Wedding March

As most of you are probably aware, my home state of New York recently passed a bill granting gay couples the right to marry. Governor Cuomo signed the bill into law late Friday night, June 24th, which (wholly coincidentally) was perfect timing to kick off New York City’s gay pride weekend, which always takes place over the last weekend in June. Stewart and I are already legally married, thanks to our northern neighbors in Canada, but nevertheless we were absolutely thrilled that the state will finally recognize our marriage, and that it will allow thousands of other gay couples to plan and hold their own dream wedding in our hometown. 
 

Like most gay New Yorkers, as soon as we heard the news that the marriage bill would pass the state senate, we knew instantly where the party would commence -- at the iconic Greenwich Village gay bar: the Stonewall Inn. That is where the gay civil rights struggle for equality unofficially began, in the form of a skirmish between its gay patrons and police over their unwarranted raid of the bar back in late June 1969 -- hence the city’s gay pride parade taking place in late June ever since to commemorate that special night of defiance. So of course it being gay pride weekend, and another historic night being upon us, the Stonewall Inn was everyone’s instant destination.

Stonewall Inn riot

Unless, of course, you are a gay couple caring for a sleeping one year old. Stewart and I couldn’t make it to the Stonewall Inn that night for that obvious reason. That made it particularly important to us to make it to the pride parade to take place down 5th Avenue that following Sunday afternoon, so that we could have our moment of celebration too. To be honest, in the pre-Max years this parade was not all that important to us. Our focus that day instead had been on an annual brunch that we traditionally had for friends at our apartment before the parade, and to the bar-hopping festivities that commence after the parade has wound down. Due to Max being in our lives, we haven’t had our gay pride brunch for the past two years, and last year Max was too tiny for the parade.

Between the historic nature of the marriage equality bill having just passed, and Max now being old enough to marvel at all of the sights and sounds of the city, we were determined to get to the parade this year, and luckily we had some very good couple friends with us to join us (one of whom are getting married next month themselves!). Like past years, this year we didn’t stay at the parade for long, but that didn’t prevent me from getting all teary-eyed once we arrived, which believe it or not is very unusual for me. Right as we showed up, with Max on my shoulders, we saw Governor Cuomo march past. The crowd cheered louder than I’ve ever heard them, because everybody knew that not only did he sign the marriage equality bill into law, he was the key supporter who risked his political capital to make sure the bill passed the republican-controlled state senate. No previous democratic governor had put forth that effort or achieved that result -- even when the senate was controlled by fellow democrats.

Gov. Cuomo and other supportive pols marching in the parade

And if the raucous cheers in recognition of his heroic efforts weren’t enough to get me choked up, the “It Gets Better” project was marching right behind the governor, followed by the Trevor Project (a national organization providing crisis and suicide prevention services to LGBT youth).  It is no surprise that these floats were linked to Cuomo and his accomplishment. After all, marriage equality is a very tangible sign that life does “get better” for the LGBT community, and hopefully LGBT youth witnessing first-hand their state government beginning to treat gay relationships with as much respect as their straight counterparts will give them the courage to live open and proud lives.

Max and his daddy taking in the festivities

And I was particularly thrilled to watch the parade, with all that it symbolized this year, with Max on my shoulders watching along with me. Because I realized that Max will now blissfully get to grow up never knowing a time in his life when his parents’ marriage wasn’t official or wasn’t recognized by the state. This is one aspect of our lives that we’re happy to be perfectly banal in the eyes of our son.

Talking Q-Talk

A couple of Saturdays ago, my friend Frank, who is trying to have a baby via surrogacy, told me that he was going to Q-Talk. It’s a monthly late-night gay-centered talk show at The Metropolitan Room, a small cabaret spot on West 22nd Street in Manhattan. This month’s topic was perfect for Frank: LGBT Parenting through surrogacy. Of course it was also of interest for me, but to be honest, my main motivation in wanting to go was simply getting out of the house Stewart worked that Saturday, and after being with Max all day I was ready for a change of pace. Before Frank could even extend me an offer, I invited myself to join him!

I was new to Q-Talk and didn’t know what to expect. It turns out I was in the minority about that. A good-sized crowd of 40 to 50 people showed up, and when they were asked if they had attended Q-Talk before, an overwhelming majority raised their hands. The crowd seemed to be made up of mostly gay men and a sprinkling of women. The other thing I immediately noticed is that there didn’t seem to be many parents in the audience. This should be quite interesting, I thought!

The show’s guests were John Weltman, a gay dad and president and founder of Circle Surrogacy (an agency that helps infertile and gay couples have kids via gestational surrogacy), and Tony Brown, a gay dad featured in the CNN documentary Gary And Tony Have A Baby, about the journey he and his husband Gary took towards having their baby via gestational surrogacy. Since Frank and I are both fairly educated on the topic of surrogacy, and have met John and Tony before, their ensuing discussion that night wasn’t very illuminating for us, at least as far as surrogacy is concerned. We did, however, both find it amusing when John mentioned how, while he enjoyed very much the documentary and how it portrayed Tony and Gary’s journey to parenthood, he did have one serious beef with it. The show mentions at least ten times throughout that Tony and Gary used an agency to help them with the surrogacy process, but never once mentions the name of the agency. Why did John care? Of course because the agency Tony and Gary used was none other than John’s own agency, Circle Surrogacy!

While we didn’t learn much new about surrogacy that night, the show was hardly a disappointment, in large part due to a surprise guest. John brought his 15 year old son with him to the show. I don’t know many gay parents to begin with, but none of the ones that I do know has teenagers already. Because we all know that those can be difficult years for any parents, I am very interested in hearing what teens of gay parents have to say about their experiences growing up in that household, and also in seeing how they interact with their parents. John’s son spoke to the Q-Talk audience that night, and I was very impressed with how articulate and open he was about his family life. Just as I had hoped and expected, he was a typical 15 year old – a kid who liked to give his dad a hard time, but in a fun-loving way. He seemed content and comfortable in his own skin, which can’t be easy for someone his age in a room full of strangers who are prying into his family life. Most importantly, I could tell that he was proud of his dad and that they enjoyed a strong, loving bond. Oh, and to top it off, the kid was funny too. When an audience member asked him what it was like having two dads, he replied that it was pretty awesome. Why? Because he can leave the toilet seat up without anyone in the household getting mad at him!

Thankfully Max is a long way away from being a teenager, and since the country is continually improving in how it treats its gay citizens, hopefully by the time Max hits those years the environment for gay-lead families will be more welcoming than it is today. But it was certainly nice to see from John’s son at Q-Talk that even now, what there is still a lot of work to be done in this area, there are teenagers out there being raised by gay parents who are just what any parents would wish their children to be: happy, loving and well-adjusted, with just enough back-talk and humor thrown in to keep things interesting!

"Family" Secret

As a gay male couple out and about town with a baby, Stewart and I hear one constant refrain from the many strangers we run into: “Do you remember the Modern Family episode where Cameron and Mitchell . . . .” If you have no idea what I’m talking about, congratulations, you’ve somehow managed to live a fulfilling life during the past two years without watching one of the most highly rated and critically acclaimed sitcoms currently airing on network television. Modern Family is an ABC sitcom about the hilarious trials and tribulations of three related southern California couples who are each raising families. One of the couples is the aforementioned Mitchell and Cameron, who are gay partners raising a young daughter who they adopted from Vietnam.

Because gay parents raising a small child are such a novelty on mainstream television, many people we’ve met over the past ten months toting Max around have naturally assumed that we are fans of the show. For example, recently we were down in Florida visiting Stewart’s parents, who are staying the month at a resort in Palm Beach. In two separate instances during our four day visit, women came up to us at the resort to dish about Modern Family, assuming, without asking, that we are regular viewers. Obviously these women (it’s almost always women . . . or gay men) are “cool” with our family dynamic, or they wouldn’t enthusiastically approach us to discuss our life with Max as it is supposedly mirrored in this popular sitcom. Because they are so well meaning, I feel the impulse to nod along with every Modern Family plot detail that they delve into with us.

But, the time has finally come to confess that I have been living a lie. I have terribly misled all of these well-meaning people. The shameful truth is this: before last week, I had never seen an episode of the show. This prevarication is made worse by the fact that this blog has already referenced Modern Family not once, but twice, in prior posts. Worse still, Gaddy Daddy was featured on a website promoting blogs about families akin to those featured on the show.  I doubt those running the website realized that they know more about my little Gaddy Daddy website than I know about the famous sitcom they were comparing it to!

Cameron, Mitchell & daughter Lily

For people who know my television habits, this actually may not come as a big surprise. I generally don’t watch sitcoms, or for that matter many shows on network TV. This isn’t to say that my taste is too highbrow for that, though. I watch plenty of dubious television programs that hopefully Stewart will allow me to keep secret from you all. (Stewart: let’s just say that it’s not all that unusual to find episodes of Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of . . . Everywhere” playing on our TV!) My point is that I have absolutely nothing against Modern Family. Any show that beams loving same-sex led families into the living-rooms of mainstream America is all right in my book. It’s just that network sitcoms generally aren’t on my radar screen.

But I’m tired of deceiving the many well meaning strangers who apparently believe that one of the duties of being a gay dad is being a fan of this show. So last week I decided I would go online and watch an episode of Modern Family to see what all the fuss was about, and to see just how astutely the show spoke to my life as a gay dad. The episode I watched was entitled “Unplugged,” in which Mitchell and Cameron freak out about the difficulty of getting their daughter, Lily, into a prestigious preschool . . . that is, until they are told that they can play the diversity card of being an “alternative family” to guarantee them admission into the pre-school of their dreams. Naturally, given that this is a sitcom, the guys get overconfident about the admissions process after hearing this news, leading to unexpected, and very funny, complications for their chances.

Fretting over Lily's pre-school interview in "Unplugged"

I must admit that the episode not only had a lot of laughs, but rang true to life for me as well. It just so happens that even though Max is just 10 months old, Stewart and I have already discussed potential pre-schools for him. Those of you living in New York City will know why; for the rest of you, let’s just say that this city is notorious for being ridiculously cut-throat and competitive about getting your toddler into a top city pre-school. At some schools, just getting an application is competitive, and then there are the interviews! Modern Family’s “Unplugged” episode gave Stewart and me a very humorous sneak peek into what we have in store for ourselves, and I enjoyed it.

I still can’t say that I will watch Modern Family on a regular basis. Sitcoms still aren’t my cup of tea, and it’s not as if I have a ton of idle time to watch new shows. But I’m certainly glad that I can now say that I’ve seen it, and I’m sure I’ll catch other episodes when they’re on. It’s a smart and funny show, and if it encourages the many people that I run into with Max to say a kind and supportive word to us, consider me a big and grateful fan who hopes it enjoys a long run.

Our Ten Year Journey to Ten Months

While in my late teens, my mom liked to tell me: “Jacob no matter how far out there or different you think you are, you have very traditional values.” She was right. Last weekend marked the ten year anniversary of my first date with my (now) husband, Stewart, on February 26, 2001. Ever since I came out as gay at age 22, I knew that my ideal future would include a life-long partner and a kid to raise with him. I was not envisioning a “husband” per se, because gay marriage was not only legally unavailable in the mid 1990s, it wasn’t even on the radar screen back then. That didn’t discourage my plans though. To the contrary, I even pinpointed the exact age I wanted to be when having a kid: age 38. I figured that gave me plenty of time to have fun as a single guy, and then get my act together through a serious relationship. Of course, life doesn’t run according to our planned timetables, and Max arrived when I was 36. But who doesn’t love an early present?!

Summer 2001, months into our relationship

While I ultimately succeeded in my aspirations beyond my wildest dreams, they didn’t always seem attainable. First off, I had the small problem of actually finding a life-long partner. Before I met Stewart, my longest romantic relationship had lasted all of 2 months. I remember being 27 years old and worrying that I was never going to find Mr. Right. Secondly, even assuming I found that special person, what was to say he would want to embark with me on the journey of parenthood? The concept seemed much more far-fetched back then than it does now. I didn’t know any gay male couples that had kids, or for that matter many gay male couples at all, and there was no such thing as the sitcom Modern Family on network TV. The only gay dads I had even heard of were men who came out as gay later in life after they already had children through a straight relationship. Most childless gay men who came out back then thought that in doing so they were necessarily sacrificing any opportunity to have kids of their own. Stewart has told me that he was one of those men.

Nor was it immediately obvious when Stewart and I met that we were destined to create the family we now have. Stewart was dating somebody else at the time, and so we were just good friends for a period of six months before he broke off his relationship and we became a couple. During those months we slowly became closer as we played squash together first weekly, and then twice weekly, and then started hanging out together after each squash match. Sometimes that entailed watching college basketball while having lunch at a sports bar, or discussing books at a cafe, or checking out art galleries in Chelsea. I realized that I had finally found somebody who shared all of my eclectic interests in life. Therefore it hardly seemed strange at all that our first official date was attending a New Jersey Devils pro hockey game followed by a late-night visit to a gay bar back in the city to watch a favorite drag queen perform. But I’m pretty sure we were the only couple with that itinerary that evening!

Ticket from our first date, a hockey game

From the very beginning I was up-front with Stewart about my serious interest in becoming a father down the road, and thankfully Stewart was receptive to the idea. As our relationship progressed, we renewed this discussion at every important step along the way -- including when we moved in together in 2003 and when we tied the knot in 2008 -- just to make sure we were still on the same page. Each time we were more and more enthusiastic about pursuing parenthood together, and finally decided to go for it in 2009. The rest is history, as they say, and our precious Max, born almost 10 months ago, is proof positive that a little dream I had in my twenties could actually become an amazing reality over a decade later.

With 10 month old Max on the 10 year anniversary of our first date

Gay Dads & New Moms Over 40 -- the Interview

I am thrilled to announce that yours truly was featured this weekend on the wonderful blog "Flower Power Mom".  Flower Power Mom is a blog for and about the growing number of women who have children after age 40, and the unique challenges that they face as mothers.  It is written by the estimable Angel La Liberte, a published author and media commentator widely sought to provide her experience and expertise on this fascinating subject. 

After seeing the Gaddy Daddy website, Angel came up with the insightful realization that gay men having kids and women over 40 having kids actually have a lot in common.  After giving it some thought, I completely agreed, and Angel asked me if she could interview me for a post on her site about this unexpected connection.  Of course I agreed, and the result is a post she created that is now up on her site, provocatively entitled: "Gay Dad Defends Moms Over 40."  I think she did an amazing job synthesising my rambling thoughts into a coherent narrative that I think you all will enjoy. 

Please check it out.  If you are as happy with the results as I am, be sure to leave a comment on Angel's site letting her know!  I'm also adding Flower Power Mom to my blogroll because her site is chock full of great, informative posts that I plan to keep following, and encourage you all to do the same.

Exciting News About . . . Passport Applications?!

In one of my earlier posts, I wrote about how my husband (Stewart) and I believe that we made legal history in Georgia when we obtained a pre-birth order from a state court judge there stating that, even though we are two men and only one of us is a biological parent of Max, both of our names may be listed on Max’s birth certificate. I went on to write that while the Georgia Vital Records Department fulfilled that order, we were disappointed to discover that they would not alter their form to reflect our family structure and insisted instead on listing Stewart as Max’s “Mother”!  While Georgia may have a ways to go in this area, I am pleased to report that the U.S. State Department is finally starting to catch on that its forms wrongly assume that all families are structured the same way – i.e. the “straight” way.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton recently ordered the State Department to change the wording on all applications for U.S. passports issued to children. The designations “mother” and “father” will be replaced with "mother or parent 1" and "father or parent 2". (Interestingly, the government originally intended to eliminate the terms “mother” and “father” altogether and just use “parent 1” and “parent 2”; however, backlash from conservative groups caused the government to retreat slightly and compromise with the “or” formulation that I mention above). The State Department website explains the purpose behind the new terminology: "These improvements are being made to provide a gender neutral description of a child’s parents and in recognition of different types of families.” The gender-neutral passport applications will be rolled out next month.

 

 

Why is this important? Because while for most families applying for and receiving a passport is what it should be -- a forgettable bureaucratic chore -- when that process serves as an official reminder to you and your child that your government does not recognize your existence, and instead turns your “papa” into your “mama,” those documented lies aren’t so easy to pass off and ignore. Childhood for everyone is full of uncertainty and anxiety. There is no reason the government has to encourage our family structure to be an added basis for that.  So any time that the government removes an official imprint of “otherness” stamped onto our family, that is a big positive in and of itself -- even if there isn’t also an immediate and concrete benefit resulting from the change, since we are not planning to go anywhere outside of the country with Max anytime soon.  

 

 

 

And of course many more than just our family will benefit from the government's thoughtful announcement.  “The updates remove significant challenges for the two million children being parented by lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) parents,” said Jennifer Chrisler, executive director of Family Equality Council, which led the effort to change the forms.  So I applaud them, and the State Department, for this small but important step in making passport applications as boring for us as they are for most of you.

The Taxing Matter of Health Care

At the end of 2009, five months before Max was born, I was laid off from my job in the publishing industry. I was naturally disappointed, however I considered myself very fortunate that my family would have the means to live on one salary for a temporary period of undeterminable length. Stewart and I decided that during that time-period I would be Max’s stay-at-home dad, which of course is what this blog is all about. One reason we felt we could do this is the fact that Stewart’s employer, as mine had, extended domestic partner benefits to committed same-sex couples. So the plan was that I, along with Max when he was born, would go on Stewart’s health care plan. I was pleased that as a gay married couple (married legally in Canada in February 2008) we had the same options that my heterosexual married peers have.

 

Little did I know, however, that same sex domestic partner benefits are not equal to the ones that married heterosexual couples receive. This is not the fault of employers, but of the federal law that does not recognize same-sex marriages -- even those legally entered into in a state or country that does recognize them.  Gay employees who are fortunate enough to work for employers that extend health insurance to domestic partners are unfortunate enough to be taxed on the value of that coverage — a tax that is not paid by their heterosexual married colleagues.  That is because, under federal law, employer-provided health benefits for domestic partners are counted as income if the partner is not considered a dependent.  The tax laws for who can be declared a dependant are very strict; for example, anyone who accumulates more than $3,650 of gross income in a year cannot be considered a dependant for tax purposes. Even unemployed, I do not fall into this category.

So tax is owed. The amount is based on the value of the partner’s coverage paid by the employer. As a result, employees with domestic partners will pay about $1,069 more a year in taxes, on average, than a married employee with the same coverage, according to a 2007 report by M.V. Lee Badgett, research director of the Williams Institute, which studies sexual orientation policy issues.  Given the escalating cost of health care, those numbers are estimated to be even higher now. So, despite my initial happiness that Stewart’s employer would extend benefits to me, it turned out that it was cheaper for me to elect to go on Cobra than it was for me to go on Stewart’s health plan.

Hopefully this baldly discriminating policy will change soon. In the meantime, some employers are recognizing the significant money crunch that the policy can unfairly foist on their LGBT workers, and are doing something about it. For example, last week I was very happy to hear Facebook announce that, beginning in the New Year, those employees whose same-sex domestic partners are on the company’s medical, dental or vision plans will be reimbursed by the company for the resulting federal tax hike that the government will be hitting them with. A spokesman for Facebook said that employees’ W-2 forms would be adjusted so that they wouldn’t have to pay for the extra tax.  In other words, their income will be increased just enough to cover the extra costs.

Facebook joins a small but growing number of large companies that are currently doing this, or are committed to doing so in the beginning of the new year, including: Barclays, Google, Cisco, Kimpton Hotels, Bain & Company and the Gates Foundation.  It is clearly the right thing to do, but it also makes business sense for them.  I am sure they recognize that in the ultra-competitive world of big business, talented LGBT job applicants will be more likely to sign on with them than their competitors, seeing these companies’ gestures as both a sign that their office environment is gay-friendly, as well as financially beneficial to them when comparing similar offers.

 

I think it is great that these big companies are making up this shortfall, but let’s face it: the law needs to be changed.  It is not these companies’ responsibility to foot the bill for basic equality over everyone else.  Gay employees working for any company should not have to shell out more to insure their spouses’ medical coverage than their straight colleagues.  That is lost money that could have gone towards many other things, including the care of their children, who are silent victims of this discriminatory law.  Unfortunately it is but one of many federal and state laws that show that married gay couples do not have rights equal to those of heterosexual married couples. While it is absolutely wonderful that Congress finally repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” this past weekend, the gay community and its friends cannot grow complacent. There is still much to change, for the sake of basic equality and for the sake of the many LGBT-run American families not as financially fortunate as ours.

Raising Kids, Raising Hope

Over the past couple of months, the “It Gets Better” video campaign created by Dan Savage to combat the bullying of LGBT youth has exploded from a small grass-roots project to utter ubiquity, in which it seems like everybody and their PFLAG-waving grandmothers have sent in a video. And not just human beings either -- each new day it seems like a different corporation has gotten into the act. Of course the project’s popularity is nothing but a good thing for struggling gay kids out there, but when you see reality-TV faux-celebrities like those from the MTV show “Jersey Shore” beginning to post “It Gets Better” videos, it is hard not to feel like enough is enough already.

That said, there is one important group near and dear to my heart for which the growth of this project has served well – gay dads. When we submitted our video in late September, the project was only a little over a week old, and there were only a hundred or so submissions. (There are now over 5,000!) Besides Dan Savage’s own video, featuring himself and his partner Terry and incorporating still photos of their son, we didn’t see any other videos than ours that featured gay couples with kids. That may be why Dan Savage emailed us personally to thank us for posting and to congratulate us on our family. At the time, we were quite shocked that it seemed like we were the only other gay family featured in the project. After all, in those hundred videos we scrolled through when posting our own, we saw gay people from all walks of life talking about how their lives got better after high-school -- but where were the gay guys and gals raising children?

 

To be sure, that representation is much more important for LGBT kids to see than some gay celebrity who reached a level of fame (usually, ahem, by staying in the closet well into adulthood) that these kids will almost certainly never experience, and probably don’t aspire to. On the other hand, there are definitely LGBT kids out there who would love the experience of raising a child some day, but are feeling miserable because they fear that they are doomed to the unenviable choice of either living their life open and honestly as an out gay person and sacrificing their dream of having a family, or staying in the closet to become a parent through the disastrous lie of a straight marriage. I personally know several people who told me that when they came out they felt like they were sacrificing the option to have kids some day.

And here is where the tremendous growth of Dan Savage’s project over the past month or so has real value, because its popularity has resulted in not only all those annoying celebrity videos out there, but -- unlike when we made ours -- there are now a plethora of videos by gay parents on the channel as well. For example, a couple of weeks ago change.org reported that The Pop Luck Club, a Los Angeles based organization of gay dads, prospective dads, and their families, put out a compelling and powerful “It Gets Better” video. The video features short snippets of testimony from 13 dads who relate their stories of coming out, meeting their husbands, ultimately deciding to have children, and how rewarding those experiences have been for them. And they are not the only ones. Videos like these are so important because they show LGBT teens that you can be both openly gay and have a family of your own some day. I think that message will brighten these kids’ views of their futures much more than what a celebrity or corporation might craft for the project through their PR firms.

Stewart and I were initially hesitant to put our family on video in such a public setting as youtube, but we realized that the simple fact that our family exists as it does is too important for the next generation to see to let what little amount of privacy we gave up stand in the way. We are thrilled that so many other gay parents have realized the same thing, and we think that Max will be super proud of his family’s part in this project when he gets older (though he’ll likely be mad that we didn’t edit out his big spit-up in the middle of the video!)

Molecular Parenting

This is a guest post by Stewart, aka "Papa":

Max is my biological son.

I know what you’re thinking. Whoa . . . wtf?! I thought Max was Jacob's biological son! But wait, family members, don’t faint just yet.  Max is also Jacob's biological son, and Jacob would beat me hands down in any Jerry Springer paternity test episode.

Okay, now that your universe has righted again, let me explain. When you are two guys planning to start a family via surrogacy, everyone wants to know which one is going to be the biological father. Some people ask directly, and others ask everything about the process except that, hoping that you mention the parentage, since it’s what they really wanted to know in the first place. But even as it’s obvious how badly people want to know, their question is always tempered with: “not that it matters . . .” Indeed, we know several sets of gay parents who have taken this attitude to heart, and actually mixed their sperm together before inseminating their surrogates, so that even they would not know which of them is the “real” father. After all, it just doesn’t matter. Each of the men in these couples are their babies’ “real” fathers, regardless of whose little swimmers won the race.

But, even these couples usually end up finding out the answer through a paternity test when their children are very young (even if, in the spirit of “not that it matters,” they do not divulge the results to others). Because biology does matter in certain respects, right? It can matter legally, as I discovered when our lawyer and I had to go through more hoops than Paul “Dizzy Hips” Blair just to get listed as “mother” on Max’s birth certificate. It certainly matters medically, as we know that genetics affect an individual’s tendency towards such innocuous traits as height, eye color and skin tone, as well as much more serious concerns, such as susceptibility to cancer, alzheimer’s and diabetes. Let’s face it, there is a reason why, if you want to become a sperm donor for an infertile couple, you have to do more than grab a dixie cup and aggravate Christine O’Donnell (so to speak). You also have to fill out a 22 page questionnaire about your family’s medical history. Anyone in your family ever have Mad Cow Disease? You better know the answer (for real) if you want to earn that $200 for your deposit.

So yes, biology matters. But so what? That’s no skin off my back. Because parents who adopted their kids, or whose partner did the donating in a surrogacy relationship (as in my case), are still their kids’ biological parents. How? Because a person’s genes are not solely the result of which sperm met which egg. Parenting also plays a role in the biological make-up of our children. For example, as parents we can literally alter our children’s tendencies towards certain genetic conditions. According to a finding published in Newsweek last year:

In most cases, our genes are only a predisposition; they are not written in stone. And if we have a strong family history for diseases such as prostate cancer, breast cancer, or heart disease -- "bad genes"-- then we may need to make bigger changes in lifestyle in order to help prevent or even reverse chronic diseases. In the centuries-old debate about nature vs. nurture, we are learning that nurture affects nature as much as nature affects nurture.

As parents, we have the power to affect in our children all of the lifestyle choices mentioned in the article: “nutrition, stress management techniques, walking and psychosocial support.” As another example, through parenting we actually change our children’s physical brains. The Toronto Star reported last year that:

Infant brain imaging, baby brain wave studies and even autopsies of infants show the profound similarities among newborn human brains. Adult brains, however, are profoundly different biologically.

In other words, our brains are literally shaped by our lifetimes, and our lifetimes are shaped by our parents, irrespective of how they became our parents.

So, while Jacob and Christie created Max’s biological make-up, as his “papa” I will have the tremendous privilege and obligation to help mold his biology in a positive direction, towards a lifetime of health and happiness -- through guiding him in what he eats, how much exercise he gets, how often is brain is engaged through reading and experiencing the world, and in countless other ways. So yes, Max is my biological son, and is becoming more so every day.

Raising (Up) Kids

I apologize for being off the grid for two weeks. My husband has been super busy at work, meaning I’ve been pulling double shifts with Max. That leaves me no time for my favorite extra-curricular activities – including blogging to you all.

One of my recent posts dealt with the amazing Dan Savage youtube project (now with its own website), “It Gets Better.” Who knew that after Stewart and I posted our video, literally dozens of celebs, from Tim Gunn to Kathy Griffin (and most recently President Obama) would join the fight by posting their own videos to combat bullying against LGBT youth. Believe it or not, our video has been watched over 3,000 times!  Had we known that, we would have dressed and rehearsed a little better! Even if only 1 of those 3,000 views was from an LGBT youth who checked it out during a tough moment in his or her life, the effort was well worth it.

I thought that with this post I’d look at the mirror image of Dan’s project – not how gay youth with straight parents cope with coming out, but how (presumably) straight youth fare being raised by gay parents.  Fortunately, study after study have shown that children of gay parents are as well-adjusted as those who are raised by their heterosexual counterparts. While the explosion of gay men having kids is too recent for any long-term study, fortunately our lesbian sisters are well ahead of the game, having and raising kids (much of the time off the public radar) for decades now. It’s gotten to the point that Hollywood has finally gotten its act together and produced a film about the subject: “The Kids Are All Right” (which we’ve yet to see, natch, given our new baby-centric lives).

The National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS) is the latest and most influential study yet to show that gay families are just as well-adjusted as straight ones. The longest and largest study of American families of its kind, this seminal and ongoing study has been following children of lesbian families (via a male donor) for the last 24 years. The NLLFS began interviewing the mothers when they were pregnant, then began interviewing the children when they were a year and a half to two years old, and then again at five, ten and seventeen years old. They discovered that the kids in this study might be better well-adjusted than even their straight peers. For example, kids of gay parents rated “higher in social, academic, and overall competence, and lower in aggressive behavior, rule-breaking, and social problems, on standardized assessments of psychological adjustment.”



Modern Family's Mitchell & Cameron

As I mentioned in a previous post, the reason is likely because gay parents only have kids because they desperately want to be parents – after all, it isn’t exactly easy for us to become pregnant accidentally! I think that kids intuit that loving desire, and grow up more secure as a result. I also think that many gay parents feel like they have to be “super parents” in order to overcome the stereotype that they somehow aren’t fit to raise their own children. Naturally, one would think, that extra effort benefits the emotional development of their kids.

Unfortunately, the only downside of the NLLFS study is that it found that kids of LGBT parents tended to suffer discrimination at school because of their parents’ sexual orientation. That brings us full circle to Dan Savage’s project, doesn’t it? If the primary obstacle to happy, well-adjusted kids of gay parents is high-school bullying, then what better current message to those kids – until we can finally put the kibosh on such bullying – than that “it gets better.” As an occasional target of bullies throughout middle-school and high-school, I can attest to that. I now have an amazing husband and son. I plan to work hard to make sure that many others have the opportunity to feel the same way.

Fragile Dwellings

This past weekend, Stewart, Max, and I went out to New Jersey to celebrate Sukkot at my sister-in-law’s and brother’s Sukkah. My sister in-law asked everyone to name who they would have invited to the Sukkah had they been able to -- irrespective of whether that person is alive or deceased, and irrespective of whether that person is known personally or famous. Some guests declared that they would have invited people dear to them that couldn’t make the event or had deceased, and others stated that they would have invited particular famous individuals that inspired them or piqued their curiosity. For example, Stewart named Christie, Max’s surromom. When it then came to my turn, I named the sex advice columnist and author Dan Savage because he inspired me recently by using his talent, stature and resources to support LGBT youth.

Sukkah

Last week Savage created a You Tube video channel called the “It Gets Better Project” after hearing about the suicide of Billy Lucas, a Greensburg, Indiana, high school student who was bullied and harassed by classmates for presumably being gay. Savage explained in his sex advice column (third letter down) that after he posted about the suicide on his blog a reader commented that he wished he could have spoken with Billy Lucas for five minutes before he killed himself to explain to him that things do get better for gay kids after the hell that high school can be for them. Savage responded that he had that same reaction, and then realized that with social media like YouTube, that is so popular with teenagers of all stripes today, gay adults actually can reach out to bullied LGBT kids before it’s too late. Savage explained: “gay adults aren't allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don't bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.”

Out of this realization, Savage created the “It Gets Better Project” and asked his LGBT readers to post short videos of themselves on his You Tube channel describing to gay kids that they too had discouraging high school experiences that included bullying and harassment, but that “it gets better” and they have now grown into strong and proud gay adults happily living their lives. In other words, the message is: life really does get better after high school, so hang in there! As Savage eloquently explained in an interview with the New York Times, through his project “[g]ay adults can show our present lives and help them [gay youth] picture a future.” Savage told the Times that within the first 24 hours of launching the channel, he received 3,000 e-mails! The ones that affected him the most, he said, were those from straight kids who wrote that they were e-mailing the link to the project to their gay classmates and friends who are being harassed.  Sadly, that includes 9 out of every 10 gay teens.

Savage’s project could not have come about at a more urgent time. Unbelievably, in the short time since Savage launched his video channel, three more gay teenagers have committed suicide due to bullying and harassment at school. Hopefully this project will (and maybe has already) given some despondent gay teens the glimmer of hope and encouragement they need to step back off that ledge and embrace life and all its potential.

Stewart, Max and I have recorded our own video and have submitted it to the project. My middle school and high school years were not the best years of my life. I was definitely picked on during those years and, at times, called “fag” and other terrible names. But I knew that life could only get better. Even so, I don’t think I realized how much better my life could get! That’s what I want the kids who visit our video to know. If it gets approved by Savage and posted on his You Tube channel I will let you all know. In the meantime, the video is below. (Go easy on us -- we're youtube newbies!)  Thanks for watching, and please spread the word about the Project.

Occupation: Chasing After Little One

As a stay-at-home dad (“SAHD”), I am a proud member of a rather exclusive club. The census bureau reported last January that the United States has an estimated 5.3 million "stay-at-home" parents. Rather amazingly, 5.1 million of them are mothers, and only 158,000 are fathers. And if you think the number of SAHDs is low, it is actually a significant increase from the number of SAHDs this country has had over the course of the past decade and a half. For example, in 2003 the census bureau counted only 105,000 SAHDs, and that number was a jump up from a mere 64,000 in 1995.

Are there really that few male caregivers in this country? Probably not. Jeremy Adam Smith explains in his book “The Daddy Shift” that “these numbers tell only part of the story of male caregiving, because they exclude stay-at-home fathers who also do paying work.” The census statistics are also skewed low because they consider only married couples, which means that they do not include unmarried straight SAHDs or gay SAHDs. Brian Reid, the blogger behind Rebeldad.com, also believes that there are a lot more stay-at-home dads than the number the census is reporting.  In other words, my new role as a SAHD is completely under the radar as far as the government is concerned. There simply aren’t any statistics that I could find that estimated how many of us gay stay-at-home daddies are out there.

I realize how lucky I am to have the choice to be a SAHD. There are many dads out there who would like to be a stay-at-home parent but do not have the means to do it. For example, Rebeldad.com, on its Statistics page, includes a 2007 press release from CareerBuilder.com stating that “37 percent of working dads say they'd leave their jobs if their spouse or partner made enough money to support the family.”

So how did I wind up a SAHD? I’ve gotten that question a lot during my journeys out and about with Max. In the summer of 2008, when Stewart and I started to seriously consider having a child, we were both on the same page that one of us would stay at home with the baby, or at least be the primary care taker. If Stewart and I were going to work so hard to have a kid it would be a shame if one of us wasn’t there to raise him or her, since we have the means to do so. I was happy to volunteer to be the one to take on this role. Why me and not Stewart? The most obvious reason is that Stewart made a lot more money as a corporate litigation lawyer then I did as a business development manager in publishing. If we tried to raise Max on my salary alone we wouldn’t last very long, especially in New York City. We’d have to put Max to work at age 6 weeks. And while Max is certainly cute enough for Gerber casting calls, he’s a bit of a diva and that might cost him some call-backs!

So it was decided that I would be the SAHD. But we weren’t sure what the exact set up would be. Was I going to work part time for the job I was already in, and if so would it be from home or would I go into the office a few days a week? The decision was made for me when I got laid off at the end of last year -- a silver lining in the dark cloud that has been this recession. When that happened, we decided that instead of me looking for a new job, where I would only be able to work for 5 months full-time before having to ask them for time off when the baby was born, we decided that I would be a full-fledged stay-at home dad. We haven’t regretted it for a second. While caring for Max certainly feels like a full-time job sometimes, it’s certainly the most rewarding one I’ve ever had.

Who knows how long it will last. Ideally, I would like to be the primary care taker for our child until he goes to school for the majority of his day. At that point, as Max stretches his wings in school, I can see myself wanting to stretch my wings again back in the workforce. Then all three of us, Abba, Papa and little Max, can sit around the dinner table to discuss the projects we worked on each day, and complain about Mondays, and look forward to all of our exciting weekend plans together.  What fun!

Having a Picnic

Being a gay parent, even in New York City, is still unusual enough to engender curiosity about our family. This blog is, in part, a response to that. But in reality, there is very little about the act of parenting so far that has had anything to do with sexual orientation. That fact hit home when, a couple of months ago, Stewart, Max, and I attended the 21st annual LGBT Center Kids, Center Families Pride Picnic during Gay Pride Week at Church of St. Luke in the Fields here in NYC. We made a special effort to attend because even though Max was all of a month old at the time, we thought that if any event would highlight for us what life would be like as a gay parent in the city, this picnic would.

At the end of the day, though, the picnic was refreshingly boring. What do I mean by that? Well, the only thing that differentiated this event from the likely thousands of neighborhood block parties that take place across American suburbia each summer is that the parents were same-sex couples. Otherwise, the activities consisted mostly of parents running around after their kids making sure they didn’t hurt themselves, refereeing playground disputes, feeding them hot dogs and hamburgers and cleaning them up afterwards, and trading tips with other parents about schools, or family-friendly summer events, etc. etc. In other words, they were simply parents being parents. If any of the homophobic interest groups out there had snuck in to videotape for an exposé, they would have been sadly disappointed.

This isn’t to say that we didn’t have a great time, or that we don’t feel the need to attend events for gay families in the future -- to the contrary. What we enjoyed most about the picnic was the diversity of the families that attended. There was a good mix of lesbian parents, gay male parents, inter-racial couples among both, and children of all sorts of different ethnicities (sometimes even within the same family). We love what that says about the color-blind nature of love and we hope Max’s friends will reflect the melting pot that makes this city so great. I’ve mentioned in a previous post how interested many strangers have been in how Max was conceived, so it was also refreshing at the picnic that when we met and chatted with the different families there, no one asked us about that, and we didn’t think to ask anyone else how they went about creating their families. We love Max’s creation story, but sometimes it’s just nice to be a family. Everyone else there seemed to feel the same way.

The picnic was also important to Stewart and me because we both agree that we want Max to grow up knowing, and hopefully having close friends from, other same-sex led families like ours, so that having gay parents winds up being as ho-hum to Max as the picnic ultimately seemed to us. We want to start working on that before Max even knows what being part of an “alternative” family means. And believe it or not, that will take some work. Stewart and I do not live our lives in a very gay-centric way. While we have a small circle of amazing, and amazingly supportive, gay friends, we don’t live in a gay ghetto or have a large extended gay network. We don’t know many gay couples with kids (or for that matter many straight ones!) So, starting next month, we plan to attend the LGBT Center Kids, Center Families Play Days which are held once a month during the school year.

I can only imagine that the first summer picnic twenty years ago must have been much different than the one we attended, and maybe in twenty years families with gay parents will be so common-place and accepted that there will not even be a need for such an event. But until then, Stewart, Max and I will have our picnic baskets fully stocked and ready to go!

Gay In More Than One Sense of the Word

Many of you might be aware of a New York Magazine cover story from last month entitled: “Are You a Miserable Parent?” The gist of the article was that parents are less happy than their childless peers. According to the article, study after study finds that parents are more depressed than non-parents and that children reduce marital satisfaction. The parents’ unhappiness is caused by such factors as the stress related to parents viewing their children as “projects to be perfected”; parents falling into the trap of constantly comparing themselves to other parents and thinking that they are not performing up to par; and, parents not having enough of a life outside of their kids.

While all of these factors apply to all parents – gay and straight -- thankfully for me there appear to be countervailing circumstances that boost the happiness quotient for gay parents specifically. The Rockaway Institute recently released a study that examined the experiences of 40 gay male partners who became fathers -- like Stewart and me -- via surrogacy. One of the notable findings was that having a child significantly improved the gay fathers’ self esteem. Nearly all (95 percent) said that having a child “makes me feel good about myself” and that their self-esteem had improved since being a parent. The study reported that many gay fathers become closer with their extended families due to parenthood, which further boosts their self-esteem because, previous to that, many gay men had strained family relationships due to their sexual orientation. Having kids is a common -- and communal -- experience that can bridge such familial differences.

There were other interesting findings from the Rockaway study. For example, gay fathers are more likely than heterosexual fathers to scale back their careers in order to care for their children. Also, although their reported spirituality had not changed significantly, parenthood made it more likely that they were attending religious services as a family than they had before they started one (an increase from 25 to 38 percent of respondents).

Summarizing their findings, the researchers concluded that the new fathers “felt extremely positive and proud about being parents… The narratives of the gay fathers in this study underscore how being a parent contributed to greater meaning in their lives… They derived pleasure and pride in taking care of their children, while they also received increasing validation from their families and their communities.”

The conclusion of the study makes a lot of sense. I think the sense of self esteem that gay parents feel is unmatched because many started with such low expectations. For instance, many were told when they came out that they would never be parents, or thought they could never be parents. Also, you can’t become a gay parent by accident -- you have to actively work at it, and to succeed at having a kid is a big accomplishment!

Stewart and I didn’t need a study to tell us that parenthood has positively transformed our lives. I am not going to state that I don’t have rough days taking care of Max or thinking what the hell did I do. But I will say that while we were very happy and content before Max, he has brought us such love and joy that we can no longer remotely fathom life without him.

Mr. Mom

The two month anniversary of Max’s birth had come and gone and we still had no birth certificate for our son.  We had been told by the hospital in Atlanta that we should expect his birth certificate within four weeks. We were starting to get a bit nervous. Was it held up in the system simply due to government bureaucracy? Had the hospital simply gotten the typical time-frame wrong? Or was something more sinister afoot -- was some renegade county clerk from the heart of Dixie refusing to process the birth certificate after seeing that Max’s parents were two men? Were we going to have to sue the state’s Attorney General to force him to issue Max his birth certificate?

Finally, to our immense relief, a couple of weeks ago an envelope arrived in the mail with the return address of Department of Community Health, Vital Records Branch, Atlanta, Georgia. Max’s birth certificate! The first thing we did was to check to make sure that both of our names were listed on it. We are believed to have made legal history in Georgia because we obtained a pre-birth order from a state court judge there stating that even though we are two men, and only one of us is a biological parent of Max, both of our names may still be listed on the birth certificate as Max’s parents. It took a lot of work to get that order! While we were pregnant, we met at our monthly Planning Biological Parenthood for Men group a couple who obtained a pre-birth order in North Carolina. And like Georgia, North Carolina was not known for actively processing pre-birth orders for gay men. The couple said that they thought they might have been the first gay male couple to obtain one in North Carolina. Well, I thought, if they could obtain one in North Carolina then we should at least try for one in Georgia, right?

Normally in Georgia, and in most other states (the exception being California and Arkansas), since I am the biological father my name alone would be listed on the birth certificate. We would have to apply for a second parent adoption for Stewart to be added to insure that he has the same parental rights that I do. But by making history in Georgia and getting a pre-birth order, Stewart’s name is on Max’s birth certificate from the start, so now he doesn’t have to worry about whether or not he will be perceived as a legal parent of Max. If Stewart is traveling alone with Max and for whatever reason he is questioned, all he has to do is show the birth certificate.

While the Vital Records Department made us very happy with the birth certificate, there was one big inaccuracy on it. While I am listed as Max’s “Father,” Stewart is not – he is listed as Max’s “Mother”! With all due respect to you mothers out there, Stewart was not pleased to be included among you! In fact, he had actually anticipated this possibility. While filling out the information for the birth certificate in the days after Max’s birth, we noticed that the paperwork only allowed for one parent to be listed as “mother” and one for “father.” Stewart decided to edit the form by hand to replace the listing for “mother” with “Father # 2.” As an additional attempt to sway Vital Records, we attached a letter to the application requesting that they list us on the birth certificate not as mother and father, but as “Father 1” and “Father 2” or – if that was too gay for them – as the more benign “Parent 1” and “Parent 2.”

When we opened up the envelope two months after Max’s birth we learned that our efforts had failed. Maybe it was political, or some clerk’s moral judgment, but more likely – in our minds --the Department of Vital Records didn’t want to bother to change around their template to accommodate the reality of our family structure. Of course the important thing is that the birth certificate proves that Stewart is Max’s legal parent, even if it isn’t so accurate in the particulars!

When I have shared this story with people, some have asked why Stewart wasn’t listed as “father” and me as “mother.” One friend pointed out that I am playing the more traditional mother role by staying at home with the kid. My sister pointed out that on a birth certificate it is usually definite that the mother is the biological parent and they are not always sure about the dad; in this case, since I am the one that has the definite biological connection, she argued, I should be listed under “mother.”

The reality though is much less philosophical.  The pre-birth court order we obtained had legally established me as Max’s biological father – so Vital Records was required by law to list me as the father on the birth certificate.  In other words, Stewart became "Mother" simply by process of elimination.  Stewart has been a good sport about the whole thing though.  He looks at the bright-side. Now he can ask for breakfast in bed on Mother's Day!