of these dancers were to drop dead from heat stroke, and sooner or later one will, her belly will go on dancing for half an hour after she hits the pavement.
I say these cruel things with full awareness that I will one day be heavy myself, for it is my genetic destiny. I would not make fun of black people or the disabled unless I woke up black or disabled one day. But I feel that I can in good conscience make fun of fat people, because I will one day be hugely fat. My family gets fat in middle age, so it could happen any day now. Every joke is just my sadistic way of adjusting myself to the future state of my body.
And when the pounds come my way, I don't want people— especially other gay people, who can be so cruel!—to look at me and say, “Wow, Dan really let himself go. Can't he get himself to a gym?” I want them to say, “Dan's priorities have changed. He has children. He doesn't have time for the gym. He has more important things to do.”
That's why kids.
There's one more reason we decided to have kids early in our relationship, rather than waiting until we'd been together longer. And I'm afraid that, like having a hobby and getting fat, it wasn't a very good reason. But I want to be honest about everything that's shaped our decision.
I write a syndicated sex advice column. One day I was minding my own business, writing my column, when along came an agent, an editor, and a book publisher. They offered me a book deal, and I accepted. I signed a contract, and then I cashed an advance check with a lot of zeros before the decimal point. The problem with the book deal was that I didn't have the faint
est idea what I wanted to write a book about.
There are thousands of writers out there with books they've already written who can't get book deals, much less deals with fourteen-gazillion-dollar advances, and it must pain them to read that someone got a book deal with no book. I don't know what it's like to have a book already written that you can't find a publisher for, and I assume it's hell. But having a deal and no book has to be at least as hellish. The sun comes up, you think about your approaching deadline. You stare at the computer, which stares right back at you. “Why are you surfing porn sites?” your boyfriend says every time he walks into your office. “Don't you have a book to write?” Every time you leave the house a friend asks, “How's the book coming?” Every time the phone rings, it's your mother. “I'm not pressuring you,” she says when she calls to pressure you. “I just wanted to know if the book will be out by Christmas so I can give it to people as a gift.” Having a deal but no book maybe isn't the deepest pit in writing hell, but it's close, and anyway hell isn't a contest. In hell everyone suffers.
If being asked by your lover, friends, and family how the book is coming is hell, getting calls from your agent, editor, and publisher asking for the manuscript is dirty rotten stinking can't-sleep-at-night hell. Having a book deal and not a clue as to what you want to write a book about is like standing in front of an open trench. There are Nazis standing behind you— No, that's a little extreme. Let's just say there are very insistent people with German accents standing behind you. If you don't fill that trench with words, hundreds of thousands of them, then one of those insistent people with German accents (your agent, your editor, your mother, your boyfriend) is going to march up behind you and put a bullet in the back of your head, filling the empty trench with your dead body.
With the deadline trench yawning before me, I asked myself what kind of book the world needed from a gay man right now. I'm not a complete idiot—I did get a book deal, after all—and I had some ideas. But I had wasted so much time surfing porn sites that other gay men with book deals and better work habits were coming out with books I might have written if I could have pulled myself away from bigcocks.com. The “Gay men should stop having sex” book came out, followed by the “Gay men should move to the suburbs” book, followed by the “Gay man giving sex tips to straight women” book, and then the “Gay men should get married” book. Anyway, by the time I was ready to write, the books I might have written were all on remainder tables at Barnes & Noble. Except one. Some gay men were writing books saying gay men should get married and have kids, but none had actually done it themselves—had the kid and written about it. So, I sat down and started writing the “Gay man actually having kids” book.
There was this book deal, and there was this squandered advance, and there was an approaching deadline. And I really did want kids, and I had almost made kids with lesbians before the book deal, and then the boyfriend started talking about adoption, and, well, why not kill two birds with one stone? Adopt a kid, and write the book about adopting the kid. That way, I wouldn't have to pay back the advance and I would get to write off every expense associated with the kid forever.
So while the adoption would have happened without the book deal, and the book deal happened without the adoption, I can't say that the book deadline didn't move the adoption deadline up just a tad.
So, that's why kids. And besides, I'm allergic to dogs.
Put This Book Down
That last chapter wasn't very pleasant to write, so I can't imagine-it was very pleasant to read. When you write about kids, convention dictates that you go all mushy and magical: miracleof-birth, new-life-created-out-of-love, proof-of-God's-existence, blah blah blah. But there are always practical considerations, and as people get better about planning their pregnancies, more people, gay and straight, are applying a kind of Wall Street Journal hard-nosed cost-benefit analysis to timing when they have kids.
But let me emphasize this: the book deal that destroyed my carefree sex-columnist lifestyle (open the mail, read the letters, cash the checks) was not why were adopting. For the record, Terry and I began the “lifelong adoption process” before it even occurred to me that I could make it the subject of the book I was contracturally obligated to write. I need to write this to avoid offending the kid Terry and I will wind up adopting. Even when children are brought into this world as a result of practical, less-than-magical reasoning, or when children are brought into the world by accident, their parents usually don't share that info with them. Our kid would, we hoped, be able to read eventually, and if this book was one day required reading in all American high schools—as it should be—he would run across it, and one day be exposed to information that most kids are spared.
“My father never loved me,” he'd tell his therapist one day. “He just adopted me because he spent his advance.”
So you'll forgive me if I do something I swore I wouldn't when I decided to write about becoming a dad. I'm going to address my as yet unborn child, assuming that he can read.
Sweetheart, if you're reading this, rest assured that I was kidding when I wrote that last chapter. Kidding and drunk. Don't believe me? Ask your other father. We wanted a kid before I got a book deal, though once I decided to write about how we got you, kiddo, we moved your adoption to the front burner. Deadlines are deadlines, after all.
My advice for you would be not to read this book. It can be hard to put down a book that's all about you. God, for example, likes to have the Bible read to him every Sunday in church, as you would know if we had ever taken you into a church, and he never seems to tire of it. If you insist on reading this book, I'll understand. But take everything in it with a grain of salt, just as I assume God takes everything in the Bible with a grain of salt.
This advice I'm giving you—to put the book down and slowly back away from it—comes from experience. You see, my mother, your Grandma Judy, kept a journal all through 1964, the year she was knocked up with me. Her journals were never published, but I did manage to find them while digging around in her dresser. I stole them and read them, and it was a mistake. I learned things that I didn't need to know and things I would have been happier not knowing, risks you're running by reading this book.
For instance, my parents had sex, with each other, and quite a lot of it. For years before I found my mother's journals, I'd suspected my parents were sexually active, but I had no proof. Having my suspicions confirmed, in my mother's handwriting no less, was too much for my fifteen-year-old head! Suspecting something is different than reading all about it, especially in the same handwriting that signed “Mom & Dad” to all my birthday cards. Even more disturbing than the news that my parents had sex was reading about my parents having sex while my mother was pregnant with me.
But most disturbing of all was reading that my mother and my couldn't-keep-his-filthy-paws-off-a-pregnant-lady father were hoping and praying that the baby she was carrying—me—would be a girl. My parents already had two boys (your uncles, Billy and Eddie), and Mom and Dad wanted a girl this time. Mom lit candles, said Hail Marys, and buried saint statues upside down in the backyard. I guess my father had read somewhere— Esquire? Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)? Field & Stream?—that if he screwed Mom while she was pregnant—over and over again—this would turn me into a girl.
Now, back when I found my mother's diary, I was just beginning to understand that I might be gay; I was a little too excited whenever the Hardy Boys got tied up on TV. Not knowing what made boys gay, I wasted a lot of time wondering if I was gay because Mary, Mother of God, was only half-listening to Judy, Mother of Dan, when Judy prayed for a girl. Or because my mother had buried Saint Jude facing the wrong direction. Or because Bill, Father of Dan, had endowed me in utero with a taste for what he was giving my mom every damn night. Reading my mother's journals led me to believe I might be gay because of some Catholic technicality, or as a result of floating in a pool of my father's semen for nine months.
I k
now now that it wasn't Mary or Judy or Bill that made me gay, but genetic predisposition, Catholic school, high-tension wires, and sitting too close to the TV. But I could have saved myself years of anguish had I respected my mother's privacy and not read her journals when I was fifteen. So, kid, you might be better off if you didn't read this book. Just as I learned things about my parents I didn't need to know, there are things you'll learn about your dads from reading this book that you'd be better off not knowing. Like about those Polaroids, or how your other father once looked like Kate Moss with a dick.
If you put this book down now, you won't get to the chapter in which I discuss your father's and my sex life in detail. Being able to live your entire life in denial about your parents ever having had sex is a distinct advantage that you, the adopted child of two gay men, have over biological children raised by straight parents. Bio-kids can't live in denial forever about their parents' sex lives, because they're living proof their parents had sex at least once. But you, kiddo, you can live out your days without having to wrestle with the mental image of Daddy crawling on top of Daddy and drilling away, provided you put this book down before you read this paragraph.
Open and Closed
Negotiations with Lesbian Couple and Lesbian Single were just starting to fall apart when I first learned about open adoption. I wasn't immediately interested, being convinced at the time that the commingling of gay and lesbian genetic material was a beautiful, transformative, progressive notion, and an appealingly subversive way in which to breed. But a good friend felt differently. When I told my lawyer, Bob, that I was trying to get a lesbian pregnant, he said, “Why would you do something so stupid?”
