by Dan Savage
Meeting the mother of the boy you sodomize is one of those situations in which homos are likely to interpret silence as disapproval. After ten minutes of Terry's mother staring at me— unsmiling, unblinking—I was convinced that she hated my boy-buggering guts.
My family is aware that silence can be interpreted as disapproval, and they don't want to seem disapproving. My family was so noisily welcoming whenever I brought a new boyfriend home that some left with the impression that my family strongly approved of my being sodomized. A few got the impression that my family, especially my sister, would approve of my being sodomized right in front of them.
After a few more visits with Terry's mom, it became clear that she did approve of our relationship. Terry's mom, like his brother and his stepdad (Dennis), are just very nice, very quiet people, and my relationship with Terry's mom continues to evolve. There was one unfortunate setback when I used a metal spatula on one of her nonstick pans, but we've managed to put that behind us and rebuild. Anyway, after our first meeting, things had nowhere to go but up. Claudia and Dennis like to fish, and they recently shipped us two hundred pounds of halibut, caught by Claudia on a trip to Alaska. Our freezer is filled with fish. She may not have much to say, but she has made it clear she doesn't want us to starve.
When Terry told his mother that we were adopting, he wasn't sure what to expect; he thought she might be excited by the idea of grandkids. But Claudia only said, “Oh.” She didn't ask any questions about how we were adopting or when. We weren't sure how she felt, but she seemed underwhelmed by the idea.
A few months later, when we were in the middle of the paper-work, the annual Miller Christmas newsletter arrived. Terry's mother wrote at great length about her oldest son. Tom was getting married the following June to Pam, a very nice woman he met at his fundamentalist Christian church. Reading the newsletter, you learned that Tom was very happy, that his fiancée was very sweet, that they met six months ago, that they became engaged after just three months, and that everyone was very excited about the wedding. On and on, for four paragraphs.
As for Terry, “Terry works in a bookstore, and enjoys his job.” That's all. Nothing about the guy Terry has been with for two years, nothing about the fact that we're adopting a child. Maybe we could have snagged a line or two in the newsletter if we were adopting a Promise Keeper. When the Christmas newsletter went out, we'd already done the weekend seminar, and were hard at work on our paperwork. Claudia knew we were getting close to acquiring the kid; she had even written a letter of recommendation to the agency.
Maybe she wanted to surprise folks with the news of our baby in the next Christmas newsletter, but not even Terry thought that. He believed the letter was a subtle communication from his mother. She disapproved. When someone “isn't very verbal,” you read their feelings into their actions, and this was an omission that spoke pretty loudly. Terry was upset, but unwilling to ask Claudia about it.
“It wouldn't do any good, and it would make her feel bad,” he said.
“The letter made you feel bad, so why not talk to her about it?” I asked.
Terry thought for a minute.
“When she sees the baby, she'll come around.”
Our friends, gay and straight, were supportive. But some of our older gay and lesbian friends were mystified that we would want kids at all; when they came out, kids were a spring in the heterosexual trap. A few looked on having children as a betrayal of gay and lesbian liberation. A gay male friend in his sixties told me that he's amazed by the demands made by younger gay men and lesbians (he means anyone under fifty), and he worries that some of us may go too far, demand too much, and create a backlash that harms all of us. When he was young, all he wanted was the right to suck dick without having to worry about getting arrested. When I first told him we were thinking about adopting, he looked like I'd announced we were moving to Jupiter.
A gay academic friend jokingly accused me of adopting a “heteronormative” lifestyle, and a gay Communist accused me of selling out.
The other objection we've heard from some homos is that my boyfriend and I are not the kind of gay men who should be adopting. When word of our plans went out in Seattle, a local gay activist/idiot called me: Had we given any thought to the political aspects of what we were doing? He felt Terry and I should wait. It was important, he said, that gay people adopting right now be safe and unthreatening. Gay parents should be men in their forties, together at least eight years, monogamous, professional, irreproachable, and unassailable. With the religious right making an issue of gay adoptions, gay dads were going to be under a lot of scrutiny. He felt it was important that they be as unthreatening to straight people as possible. Gay men like me and Terry, gay men closely identified with “the urban gay lifestyle,” should wait.
Most of my friends involved in gay politics have been very supportive; few would suggest that a gay person wait to do anything out of deference to the religious right. But more than one person told me we weren't the kind of guys who should adopt. You know, for political reasons. I'd written too much, and too frankly, about my sex life. The religious right wants to ban gay adoption, and is probably looking for gay parents it can use to scare those little old ladies in Omaha.
Until the first really juicy example of an evil gay parent comes along, the first gay dad or lesbian mom to rape or kill their kids, the religious right will have to make do with whatever “unfit” gay parents they can find. Of course, straight people rape and kill children every day. Child abuse is so common that unless the circumstances are unique or compellingly gruesome (six-year-old beauty queen, heavy-metal prom night, kids tossed out windows), the deaths of children at the hands of their straight parents hardly make the papers. And naturally, they're never held up as examples of the unfitness of heterosexuals to parent.
But for gays and lesbians, having children, like everything else, is regarded as a privilege, not a right. And privileges can be taken away.
Misrepresenting Our Relationship
We left the seminar in Portland with everything we needed, except confidence. We had a stack of forms to fill out, and should we decide to pursue open adoption even though most birth mothers seemed to want Christian homes for their babies, we had a stack of checks to write. Unlike most agencies, ours does not demand a lump sum up front but instead staggers payments over time. This makes the cost less burdensome, according to the head of the agency, making it possible for po' folks to adopt. But adoption's still expensive. The seminar cost $350. Next up was the Application Fee, $600, followed by the Family Preparation & Homestudy Fee, $2,175. Then there was the Pool Entry Fee, $3,080, and, if a birth mother picked us, the Adoption Mediation & Planning Fee, $4,650. If we got the kid, there was a Placement Fee, $2,100. The agency fees would add up to $12,455, but the fee schedule warned additional costs: “travel, medical expenses, legal fees, and birth-mother adoption-related living expenses when appropriate and desired by all parties.” We could expect to spend somewhere between $13,000 and $15,000.
Looking at the payment schedule, it was hard not to get the feeling we were buying a baby on the installment plan.
We also left Portland with a stack of handouts. The most helpful, though not in the way the agency intended, was “10 Reasons Not to Adopt a Child.” I read it aloud to Terry as we drove out of Portland (“Never to return, hopefully,” said Terry), and from it we learned what not to say in any of our upcoming meetings with agency counselors. For example, we shouldn't say we'd been growing apart and hoped a child might bring us closer together, or that we wanted someone in our lives who had to love us. And we shouldn't say we wanted a child so he could accomplish things in life that we hadn't, and we shouldn't say we were adopting because we felt sorry for orphans. There was nothing in “10 Reasons Not to Adopt a Child,” however, about adopting kids because you wanted to have a hobby, prove a point, or get fat.
Our next appointment was a final intake interview. A week after the seminar, we sat down in a small office with t
he agency's Seattle-based counselor, Marilyn. Marilyn told us that the agency was willing to work with us, that we seemed like good candidates for open adoption, and that she was sure there was a birth mom out there for us. As we left, she advised us to get cracking on the paperwork.
And there was quite a lot of paperwork to crack. In addition to a homestudy written by the agency, we would have to fill out application forms, compile health histories, sign releases for financial information, authorize criminal background checks, obtain letters of reference, and write our autobiographies. The end of the seminar was really just the beginning of the paperwork. During the home study, an agency counselor would come to our house, sit down with us, and ask us what the hell we thought we were doing. If our relationship outlasted the paperwork phase of the adoption process, our final act before entering the pool would be to write a “Dear Birthparent . . .” letter.
When it was time for a birth mom to select a family for her baby (after she was six months pregnant and had had some counseling), she was given “Dear Birthparent . . .” letters to review. Writing our letter, Bob and Kate had warned us, would be the hardest part of the paperwork. Each birth mother got a personalized set of the “Dear Birthparent . . .” letters. That way, if she was carrying a multiracial child, she wouldn't be shown letters from couples not interested in adopting such a baby. The birth mom then picked out one or two couples from the “Dear Birthparent . . .” book and got their home studies to read, as well as their autobiographies. She then selected one couple. The agency called the couple, set up a meeting, and introduced the birth mom to her first-choice couple. The birth mom or the couple could say no; when that happened, the birth mom moved on to her next choice, and the couple went back in the pool. But if the birth mom liked the couple, and the couple liked the birth mom, three months later they adopted her kid. Simple.
It wasn't always that simple, though. Sometimes women contacted the agency from the hospital after they'd given birth. In these cases, “Dear Birthparent . . .” letters and an agency counselor were hustled over to the hospital. The birth mom picked a family, and the counselor called and asked the couple if they wanted to take this child. If you did a hospital placement, you didn't get to meet the birth mom before the birth, which was a drawback. You were going to be in touch with this woman for the rest of your life, so compatability counted; also, she hadn't had any counseling and might not be completely comfortable about her decision to “make an adoption plan.”
“Once your paperwork is finished, your home study is done, and your birthparent letter is written,” Ruth told us during the seminar, “it's pretty much out of your hands. Once you're in the pool, the average wait is about nine months. Some couples have waited as long as two years.”
Apparently, the wait could be stressful: along with “10 Reasons Not to Adopt,” the agency gave us another handout listing ways couples could keep from going crazy while waiting in the pool: redecorate; travel; read; learn to bake. What you weren't supposed to do, however, was buy baby furniture, diapers, or booties, or decorate the nursery. Looking at an empty nursery every day for two years could drive a couple crazy. Since all indications were that Terry and I would have to wait a long time, we decided not to pass the time we were in the pool painting bunnies on the ceiling of our spare bedroom.
“Anyway,” Ruth told us on the seminar's first day, “everything you need for the first few weeks, you can pick up on your way home from the hospital.”
But before the hospital, there was the home study; a counselor from the agency would visit our home, ask us questions, and write up a report for the agency and the state assessing our fitness to parent.
I didn't mind the idea, but it was clear at the seminar that the straight couples minded it very much. In the first Q&A session most of the Qs were about the home study: how it was conducted, how intrusive it was, what the agency was looking for, were they trying to “bust” couples, how often did couples fail. Ruth assured us that there was nothing adversarial about the home study, and that while they would be visiting us at home and asking a lot of personal questions, they weren't out to “bust” anybody. There were no unannouced visits, no white-glove tests, no poking around in drawers or closets. And as for personal questions, they couldn't be avoided. The agency would have to vouch for us to the state and our birth moms, and to do that they would have to get to know us.
It seemed sensible that before the agency handed anyone a kid, they'd have someone drop by and ask a few questions. It would be in everyone's best interests for the agency to make sure we had smoke alarms, indoor plumbing, and a good reason for wanting a baby. Likewise, if we had pentagrams painted on the walls and dead chickens scattered around the living room, well, the agency might want to take that into consideration. The home study made sense to me.
But I'm not straight.
I haven't lived all my adult life with the expectation that when I decided to have children, only one other person would be in on the decision. Terry and I didn't regard having babies as our inalienable biological right. Even before we decided to adopt, we were having to answer a lot of questions from the people who could've made us dads: lesbians and next-door neighbors.
But the straight couples had expected to make the decision to have kids with absolute autonomy. When they tried to get pregnant and couldn't, they sought out fertility treatments. They lost some physical autonomy, and judging from what some of the couples subjected themselves to, they lost a little dignity. But they were still in charge, and when and how they had kids was still a decision they got to make.
When they gave up on bio-kids and started the process of adoption, the loss of any sense of autonomy must have come as a shock. The agency called all the shots, and unlike doctors and insurance companies and functioning reproductive systems, the agency made you prove you were fit to raise children before they'd help you have a baby. You had to open your home, your bank accounts, your criminal record, and your skulls for agency inspection. And in open adoption, the birth mother called the final and most important shot: she decided who got her baby.
Fertile couples have complete autonomy. They can have as many pentagrams and dead chickens as they like, with no agency standing in judgment. They can prove themselves unfit after having a baby, but no one tells fertile straight people they can't have babies in the first place. Twelve-year-olds have babies, insane people have babies, drug addicts have babies, dirt-poor people have babies, drunks have babies, people who've had their babies taken away from them have more babies. None of these people would get through an adoption agency's home study. Only adoptive parents have to prove themselves fit. For the couples at the seminar, this double standard heaped one more insult on the pile of injuries and indignities of infertility.
Our home study was more complicated than we thought it would be. It wasn't one visit at home with an agency counselor, but four: one visit with both of us present, one visit each alone with the counselor, and a follow-up home visit with both of us. After we sent in our completed application, we got a call from Ann, who was going to do our home study. The day before our first appointment, Terry and I took steps to deceive Ann, misrepresent our relationship, and conceal the truth about our living arrangements.
We cleaned.
Terry's a slob and so am I. We don't live in filth; there's no rotting food in our fridge or black slime growing around our toilet seat. But we do let things pile up. We don't hang our coats up, we don't throw newspapers away when we're done reading them, and our bedroom is basically a dresser, with dirty and clean clothes piled up on the floor. Pretty much every flat surface in our apartment was covered in change, receipts, notes, clothes, books, and empty shopping bags. The place was a mess, and we liked it that way. It was comfortable. We worried, though, that the agency wouldn't like it, so we decided to clean up just a little bit before Ann was supposed to come over. It was probably anxiety, but we wound up cleaning things that no one but my mother and other obsessive-compulsives would even think of cleanin
g. We washed the windows, rolled up the carpets, and swept under the rug. We dusted the plants. When Ann walked in, our living room looked like a showroom at Ikea.
Ann was an older woman, fifty-ish of the radiant variety. She wore chunky amber jewelry and elegant earth-toned clothing. She had an open, honest face, and complimented our taste in, oh, everything before she'd even sat down.
“Oh, this is nice. Where did you get this?” she said, picking up a large crucifix I keep on our coffee table. Ann wasn't the kind of person that anyone would feel comfortable telling lies to, and after a few short minutes we broke down and confessed.
“We're not this neat,” I said. “Usually the place is a mess.”
Terry glared at me.
“We would be neater, but Dan's a slob and I don't like picking up after him.” Terry lied. He's at least as much a slob as I am, and if anyone picks up after anyone, I pick up after him. If he cares to dispute this, he can write his own book.
“Oh, you don't have to be neat to be good parents,” Ann broke in. “In fact, the opposite is often the case. Well, let's talk. Why do you fellas want to adopt?”
