University of Massachusetts Amherst

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Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses

July 2019

QUEERING KINSHIP: LGBTQ PARENTS AND THE CREATION OF

REAL UTOPIAS
Laura V. Heston
University of Massachusetts Amherst

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Heston, Laura V., "QUEERING KINSHIP: LGBTQ PARENTS AND THE CREATION OF REAL UTOPIAS" (2019).
Doctoral Dissertations. 1655.
https://doi.org/10.7275/14228043 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1655

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QUEERING KINSHIP: LGBTQ PARENTS AND THE CREATION OF REAL
UTOPIAS

A Dissertation Presented

by

LAURA VICTORIA HESTON

Submitted to the Graduate School of the

University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

May 2019

Sociology
© Copyright by Laura Victoria Heston 2019
All Rights Reserved
 QUEERING KINSHIP: LGBTQ PARENTS AND THE CREATION OF REAL
UTOPIAS

A Dissertation Presented

By

LAURA VICTORIA HESTON

Approved as to style and content by:

____________________________________________
Robert Zussman, Chair

____________________________________________
Joya Misra, Member

____________________________________________
Naomi Gerstel, Member

____________________________________________
Laura Briggs, Member

_______________________________________
Tony Paik, Department Head
Sociology
 DEDICATION

To the family members I have lost and the ones yet to come.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work would not have been possible without the help and support of my

incredibly patient and unwavering committee members Joya Misra, Naomi Gerstel, Laura

Briggs, and especially my chair Robert Zussman. I owe a great deal of thanks to my

friends and chosen family members, each of whom contributed with inspiration and

motivation throughout the years, including Ghazah Abbasi, Sharla Alegria, Irene

Boeckmann, Dan Burland, Zack Clark, Katie Cicatelli-Kuc, Jill Crocker, Andrew

Eliopulos, Nick Eliopulos, Sommer Gray, Melissa Hodges, Sarah Hughes, Nick Kuc,

David Levithan, Zack Lewis, Elisa Martinez, Nico Medina, Billy Merrell, Miranda

Nichols, Sonny Nordmarken, Tim Sacco, Mary Scherer, Chris Smith, Edward Spade,

Mahala Stewart, Abby Templer-Rodriguez, Millie Thayer, Ryan Turner, and Danielle

Young. Special thanks go to Earl Heston, Marie Heston, Tony Heston, Tillie Marsilii,

Carol Cocciolone, Melanie Cocciolone, Michael Rieger, Craig Miller, Nancy Miller, and

Chloe Miller, who teach me every day what it means to be an evolving family. Thanks to

my incredible participants who took my idea of what was possible for queer families and

exploded it. Finally, my eternal love and ultimate gratitude goes to Sarah Miller, whose

magnanimousness fueled my writing, and me, throughout.

v
 ABSTRACT

QUEERING KINSHIP: LGBTQ PARENTS AND THE CREATION OF REAL

UTOPIAS

MAY 2019

LAURA V. HESTON, B.A., UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

Directed by: Professor Robert Zussman

Parenting in queer families calls into question some of our most fundamental

assumptions: that parents are biologically related to their children, that only women give

birth, that all fathers are men, that families push away friendships and communities based

in anything other than ―blood‖ ties, and that parenting is life-long. In this dissertation,

presented through five in-depth family case studies and a series of analytic chapters based

on fifty semi-structured interviews with LGBTQ adults in families with children I discuss

gay sperm donors, gestational fathers, non-binary foster parents, transwomen dads, queer

adopters of kids from queer birth parents, trans step-dads, and chosen third (or fourth, or

fifth) parents. I argue that queer parents demonstrate the vast possibilities of parenting—

and living—freed from heteronormative scripts.

The forms LGBTQ families with children take, that they can seldom be reduced

to two procreative bodies and their offspring, leave opportunities for queer utopian

experimentation in an institution synonymous with heteronormativity. I frame these

families as ―real utopias.‖ To call these families utopian is not to claim they are free of

hardship, violence, sadness, or struggle. It is, however, to recognize that the new family

vi
forms LGBTQ people are actively producing are not simply individual adaptations to

new situations but also a way of rethinking family more generally.

vii
 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................ v

ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... vi

CHAPTER

1. THE DEATH OF FRIENDSGIVING ............................................................................ 1

The Birth of a Queer Holiday ................................................................................. 1

Dragsgiving, a Drag Pastiche .................................................................................. 7

Family Feud ............................................................................................................ 9

Queer Futures ........................................................................................................ 11

2. QUEER FAMILY AS REAL UTOPIA ........................................................................ 14

Introduction ........................................................................................................... 14

Real Utopias .............................................................................................. 15

Queer Utopias ........................................................................................... 16

Real Queer Utopias ................................................................................... 20

Queer Structures............................................................................ 22

Queer Roles and Practices ............................................................ 26

Queer Temporalities...................................................................... 29

Methods and Overview ......................................................................................... 33

3. CASE STUDIES IN QUEERING KINSHIP ............................................................... 40

My Three Dads: Michael, Huck, and Bayani ....................................................... 40

Michael and Huck‘s Path to Parenthood ................................................... 41

Bayani: Third Dad for Now ...................................................................... 53

Transracial Adoption-Extended Family: Katie and Catherine.............................. 67

viii
 Co-parenting in Dyke Slope...................................................................... 67

The Adoption Gauntlet ............................................................................. 72

―It‘s Lesbians and a Black Kid!‖ .............................................................. 80

Party of Seven? ......................................................................................... 85

Transfeminine Fatherhood in Provincetown: Fran and Avril ............................... 88

―I could tell my wife…was pissed‖ .......................................................... 88

Harriet and Alice Meet Fran and Avril ..................................................... 96

―Love, Your P-town Moms‖ ..................................................................... 99

Queer Blended Family: Liz, Yasmine, Derek, and Sadie ................................... 110

Liz Makes Her Case ................................................................................ 111

Derek and Yasmine‘s Path to Parenthood .............................................. 117

―Sometimes You Want to Do Something Even Though It‘s Hard‖ ....... 121

Claiming Narratives ................................................................................ 126

At the Gates of Queer Heaven ................................................................ 130

4. QUEER OTHERHOODS ........................................................................................... 136

Transwomen Dads .............................................................................................. 137

―I Told Them I Would Always Be ‗Dad‘‖.............................................. 141

―I was exhausted, so I wasn‘t a good parent‖ ......................................... 142

Trans Mothering...................................................................................... 146

Conclusion .............................................................................................. 148

Gestational Fatherhood ....................................................................................... 148

Creating ―the Pregnant Man‖ .................................................................. 148

Normative Narratives of Trans Experience ............................................ 152

ix
 Relationship to the Self/Body ................................................................. 156

Fertility Clinics, Man-ternity Care, and Insurance ................................. 161

Legal and Custodial Challenges.............................................................. 171

Conclusion .............................................................................................. 180

Known Gay Sperm Donors ................................................................................. 181

Looking Beyond the Two-parent Family................................................ 181

The Origin of the Known Donor ............................................................. 184

A Rose is a Rose? ................................................................................... 187

Creating ―Our Own‖ Kids ....................................................................... 194

Conclusion .............................................................................................. 197

BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 199

x
 CHAPTER 1

THE DEATH OF FRIENDSGIVING

I think I might be ready to give up the ghost. In 2016, we celebrated

―Friendsgiving‖ on the Monday before Thanksgiving…at a restaurant. Nostro, just

opened earlier that year, the first nice, sit-down eatery in the newly-named ―Greenwood

Heights.‖ It was owned and run by an Italian immigrant couple who prided themselves on

their handmade pastas. Nice as it was, it wasn‘t like what we‘d done the ten years

previous—thoroughly planned a day-long boozy potluck celebration of our queer family

on the actual day. It was my first exposure to a way of organizing intimacy outside the

nuclear family. By way of introduction to this dissertation, this is an autoethnography

capturing my own short-lived experience of queer utopia.

The Birth of a Queer Holiday

I met Billy my freshman year of college at the University of Florida, circa 2001.

In a sea of 48,000 undergrads, finding him was almost a miracle. I was dating men and

women at the time, but when a woman I was seeing introduced me to him at Denny‘s,

where he worked as a server, he took my number, entered me in his phone as ―Laura

Lesbo,‖ and I knew he was right. I was coming into my queerness in near isolation. He

brought me out to the sole gay club in Gainesville and introduced me a to a community I

had never seen before. He brought me up, teaching me a language of identity and

openness and the absence of shame. He wanted to know everything I‘d never told anyone

and he let me follow him anywhere. I got to him about a week before he started dating

Nico and I thought he‘d disappear into a love bubble, but it wasn‘t like that. The circle

only grew. It‘s true I could have probably found my ―tribe‖ in a group of women or

1
gender non-conforming people, but it didn‘t happen that way. I was raised by gay men

and the straight and bi women who were in their orbit.

In those days, we all always went home to the various cities in Florida we‘d come

from for Thanksgiving. For me in college, going to Sarasota always meant going back in

the closet. Aside from being the break before the break in the school year, Thanksgiving

held no particular significance to me. Moving so far away, to New York City for most of

my friends and to Amherst, Massachusetts for me, and being typically broke, heading

home for Thanksgiving and then again for Christmas didn‘t make sense for any of us. By

then our ranks had grown: there was Nico, of course; Ed who Billy went to high school

with and dated for about a minute; Nick, Ed‘s ex, who was in love with Billy for years

and was also my male doppelganger; eventually, Zack, Nick‘s ex-boyfriend; Katie, who

Nico and I worked with proofreading accounting exam review books, and who opened up

her monogamous straight relationship with Dan to date me; Dan was almost always there

too. In an allegedly post ―get thee to a big city‖ era in LGBTQ history, we all found

ourselves in The City, together for every Thanksgiving for ten years.

When Billy and Nico (and Nick, now also their roommate) first moved into their

apartment in Brooklyn surrounded by warehouses and abandoned buildings and flanked

on the east by Greenwood Cemetery, it was called Sunset Park; a few years later it

became South Slope, as in south of Park Slope—a neighborhood people actually wanted

to live in. The Aladdin bakery across the street was a warehouse that supplied local

businesses and bodegas with the Cuban rolls on which all deli sandwiches were made,

from Bed-Stuy to Coney Island. The Spanish-speaking workers in white jumpsuits and

hairnets road around on forklifts that beep beeped all night long—the frequency of which

2
was truly ear-piercing. The bar on the corner, El Norteno, was known locally as a

―Mexican gang bar,‖ though that was likely an unfair assessment of the clientele.

Whether gang members actually went there or if they were actually Mexican (rather than

Puerto Rican, which was much more common in the area) was true or just racism, my

friends and I, seemingly the only white people in a 10-block radius in 2007, and the only

gay people for miles, never went in.

Because green space is hard to come by, and because real estate agents are always

trying put a positive spin on things, when Greenwood Cemetery renovated its gothic

entryway and became more welcoming to visitors, it transformed from just a graveyard

from which you could view the Statue of Liberty to something more akin to a park. By

2015 Aladdin changed its name to ―Baked in Brooklyn‖ (a name I once joked would be

the title of Billy‘s memoir) and had a storefront where you could buy coffee and bagel

sandwiches and bags of the new pita chips and pretzel sticks branded with the company‘s

logo. El Norteno became Club Ecstasy (or Stasy‘s as we affectionately called it), now the

southern-most officially-gay bar in Brooklyn, and its placement on the end of their block

was divine intervention if I have ever seen it. Soon after, a nearby block once dominated

by a chain-link fenced power station welcomed a cute little Italian restaurant—Nostro.

And Greenwood, the cemetery in front of which Nick was mugged while coming home

drunk at 3 am, was a tourist attraction. ―Greenwood Heights‖ was born.

It‘s hard not to see this normatizing process, this gentrification into what our

friend Sarah would call ―grown-up Brooklyn‖ of which Park Slope has been emblematic,

as a form of assimilation to which we all fell victim as the years went on (or helped

initiate, depending on how you look at it). The first Friendsgiving was an accident. Back

3
then, Billy, Nico, and Nick lived in Washington Heights in an apartment in which they

were so crammed it was literally hard to turn around. Nick occupied a ―bedroom‖ that did

have room for his bed, but nothing else. Renovations somehow made it so the shower

head sprouted from the wall perpendicular to the bathtub, such that it hosed the shower

curtain and often soaked the sliver of floor beyond it. Visitors would almost inevitably

bruise their knees navigating around the tub to the tiny space past it where the toilet sat

too close to the wall. It was in this apartment that we made the first turkey and stuffing to

bring to Veronica‘s apartment for what, in retrospect, would be the first Friendsgiving.

No dining table, we all held our paper plates and sat on chairs and couches, or just

stood in the kitchen. After dinner we all went out drinking, to hidden gay bars in upper

Manhattan, and a club called Duvet where beds were the only seating. I picked back up

on a not-at-all-secret affair with Katie whose commercial airplane pilot boyfriend was

conveniently out of town. Nick joined Veronica‘s roommate in responding to a Craig‘s

List men-seeking-men ad (a primitive form of Grindr) and went on to have a three-way

with a closeted minor television personality. The first fall snow fell that night. It was

unlike any Thanksgiving I‘d ever had and, my god, I wanted more.

The next year it was at Katie and Dan‘s Inwood apartment—it was so far uptown,

we took the 1 train as far as it would go and went the rest of the way on foot. While Katie

and I shared a vegan Tofurkey that looked like a leathery balled-up sock, the boys tackled

a turducken, which looked even grosser than it sounded. We drank, we danced, we

Friendsgiving-ed. By the next year, everyone was already living in Brooklyn. As a last

act still living in Manhattan, Billy proposed to Nico over a McDonald‘s breakfast and a

100-page poem he wrote. Even after Billy and Nico became affianced, they moved with

4
Nick to the apartment on 26th Street, a two-floor railroad with a small backyard and patio

that would serve as Friendsgiving headquarters for the holiday‘s remaining years. Over

time, as the celebration grew year-on-year, the boys invested in more tables and chairs,

patio furniture, two huge coolers, an outdoor heater (for the smokers), and raised garden

beds for, among other things, fresh herbs for the turkey. Billy experimented with a half

dozen different preparations with various amounts of baking, brining, stuffing, under-skin

buttering, and herbing. In the weeks leading up to each Friendsgiving, Nico would send

out the mass invitation and have everyone sign up to bring various dishes, desserts, or

bottles of alcohol. We once had four kinds of stuffing: traditional, vegetarian, oyster, and

White Castle (a dozen tiny burgers chopped with celery and carrots baked with chicken

stock—it won that competition).

In a typical Friendsgiving, the festivities started with appetizers at 1, moving on to

dinner at 3, this was followed by a nap and video/board gaming segment of the evening,

dessert and coffee, and walking en masse to local bars and dance clubs. Somewhere in

there, we would help clean up and pack Tupperware to send people home with leftovers.

In the course of the night, people would come and go, smoke pot, call their relatives, get

drunk, sober up, and get drunk again. It was unapologetically pleasure-centered, but

warm and safe. Sure, it was a bit debauched, but I had the feeling of being exactly where

I wanted to be, doing exactly what I wanted to be doing. My friends and I seldom made

each other food, let alone all sit down at a big table passing the gravy. My sweet, but

clueless, grandmother was not there to ask me if I had a boyfriend, then when I said, ―I

sure don‘t, Mom-mom!‖, respond with a wink and ―Oh, I bet you have lots of

boyfriends.‖ And I did, I had lots of boy friends!

5
 My friends and I rarely played games together either, but somehow Friendsgiving

was different. Instead of watching football, we‘d play board games or video games. And

there is dancing, always dancing. If we didn‘t go out to dance, we pushed aside the coffee

table and Billy and Nico‘s two fake-leather couches, switched off the lights and turned on

the actual miniature fog machine they bought and danced. It is painful to admit, but I

don‘t think I‘d ever experienced much joy at family holidays before Friendsgiving. I‘d

felt anxiety, and fear, and obligation, and even love, but not joy. Friendsgiving was

different from a regular party, something about choosing to spend what is normally

considered a ―family‖ holiday together gave us more of a sense of chosen family than

anything else did. Choosing it over and over for ten years only solidified that feeling. We

took shelter with each other. And between the mainstays of dancing at gay clubs, post-

turkey Craig‘s List cruising, hooking up, sexual puns in all of our game-playing, and the

one time Nico tried to have everyone go around and say what they are thankful for and

Zack yelled ―COCK,‖ queer sexuality was absolutely at the center of it all. Though there

were always some straight-identified people there, it was a space where queers were the

majority and sexual domination was flipped on its head, and straight people who might

be offended by someone yelling ―COCK‖ at the dinner table were unwelcome.

When Lisa Duggan wrote about homonormativity, bringing the term into queer

theory‘s academic parlance, she named what she felt were twin evils plaguing the queer

movement (2003). These evils, she argued, would inevitably sap the queer movement of

all its anti-normativity and put us on the slippery slope toward assimilation: domesticity

and consumption, the handmaidens of neoliberalism. Domestic coupling divorces people

from their broader communities and makes daily concerns and struggles simply personal;

6
it motivates people to understand both successes and failures as the result of personal

striving (or lack of it) rather than something shaped by structural conditions like

economic and political shifts. Consumption is the carrot that‘s always moving: there are

always better neighborhoods, bigger houses, faster cars, and more effective anti-aging

creams. All these things take money and keep the labor force working harder and harder.

The combination of domesticity and consumption, in Duggan‘s understanding, makes for

a docile and divided populace. The fear is that these temptations will distract queer

people from the revolutionary goals of smashing the family, which was defined in terms

that excluded them, or seeing their struggles as linked with those of other marginalized

and disempowered groups.

Dragsgiving, a Drag Pastiche

Queer family Friendsgiving took the sacredness of Thanksgiving—a

quintessentially American holiday celebrating both domesticity and consumption—and

made it profane. We played at domesticity through cooking for each other and eating

around a big table, but we were also making it farcical. The love was genuine, but the

ritual felt like play—a turkey-bordered paper tablecloth bought at C-Town was

simultaneously earnest and ironic. Friendsgiving was family drag as well as family. And

though we certainly consumed a lot, alcohol and drugs and sex, we thought, moved this

consumption away from the realm of ―playing into the hands of capitalism‖ and more

into the less productive space of pleasure-seeking.

The play and satire of family drag, a simultaneous recognition of connection and

subversion of what connection obligates, was epitomized in Friendsgiving 2015‘s theme:

7
―Dragsgiving.‖ ―Dragsgiving‖ was dreamed up that summer when about 10 of us

celebrated the last of us turning 30 with a metaphorical trip to ―Drag Island,‖ by staying

on Fire Island and dressing in drag for three days. This coincided with both the

―transgender tipping point‖ and the mainstream breakthrough of RuPaul’s Drag Race,

arguably bringing ideas of gender construction and fluidity into mainstream gay culture

after many decades on the margins. There were suddenly dozens of YouTube videos

teaching people with masculine jawlines how to create the illusion of high cheekbones

through makeup contouring. For the white and middle-classed gay men I hung out with,

there was a shift in culture big enough to give permission to explore and play with gender

on days that were not Halloween. Since college, Nico had looked forward to Halloween

all year, often planning a costume months in advance. Even among our friends, he felt it

was the one day a year he was ―allowed‖ to dress in drag and not also carry the weight of

a gender-nonnormative identity. At one point on that trip, Nico was sunbathing in a lime

green, floral, silk romper and short, gray wig when Sarah asked for the time. Nico slowly

rolled his head to the side, looked over his sunglasses, and said in a slow, gravely Joan

Crawford affectation, ―There‘s no time on Drag Island.‖

On ―Drag Island,‖ dressing flamboyantly in the garb of someone you were not

was entirely the point and not played for laughs. The goal was to embody, convincingly

and playfully, a version of one‘s self not normally seen. In this context, because it wasn‘t

a joke, support and care were required. We came up with pseudonyms (some favorites

being the literary nod, Donna Tartlet; my own, Dick Stranger; and the even more

perverse pun, Nico‘s Diana Jacuzzi) and developed personae that might change with the

outfit. In a plaid skirt, one might be an anime-loving high school girl or 1990s Brittany

8
Spears, depending on the wig. It was a space of trust and vulnerability as much as it was

about play, and it was thrilling. Someone there uttered the word ―Dragsgiving‖ and our

fates were sealed.

Months later, ―Dragsgiving‖ was a continuation of this experience in which the

wigs, costumes, and makeup were brought out of what Billy and Nico called ―deep drag

storage‖ for an occasion known for its excess, but otherwise not that connected:

Thanksgiving. Billy, our consummate host, was dressed as a Southern, 1950s housewife

complete with big hair and checked apron. I was a Naval private on shore leave, and

several other attendees were inspired by the aesthetics of various pop divas. While other

people around the country were dressing for dinner in their Sunday best, we were

dressing up in a different way.

Family Feud

Then, the babies came. In prior years it was in the form of nieces and nephews.

Since none of us were actually barred from spending Thanksgiving with our families of

origin, when siblings started having kids, there was a pull and a pressure to spend time

with them in their early years. Billy‘s brother had a baby, then two. Nico‘s sister had a

baby, then three. Nick became Uncle Nick. But, they could have Christmas, right? Then,

our friends Audrey and Frank brought their one-year-old to Dragsgiving. We were happy

to have her, she was a source of both humor and curiosity, but the tiny tot was nearly

tripped over by several gay men having Jell-O shots in heels and the family left early. It

was official: Friendsgiving was not family friendly! But, two years later, when Katie had

a baby, all eyes were on Mila. She made Zack‘s ―ovaries hurt.‖

9
 Zack had recently moved in with an architect, also named Zack. Their last names

(which I use to avoid confusion) are Clark and Lewis respectively, and Clark has

admitted to envisioning their Lewis and Clark-themed wedding invitations from very

early on. Lewis comes from a line of architects and owns a place on the Lower East Side.

One year, Zack and Nick—who once dated, then became best friends, and are now

writing partners on a series of young adult novels—got into a fight about having children.

But, the weird thing was, neither was against it. The argument was about surrogacy

versus adoption. Lewis‘s mom had offered to pay up to $200,000 on a biologically-

connected grandkid through a surrogate mother. Once, Clark had been the most

politically progressive among us, and even offered Sarah and me his sperm, no strings

attached, but the prospect of surrogacy made him reevaluate and express that he truly had

a preference for ―his own‖ child. He got defensive when Nick mentioned all the children

already in the world who were in need of parents and was incredulous when Nick said he

didn‘t want to pass on his genes. Clark accused Nick of acting like a martyr and

articulated Dan Savage‘s argument in The Kid, a line of thinking rarely articulated, but

perhaps not so rarely felt—that gay men were entitled to have the children they wanted.

Savage adds the extra insult that the children gays are encouraged to adopt (older

children, children with disabilities, and children of color) were lesser and ―damaged,‖ and

that he and his partner were entitled to a healthy, white baby as much as hetero white

people.

I was actually a white baby adopted by hetero white people. But as a result, for

me, biological connection has never been the basis for family. There was certainly a time

when I wanted to reproduce with one of my guy friends, less for the biological

10
connections than adding a new layer of intimacy and connection with my friends, my

chosen family which others might then recognize as family (including our families of

origin) if we shared this link. My big personal dilemma was choosing whose sperm I

would use. Maybe we‘d mix some together and see what happened? But, like they say,

―make plans and God laughs‖— I started menopause at 29 years old. Most people

assigned female at birth hit menopause closer to 50, but there I was having hot flashes

and getting bone scans in my twenties. But, I had never really expected or preferred a

biological child. I had mistakenly thought all queer people felt this way and would not

pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a genetic connection.

Another layer to this conversation is that when Nick mentioned his ―bad genes,‖

he wasn‘t joking. At 34, Nick was diagnosed with lymphoma. The Friendsgiving that

year, 2013, had a more serious tone, though we were so happy to see him attend. Nick

had been receiving chemotherapy treatments for several months through a port in his

chest, and was quite weak. The diagnosis lead to a dramatic lifestyle change, he quit his

half pack a day smoking habit and drinking entirely. Billy got an expensive juicer in part

to make Nick elaborate healing concoctions. It hit us all pretty hard, but no one more than

his partner, Andrew, who became his primary caregiver at the time and had medical

problems of his own.

Queer Futures

In 2017, though Friendsgiving still happened in name, it came together at the last

minute and was fairly intimate. At its peak, there were a couple dozen people eating

spinach dip and smoking cigarettes on the patio. This year, we were 10, more than half of

us were married, and a baby stayed through dinner: the edge was gone. Children—the

11
ones we were planning and the ones we were related to—were coming between us, and

the specter of death—from Nick‘s illness to the beginnings of our own parents‘ deaths—

was making things weightier. Various couples wanted to spend holidays with their ―real

families‖ to visit with the kids and to see their own parents more.

Ironically, this kind of deterioration of queer social life is the consequence of

greater social acceptance. In the recent past queers were excluded from straight families

of origin, either physically or in spirit—often their intimates were not even acknowledged

enough to be excluded. This change is certainly a good thing, but we didn‘t need each

other the way LGBTQ folks used to. Domesticity may have killed us after all. For a while

we were choosing to be together, and then we were free to choose differently. This is not

to say these things always fall apart. The families in this book have, in large part, found

ways to maintain the plurality and unconventionality of their families even with the

addition of children—some of whom they created with their friends. Looking back, it

does seem a bit naïve thinking it might last. It seems more and more that I mistook a

lifecourse phenomenon—those normless years between college and adulthood that were

our twenties—for an experiment in critical family transformation. And yet, naïve though

it might have been, there was something distinctively queer about our Friendsgiving.

More importantly, no matter how temporary our Friendsgiving tradition turns out to be, it

did show us a different way of organizing intimacy, an alternative both to biological

families and an alternative to conventional sexualities and practices. Even if it‘s really

over, it was an experiment worth having. This lesson is something we‘ll take with us, as

we develop ―our own‖ families that might make them a little less exclusive than a

heteronormative family might be. Maybe Friendsgiving wasn‘t revolutionary but it did

12
provide a model for a different organization of social life. It was our version of a real

queer utopia, and this dissertation traces the possibilities of that utopia as it emerges from

queer family life in the first part of the 21st century.

13
 CHAPTER 2

QUEER FAMILY AS REAL UTOPIA

Introduction

―A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one

country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a

better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of utopias.‖ – Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under

Socialism

―Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never

touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality…The

future is queerness‘s domain.‖ – Jose Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia

Imagining another world, or fundamental changes to the one we have, is a human

practice going back centuries. Some theorists believe that the imagination of alternatives

is fundamental to efforts at social change. The place of ―imagination‖ in social theory is

certainly fraught—it is easy to dismiss discussions of utopia is hopeless, pie-in-the-sky

optimism or naïve, short-cited ideology. In Ideology and Utopia (1936), Karl Mannheim

distinguished utopianism from ideology; ideology looks to the past (witness the slogan

―Make America Great Again‖ which imagines an idealized America of the past when

things were ―great‖) whereas utopia represents the possibilities that have not yet been.

There are also reasons to fear utopia. A literary theme from Brave New World (Huxley

1932) to The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood 1985) to The Hunger Games (Collins 2008) is

that one group‘s utopia is another‘s dystopia. Examples of this in reality might include

some iterations of repressive communism in which a hopeful utopianism, put in practice,

lead to the imprisonment and death of detractors. This has led some to believe that

14
utopias cannot become real, that they are confined to the realm of fantasy. Even the word

―utopia‖ is a joke—a false cognate in Greek meaning both ―good place‖ and ―no place.‖

Philosopher Ernst Bloch addressed this common critique—the utopias cannot

exist in the real world—by specifying the difference between a utopia which was merely

abstract versus one that was concrete, or able to come to fruition (Bloch 1923). Abstract

utopias are those only ever alive in thought and not accompanied by a will to change,

while concrete utopias are anticipatory (rather than compensatory) and reach toward

some real possibility (Levitas 1990). His distinction rests on the threshold of ―educated

hope‖ – in the words of Ruth Levitas, ―While abstract utopia may express desire, only

concrete utopia carries hope‖ (Levitas 1990, 15). One way to identify concrete utopias is

to look to the practices that already exist.

Real Utopias

Informed by Bloch‘s ―concrete utopia,‖ Erik Olin Wright articulated a concept of

the ―real utopia.‖ Real utopias spring from identified circumstances in which human

suffering is produced from existing dominant institutions, and the act of transforming

these institutions would lead to less suffering. Not everyone in the society needs to be

suffering from the status quo in order for it to be worth changing, Wright‘s paradigmatic

example is capitalism, in which many suffer economically for the benefit of the few, and

transforming this system could lead to much greater human thriving for many more

people. In Envisioning Real Utopias (2010), Wright a) maps out the moral principles an

economic system might accomplish, b) diagnoses the ways in which capitalism fails to

fulfill those principles, c) identifies viable alternatives to capitalism currently being

15
experimented with in the real world, and d) theorizes a path to systemic transformation.

Wright states that the moral principles under consideration may be different in the

transformation of other systems, but that he had identified democracy, equality, and

sustainability as some core values threatened by capitalism.

Archetypal studies of ―utopian‖ experiments imagine worlds unto themselves.

Self-sustaining alternate communities with their own (usually egalitarian) forms of

governance, separated from dominant society. There are studies of how people enter

these communities, how they form, how they end, how they change people‘s lives. They

are also incredibly exclusionary, hard to access, and hard to change. But there is utopia to

be found in the everyday. There is evidence to suggest that proximity to the world outside

reinforces people‘s commitment to living differently (Cooper 2014; Sargisson and

Sargent 2017). All Wright‘s examples—alternative economies, divisions of labor,

democratic practices—happen within the context of normal life. The utopian spaces

studied by Davina Cooper (2014)—including street-level public forum for debate and a

lesbian bathhouse—offer respites from normal life by articulating with it. By viewing

these life experiments through the lens of utopianism we take people‘s efforts at micro-

level social change seriously. Looking at queer families, the ones living in communities

and spaces not cut off from the outside world, is to emphasize the ―real‖ in real utopia.

Queer Utopias

Bloch‘s understanding of utopia is also taken up by the late José Esteban Muñoz

in Cruising Utopia (2009) to advocate for a utopian striving in queer life and respond to

a particular line of thought in queer theory. The ―anti-social thesis‖ in queer theory is a

16
perspective founded on the understanding that since LGBTQ people have been cast out of

the normative understanding of the heterosexual family and the reproduction of children

which sanctifies it, they should embrace their abject status rather than fighting for the

right to be included in a structure meant to exclude them (Bersani 1996; Edelman 2004).

The figure of the queer, in political discourse and popular culture, signifies selfishness,

frivolity, lack, and death, for instance finding its manifestation in the well-dressed, villain

bachelors of Hitchcock films. Social life, with continual gesturing toward a future ―for

the children‖ is guided (or ―terrorized‖ in Edelman‘s terms) by the mandate of

reproductive futurism from which the queer is, by lack of a reproductive sexuality and by

his very queerness, excluded. But, in this, Edelman sees an opportunity:

Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the

queer, we might, as I argue, do better to consider accepting and even embracing

it…Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we‘re collectively

terrorized. (Edelman 2003: 29)

Instead of taking offense to hostile characterizations of queer life, like that queers are too

focused on sex and not invested in a collective future, Edelman wants us to embrace

them. Edelman advocates giving up the ghost of liberal, rights-based political activism

because the future in which we are all equal is a future without queers in it. Queers stand

outside the social order guided by hetero-reproduction.

The fear of queer assimilation underlies many critiques of the gay family and has

coalesced in the term ―homonormativity.‖ Lisa Duggan (2003: 179) defined

homonormativity as,

17
 a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and

institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a

demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored

in domesticity and consumption.

Though it is unclear that participating in the institution of the family in and of itself

contributes to this slide into homonormativity (as queer people were affiliating in families

in the 1970s, the heyday of radical queer politics, as they do today), the literature on

homonormativity has crystallized around the queer critique of gay marriage. One of the

most convincing lines of reasoning in this critique asserts that in addition to being an

exclusionary and privileged relational form, access to marriage would also produce ―good

gays‖: those who do not question State policies that perpetuate inequalities (Warner

1999; Halberstam 2012) A chief consequence of some gays—namely White, gender-

conforming, middle-class gays and lesbians who practice monogamy and have full

citizenship rights—being given a place at the proverbial table is the reinforced exclusion

of the poor, people of color, trans and genderqueer people, the polyamorous, the

undocumented, and those practicing any form of sexual kink that might challenge the

sanctity of marriage or its purpose as an institution bestowing rights and privileges to a

particular relationship between adults. Ergo, gays and lesbians uniting for access to

marriage reproduce the exact consequence, civil exclusion, which they are presumably

fighting against. While expansions of civil rights-based protections, including marriage,

are improving the lives of ―good gays‖ who practice homonormativity, queers‘ lives

remain invalid, despised, and marginalized.

18
 But, before we declare the end of queerness, killed by the twin evils of

domesticity and consumption, Muñoz reminds us, ―Queerness is not yet here.‖ For

Muñoz, queerness is always on the horizon, something we are striving for by imagining

what queer life could be. He claims that relationality, and not anti-socialism, is a key

component of queerness primarily because queerness itself only exists in the future and

necessitates communion—between people and between generations—in order to be

realized. Muñoz offers a ruinous critique which undermines the premises of both

Edelman and Bersani‘s anti-relational arguments,

Yet I nonetheless contend that most of the work with which I disagree under the

provisional title of ―antirelational thesis‖ moves to imagine an escape or

denouncement of relationality as first and foremost a distancing of queerness from

what some theorists seem to think of as the contamination of race, gender, or

other particularities that taint the purity of sexuality as a singular trope of

difference. In other words, antirelational approaches to queer theory are

romances of the negative, wishful thinking, and investments in deferring various

dreams of difference. (Muñoz 2009: 11)

Essentially, Muñoz suggests antirelational arguments come from the presumption of a

White and masculine gay subject free of any other ―difference‖ beyond sexuality.

Edelman and Bersani see no need for collective action because they imagine all queers

are middle-class, White men with no sources of oppression other than that based on their

sexualities. Assuming this identity, freed from any commitment to a community or

interdependence with subjugated others, meant that to embrace the ―death drive‖ would

cost them nothing but themselves. Similarly, Halberstam notes that in Edelman‘s rant

19
against reproduction, ―woman becomes the site of the unqueer‖ in his analysis

(Halberstam 2011: 118). Women, by the very fact of their birthing potential (not to

mention the cultural associations of their care giving) come off as inherently more

heteronormative and invested in reproductive futurism. Although Muñoz sidesteps a

discussion of reproduction or childrearing per se, he does say, ―I respond to Edelman‘s

assertion that the future is the province of the [C]hild and therefore not for queers by

arguing that queerness is primarily about futurity and hope‖ (Muñoz 2009: 11).

The act of visualizing a utopian future is itself an act of resistance and a key part

of any politics dedicated to social change. But, Muñoz doesn‘t just want us to think

utopia, or dream utopia, but to feel utopia. It is easy to feel cynical, what is more difficult

is to put one‘s emotions and energies behind realizing alternatives to how things are

already lived. Muñoz quotes Oscar Wilde when he says, ―A map of the world that does

not include utopia is not worth glancing at.‖ Similarly, to Muñoz, a social theory that

does not include the possibility of utopia is not worth considering. If queerness lies on the

fringes of legality, morality, respectability, and normativity, let it also lie on the fringes of

possibility, futurity, and the utopian. We haven‘t realized utopia, just as we haven‘t

realized queerness. What we can do is strive for utopia in the future and look for

glimpses of utopia in the past and present.

Real Queer Utopias

I argue that all three values identified by Wright (2013): democracy, equality, and

sustainability, though defined differently to suit the context, are also threatened by the

hegemonic family form of the nuclear family while queer families have developed

20
practices that enact those values. In the context of the family, I propose that this may

lead to greater human flourishing insofar as all families embraced queer practices. I also

argue that, although it is, of course, possible for straight families to engage in queer

parenting practices, or construct non-normative families, these practices are part of the

fabric of queer family life. Queer families living outside the confines of the traditional

family challenge it in three major ways. Queer families are making the family more

democratic through a fluidity of family structure, or who is included in the family. They

are undermining the gendered divisions of labor that are endemic to the traditional family

by allowing for (at least the possibility of) a fluidity of roles, untethered to particular

genders, and a greater chance at equity, if not equality, in the roles and practices of the

family. Finally, queer families recognize that family sustainability requires openness to

family dynamism and evolution over time; queer temporalities acknowledge that things

do not always proceed as planned and that to live queerly is to live with uncertainty and

be haunted by history. While these fluidities are often borne out of necessity and in

response to institutional barriers, they also comprise queer family values which dovetail

with the uniqueness of queer history and innovation.

The celebratory mode with which I write could easily lead to the dark territory of

―queer exceptionalism‖ in which one claims LGBTQ people are free from the racism,

sexism, ageism, and other inequalities. This is clearly not the case, and I hope to present

examples in which all the good intentions of individuals are no match for the stultifying

power of structures of inequality: in which adopted parents employ racism, sexism, and

classism while referencing their own child‘s birth parents; co-parenting sperm donors are

sometimes transphobic even when conceiving a child with a trans person; a general

21
privileging of marriage over other forms of partnering; instances of emotional and

physical intimate partner violence; and an exclusionary maintenance of boundaries

around families that reinforce inequalities among queer people. What I do want to focus

on is not the inherent superiority of queer people and queer families, but of the

possibilities they present for living differently within the context of circumstances and

spaces that are far from ideal.

Queer Structures. In Families We Choose Kath Weston (1991) first articulated a

model of ―gay kinship.‖ Weston observed that when gay and lesbian people ―came out‖

to their families of origin and were met by either acceptance or rejection, the idea of

choice was introduced into who is considered a family member. In many cases, children

were disavowed by their parents and other family members—thrown out of the house, cut

out of the will, disinvited to family gatherings, and unable to access emotional support.

Precisely because acceptance was not obvious, it was necessary for families of origin to

declare their support and continued involvement with their gay family member.

Communities of friends and lovers, those for whom the revelation of homosexual desires

was a point of commonality rather than a reason to abandon all ties, took on a

significance greater than Weston saw among heterosexuals. Especially in the time period

in which she wrote, the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, communities of care were

essential for the very survival of gay people as well as for the palliative care that many

needed when their lives were cut short.

Some terminology has changed since Weston wrote her book, published over a

quarter-century ago, most fundamentally expanding the gender and sexual minority

alphabet beyond G and L to include bisexual, trans, queer, questioning, asexual, and other

22
identities. Weston‘s influence has remained, but in the literature over time her concept of

―gay kinship‖ has morphed into ―queer kinship.‖ One aspect of ―queer kinship‖ is the

validation of chosen family relations. For although terminology has changed, the need for

community for LGBTQ people beyond the structure of the Standard North American

Family has remained. The Standard North American Family (or, SNAF) is shorthand for

the series of assumptions embedded in the idealized ―nuclear‖ family, including that this

family is headed by two adults, one man and one woman, who live together in legal

matrimony with their biogenetic (or, ―blood‖) children conceived through sexual

intercourse (Smith 1993). The archetypal SNAF is white, middle-classed, able-bodied,

and has a breadwinner/homemaker division of labor. It is a closed unit with no room for

non-monogamy or divorce. That these families have been in the minority even among

straight couples since the mid-20th Century has seemed to have no bearing on the SNAF‘s

continued ideological power. The SNAF, of course, leaves out all sorts of possible

arrangements, including single parents, adopted children, a family without children, live-

in friends and relatives, etc. Though not all hetero families are like this, this is the rod

against which they are all measured.

Thus, non-normative family structures are not unique to the LGBTQ community.

The literature on ―extended kinship‖ highlights the necessary emotional and financial

interdependence in economically disadvantaged communities, and particularly for

immigrant families and families of color for whom fewer safety nets exist. LGBTQ

people, even those who are wealthy enough to conceive or adopt children in any way they

want (surrogacy, private adoption, and IVF all requiring quite a bit of money), are outside

the privileged territory of the SNAF. Because of the necessity of introducing additional

23
people (or at least their donated gametes) to create or adopt children, there is no

possibility of achieving the SNAF ideal. While medical science is currently working on a

way to splice sperm and eggs in order to ensure a biological connection for two same-sex

parents, there will need to be an accompanying egg or sperm. On top of that, of course, is

that children borne of queer parents are seldom conceived in romantic intercourse. For

queer couples looking to parent, heteronormativity by way of the SNAF may be a goal to

approximate, but, without some truly hard to conceive bounds in biological science, it

will never be a reality. For religious conservatives, who would deny all queer people

access to parenthood, there is no difference between even a heteronormative queer family

and a radically non-normative one.

In Weston‘s study, individual and collective histories of breaking ties with

families of origin and built-in biological barriers to reproduction were the foundations

upon which queer families were built. That the severance of ties with families of origin

seems less and less a hallmark of queer life creates a potential quandary: the more

LGBTQ people are accepted, the less likely they are to need chosen family. Or, perhaps

LGBTQ people with children, grasping the thread of acceptance, agree to alter their

behavior to maintain relationships with their families of origin. This is absolutely a

temptation and not one we should be unsympathetic to. Mignon Moore emphasizes in

Invisible Families (2011) that being ―radical‖ is relative. For a Christian, Church-going

Black American family, inviting their daughter‘s wife to Easter dinner might be a huge

deal, and a willingness to participate in the potentially awkward situation where they

don‘t feel entirely welcome, may be a sacrifice worth making for the meaning it brings.

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 For the queer families I talked to, being excluded from the definition of nuclear or

normative family was not seen as a failure, or second-best, or a cross to bear. They are

creating families the way they want—often a mixture of blood, legal, and chosen family

ties. The understandings these families developed within themselves, however, didn‘t

always translate to the legal system, which has real consequences for those families.

Many relationships exist outside clear legal recognition, like that between a child and her

father via sperm donation who signed away his rights, or a child and the unmarried

partner of her birth mother. If the adults do happen to violate each others‘ trust, and need

to take their dispute to court, there is little recourse for the sperm donor or the ―other

mother.‖ They are vulnerable—to each other and to the State. Family members have to

rely on trust and mutual understandings of where everyone stands when there is no

language for these connections and, even less, recognition in the law. This ideal, in

practice, not infrequently meets legal challenges that can reaffirm the very hierarchy of

relationships the parents intended to circumvent. From involved egg and sperm donors, to

co-parenting gay and lesbian couples, to a live-in friend and third parent, there are

innumerable ways in which queer people are challenging the boundaries of who is

considered a ―family member.‖ They needn‘t share a home or bloodline, be romantically

involved or legally obligated to each other, but agree that they are family in spite of those

more normative family definitions. Butterfield and Padavic (2014) remind us that even

when families attempt to innovate, they not only run into structural and institutional

barriers, they also draw upon examples in the broader culture that inadvertently invite

inequality among family members. That the structures of queer families are different does

not, as some suggest, necessarily mean they are radical or that their very existence

25
challenges the heterofamily and upends power dynamics (Sullivan 2004). It does

however, create an opening—a crack in the sidewalk—where something unexpected may

grow.

Queer Roles and Practices. Once LGBTQ people do have children, or when

straight people with children transition to a different gender, come out as gay, or

otherwise become queer in way that impacts irrevocably the family they once had, the

normatively gendered scripts of ―mother‖ and ―father‖ are on unsteady ground. Who does

what in the divisions of household and caretaking labor and the relation of those actions

to family titles is unclear. When is a known sperm donor also a father: Never? At the

point of conception? When he spends enough time with the child playing? When he

contributes enough resources? When the child starts to think of him that way? When he

takes the title himself? Can a donor not be a father, but his parents still be grandparents?

For all that is made in popular culture about the difference between a ―man who

gets someone pregnant‖ and a ―father,‖ in straight culture, the two are, at least

normatively, the same. He can be a bad father, a ―deadbeat dad,‖ for not being around or

contributing enough, but the title remains attributed to the sperm provider. In queer

families, this is not so. From the outset, there may be three fathers, or no fathers. A father

may appear on the scene. A mother might become a father. A father might become a

woman. In families of choice, the choice must be affirmed and reaffirmed. When queer

families are acting in institutions, legal, medical, and educational, those choices become

quite limited.

The norms and practices of parenting themselves are challenged in queer families.

I have seen children on vegan diets, toddlers instructed to ―check in with themselves‖

26
when they are acting out, and babies being fed back and forth between a breastfeeding

woman and her transgender, breastfeeding husband. Almost none of this is distinctive to

queer families; all of it is, however, more often found there. As they navigate a world not

created with them in mind, queer families must employ a combination of ―normative

resistance‖ and ―inventive pragmatism‖ (Pfeffer 2013). Queer parents adapt and,

sometimes, resist the norms of parenting in many ways: by choosing not to marry; not

being monogamous (though the chief determiner of one‘s ability to have sexual

relationships outside the home may not be fidelity, but time); providing a range of toys,

clothing, and career options for their children, unrestricted by their genders; shielding

children from marriage and romantic love, but teaching them about social justice.

Inventive pragmatism comes out in instances when parents do things like exploit a

loophole to get both their names on a birth certificate, pretend to be partnered to a sperm

donor to qualify for fertility treatment, or allow their children to call them ―Dad‖ after

they transition from male to female.

Hundreds of studies later, we know that LGBTQ parents, all else being equal,

have no negative effects on their children‘s happiness or development. If anything,

researchers, under the assumption that any found difference between gay and straight

parents was a negative, have been motivated to bury findings of difference, even when

those differences may be positive ones (Stacey and Biblarz 2001). In a meta-review and

close look at the quantitative findings, Stacey and Biblarz found lesbian and gay parents

in these studies were more open to their children‘s gender non-normativity. The children

of gay and lesbian parents were more open to exploring non-hetero sexualities themselves

(even though they were statistically no more likely to identify as LGBTQ as adults) and,

27
overall, believed less strongly in gender norms, and the daughters of LGBTQ parents had

much broader ideas of their eventual career paths and did not see themselves as confined

to gender-typical options.

Equality is a goal and a value among queer parents. Studies, particularly of

lesbian co-parents (Sullivan 2004; Dunne 2000), but also gay parents (Carrington 1999;

Lewin 2009), find that same-sex couples attempt to live more equitably and share

household labors and childrearing. In practice though, differences in individual incomes

(Lewin 2009) or biological closeness (Butterfield and Padavic 2014; Moore 2011) do

reinscribe hierarchy into these relationships. For instance, Moore finds that in the case of

Black, lesbian stepmothers, the biological mothers maintain much more control over

childrearing as a means of differentiating their relationships from the relationships of

their children to this ―other mother.‖ Butterfield and Padavic (2014) find the same even

when the couple conceived a child together, if the non-biological mother‘s relationship is

potentially legally precarious. Holding these unequal statuses in the relationship put

couples at a greater risk of breaking up (Biblarz and Savci 2010). But, family is nothing if

not dynamic and we shouldn‘t expect queer people and their relationships to remain static

and perfect. Though the utopian is often conflated with perfection and statis—our

problems are solved!—real utopia is a shifting terrain that requires reevaluation. While

finding their footing, queer families will engage in both the radical and the traditional, the

revolutionary and the normative. These families are living things, flawed like all human

inventions are. The goal itself, though—a different way of doing family so that more

people can thrive and be included—is worth pursuing even in spite of the stumbling

blocks.

28
 Queer Temporalities. Queer families develop in ―queer time‖ (Halberstam

2005). Queer time, or queer temporality, differs from ―straight time‖ in that queer

people‘s markers of development and adulthood exist on a separate track. Whereas

straight time is marked with events like getting married, having children, and building a

career, such that a straight person who does not do those things is considered less of a

―grown up‖ than their peers, queer time might be marked by coming out or transitioning

or existing in a prolonged stage of ―temporal drag‖ (Freeman 2010). Marriage and

children may also come as stages in the life of a queer person, though these tend to

happen later than in straight time and their absence does not lock the queer person in a

holding pattern of ―becoming.‖ Queer people were once defined as forever

underdeveloped both by Freudians (having not made it through all stages of psychosexual

development) and the general public—witness the spinster aunt who lived with her

―friend‖ and was thought to be forever a virgin. By engaging in domestic life, especially

by procreating, queer people invite in a new sense of time that includes geneology,

heredity, and legacy. Of all institutional forms, The Family is the most intimately bound

up with time. Families begin, change, grow, and die like the people in them.

Queer people have a unique relationship to time through the ever-present shadow

of queer history, the collective specter of death and dying, and experiences of waiting and

uncertainty. Because of the enormous impact of HIV/AIDS on the queer community,

historically, death has also come faster for queer people. Weston makes much of this in

Families We Choose as a major reason why chosen families are necessary, particularly

for gay men. In helping their peers die with dignity, or dying themselves, queer people

during the HIV/AIDS crisis in the US, and after, became acutely aware of mortality and

29
the end of time itself. The specter of early death also hangs over trans people who are

forty times more likely to attempt suicide than their cisgender peers and more vulnerable

to homicide by simply being trans. It hangs over trans and gay youth whose rates of

attempted and completed suicides outpace other groups. To have community and support

is vital for LGBTQ people. So even as LGBTQ people gain rights and increasing

acceptance into the fabric of American society, we would do well not to forget the

lessons and lived experiences of the past as well as the daily realities for more vulnerable

members of the community: youth, people of color, low-income people, and those living

with HIV, to name a few.

The temporal has a particular significance for trans folks. Taking on a new

gendered identity may mean erasing or rewriting personal histories, having to go through

puberty a second time, and having to build families from scratch. I spoke with people

who transitioned genders before having kids, and those who transitioned after having

kids. All of the parents I happened to talk to who transitioned after having kids were

transwomen, and the trans people I talked to who transitioned before having kids were

transmen and genderqueer people assigned female at birth. In a cross-national study with

1,500 trans people, researchers found there was a significant difference in the time people

came out; if they came out as women, the median age this happened was between the

ages of 30-39 while if they came out as men, the median age was 20-29 (Beemyn and

Rankin 2011). This timing was such that nearly all trans people in my study identified as

―dads‖ either because they already were ―dads‖ when they transitioned (and continued to

identify that way), or they became dads because they had already transitioned before

30
having kids. Thus, temporality may affect families in different ways depending on a

parent‘s gender.

Becoming a queer parent can also take quite a bit of waiting. Waiting to be

―ready,‖ waiting to be chosen by a birth mother in the case of adoption, waiting until laws

change, tracking fertility and waiting to inseminate, waiting to be called upon to donate

sperm, or until they‘ve undergone enough shots to prompt egg retrieval, waiting to have

the funds together to engage in any of these practices. A birth mother can decide she

wants to keep her child. The expensive IVF treatment may not work. A biological child‘s

legal parents can cut a chosen family member out at any time. These experiences demand

adaptability and flexibility from people. A feeling of nervous uncertainty is not a new one

for LGBTQ people—they experience it every day walking into convenience stores, riding

the subway, ordering birthday cakes, going to work, accompanying their kids to the park.

All these are opportunities to be questioned, looked at with malice, and denied entry.

They also feel it with every new non-queer person they meet, having to come out over

and over and, even when embraced, always wincing a minute just in case.

The pain and shame of queer life, and the specter of death, are what lead us to

alternate ways of being and living in the first place—an emphasis on friendship and

community versus the nuclear family, pursuing pleasure now versus sacrificing

immediate desire to achieve something in the future, loosening the vice grip of terror with

macabre humor and camp, and attempting to change the status quo versus just living with

its harms. Some find that ignoring the past in order to assimilate into a structure never

built with us in mind, like the nuclear family, is too high a price to pay. Some may also

31
understand that having to be welcomed in is a reminder that queer people can always be

pushed back out.

And so we take comfort in each other. For some people I talked to, they knew

their membership or position in a queer family was temporary—the result of

happenstance, a living situation, or timing. When talking about the children that were

―theirs,‖ sperm donors and elective fathers (those who lived with a family and became

family members and self-identified parents), for instance, told me about the kids they

have now, and also the ―real‖ kids or their ―own‖ kids that would come later. They say

both ―this is my child‖ and ―when I have my own kids‖ and there is no contradiction for

them. They live simultaneously in two family timelines, the one they have now and the

one they will have later. I also talked to lesbian step mothers who were ―step mothers‖ to

each other‘s children who have both their kids and their own kids. Talking in this way

acknowledges both the structural realities and the queerness of their situations.

Whether queer people claim they were ―born this way‖ or are ―just like you,‖ or

intentionally rebelling against societal norms, the reality is that uniqueness of queer life

cannot be assimilated cleanly into US society. From ―alt-right‖ nationalists to ―family

values‖ Christians, who insist acceptance of LGBTQ people impinges upon their own

liberties, there are far too many people invested in never having that happen. Queer

critics of marriage and family who fear assimilation will lead to the death of queer

culture, though their fears are absolutely warranted, are imagining a situation, perhaps

many people‘s idea of utopia, which will never come to pass. What we can have though,

are real utopias in families and communities wherein queer identity is an area of bonding

rather than a point of contention. Facilitating queer families‘ ability to enact the lives and

32
bonds they choose, rather than force them to contort to fit into the well-worn grooves of

the heteronormative family.

Methods and Overview

My entry-point for this study was personal. As both an adoptee and a queer

person, my ideas of family cannot be taken for granted. There is no one in my life that I

share a biological connection with, so for me family has always been about choice,

affiliation, and belonging. I do not know what it is like to look at someone and recognize

my own face, filling out family medical history forms is a breeze, and my parents are my

parents because I say they are. Part of this book is based on autoethnographic data, of my

own chosen family, but all of it is informed by my experience. That said, I have tried to

remain impartial and admit when my participants have done something I disagree with.

For the most part though I assume my subjects are the experts of their own lives and

neither attempted to deceive nor impress me with false claims. I have also tried very hard

not to ―sociologize‖ or deconstruct them and their experiences into oblivion. It is much

easier to criticize people for their faults than to see them as imperfect and striving for

something different because the status quo has not served them thus far.

The four family case studies that make up the core of this text are selected from a

sample of semi-structured interviews with 50 LGBTQ adults in families with children

conducted between 2010 and 2015. I have chosen them for the breadth of family types

they illustrate and because, for each of them, I have been able to combine the narratives

of multiple family members to give a fuller picture of family life from multiple points of

entry. When looking for participants, my definition of a ―queer parent‖ was quite

33
generous in order to capture the ways in which queer people were parenting outside the

State or normative definitions. To consider oneself a parent to a child does not require

legal custody, biological relatedness, nor shared housing, though many of the people I

talked to had one or more of these qualities. I also found that to be a parent does not

require everyone in the family to agree one is a parent. A queer parenting status may

endure the test of time or not. One can also become a parent by forming a connection to a

child that deepens over time. Queer parenting structures vary: from chosen single parents

to a network of a dozen parents, step parents, biological donors, housemates, friends, and

non-monogamous partners.

LGBTQ interview subjects are still considered a ―hidden population,‖ but they are

much less hidden when the researcher is also a member of the population. My

participants came to me primarily through personal connections, friends and friends of

friends, but others I connected with through posting in Facebook groups, listservs,

bulletin boards, presenting at and attending LGTBQ conferences, and attending, flyering,

and volunteering at Provincetown Family Week in the summers of 2012-14. For the

thematic chapters, I draw upon the full sample to make points and connections among

people I see parenting on the margins of motherhood and fatherhood, as inhabiting ―queer

otherhoods‖: transwomen ―dads,‖ gestational fathers, known donors, and elective parents

with neither biological or legal connections to their children. The parents I interviewed

were predominantly located in either Western Massachusetts (19) or New York City (14),

but others were living in Minneapolis (4), Boston (3), Provincetown (3), Tampa (2),

Pittsburgh (2), San Francisco (2), and New Orleans (1). The slight majority of people in

my sample identified as women (26), while twenty identified as men and four as

34
genderqueer. Most of my subjects identified as cisgender (38) while twenty-four percent

identified as trans, including five transmen, three transwomen, and four non-binary

people.

Of my 50 participants, 41 identified as white, 3 as Black, 2 as Asian-American, 2

as Latino, and 2 as Middle Eastern/North African. This racial skew is due almost entirely

to convenience sampling methods. Since I am a white, genderqueer, overeducated person

my personal networks tend to reflect these identities. The sampling that went beyond my

networks happened at queer conferences and Family Week where the participants were

mostly middle-class and white. I regret that my sample is not more diverse. I think my

findings will necessarily reflect only a thin sliver of queer family life because of this

racial homogeneity which keeps me from seeing the many many varieties and approaches

to queer parenting and family formation that exist. Still, I was able to gather data from a

pool diverse in family forms, gender identity, and experiments with utopic striving. My

sample was never meant to be representative of the general population of queer parents

(the majority of whom are actually queer parents of color in the South), and the cases

presented here were chosen for their structural dissimilarities to the two-parent family

norms and their potential theoretical significance. A clear future direction would be to

consciously sample queer parents of color and poor parents; this would allow a researcher

to potentially tease apart two strands of sociological theory: that which focuses on the

extended networks of kin more common to working-class and poor people out of

necessity and of people of color through the importance of common community, and that

of queer people forming families of choice via a mixture of those two motivating factors.

35
 The four family case studies in Chapter 3 show there is no eponymous queer

parent. Though the cases represent five different family ―types,‖ this is not to suggest

there are only five types of queer parents or that these cases can be generalized to other

families of the same type. The family cases chosen also vary in their internal intersections

of race, class, gender, and age. Rather than produce composite narratives based on many

cases (Hochshield 1989), these chapters are composites of my interviews with multiple

family members, forming a triangulated and more complete picture of the family as a

whole. I chose this organization in order to honor the specific complexities in each case;

to take them out of context or significantly change the details of their experience would

risk my ability to adequately analyze them or draw conclusions with implications for

theory, which is the general goal of a case study approach (George and Bennett 2004).

When I present information I think is a product of one person‘s point of view or an

embellishment, I note this in my discussion. The words and experiences of the families

captured here reflect where they were in a certain point in time. Though many of the

contours of these families have changed since the interviews I conducted 2010-2014—

some have broken up, some have added new members, individuals have transitioned or

detransitioned—I limit my analysis to the data captured in the interviews and my

observations from fieldnotes at the time of study.

Chapter 4 draws upon data from the wider sample of interviews conducted in this

project. Each part is organized by a type of ―queer otherhood‖ or a variety of parenthood

that falls outside heteronormative definitions of gendered parenting. Here, I combine data

from several interviews with people with similar parenting experiences and draw broader

conclusions about how these parents challenge and expand our most fundamental ideas of

36
parenthood in ways that at once give insight into the mothering and fathering practices of

their hetero and cisgender counterparts and lay out paths for alternate ways of being. I

look at the transwomen in my study who still identify as ―dads‖—they are proud of their

roles as parents developed in the context of their lives before transitioning and so

continue accepting with this gendered signifier (Dad) of who they simultaneously are and

are no longer. However, it was through transitioning that they were able to form closer

bonds to children and become better parents. I also consider the collective experiences of

the gestational fathers in my study—those transmen and masculine of center genderqueer

people who carried and delivered their children. Through the experiences of these parents

we are able to see all the taken for granted ways parenting is gendered and how

disrupting these expectations has different consequences for binary versus non-binary

identified people and people of color. Known donors show us the power of biological

connection even outside of heterosexual family structures and the ways in which gender

power dynamics are undermined in some ways and reinscribed in others. Finally, elective

parents are those who lack biological or legal connection their children; they have chosen

to become parents free of both obligation and legal security, but reaffirm their connection

daily in the lives of their children.

Can real queer utopias be realized in the present? What are the conditions under

which they are either hampered or flourish? What we have now are chosen families in

which LGBTQ people pick and choose from among their biological/adoptive families of

origin, their friends-as-family bonds, and the people that come into their lives to facilitate

their becoming parents—sperm and egg donors, surrogates, the birth parents of their

fostered and adopted children, etc.—to create a family amalgam. Here I discuss the

37
negotiations of the realities of queer co-parenting, its failures and successes, and how

even with the best of intentions, queer families are not free of inequality, particularly

between and among genders. For people of any sexual orientation, family members are

born, die, blended in, and phased out over the course of a lifetime. For non-traditional

members of queer families (those without legal rights or biological connections), there is

a simultaneous struggle to stay part of their chosen families versus a desire to break away

and start ―their own‖ families.

These are not perfect arrangements. Within these families are unequal power

dynamics, different amounts of labor, different understandings of the same situations, and

instances where they sometimes show bias and bigotry. They are families composed of

flawed individuals. What they also are are attempts at doing family differently the results

of which will prove to benefit all families. When I started this project, it seemed

relatively conservative to study the domestic lives of queer people who decided to, for the

most part, get married and have babies. Now, the political context of the Trump

presidency and the ushering of archconservatives into the legislative process and the

courts that adjudicate those decisions, which are already curtailing and rolling back

LGBTQ people‘s rights under the banner of ―religious freedom,‖ clarifies the importance

of this work. These families are on the margins of an already marginalized group in an

America working to quash them. The people we are supposed to rely on to protect our

rights believe Christians in public office should be able to deny LGBTQ people services,

including medical and legal services, that LGBTQ people do not need equal protection

under the law when it comes to housing or employment, that transgender people,

particularly adolescents and those in the military, should be eliminated from these

38
institutions rather than changing those systems to accommodate them. Couldn‘t we all

use a little utopia?

39
 CHAPTER 3

CASE STUDIES IN QUEERING KINSHIP

My Three Dads: Michael, Huck, and Bayani

In Unhitched, Judith Stacey states, ―Gay men would seem to make unpromising

subjects for a study of family life. They lack the biological equipment, the social training,

and the conventional institutional and legal resources for forging families‖ (Stacey 2011:

15). Of course, they do form the ―postmodern families‖—those lacking clear norms and

departing in structure, content, and kind from traditional nuclear families—which have

served as a cornerstone of Stacey‘s sociological ouvre. Stacey argues that gay men have

not been prepared for family life in the ways women have. They face the twin family-

forming handicaps of a lack of training in feminine ritual (kin, domestic, and emotional

labors among others) and the inability to rely on women to compensate for them as

heterosexual men do. However, Stacey constructs this straw man in order to topple it by

arguing the gay men have also been uniquely adept at reconfiguring their approaches to

intimacies, negotiating polyamory and monogamy, and, more than straight folks or

lesbians, having intimate connections across class, race, and age. She finds that this

variety and fluidity promotes a ―rainbow kinship‖ of friends and lovers that benefits

structurally disempowered men in ways heterosexual women seldom experience in their

intimate relationships with men. Thus, gay men are hardly incompatible with family

connection. The case explored in this chapter is that of a multi-racial and class diverse

household of three men and their young son. Michael and Huck are a married, white, gay

couple with careers in the competitive and well-compensated world of theater in New

York City: one in set-design and the other in accounting. They share their home with

40
Bayani, a second-generation Filipino-American who works for a religious non-profit. The

three have lived together since before their son, Gus, was born. When they were shopping

for their downtown Brooklyn brownstone, Michael and Huck had it in mind that they

wanted Bayani to live with them and they wanted space to bring children into their family

as well. They talk lovingly about their unconventional home, how they share labor and

avoid conflict. Though Michael and Huck are Gus‘s legal parents, they consider Bayani,

and he considers himself, to be a third dad in the house. Bayani sometimes struggles with

his position as the ―outsider‖ in Michael and Huck‘s family and he eventually sees

himself moving out and starting a family of ―his own.‖ They are assisted in

accomplishing the tasks of parenting by the ghostly presences of women: Gus‘s birth

mother, their part-time nanny, and a housekeeper. I begin with Michael and Huck‘s path

to (legal) parenthood and then discuss Bayani‘s role and some potential complications.

This case shows that some utopian family situations are facilitated by conventionality in

other areas.

Michael and Huck‟s Path to Parenthood

Michael and Huck had stopped waiting by the phone for a birth mother to pick

them. The two had recently moved from a Manhattan condo to a Brooklyn walk-up to

have more room for kids, but it didn‘t look like the kids were coming any time soon.

They called their lawyer and said they wanted to try again in six months; by then maybe

their luck would change. They had been chosen three times, by three women, and each

time the woman had a change of heart. Rather than go through an agency, with a

potentially long waiting period until they would be considered even potential parents,

41
Michael and Huck struck out on their own convinced they could cut the time by placing

ads all over the country, asking if any pregnant woman considering adoption would

choose them to adopt her baby. As two white, upper middle-class, gender-conforming,

fully-employed citizens, they may have actually had better luck at an adoption agency

than a similarly-positioned heterosexual couple. There is some evidence to suggest gay

couples stand out to and are even preferred by birth mothers, inundated with similar

vacation pictures and generic-sounding profiles from dozens of heterosexual couples.

Some also like the idea of adopting out to gay couples since they can remain a child‘s

―only mother.‖

A friend recommended the alternate, less predictable, and highly stressful path of

hiring a private lawyer to advise them as they sought to adopt independently.

Traditionally, gay couples would hire these lawyers because adoption agencies have

biases which benefit married, Christian, heterosexual couples. Now, gay couples hire

private lawyers to keep up with the changing field of gay rights in all states and the

effects on family formation. The independent, non-agency path offers both more control

of and vulnerability to the adoption process, but is banned in some states since the

practice is less regulated. For instance, this route does not require parents go through any

training or home studies before they adopt. In addition to finalizing transfers of

parentage, lawyers offer a particular set of services to couples centered on brokering

agreements for payment (e.g., compensation for medical expenses) and negotiating

visitation or the frequency of updates sent to birth parents.

Michael and Huck‘s lawyer posted ads in newspapers in five states. The first

response they got was via text message. The women were instructed in the ad to dial an

42
800 number, but somehow this person got a hold of Michael‘s cell number and texted

him. Michael called her back anyway and they spoke briefly and planned to have another

call soon. Before Michael called her again, he Googled her, found a mug shot, and

promptly withdrew his interest. But the ad plan worked, kind of; Michael sometimes felt

like a call-center worker. He‘s the first to admit that Huck is far more charming and

personable than him, especially on the phone, but, during a particularly busy time at

Huck‘s work, a theatrical talent agency, the calls kept coming in and Michael, channeling

his best Huck impersonation, fielded them all. At one point, like hopeful job applicants

with multiple interviews, Huck and Michael thought they might be able to choose. But,

like many hopeful job applicants with multiple interviews, they nervously took calls, and,

one by one, women regrettably informed them they had gone with someone else, or no

one at all.

Just as they were giving up hope, one of those women called back saying she had

reconsidered. Before they got too excited, they flew out to Ohio to meet Eileen, the birth

mother, in person. She was a tall white woman with dirty blonde hair, and immensely

pregnant. She had set up an OB/GYN appointment for their visit, so they could see a

sonogram of their future son. While they held hands, tears welling up and overflowing

their eyes, staring at the fuzzy, TV-static shape of their son, Eileen began contractions

two weeks early. Of course, since they were only planning a short visit, Michael and

Huck were completely unprepared to meet their baby on the same day they met his birth

mother, but that‘s what happened. They had to call their relatives, close friends, and co-

workers to say, ―We finally found a birth mother! Oh, and she‘s giving birth today!‖

Huck‘s parents immediately got in the car and drove the three hours it took to meet them

43
at the hospital. They met Eileen, her mother, her two-year-old son, and, later that same

day, they all met Gus.

Michael and Huck were both in the delivery room, but only Huck got to cut the

umbilical cord. It was the first time they ran up against the assumption that their child

would have only one father. The nurse offered, and they just had to make a snap decision.

But, hours after he was born, Eileen said she needed time to think. Transfer of custody

papers unsigned, Michael said they ―just stopped breathing.‖ At first, they all waited—

birth mother, her mother, two would-be dads, and two would-be grandparents—in the

same hospital room. The nursing staff, aware of the painfully awkward situation,

arranged for another room. The baby initially went with Michael and Huck, but, all night,

Gus traveled back and forth between the rooms because Eileen wanted to see him. The

men couldn‘t sleep at all that night, expecting Eileen to change her mind. But, she didn‘t.

By the morning, Eileen had signed the papers, went to court via conference call, and

irrevocably gave up her rights to Gus. Eileen was discharged and she and her mother

hosted a pizza party for Gus and his new family that night.

But, missing from this celebration was Bayani, Michael and Huck‘s housemate,

best friend, and shared best man. He‘d stood by them through the whole process: the

excitements, the fall-outs, the tough choices. When Michael and Huck drove home, they

drove home to him. They arrived at two in the morning, and Bayani had waited up for

them. He‘d set up the crib himself. Last-minute as it all was, they weren‘t nearly prepared

to bring a baby home already. But, they were figuring it all out together.

Everything happened so quickly that Eileen only got to negotiate the terms of the

adoption after the birth. The new dads went home with their crying, pooping, sleeping

44
bundle of joy and were immediately involved in ―money negotiations.‖ They explained to

me that they didn‘t want to ―buy a baby,‖ but they could give Eileen money for her

medical expenses, ―which she was really pushing.‖ In Michael‘s description of Eileen,

she is smart, funny, and makes ―poor decisions with men.‖ He rationalized her choice to

relinquish her rights to Gus for monetary reasons: ―So she [already] had a kid, she could

barely take care of him; she knew she couldn‘t take care of a second kid.‖ But Michael

prickled at the thought of actually paying her and felt she was being ―pushy‖ by asking.

They were doing her a favor, taking this child off her hands.

―You can‘t buy a baby‖ is a refrain of many adopting parents, meant to distance

themselves from the transactional nature of bringing someone else‘s child home. It also

makes it OK to have that transaction be one-sided. When money and intimacy get too

close together, we become uncomfortable. The suggestion that love, or sex, or family

connections can be ―bought‖ seemingly (and ironically) cheapens them. The suggestion

that an adoptive couple has purchased a baby is especially threatening as it begs the

question, ―from whom?‖ Looking too hard at the conditions, principally poverty, that

motivate someone to put their child up for adoption mars the otherwise oversimplified

narrative of destiny and joy. The idea of giving Eileen compensation also suggests that

Gus is, in fact, not priceless, but part of an adoption economy which moves children from

poor homes (mostly of color) to well-off ones (very often white). The position of LGBTQ

people in this economy has shifted over time. There are now more agencies that cater to

gay and lesbian couples and singles looking to adopt, but there are also constant culture

wars threatening to become policy and restrict queer people‘s ability to parent. The fear

45
conservative people have, about the degradation of the ―American family‖ (read: straight,

white, and wealthy) is an invention, but the multiplicity of family experiments is real.

About a year later, Eileen was pregnant again. She asked Michael and Huck if

they wanted to adopt Gus‘s sibling. They would be full siblings since Gus‘s birth dad was

back in her life. It seemed a little odd how casual she was about it. A friend of theirs, a

self-proclaimed medium told them she had a feeling Eileen was getting pregnant ―for the

money.‖ Considering how little she received from the last adoption, this seems unlikely,

but, I suppose, possible. Deciding whether to also adopt their son‘s sibling was pretty

agonizing. They weren‘t planning on another child, but they felt inherently invested in

Gus‘s ―blood‖ kin, and saying ―no‖ felt like betraying Gus and abandoning his brother or

sister. On the other hand, Huck said, they saw the pregnancy as an outcome of Eileen

―not making smart choices for herself.‖ Eileen‘s mother called them and said she was

―terribly disappointed‖ in her daughter, but she expressed wanting her grandchildren

under the same roof as well. They tentatively agreed to adopt. Eileen was about four

months pregnant and would sometimes call randomly and ask for small sums of money,

and they gave them to her. Then, the birth father called. He felt he was owed some

compensation as well as this would also be his child and he had a claim to custody.

Michael says he requested either $500 or $1000 to be ―bought off,‖ Michael couldn‘t

remember. The men could easily afford that sum, but the sense that they were being taken

advantage of grew and they pulled out. Eileen called and texted them for weeks

afterward, but they stopped communicating with her. What began as an open adoption,

with promises to send regular pictures and updates, to talk to her on the phone, and even

take calls from her mother and other family, shut down. From then on, Huck and Michael

46
vowed to only follow the adoption agreement to the letter, sending annual updates until

Gus turned four, and that was it.

But, just because Gus would not have much of a relationship with his birth mother

didn‘t mean Huck and Michael were the only parental figures in his life. They adopted

Gus in the context of living in the same house as Bayani—their long-time friend,

confidant, chosen family member, shared best man, and Gus‘s godfather—with the

knowledge that he would be a daily part of Gus‘s life. Gus has uncles, but they are not

nearly as involved as Bayani. In fact, the three men agree that they are raising Gus

together, Bayani serving as the third dad, even though on the cover of their book for birth

mothers Bayani was literally out of the picture. The triad is open about and proud of their

arrangement to most people: friends, relatives, and relative strangers like me. It‘s a family

arrangement they all agree works for them, though it can be hard for some to understand.

This set-up, unlike an extended kin network based in need, was chosen. Michael

and Huck are both fully-employed and doing well enough to own their own brownstone

in Brooklyn. They are married, monogamous, gender-normative, and only somewhat

politically-minded white men. Huck stays home half the day with Gus, and for the other

half of the day, they have a regular nanny. They are perfect candidates for the

embodiment of homonormativity. But, and with almost no self-congratulation, they are

choosing to live in a queer family form, sharing their home and childcare with Bayani, a

Filipino-American gay man who is also financially capable of living on his own. Before

they found the house, and they all looked together. Though Michael and Huck have the

mortgage and Bayani rents from them, Bayani would regularly spend the night on their

couch in their Chelsea apartment. Recounting what Michael or Huck once said and how

47
they all decided to live together, Bayani says, ―They were like, ‗You basically kind of

live here,‘ so…[laughs] so they were kind of used to seeing my face in the morning,

so…yeah.‖ They were looking for more space for their family, the one they were starting

and the one they had already.

In all my time visiting Brooklyn, over ten years, I had never met anyone who

actually owned a brownstone. I had no idea I was only two-degrees separated from the

upper echelon of Gay Brooklyn, having been introduced by a mutual friend. I got off the

train at Jay St-Metrotech, walked two blocks away from the bustle of discount sporting

goods stores and clothing outlets I associate with downtown Brooklyn, and ended up on a

tree-lined street. I should have been tipped off when the address they gave me did not

include an apartment number, but I came to a stop in front of an imposing set of stairs. I

climbed, rang the doorbell, and was greeted by Michael, a white, thin, buttoned-up,

handsome man, who invited me into their front room—he actually called it ―the parlor.‖

He seemed wary of me, and we shared a stiff handshake and clipped introduction.

I sat on the edge of an overstuffed, light blue couch, my back to the requisite bay

windows I have seen in all Brooklyn brownstones (though, until this point all my

referents had been broken up into apartments) as he grabbed me a glass of ice water. Just

then, Huck came down from checking on Gus, their 18-month-old son, all smiles and

charm. Huck has the relaxed handsomeness of someone so well-aware of his

attractiveness he became bored of it long ago and now attempts to pass as a mere mortal.

He has an athletic build, I would learn, from his years playing hockey in the small, snowy

town in Indiana where he grew up. He wore a relaxed, plaid shirt with an open collar and

rolled sleeves which came off as more casual in contrast to Michael‘s multi-colored,

48
striped polo shirt buttoned almost all the way up. They are the kind of gay men who don‘t

―seem gay‖ to straight co-workers and take their sexuality for granted most of the time.

Straight women regularly had crushes on them. Huck even ended up on a Buzzfeed list of

hot guys reading books on the subway.

The two men took their seats upon stylish a club chair and rocker, at conscious

diagonals, across from me. The seats were a lot like the men themselves: modern,

coordinated, but definitely not matching. The chairs were situated about ten feet away

giving me the distinct impression that they were interviewing me and not the opposite. I

also noticed that Michael had laid down a coaster on the coffee table, under my drink,

and as I looked up from it I finally took in how immaculate the place looked. There were

no toys or board books scattered about, and the decor was certainly not centered around

baby supplies like an activity chair or play mat as I had seen in other homes. They had so

much control of the space they even had a single, decorative toy among all the photos on

the mantle: a train piece in the shape of the letter G, for Gus. All other toys, like the baby

himself, were completely out of sight.

Michael and Huck‘s path to parenthood began on their first ―serious‖ date, which

was actually only their second time hanging out together. I take the designation of

―serious date‖ to mean that this was the first time Huck slept over at Michael‘s place,

because he was still there the next day. The date lasted into the following evening when

Michael had to attend a board meeting for his condo association. Meanwhile, Huck

stayed behind and watched episodes of Nip/Tuck while sipping on gin and tonics. This

was their relationship in a nutshell—Oscar and Felix, the straight man and the comic

relief, the one who goes to meetings on the weekend and the one who feels comfortable

49
alone in anyone‘s home. As Michael puts it, ―[I am a] perfectly fine lovely person, but

[Huck] comes off much warmer right away.‖ But, of course, this is too simple a story to

tell. While Michael was at his meeting, Huck prepared, in his head, a short list of serious

questions, the answers to which would determine either their ability to continue dating

seriously, or the necessity of downshifting back to a more casual relationship. This is how

Michael tells it:

And when I came back he said he had three questions, because he was perfectly

prepared to just have fun and see where the relationship went but it wasn‘t going

to get serious unless I answered the three questions properly, in order of

importance. Which were: ―Would you ever have a Christmas tree?‖ Because I‘m

Jewish. And, I said yes. And, did I want to have children one day, not necessarily

with him, but someday, and I said yes. And then the least important to him, and of

course it was a different time, not that long ago, but a different time, was, ―Would

I ever want to get married?‖ Which was also a ―yes.‖ So, apparently, having

passed the test, I...we were allowed to continue.

Christmas, marriage, and family. These were the questions on Huck‘s mind by the

second date with Michael, his new gay lover. Huck is an actor and has always had jobs in

the arts. At the time of the interview, he was working for a prominent theatrical talent

agency. Michael worked in the theater as well, but in an administrative capacity.

Frequently, after work, the two attended play openings and other work/social events that

put them in contact with New York‘s, still strongly gay, art scene. When they moved in

together, about a month after the above conversation, it was to Michael‘s one-bedroom in

Chelsea which, in 2007, was still the (gentrifying) heart of gay New York.

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 Huck grew up in the Midwest, playing team sports and attending church four or

five times a week. The Baptist church he attended was very vocal about being against

homosexuality and his father was a church deacon. As the church forbade it, Huck never

saw his parents drink. Dancing and card games were also out of the question. Without

humor, his grandfather called playing cards ―the Devil‘s play toy.‖ He basically lived in

the town in Footloose. Ironically, Huck managed to come out at a relatively young age,

17, and his parents showed him nothing but support, though their own version of it. They

wanted to sign him up for corrective counseling with the hope he would be ―helped‖ and

change his mind about being gay. To their credit, they ultimately respected his view that

that kind of counseling was ―not an option.‖ Huck doesn‘t seem ruffled at their initial

response and feels they had to process the information much as he did. And, he

sympathized with their concern for his health and physical safety. As he puts it,

… when I came out of the closet, it was the mid-90s. Certainly AIDS and HIV is

something that is still a big issue in the world, but it‘s not the sort of death

sentence [for gay men in the US], necessarily, as it was…then. And I think that

scared them. I think they were horrified by the challenges that I was going to face

in my life because of this added component. It‘s not added, it‘s just who you are,

but that‘s the way they sort of communicated it to me when I was in high school.

And I think now...as times have evolved, too, [my parents] are completely

different...completely embrace it. They realize that the challenges that I face are

just life challenges, just like my other brother’s face, and that we‘ve been blessed

and we got…we‘re lucky.

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 Huck highlights the tension between his parents‘ protection and disapproval. He

mentions the mid-90s, the peak of the HIV/AIDS health crisis, very specific to gay men,

as a concern of his parents (and, presumably himself), but quickly transitions into the

language of equality emphasizing that his struggles are no different from his brothers.

But, they are. His two hetero-identified brothers did not have come out to their parents,

nor fear their rejection. They could also feel largely immune from a disease once known

as the gay plague. This contradictory thought process, ―I‘m different, but I am no

different‖ could also summarize the current lesbian and gay movement in the US. As a

political strategy, gay men and lesbians have taken up a ―we‘re just like you‖ discourse.

This not only privileges the experience of heterosexuals, but situates heterosexuality as

the standard by which other sexualities are measured. It also, implicitly, begs an abstract

heterosexual public for admittance to the realm of full social, and eventually legal,

citizenship (through marriage, adoption and immigration rights). Ultimately, this strategy

only brings the most normative of gays and lesbians into the fold: the white, middle-

classed, monogamous, HIV-negative, documented, and gender-conforming. By situating

himself as identical to his brothers except for the ―added component‖ of being gay, Huck

is helping himself to feel safer. But, as someone with the above advantages, he is

relatively safer, from violence as well as AIDS, than other gay men.

Huck left the Midwest for New York City in 2006, right after he graduated from

college. He began in the city the way so many college graduates do: working for free as

an intern and hoping to god it would pay off with a job at the end. He had always loved

musical theater and had a dream of making a living in the arts. In an effort to keep his

passion alive on very little money, Huck became a fixture at Marie‘s Crisis, a now-

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closed, mostly-gay piano bar in the Village. The place had the added advantage of putting

him in touch with a gay community the likes of which he had never seen growing up in

Indiana. Through their mutual friend, the piano player, he met a second-generation

Filipino man, and fellow recent transplant, Bayani. The two became fast friends, then,

briefly, lovers. Their relationship began romantically but quickly transformed into close

friendship. Talking about their early days, Bayani seemed a bit wistful, as if it had been

Huck‘s decision to just be friends.

Bayani: Third Dad for Now

When I met Bayani for the first time, before work in a sweet and pricey French

coffee spot in downtown Brooklyn, I knew him even before we spoke: his clothes spoke

on his behalf. While Huck and Michael were certainly not sloppily dressed when I met

them, Bayani‘s look was head-to-toe impeccable. His hair seemed freshly cut and

painstakingly molded into a very of-the-moment style crewcut around the back and sides

with a long, floppy pompadour-ish crown. He wore a slim-fitting navy blazer over a

tailored, textured white dress shirt (with French cuffs, of course) and a very hip, yet

professional, navy and red knit tie. His khaki pants suggested casualness, but their fit, cut

to his form and hitting slightly above his bare ankles, said otherwise. The pièce de

résistance was definitely the cognac-colored, polished wingtips. This may not sound

especially unusual for a professional reporting to work in Manhattan, but Bayani works

for a religious non-profit: suit and tie is definitely not the dress code. Bayani has held a

couple of jobs as an adviser on LGBT affairs to different Christian non-profits, but

recently got a new position at the United Nations. Even so, Bayani does not come from

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money and probably buys his high-end fashions thoughtfully. His look is refined and

cultivated, but also a little stiff, and speaks to his need for control.

Bayani does nothing halfway. Not only did he serve as both Huck and Michael‘s

best man at their wedding, he was also the de facto wedding planner. Michael and Huck

keep a treasured picture of him from the wedding in their living room; he looks very

serious behind a pair of Ray-Bans on the phone with a tardy violinist. They value his

seriousness, but also find humor in it. They refer to the Bayani in that picture as ―The

Don‖: a conscious reference to The Godfather. He actually is Gus‘s godfather, but, like

Marlon Brando‘s character, he is the kind of godfather you don‘t want to mess with.

Since Gus has come into his life, Bayani serves as a resource for his other gay friends

looking to have children; you may even say they ―seek his counsel.‖ He once advised a

couple not to buy a certain house based on its baby-unfriendly layout. He also has weekly

visits with a single-father friend with baby triplets in order to help him with the kids and

impart wisdom he‘s gained watching Gus grow into a toddler. He describes his

propensity for mastery and control in life this way:

I handle it. I do it at work; I do it in my personal life. In fact, I was joking with

this guy that I‘m talking to [romantically]…that it‘s just in my nature to be

handling things, or fixing things. And so, yeah, for [Michael and Huck‘s] wedding

I did that especially. And, it was fun, and I‘ve done it for other people‘s

weddings. It‘s just kind of my nature: figuring out stuff. Having some sort of

control…but, I’m not like a control freak. [stiff laugh].

In my experience, the only people who insist they are not control freaks are people who

worry they are control freaks. Bayani certainly likes knowing what to expect and

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preventing mishaps. This became clear in the first moments of our sitting down to talk. I

will admit, just the look of his perfectly constructed appearance, and the fancy place we

met, intimidated me. That vanished pretty quickly when he spilled his tea (black tea with

milk) all over the table. He was flustered and embarrassed in a way that suggests he takes

himself a little too seriously and then found equilibrium by calling over a waitress to

clean it up.

In his past, Bayani found there were things he could not control. His father died

when he was still a teenager. When he talks about the loss, he tells it through the

perspectives of everyone else to obfuscate his own feelings. His mother was crushed, of

course, and his two older brothers started getting into more trouble with drugs, violence,

and incarceration. His relationships with both brothers failed, a combination of their drug

abuse and homophobia, and they haven‘t spoken with him in years. Bayani, from a young

age, was his mother‘s ―golden boy.‖ Growing up, he felt pressure to succeed for his

mom: he was all she had left. Further explaining his generalized anxiety and need for

control, Bayani states,

I‘m anxious because…I just wanted to like prove to [my mom] that [she] did a

great job, right? And, I can do this (succeed at life). And I can do this because

[she] taught me how. So that‘s kind of the reason for why I‘m pretty anxious.

Bayani, very aware that there are many people who would blame his mother, an

immigrant of color and single parent, for the waywardness of her children, did not want

his brother‘s failures laid at their mother‘s feet. He took it upon himself to prove that she

was a good parent by making himself a living example: succeeding at school and staying

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out of trouble. But then, of course, he knew he was gay and worried that this would

disappoint her.

The way he came out was rather orchestrated. He waited awhile to tell her he was

gay, though everyone at college knew. Free of the constraints of the home in which he

grew up, Bayani developed a gay community in college and quickly met his first

boyfriend. Always close with his mom, Bayani couldn‘t stand not telling her, and he saw

his new boyfriend as an opportunity to show her he was happy. Explaining his reasoning

for waiting until he was in a relationship before coming out, Bayani stated:

…if I had somebody to kind of show that I was happy with, and have some sort of

proof of that happiness, and that he happened to be a really nice guy and a cute

guy then my mom would be like, ―Okay, alright, this all makes sense,‖ right?

Aware of the cultural trope of the sad, lonely gay man, made popular in cinema

representations and intensified by the constant grief and threat that AIDS brought to the

gay community. He came out in 2002, when the worst seemed to have passed, but was

still very much in recent memory. He wanted to bring his mother a nice, cute guy that

would help her see that gay men could be healthy and happy together. The problem was,

he didn‘t exactly tell her. Bayani went home for three weeks in the summer after his first

year of college. The first week, it was just him; the second week, his gay best friend,

Blake, joined them; and then his boyfriend, Mitch, was to arrive in the last week. Bayani

knew he had to come out ahead of their arrival, so he took his mom out to dinner with the

intention of telling her. He was incredibly nervous and used his friend to lay the

groundwork for his own coming out by telling his mom not to ask about Blake‘s

―girlfriend‖ (as parents do), because he was gay. So, his mom asked about the other

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young man scheduled to visit and Bayani simply said, ―Mitch is my boyfriend.‖ Silence.

Bayani asked her what she thought about what he had just said. In his words,

And I‘m like, ―So, mom, what do you think? Do you care?‖ and she‘s like,

―Anoko,‖ which means, in the Filipino language that my parents speak, anoko

means ―the only thing I care about is getting a spoon for my soup.‖

His mother was letting him know his admission was neither shocking nor a big deal. But,

she also didn‘t acknowledge it at all. She suggested to him that she ―didn‘t care‖ (though

she didn‘t even say this explicitly) in response to a confession about which he had clearly

struggled. Bayani repeats the story, now, as a point of humor without reference to the

dismissiveness of her reaction which is really the underside of the same story.

Bayani is still close with his mom, but the core of his family has shifted to his life

with Huck, Michael and Gus. His connection extends beyond the two men and into their

extended families with whom he has a standing invitation to family holidays and

vacations.

I‘ve spent the last, I don‘t know, five or six Thanksgivings with [Huck and

Michael]. All the holidays: Hanukah, Yom Kippur, everything. Gone on family

vacations, and so Michael and Huck they‘re like my urban family, ‗cause I

haven‘t been home to California, where my family [of origin] is from, in about

three years and [Michael and Huck have] just kind of become that nuclear unit for

me that grounds me here in New York.

Bayani calls Huck and Michael his ―urban family,‖ indirectly referencing the similar

terms ―chosen family‖ or ―queer family.‖ More explicitly, Bayani referenced the lack of a

57
relationship with his own brothers and stated, ―So, in a way, Michael and Huck have

become kind of like replacement brothers for me.‖

His relationship with Michael and Huck can be hard for outsiders to understand.

As a way of making sense of his sharing a home with these two married men, people

assume their relationship is either sexual or exploitative. Bayani says he is often asked if

the three men are in a ―thruple‖ (three-partner relationship) to which he responds, ―Like

no, there‘s not a thruple, [Michael and Huck and I] don‘t have that type of relationship

we‘re all, you know, just really good friends, so that‘s just the way it is.‖ Though, this

knowledge has not kept previous partners from expressing jealousy or concern.

[When Gus was born] I was dating a guy who… was worried that my life would

be kind of consumed by their life, by Michael, Huck, and Gus‘s life, and that I

wouldn‘t…have time for myself, or that I would become some sort of glorified

nanny or something like that. But, to me it was just kind of, this was my family,

right?

I admit that, at first, I had the same concern as Bayani‘s former partner. Why else

would two wealthy white men share a home with an unrelated man of color, specifically

an Asian man, if he wasn‘t doing domestic work? Again, drawing from film, Asian men

out in the settling US West, displaced from work laying track for train lines, found a

niche in domestic work. While wealthy Americans preferred women (typically women of

color) to work in homes back East, Asian men, both available and stereotyped as

―feminine,‖ were handy surrogates. This legacy is alive in Bayani‘s partner‘s comment

about becoming a ―glorified nanny.‖ Though it is clear that Bayani‘s lack of time with his

boyfriend was the more prominent motivator for the comment, there is a broader critique

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of the domestic relationships that develop when wealthy whites share their homes with

employees of color- while the white employers may see their nannies and housekeepers

as ―family,‖ the sentiment rings hollow because these workers are taking time away from

their own families in order to serve another (Hondagneu-Sotelo). There‘s also the

awkwardness that one side of that ―family‖ dynamic can be asked to leave at any

moment. Bayani‘s partner saw the danger of the situation for Bayani, having no legal or

defined social connection to Gus he could have easily been exploited and then discarded.

But, Bayani sees it differently. To him, Michael, Huck, and Gus are his family

and any labor he does, from coming home early from work, or spending an evening or

weekend with Gus while Michael and Huck are away, are priorities for him. It doesn‘t

feel like exploitation because he wants to do it. In the statement above, Bayani moves

from his ex‘s concern about his time to a rearticulation of his status as a member of the

family. Still, rather than a declarative statement, Bayani couches his assertion in a

question, ―this was my family, right?‖ Plus, Bayani knows he is not the nanny because

the men also have a nanny!

Reflecting on how he became Gus‘s other dad, Bayani sites his close connection

to Michael and Huck: they are his family. They became especially important when

Bayani‘s genetic siblings rejected him for being gay and he found these ―replacement

brothers.‖ So, it follows, Gus would be his family as well. Bayani says,

And so, when Gus came into my life, I was just like, ―well, this is a given, right?‖

it‘s just a fact of life, and I‘m gonna love him as if he’s my own, and if that has an

impact on the rest of my life, then that‘s just the way it is.

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The way Bayani tells it, it really wasn‘t a ―given‖ that he would become a parent to Gus,

but it wasn‘t a surprise either. It doesn‘t seem like this was entirely the plan, but Bayani

was excited to take on the responsibility. When he says, ―I‘m gonna love him as if he‘s

my own,‖ he could be referring to the fact Gus is adopted, but he‘s also talking about his

own tenuous position in the family: legally, Gus is Michael and Huck‘s. But Bayani plans

to have Gus be a permanent part of the rest of his life. The impacts it could have on his

life are making decisions to live where the boys want to live, and to have to continually

explain, as he did to his ex, what his role is in the family.

One person who did understand the significance of Gus‘s arrival for Bayani was

his boss, at the time, who made accommodations and allowed Bayani to take time off as

if Gus were ―his own.‖

My boss…just thought it was awesome that I was doing this with the boys and

that I was so committed to Gus‘s life and helping to raise him and she would

encourage me to go home early and spend time with Gus. And I had a lot of time

off, or working from home when Gus was born because she was just like, ―Stay

there, I mean, it‘s such a privileged time and not many people get to do this, so

you should do that.‖

Bayani was working for a non-profit Christian advocacy organization which encourages

churches to be more welcoming to lesbian and gay parishioners, so his boss may be more

open-minded than most. Still, it was really important for Bayani to have his status as a

parent and caregiver validated by his employer.

Bayani has also received a surprising amount of support from his mom, who,

although pretty blasé about his coming out, has been so excited to have Gus in her life.

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 And then my mom is, she just loves Gus like he’s her own grandson and she came

here for Mother‘s Day and was just like doting on him the entire time. So she asks

about him, we Facetime with her. So, it‘s like the cliché, it‘s just the new normal,

this is what happens, right? I don‘t think it‘s uncommon to, you know, even

heterosexual families to have somebody else around. I‘ve known like a bunch of

my aunts and uncles to have brothers and sisters of theirs help raise the kid for a

time, you know?

Again, Bayani‘s language is tempered when it comes to claiming he‘s a parent or

his mother is a grandmother, but, unlike, his aunts and uncles, he‘s not helping ―from

time to time,‖ he‘s living with them, eating dinner with them every night, and seeing Gus

every day. Bayani‘s touchstone for examples of other non-nuclear childrearing set-ups is

his own family. In his experience, it‘s pretty normal for extended kin to help one another

raise children.

I asked Bayani if he could explain why it seems like this situation is ―the new

normal,‖ and he astutely pointed to economic factors that might motivate the need for

extra support, but ultimately thinks it just ―makes more sense.‖ Bayani says,

Well, it‘s all, it‘s the whole it takes a village thing, and if there are people willing

to do it, why would you reject the help, right? So, because, we‘re not in the 1950s

anymore—both parents have to work, right? And childcare is expensive. And also,

housing is expensive, and so if you have a sibling who needs a place to live, and

you have room, and they are willing to help with the, to lend a hand with the

baby, then why not? Because it’s more love for the baby and it makes your life a

little bit easier as a parent, so you’d be crazy and a fool to like reject something

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 like that unless you had a terrible relationship with the person, but it just, you

know, economically, emotionally, you know, relationship-wise, I think it all

makes sense. I mean, obviously it wouldn‘t work for everybody, but I think

Michael, Huck, and I had a very strong relationship before [Gus arrived].

Living in New York City, Bayani would know how expensive things can get. Though his

statement begins with economic need, it ―takes a village‖ because everything is so

expensive and people need each other to afford it, it quickly transitions into an emotional

explanation. It‘s more ―love for the baby‖ and you‘d have to be ―crazy‖ to interfere with

that. It‘s also help, and even if it isn‘t needed, it sure is helpful to have life be a bit easier

for parents. The baby wins, the parents win, but he neglects the reason he got involved in

the first place, it‘s good for the person helping out too. It‘s harder to see what Bayani

gets out of this arrangement. He‘s not being paid, in fact he‘s paying rent. What he‘s also

doing is making his own family. In the absence of a romantic partnership or a supportive

family of origin, Bayani has found the most stability and support in his life with these

men. Helping take care of Gus solidifies his import in this family. And, although Michael

and Huck are far from poor, childcare is expensive and rent is expensive and these factors

have opened a place for him. Even if Bayani never creates ―his own‖ family, he has one.

Michael and Huck clearly value him. Firstly, he makes an unfamiliar experience,

caring for a child, seem bearable,

If we lived more isolated lives, if [Bayani] lived down the block, if my mother

wasn‘t 45 minutes away, if we didn‘t feel like we could really depend on friends

and family, what already feels slightly overwhelming would probably feel too

daunting.

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If Bayani even lived down the block from them, Michael knows his life would be more

difficult. For Michael, a terrifying experience he wasn‘t quite sure he‘d be able to have,

being a dad, is made much more possible with help. So, what does any of this have to do

with being gay? They are much more open to the help. At the end of the interview, in a

rare moment of emotional sincerity, Michael told me,

Perhaps we [gay parents] are just more open to it [family structures with more

than two parents] because nothing is conventional in how we grew up and how we

formed our families...We don‘t have as defined roles either, right? [Huck] is the

primary caretaker, he‘s home…but, we don‘t have, it‘s never ―he‘s supposed to

do that‖ or ―I‘m supposed to do that‖ to begin with. So, therefore, if somebody

else comes into that equation to help or to be apart of it, they are not necessarily

stepping on my toes or his toes either.

Michael hits on a lot of points here. He makes the case that queer people may be more

open to non-normative family structures, a taken-for-granted idea, but he offers a multi-

part explanation: gay people grow up differently, they form their families differently, and

they do not have the codified parenting scripts straight people do. Queer people come up

knowing that the conventional life course path does not include them, and so is

fundamentally flawed and worth questioning. If they want kids outside a hetero

relationship, the conventional does not cut it there either. Even the most heteronormative

queer folks have to involve other people to have a child. At least one other person, but

often more, is necessary: to adopt, to use one member‘s genetic material to produce

biogenetic offspring, to gestate a fetus in the absence of a uterus. And those additional

people bring even more family connections to the table. Finally, the guidelines of who

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should do what are unclear, straight mothers and fathers know what is expected of them

even if they rebel against those norms, but queer people still have few models. Most

insightfully, Michael remarks that unclear roles leave space open to additional people.

Michael offers an explanation that goes beyond positing that queer people are inherently

―more evolved,‖ but that there are fewer scripts and people are generally making things

up as they go—thus there are lower barriers to entry, if someone wanted to jump in as an

additional co-parent. And, lo and behold, it makes things easier in practice.

I can‘t help but be worried. Bayani, as Gus‘s godfather, may be the designated

caretaker in the event of Michael and Huck‘s untimely passing, but, in the meantime, his

rights are limited. Throughout our interview though, he seemed to be gesturing toward

the inevitable: that someday he wants his own family. Bayani says four times in our

interview that he cares for Gus as if he were his own, and also that his mother treats him

as if he were her grandson. Bayani is very realistic about the fragility of his situation and

the possibility of the current set-up ending. He says,

And that‘s something that I think about every now and then when it comes to

[Gus]. Like, I love him like he‘s my own, but I could very easily remove myself

from the situation if I wanted. So, it is a very privileged position to be in. And I

think, because I choose to be in it, I think it carries more weight and meaning.

The idea of endurance, even if it doesn‘t last, seems integral to the establishment of

family ties, and the same could be said for obligation. Bayani doesn‘t see it that way.

He‘s knowingly chosen to be part of a complex family situation for now. He‘s right, the

ability to walk away is a privilege he has, and Michael and Huck could also walk away

from him. Realistically though, people walk away from family obligations all the time, a

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legal or biological connection does not guarantee people stick around. The stakes are

lower for him, of course, but it is still a family experiment worth trying out, even if it

doesn‘t last. Right now, he is Gus‘s third dad. He may not always be, but it will not mean

the family has ―failed‖ if he isn‘t.

Michael, Huck, and Bayani, an example of a queer parenting structure, are also

operating on ―queer time.‖ Straight time unfolds in a predictable way—you move out of

your parents‘ house, live on your own, you build a career, get married, have children, get

rich, and die—and anything short of this progression is a perpetual ―becoming‖ or

growing up (Halberstam 2005; Freeman 2010). Queer people who take part in the club

scene, have sex with multiple partners, do not have steady incomes, and live with

roommates aren‘t seen as grown or settled no matter their age. ―Settling down‖ is

something LGBTQ people increasingly take part in, most clearly seen in getting married

and having babies. But Michael and Huck have careers, they‘re married, and they have a

baby, but they also have a roommate. They don‘t need Bayani to live with them, but they

choose to have him live there. This set-up and the fact of their queerness left open the

possibility that Bayani could help them raise their son. As Michael said, the absence of

roles in queer childrearing means no one is doing someone else‘s ―job‖ or stepping on

someone else‘s toes. The consequences for Gus and his parents are overwhelmingly

positive: Gus has more people in his life and more love, Michael and Huck have more

help, free babysitting, and another source of income. While these side-effects may seem

rather bourgeois, they accomplished through a conscious queering of the nuclear family.

This case adds necessary nuance to the claim that with the possibility of marriage and

parenting queer people will come to mimic straight people and become ―no different.‖

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Michael reminds us though that, with the lack of gender-based parenting scripts hanging

over these families, they will always be different, and being different offers them the

freedom to innovate.

Queer temporality of another sort is manifest in how this family recognizes it can,

and likely will, change. Bayani could move out, he could sever himself from this

relationship and this family. But, knowing that and choosing to stay makes the situation

―more meaningful‖ to him. In spite of the frequency of separation and divorce among

straight couples, the imperative is to endure. To admit the family structure could change

in divorce or in death would be taboo. This family can change and they are all aware of it.

If or when it does happen, they will be more prepared to handle it and stay on good terms.

Although conventional in many ways, Michael, Huck, and Bayani bring

alternative understandings to the parameters of parenting. It is this alternative approach to

intimacies Stacey finds so beneficial to gay men and the families they form. They chose

to raise Gus in a house with three dads and found it hugely beneficial to have the help.

Gus gets more love and care and a lasting relationship (though the contours of it may

change over time) with someone outside his legal family. Bayani gets to weed out the

potential partners that are not understanding of the alternate family form he has. Michael

and Huck, the very model of the gay ideal—young, prosperous, good-looking, and

white—still understand family to be malleable, chosen, and oriented toward fulfilling

needs for connection and care. This family could be entirely heteronormative, Michael

and Huck have the means, but the members of this family recognize that what they are

doing helps them all and the child they are raising. This innovation that improves their

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daily lives, even though many people question it and do not understand how it works, is

what makes this three-dad family a real queer utopia.

Transracial Adoption-Extended Family: Katie and Catherine

Co-parenting in Dyke Slope

Katie and Catherine are one of the few couples I talked to who were not only

unmarried, but against marriage. My interview with them was before the 2015 Supreme

Court decision to overturn DOMA. Knowing they are against marriage does not stop

anyone from suggesting it. They have jointly adopted their daughter, Ophelia, so getting

married would not add anything to their legal claims to her, only to each other. Because

they don‘t make much money separately, both employed by politically progressive non-

profits, they would not save much money by marrying and filing their taxes together. But,

getting married would guarantee their wishes to will everything to the other in the event

of their death. As their lawyer tells them, ―it really has no benefit to you in life, it benefits

you in death.‖ Katie especially, sees no benefit at all, and has a well-developed critique of

marriage:

I‘m opposed to marriage, I mean you can do it if you want, I‘ll fight for your right

to do that, but I don‘t think the government should be sanctioning relationships,

period. And I don‘t think there should be financial benefits or harm to your

relationship [through marriage], and I think you should be able to give your

money to whoever you want and all of that. So, for me, the whole marriage thing

is not all that exciting, quite frankly. I think we‘d be better off fighting for people

to live their lives however they want.

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Katie sees marriage as an opportunity for the government to sanction relationships, and

ultimately control people‘s lives. She works for a large non-profit that advocates for civil

rights, and, on this issue, her own thinking clashes with the advocacy she is paid to do.

And it‘s hard, like I work at [a civil rights advocacy organization] and it‘s a big

part of what we‘ve done and I get it that it‘s for the movement, but I have real

frustrations. All the work we do in our LGBT stuff is about being the same as

everybody else. [I’m frustrated] because I thought it could be a little different.

Katie finds herself a minority within a minority: a gay person against gay marriage. Her

critique here not only goes against the position of her own organization but the vast

majority of the gay rights movement for whom legal parity with straight couples is the

goal. Katie would rather open the field of options, for people to ―live their lives however

they want‖ rather than restrict gay lives to being ―the same as everybody else.‖ Katie and

Catherine‘s family is not like everyone else‘s. They adopted their daughter in an open

adoption process through a private, though politically progressive, adoption agency. They

are white, Brooklyn lesbians with an adopted Black child living in an area of Brooklyn

where people of color were pushed out to make way for the monied and white. Ophelia is

not without connection to her birth family though because her biological sister is living

just a few blocks away with another white lesbian couple. Through this connection, the

two families have merged their lives, seeing each other on a regular basis by playing in

the park, making each other dinner, and going on vacation together. When they decided

to adopt Ophelia, the couple had no idea they were adding so many new people to their

lives. Katie‘s opposition to marriage and family access as core goals of the LGBTQ

rights movement unquestioningly framed these families as nuclear, heteronormative,

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closed units. But her experience of her own queer family is more radical than even she

was prepared for.

Katie and Catherine met in 1994. They were interning together in Washington,

DC for at the headquarters for the National Organization of Women. At 24 and 23, their

lives were driven by their feminist politics, and they continued working for change in DC

for five more years as their relationship got more serious. In 1999, they moved to New

York so Katie could go to graduate school in the city. This was also a homecoming for

Catherine who grew up in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, though the two non-profit

workers had to settle for more-affordable Brooklyn. They landed in Park Slope and soon

bought the top floor of a three-floor walk-up brownstone only a handful of avenues west

of Prospect Park. They assure me that in the late ‗90s the neighborhood was a bit

different than its present affluent, stroller and coffee shop-spotted state. As Katie

explains:

So, I‘d say that when we moved here, it really was Dyke Slope, right? So, it was

like lesbians everywhere. The neighborhood was still being gentrified...And 7th

[Avenue] only really had a couple of nice restaurants, but the Barnes & Noble

was there. So it was really like: lesbians, teachers, like, the co-op was there so it

still had like the activist people, non-profit people, all of that. And then, I don‘t

know when...there was literally a day when we were out in the neighborhood like,

―What the hell? Who are these people?‖

Katie‘s comment makes it seem like the neighborhood changed overnight, though Park

Slope has a long and fraught history of changing residents and gentrification. The area

was built into a residential neighborhood in the late 19th Century. By 1900, it was among

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the richest communities in the US. During the Depression, working-class Irish and Italian

immigrants called Park Slope home, though it wasn‘t long before increasing Black and

Latino presence in the now more-affordable neighborhood led to ―white flight.‖ By the

1970s the area began to be ―cleaned up‖ by real estate developers attracted to the

brownstone and other historic buildings; they pushed out low-income residents and

poured money into restoring buildings. Sections of Park Slope were then deemed to have

historic significance and rents steadily climbed. A Barnes & Noble moved in.

All this happened before Katie and Catherine‘s time, though their having

purchased their apartment before the area was completely gentrified (yet again) gives

them access to some claims of authenticity. Though they live in Park Slope, they are not

―Park Slope‖ in all its current yuppie connotations. They associate themselves with the

white artists and activists, disproportionately lesbians, who moved in (along with another

wave of working-class Irish and Italians) rather than the present wave of well-to-do

Manhattan professionals looking to start families somewhere more tree-lined and calm.

The New York magazine profile of the neighborhood speaks volumes about the current

state of Park Slope.

No neighborhood is the butt of more stroller jokes or the recipient of more anti-

gentrification scorn. But any way you slice it, Park Slope is the very definition of

a well-rounded neighborhood. It falls just slightly below average in two [ways]:

affordability (the average two-bedroom rental is $2,275) and diversity. In all other

areas, it‘s somewhere between above grade and superlative: It‘s blessed with

excellent public schools, low crime, vast stretches of green space, scores of

restaurants and bars, a diverse retail sector, and a population of more artists and

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 creatives than even its reputation for comfortable bohemianism might suggest

(more, in fact, than younger, trendier Williamsburg). It might not be everyone‘s

idea of a perfect neighborhood, but statistically speaking (by a hair), there‘s

nowhere better. (Newyorkmag.com)

Katie and Catherine had no idea the neighborhood would take off like it did. As

Catherine puts it succinctly, ―The people who can afford to pay $800,000 for a two-

bedroom apartment and think that‘s a good deal are not the people we wanted to live next

door to.‖ When they bought their place in 2002, admittedly attempting to take advantage

of the post-9/11 fear of buying anywhere in the city, they paid $200,000 for the two-

bedroom apartment with the bay windows and spacious living room I sat in while we

talked. At the time they felt like they were paying a fortune, but as they watch their

neighbors across the hall (another lesbian couple with kids) buy for 400% more 15 years

later, they feel lucky.

Katie has long blond hair with a strong, athletic build while Catherine is a lithe

brunette always in a baseball cap. Neither is particularly butch or femme looking; as

Catherine says, she never felt ―conspicuous as a lesbian‖ in public. Though it is clear they

both preferred modest ―Dyke Slope‖ to the prosperous, straight present, they have no

plans to move. In any other city, their modest apartment would be considered cramped

but cozy. But, by Brooklyn standards, it is a nicely-sized two-bedroom in a great

location. Katie and Catherine are the first to admit that they would have to move if they

had another child. Luckily, their motto on childrearing is ―one and done‖ because, as

Katie puts it, they prefer to outnumber their child(ren).

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 The Adoption Gauntlet

After thirteen years together, Katie and Catherine decided it was time to try and

get pregnant. Their first choice was to have Catherine give birth. She works as a nurse

practitioner specializing in fertility care and has successfully, in her words ―gotten other

women pregnant,‖ so she assumed it would be relatively easy. The two ordered

anonymous sperm from a non-profit sperm bank in California which arrived, rather

indiscreetly, at their local post office creating even further embarrassment with a bus

driver who refused to let them board with the suspicious package covered in warning

labels and, then, nosey neighbors in the lobby of their apartment building. When these at-

home attempts (at around $800 a pop) were unsuccessful, they tried going to a clinic.

Catherine still couldn‘t conceive. Then, they tried getting Katie pregnant; still, nothing

happened.

They started researching gay-friendly adoption agencies. One such agency

encouraged them to apply for admittance to an international adoption information

session. After a two-hour meeting, Katie and Catherine were told that no countries the

agency works with allows for adoption by gay and lesbian couples. They were told that

one of them could have applied as a single person, but now that the agency knew they

were a couple, they would not lie for them. The agency‘s domestic program was more

accepting, but by then the two decided they did not want to work with this agency that

misled them. A few months later, they then met Josie, a representative of Triad

Adoptions. At Triad, they provide services and care for birth parents, adoptive parents,

and adoptees. It‘s a private agency founded with the goal of honoring all members of the

adoption ―triad.‖ Co-founder Josie, who adopted her own daughter, is a proud ex-hippie

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who was annoyed at what she saw as discriminatory practices in other agencies. She and

her male partner had a hard time adopting in the 1980s; agencies did not like that the

couple wasn‘t married, that they were atheists, and that they were generally non-

conventional. This experience motivated Josie to found an agency that explicitly (though

not exclusively) works with co-habiting unmarried heterosexual couples and gay and

lesbian couples.

Josie was upfront with Katie and Catherine about the challenges of being a same-

sex couple looking to adopt; she told them it would likely take longer than for a straight

couple, but that it would happen. They called the agency many times looking for a spot

on the agency‘s short client list, but for six months they were turned away.

They had a certain balance that [Josie] liked between like...it was like 1/3, 1/3,

1/3: it was straight [couples], gay men, gay women [respectively]. They weren‘t

even taking single people [because] she had that one woman who had been on the

list a very long time. So we had to keep calling.

Josie had a preference for a sort of balance of clients in terms of gender and sexuality. It

was the policy of the agency to turn away any kind of couple (or single) they had ―too

much of‖ since the agency was pretty small and couldn‘t serve everyone who wanted

their services. Still, Triad‘s list of potential parents was 2/3 gay and lesbian. This

certainly speaks to the growing interest of queer people in becoming parents, but it also

reveals the politics of maintaining a ―balance‖ between those who would quickly be

chosen by birth parents (straight couples) and those who would not (singles and gay and

lesbian couples). Working with Triad, though, was appealing for birth mothers because

the agency was strictly about facilitating open adoptions in which birth mothers were

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known and in some contact with the children they adopted out. Giving birth parents the

power to choose with whom to place their child has presumably maintained private

adoption agencies‘ ability to discriminate among waiting parents, but Triad worked hard

to advocate for their gay and lesbian clients. Birth parents, if they have a preference, are

likely to prefer placing their child with a straight couple. Unlike a deli line, the adoption

process is not first come, first served.

It took Katie and Catherine six months to make the agency‘s list. Next came the

orientation, the information sessions, and the home study. Catherine was particularly

peeved about the home study, not because it was difficult, but because it was mandated.

She describes the experience this way:

They just ask a lot of questions to try to learn about us and our lives. It wasn‘t

challenging at all, there was no question that it was going to be okay, it was just

time-consuming and more money. It was just frustrating to sit there and have to

tell someone your whole life story to have a kid when people get pregnant all the

time by accident or they don’t want to be or stuff like that so, it was not a big deal,

but at the same time, frustrating.

All told, it took about 14 months from the time Katie and Catherine decided to pursue the

adoption route to the time they were actually listed in the agency‘s catalog. This does not

include the time they spent looking at different agencies, nor the time it took to actually

find an interested birth family. Catherine holds some bitterness about straight couples

being able to ―accidentally‖ conceive, all the more frustrating after her and Katie‘s failed

attempts with donor sperm. Catherine felt entitled to become a parent because she

wanted to be, and felt angry that having a child was ―no big deal‖ to straight couples, as

74
though becoming pregnant when you didn‘t want to be or making the decision to place a

child for adoption were ―no big deal.‖

Adoption also turned out to be no more of a ―big deal‖ for straight couples, even

on a list that was 2/3 gay. Once they were clients of Triad, Katie and Catherine went on a

retreat to meet with other prospective parents and get to know the agency and the

adoption process. They had been trying to become parents for five years at this point: two

years of planning, two and a half years of insemination attempts, and another six months

on Triad‘s waiting list. After all this, one couple they meet at the Triad retreat

demonstrated just how different the process is for straight couples on Triad‘s list.

Catherine says, ―Of course the first people we meet [on the retreat] are like, ‗Yeah, we‘re

coming back for a second [child] and we got our first [child] within 24 hours of being on

the [agency‘s] list.‘‖ The purpose of the agency‘s retreat was to help waiting couples see

they were not alone, but for Katie and Catherine, it only reinforced their feeling of having

the odds stacked against them.

For two more years, nothing happened. To add salt to the wound, they had to pay

to have yearly home studies in order to remain eligible to adopt. When Katie and

Catherine finally were contacted, their difficulties only increased. They drove to

Providence to meet an interested birth mother, Maya, and her case worker. As they tell it,

she was flakey from the start nearly missing their first meeting. After that, it was clear

she had no idea how her birth would proceed telling them both that she was going to have

a C-section and have her labor induced. The agency also reported that sometimes on the

phone, Maya sounded drunk. Catherine wanted to know what was going on and pressed

to see Maya‘s medical records to which Maya gave her signed consent. Catherine says,

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 Yeah, and so [the agency] finally got the record [sic] and it had said that she, in

the beginning, had reported binge drinking every weekend until she had started

getting care, until about 6 months in, because said she didn‘t know she was

pregnant until that point and at that point we were out.

Catherine and Katie decided against working with this birth mother because of her use of

alcohol while pregnant even though they were told by an agency worker, years before,

that they had to be open to some drug and alcohol use ―otherwise there‘s nobody.‖

Catherine with equal parts sympathy and derision states,

Nobody is making an adoption plan for their child if they have their shit together,

right? So there‘s always some drug and alcohol use and [adoption case workers]

have you clarify whether you are okay with use and whether you are okay with

abuse.

Looking at Maya‘s medical records, Catherine concluded that she was on the wrong side

of the use/abuse divide.

Four months later, they received another call. Keisha, a Black birth mother who

had worked with the agency before, had just given birth to a girl. Her baby had been

exposed to both drugs and alcohol, but appeared healthy. The agency told Katie and

Catherine that Keisha‘s last child had been exposed to a similar amount and was doing

fine. They had six hours to decide if they wanted to take her home. Still concerned about

the drug exposure, a paranoia informed by the adoption books they had been reading,

Katie and Catherine contacted a medical specialist who worked with the agency who told

them unsympathetically, ―You never know, figure it out.‖ They went for it, and that‘s

how their daughter, Ophelia, came into their lives.

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 Looking back, Katie makes the connection between the fear of birth mother drug

and alcohol abuse, promoted by the adoption books, with racism.

And now, you look back in the stuff that we read and there is so much racial stuff

involved with the idea...with the impact of what drugs and alcohol have on kids,

you know? What you hear about is like ―crack baby syndrome‖ and this and that

and the other thing, and most of those studies haven‘t borne out, but in the

moment when you have like 3 hours to decide...so we decided to go for it and we

did.

Katie picked up on the racial undertones of ―drug abuse‖ and ―crack babies.‖ Though

calling what she saw ―racial stuff‖ isn‘t quite the same as naming racism, Katie knew she

and Catherine were being privileged in this process that painted adoptive parents

(assumed to be white) as saviors and birth mothers (assumed to be women of color) as

reckless, drug addicts not worthy of parenthood because they did not plan their

pregnancies. This became all the more clear when the two new parents went to the

hospital to pick up their baby. As Katie says,

[The nurses in the maternity ward] were fine with us being a same sex couple, but

we had not even left the grounds of the hospital and we had two interactions with

people about how horrible [Ophelia‘s] birth mom was.

These comments actually came from hospital staff who, Katie and Catherine are sure, did

not know the birth mother and may not have interacted with her while she was there.

Catherine recounts the biased way she assumes the nurses thought about Keisha,

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 It was just [like] obviously if you are giving your child up for adoption, you‘re a

horrible person. You‘re a bad person. And like, ―Oh thank god she has a better

life now‖ but they don‘t know us either.

Though Katie and Catherine were scandalized by these comments from the

hospital workers, they are themselves far from beyond reproach when it comes to

assumptions about birth mother morality. In addition to their scorn about ―accidental‖

pregnancies generally, they had their own assumptions about Keisha. Commenting that

their child‘s birth father may never know they have adopted his offspring, Katie jibes, ―I

don‘t even know if [Keisha] knows who he was.‖ Even more heinously, at the hospital

and waiting to pick up their baby, Catherine, a nurse practitioner who works for a

women‘s health center that provides abortion and family planning services, made an off-

color joke to the adoption case worker:

So, I had made some joke...made some joke when we picked [Ophelia] up, ―Oh,

my co-workers were saying I should have come with an IUD in hand.‖

This comment from Catherine is an open suggestion that the birth mother of her child

should be sterilized, or at least secretly prevented from future pregnancies. Waiting seven

years to finally have a child while she knew other women were getting unintentionally

pregnant, or placing children with adoption agencies, angered Catherine. And, rather than

aiming her anger at a heterosexist system or a homophobic culture, she falls into the too-

ready trap of shaming birth mothers. Catherine is by all accounts a well-meaning liberal

and feminist who would vehemently deny having racial biases. Still, this joke about the

IUD should be taken within the context of the broader culture. The US has a long and

shameful history of forced sterilization of women of color with remnants still found

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today, as in cases in which state welfare agencies offer monetary bonuses to women who

volunteer to be sterilized. There are many agencies now associated with the movement

for reproductive justice in communities of color, such as the Black Women‘s Health

Imperative, which traces the control of Black women‘s fertility back to slavery and use

history to put modern health outcomes and practices in context.

At an adoption picnic the following year, Catherine ran into the same case worker

to whom she‘d made the comment about the IUD. The case worker took the time, and

possibly violated confidentiality, when she mentioned to Catherine that Ophelia‘s

birthmother, Keisha, actually identifies as a lesbian.

And so that case worker says, ―Oh, I always remember you saying that because,

in fact, really [Ophelia‘s] birth mom‘s a lesbian so she doesn‘t actually need that

much contraception. Just occasionally stuff happens and then she ends up

pregnant.‖

Catherine then brushes off what seemed like a defense of Keisha‘s morality by the case

worker, someone who does know her. She says, ―It doesn‘t matter, if it happens once,

four times, you still need [laughs quietly]...If you don‘t want to be pregnant, you still

need to do something about it.‖ It is possible, but does not occur to Catherine, that the

comment about the IUD stuck with the case worker because of its offense and not its

humor or irony and that she was motivated to set the record straight as the only way to

stand up for her client. It‘s also possible that when the case worker says, ―Just

occasionally stuff happens and then she ends up pregnant‖ may have been a suggestion

that Keisha was the victim of sexual violence and not changes of whim when it came to

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her sexual partners. By mentioning that Keisha identifies as a lesbian, as they do, she may

have been hoping to humanize her for the adoptive parents.

“It‟s Lesbians and a Black Kid!”

When they started the adoption process, Katie and Catherine were hesitant to

consider a Black child. In Katie‘s words, ―We were very much of the white, liberal

[opinion] ‗Oh, I can‘t possibly take on raising a Black child, it‘s such a big responsibility

and I don‘t know enough.‘‖ In the process of waiting, and discussing the possibility

together, Katie and Catherine realized that it didn‘t much matter to them what their

child‘s race would be. Katie continues,

[Adopting a child of color is] certainly a responsibility but it‘s, as you‘re in it, it‘s

just that‘s who she is and, like with any kid, you have to figure out who they are

and we have to deal with it.

Katie couches their decision to adopt Ophelia in the language of color-blind racism, it‘s

just ―who she is,‖ as a way to mitigate the threat of ―not knowing enough‖ about how to

raise a Black child. When I asked what they did to prepare themselves for raising a child

of color, they stumbled.

Katie: (laughs) I don‘t know what we did [to prepare].

Catherine: Well, we read stuff.

Katie: Yeah.

Catherine: We went to that transracial thing.

Katie: That was after she was born.

Catherine: We went to a...

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 Katie: Oh yeah, we did.

Catherine: ...like a baby care class which was more reassuring that we knew what

we were doing more than anything else. And then we went to a post-adoption

workshop [Triad] was holding and we talked a lot about, you know how you talk

to your kids about adoption and issues with birth families and transracial adoption

and all kinds of stuff. But, it‘s one of these things that, when you‘re waiting [for a

child], it just makes you sad, but you‘re like, ―Well, I should be prepared...so, I‘m

going to do this, but then I don’t want to think of it again.‖

This kind of short back and forth was rare for Katie and Catherine. The question itself

(―How did you all prepare yourselves for adopting, and for transracial adoption, did you

do anything special?‖) may have felt threatening with its assumption that something had

been done. Though the two had attended two seminars the points they took away were to

reassure them they ―already knew what [they] were doing‖ or the information came at a

point in the process that made it unhelpful. The trainings offered to parents on transracial

adoption are typically very minimal and based on an understanding of individual

prejudice. Parents are taught not to be biased against their own children, not about

systemic racism and the effects that will have on their kids and themselves. Additionally,

as Katie says, Ophelia is ―not going to be able to hide she‘s adopted, that‘s pretty

obvious.‖

That Ophelia is Black makes it ―obvious‖ that they adopted her and draws more

attention to them as a lesbian couple. Being Ophelia‘s moms has thrust them into the

spotlight. They are like local celebrities, they cannot even go to the park without being

recognized. Catherine says,

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 Our nanny is also white, I think people think of her as the Black kid with all the

white people around her. And so like we‘ll go places all the time, and people are

like, ―It‘s Ophelia!‖ and we have no idea who they are, and they‘re like, ―We

know Ophelia from such and so.‖ It‘s like, ―Oh, okay, great.‖

As a pair of introverts now constantly being forced to be social, they feel conspicuous

and self-conscious. Catrherine expresses some anxiety about her daughter being ―the

Black kid with all the white people around her.‖ Whether they were ready or not, Katie

and Catherine are raising a Black child, and they are getting a lot of attention for it.

Though this attention isn‘t exactly negative, it‘s hard to call it supportive. At the same

time, Katie and Catherine feel more visible as a same-sex couple with Ophelia around.

Rarely affectionate in public, for the 18 years before Ophelia was around, they generally

―passed‖ as straight women, now they are tokenized as an exemplary ―modern family.‖

Catherine gives this anecdote:

Like, we went to Montana, I had a conference. And so, we all went to Montana

together and we went to Yellowstone. And there were people...like we were

staying at this place that was like an hour away from the park entrance and we

would drive every day and we went back to the hotel and [Katie] was walking

around with [Ophelia] and these people were like, ―Oh, we saw you in

Yellowstone the other day.‖

Katie adds that the same people, complete strangers, admitted to taking a picture of them.

People notice the trio, recognize them as a family, and congratulate themselves for being

so accepting. Katie explains that even in Brooklyn they are an anomaly straight liberals

parents salivate over to add diversity to their children‘s playgroups,

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 Like ―Oh, I can check off two things! It‘s lesbians and a Black kid!‖ People get

like ―Wow, this is good stuff!‖ It‘s very kind of pronounced, like ―that‘s exciting‖

more than anything, I think. That‘s honestly the experience that we have more

than anything.

Though the comments sound like approval and Katie and Catherine say they haven‘t been

discriminated against per se, their ―difference‖ from other families is constantly being

reflected back to them by other people. The attention they get is often annoyingly

tokenizing. People remember them and tell them what a beautiful family they are. Black

women in Target are drawn to Ophelia and dote on her; Katie and Catherine also have the

sense they may be checking on her or making themselves known to her. It also means

they cannot hide from people who might have a problem with their family. They live with

the constant threat of being mistreated on all sides, for being lesbians, for adopting a

child as lesbians, and for adopting a Black child as white lesbians. They don‘t even notice

how routine the added stress this attention brings has become until they are in the rare

space in which their family is ―normal.‖ As Catherine puts it,

You don‘t really think about it [being in a same-sex couple with a transracially-

adopted child] that much, but then you go somewhere, like at Family Week where

no one is looking at your family in any way and it‘s like, ―[big sigh] Oh, wow.

Relief. No one‘s paying attention to us just because of what we look like.‖

Provincetown Family week is an annual week-long event put on by the Family Equality

Council in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a tourist town on at the tip of Cape Cod known

as a progressive arts town with a high concentration of LGBTQ residents. Every week in

the summer is another special event to draw (mostly) queer tourists: Bear Week, Leather

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Week, ―Girl Splash,‖ Family Week, and others. Many of the families that come to Family

Week are mixed-race families, many, but not all of whom are composed of white parents

and kids of color. There are also many interracial couples and their kids, as well as single

folks with kids. It feels like being on a different planet. There‘s programming for kids so

they can hang out with other COLAGErs (the name of an organization, ―Children of

Lesbians and Gays Everywhere,‖ but also what the kids call themselves and each other),

meet up groups for dads, moms, trans parents, families through adoption, families

through surrogacy, a families of color ice cream social (no joke), dances, movie nights, a

beach bar-b-que, all kinds of stuff.

Family Week is one of the few places where their family isn‘t ―weird.‖

Catherine‘s relief comes in finally fitting in and not having to worry about the

microaggressions of strangers asking inappropriate questions (―Where did you get your

baby?‖) or giving dirty looks to her family. Being constantly watched, even by supportive

strangers, can produce a lot of stress for couples like Katie and Catherine. In a way they

are learning, for the first time, what it is like to be in a family of color, and a queer one at

that. They are noticing and internalizing what educator and indigenous rights advocate

Diane Hill calls ethnostress, or the psychological burden placed on people of color in the

US (fear of policing, feeling constantly watched, anxiety in response to discrimination)

which has been linked to poorer health outcomes including shorter life spans.

Katie and Catherine are practicing a wait-and-see approach to talking to Ophelia

about her Black identity. They‘ve not been terribly pro-active because they do worry that

they are those white liberals who think, ―I don‘t know enough‖ and they are afraid that all

their liberal credibility has not added up to knowing much more about race. They know

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they will have to though. They worry about what could happen: discrimination against

Ophelia, discrimination against them as a family, Ophelia potentially growing up and

disidentifying with them, Ophelia feeling confused about her own identity because they

raised her. They also feel irrevocably changed. Just as people see them as visible

lesbians, the mixed-racial character of their family is also immediately visible and that

extends to them. And they don‘t always know what they should do for Ophelia. Would

drawing more attention to Ophelia‘s race, to educate and prepare her for the world, only

emphasize her difference from them?

Party of Seven?

Luckily, Katie and Catherine soon found they were not alone in their experience

of being white lesbians parenting a Black daughter. The other child Keisha had placed

with Triad, Monica, lived just a few blocks away with her two moms and sister. The

extreme convenience of this set-up—two white lesbian couples living in Park Slope and

parenting biological siblings—was not lost on Katie. She explains that, ―We think there

was a little hand-of-god from [Josie] making it happen because it was just a little too

convenient.‖ Finally, fate, and the agency‘s discretion, was on their side. Katie and

Catherine got to meet Monica‘s moms, Jacqueline and Elisa, almost immediately after

they finalized their adoption. Monica was three, and had a five-year-old white sister,

Tara. In what Katie calls ―the joy and drama of adoption,‖ Jacqueline and Elisa were

open to help foster a relationship between Monica and Ophelia.

The two couples and three kids have spent a lot of time together, even vacationing

for a week in Maine. As Katie puts it, the connection with Jacqueline, Elisa, Monica, and

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Tara was ―just sudden family.‖ Catherine reiterates, ―Yeah, so we not only got the baby,

but four other people in our family!‖ The fifth, shadow member of the family is, of

course, Keisha. Katie and Catherine have a framed picture of Keisha and Ophelia, from

right after she was born, in Ophelia‘s room as well as picture of Keisha on their family

picture wall. As part of their contract with Triad, Katie and Catherine send pictures of

Ophelia to Keisha, through the agency, every six months. Keisha hasn‘t picked up the

last two sets. They say they hope Keisha can be part of Ophelia‘s life, though they are not

sure she wants to be, ―and that‘s why it‘s really great to have [Monica], because maybe

[Ophelia‘s] birth mom won‘t be part of her life, but then she‘ll have someone,‖ says

Katie. That Keisha‘s connection seems to be fading makes Katie and Catherine even

more thankful for their connection to Monica and her moms. They might also find Keisha

threatening in a way Monica and her household are not. I think what I‘m missing in this

section is a sense of the emotional tensions that might accompany the arrangements in

question. Rather than erase Ophelia‘s birth story and make themselves her heroines, Katie

and Catherine want her to grow up knowing about Keisha and forming a close bond with

Monica. They embrace the complications of their accidental extended family, and see it

as a kind of fortune. As Catherine puts it,

[Josie] kept on saying that you get the kid you were meant to have and you know,

[I was] kind of like, ―Yeah, yeah, whatever, you just wait and then you get one.‖

But, I really think it‘s actually true in this case—there are just too many things

about it.

Though they are far from perfect in how they talk about Keisha, they recognize the power

she will have for Ophelia and, rather than stand in the way, they are presenting Ophelia

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with opportunities for continued connection with her biological kin. Ophelia, only two

years old, doesn‘t know yet that she and Monica are biological siblings. For now, they are

friends and the two Black girls ―surrounded by white people.‖ They are planning to let

her know, just biding their time. So much of their experience is foreign to the other

parents on the playground. Liz says,

It‘s funny to see people who are just straight people with kids, and whenever we

mention things about [Ophelia] and about letting her know at some point [that she

has this connection to this other family]...it‘s very hard for them to wrap their

heads around, like she can have as many moms as she wants. Like that‘s great,

how great is that? Like if she thinks of [Monica]‘s moms as people she can go to,

if her birth mom is ever in the picture... I think because she‘s ours, we don‘t have

a proprietary thing about that mother role, so we‘re like, ―Yeah, have as many as

you want.‖ Great.

Ophelia coming into their lives has completely transformed how Katie and Catherine

think about family too. This was all very much an accident. They did not seek out a

transracial adoption, a family that extends across households, or a life in the local

spotlight. Their successes, so far, are limited, but they remain open to what may come. In

the process, they have expanded their own family to include Jacqueline and Elisa and

both their kids. Together they are helping each other figure out how to live as lesbian

couples in this ever-changing neighborhood raising daughters of color.

I haven‘t caught up with Katie and Catherine in some time, but so much has

changed in the racial consciousness in America in the last few years. The riots in

response to police killings of unarmed Black men, the rise of the Black Lives Matter

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movement, Black athletes being moved to protest on national television, the election of

Trump and the subsequent surfacing of white nationalists. Katie works for the nation‘s

largest civil rights organization and is well aware of these events. Ophelia‘s now old

enough to be going to elementary school where she will be exposed to individual and

institutional biases against her. I can only hope Katie and Catherine are ready, and in my

utopia, where their daily acts of parenting and being constantly noticed, comparing notes

with Monica‘s parents on their hopes and anxieties raises their racial consciousness little

by little, they are.

Transfeminine Fatherhood in Provincetown: Fran and Avril

“I could tell my wife…was pissed”

Fran is a 60-year-old white, trans woman and former construction worker and an

example of how someone, just in the course of living their life, can wander into

utopianism. Until she convinced her brother to buy out her half of their small business,

she was co-owner and operator of a fence contracting and installation company in rural

Pennsylvania. She was accustomed both to dealing with the financial aspects of the

business and going out on jobs to install the fences themselves. In her free time, she went

out on her 26-foot sailboat with her wife and their two young kids or cruised around on

her 1973 Harley-Davidson Sportster. Though she was never officially a member of any of

Pennsylvania‘s infamous motorcycle clubs, she would occasionally ―run with‖ Satan‘s

Sons (not to be confused with the outlaw biker gang, the Sons of Satan who were also

very active in the area). Even with all this butch cred, Fran‘s always been a romantic.

Before her transition, she and her ex-wife, Darlene, were dedicated ballroom dancers and

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dressed up and went out, kid-free on a weekly basis. Fran, then ―Frank,‖ would pomade

her hair, comb her medium-length beard, and break out a sport coat for the occasion.

Many of their mutual friends were also straight married couples in the ballroom scene.

Dancing together, and with others, kept their marriage fresh and connected.

For six weeks each fall, there would be Friday night ballroom socials with a

theme. One of these nights, the theme was ―He/She Night‖ (it was the 1980s), where the

organizers thought it would be fun for the men and women to ―switch roles‖ not only in

their dance, but in their physical gender presentation. Darlene wasn‘t particularly into the

theme nights but thought it would be fun; she could wear her husband‘s shirt and jeans

and suggested that Fran could wear one of Darlene‘s mom‘s old dresses. Still looking

back in disgust at the proposition of wearing a frumpy dress Fran tells me about that

night,

I says [to Darlene], ―No, no I‘ll take care of myself. I‘m not going to wear some

80-year-old woman‘s dress. I mean, forget it. If I‘m going to do this, I want

something at least halfway decent.‖

What Darlene didn‘t know was that Fran thrilled at the idea of going out as a woman. She

took her task incredibly seriously, going far beyond the borrowed dresses of the cisgender

men at the dance that night. First, she went to a lingerie shop two towns away and Jean,

the woman working there, could tell she needed help. As an ice-breaker Jean said, ―I help

guys every Halloween to do it [dress up as a woman], not a problem,‖ and proceeded to

help Fran far beyond what she asked. Fran explains,

[Jean] says, ―Get in there. Try this on, try that on.‖ And we finally found stuff.

She says, ―Now, you gotta get rid of the beard.‖ [I said,] ―Okay.‖ She says, ―You

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 gotta go out and get wigs.‖ My hair was relatively short at the time. I said,

―Okay.‖ ―And you‘re going to have to find shoes, I don‘t have any shoes for you.‖

But, she says, ―Come [back] here, I‘ll do your makeup for you, I‘ll get you all

ready.‖

Fran was relieved to have someone non-judgmentally assist her in her desire to look, not

just like a ―man in a dress‖ but a beautiful woman. And Jean could tell that Fran‘s

enthusiasm went far beyond the party. The night of the dance, Fran returned to the

lingerie shop with her new clothes, clean-shaven, with a wig and heels. Wanting to

surprise Darlene, she told her she was having her make-up done and would just meet her

at the party. After she was made-up, Jean offered to take some pictures of Fran outside

next to Fran‘s shiny black Camero, and Fran tells me this attracted some attention,

I‘m standing by the Camaro, and these guys come by [and say], ―Hey, girls, you

wanna come out and party tonight?‖ [Jean and I are] like [laughing], ―Oh my

God,‖ you know? [Jean] was like, ―Don‘t you say a word. Keep your mouth shut,

I‘ll talk,‖ you know?

This was the first time Fran had dressed like a woman in public and she was already

being validated as passable and attractive. Jean knew the deep voice would give Fran

away though, and either for her safety or to keep the fun going, she told her not to talk to

the men who approached them. By the time Fran got to the dance, she was beaming. She

entered to a chorus of ―Oh, my God!‖ and a sea of jaws dropping. Fran says,

humbly, ―You know, at the time I was only in my late 30s and, I must say, I came out

pretty good.‖ The only person unimpressed by Fran‘s transformation was her wife—―I

could tell my wife, my ex, was pissed.‖ As the night wore on, Darlene‘s attitude only

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worsened, though no one but Fran seemed to notice. The rest of their ballroom dance

friends wanted to spend even more time with the new Fran,

We used to go out afterwards, dancing, and they all said, ―Oh, you gotta come!‖

So they dragged us along and [Darlene] was getting more and more pissed. And I

had guys at the bar hitting on me. So, [Darlene says,] ―let‘s go home, let‘s take

you home.‖ She didn‘t talk to me for about a week after that. She was so mad.

And so, I put everything in the closet and hid it again for, I think, about six more

years before I finally came out to her.

While everyone else fed off Fran‘s excited energy and egged her on, wanting to take her

out beyond the confines of the ―he/she‖ dance, Darlene saw that Fran‘s joy ran deeper

than the gag the event was supposed to be and wanted to leave as soon as possible. From

that night on, there was no going back for Fran, but Darlene‘s response led Fran to

restrict her interest in dressing in women‘s clothes to a private activity. Though they

didn‘t talk about what happened that night or what it might mean for years, they both

knew it was significant.

Fran thought about that night a lot in the intervening years. She was worried

enough to seek out her own therapist about her desire to ―cross dress.‖ The therapist was

supportive of Fran coming out to her wife and helped her to write a letter to Darlene. Fran

handed over the letter the day they dropped their two girls off at summer camp. She

wanted to give Darlene the space and time to be mad and to process the revelation away

from the kids. Recounting the day, Fran says,

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 So, yeah, [Darlene] was furious. I gave her a letter and she read it and she sat

there in shock and then she started yelling at me, you know, [she said,] ―Oh, do I

have to protect the girls around you now…and keep them away from you?‖

Darlene‘s immediate connection—between her husband telling her, ―I like to wear

women‘s clothes‖ and the completely unrelated concern that this somehow made Fran a

pedophile—was unfair, but it was also a reflection of the times. It was the mid-1980s in

which the prevailing logic on how to interpret this news was: 1) a man who dresses like a

woman is a homosexual, and 2) homosexuals are pedophiles. It was a knee-jerk reaction,

but also a guaranteed way to hurt Fran and cut to straight to her deepest fears about

coming out and being misunderstood. After a few days, and Darlene‘s consultation with a

nurse she knew, Darlene felt different. Fran, paraphrases her comments—which, more

than growth or acceptance, amounted to a kind of individual adaptation—saying,

[Darlene said,] ―I‘ve come to the conclusion: you don‘t drink, you don‘t gamble,

you don‘t beat me or anything like that…the only [other] woman you run around

with is yourself.‖ She says, ―In the grand scheme of things, this isn‘t so bad. As

long as we, you know, figure out how to work around it.‖

Darlene concluded that Fran‘s gender non-conformity, as far as anti-social vices went,

including spousal abuse and alcoholism, wasn‘t so bad. An insult, to be sure, this

response was actually immensely relieving to Fran since it suggested Darlene could live

with it. But, Darlene‘s acceptance held hidden conditions: ―As long as we figure out how

to…work around it‖ meant Fran would have to kiss their daughters goodbye, make them

wait in another room, then change her outfit and leave without seeing them on nights she

went out in her preferred clothing. Darlene was, indeed, ―protecting the girls‖ around

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Fran, afraid of what seeing their father in a dress would do to them. Fran says that this

was basically okay with her because ―at the time, cross-dressing was enough and

occasional.‖ Fran and Darlene joined a local chapter of the Society for the Second Self,

or Tri-Ess. Tri-Ess is still an active group today, with a dozen chapters across the US,

though it‘s mission as ―an international social and support group for heterosexual

crossdressers, their partners, the spouses of married crossdressers and their families‖ (tri-

ess.org) has fallen out of political favor. Chapters vary in the language they use, but the

group was established specifically for ―heterosexual crossdressers,‖ a phrase which

intentionally, and unironically, excludes those who identify as part of LGBTQ

community. This is less a social club than a support group meant only to support people

as long as they do not seek to transition and live full-time as a gender they were not

assigned at birth. Summing up the Tri-Ess approach to gender variance Fran says, ―So, if

you decide to transition, you‘re ousted, or, if you‘re gay, you‘re ousted. They‘re very

rigid, they‘re a dying organization.‖

Tri-Ess advised a slow process of coming out to children, if at all. So, Darlene

started asking their oldest, Harriet, thirteen at the time, what she thought about men who

dressed like women. Harriet said she was fine with these hypothetical men, but when

eventually Darlene asked Harriet how she would feel if she knew her dad cross-dressed,

Harriet‘s face fell. She was incredulous, so Darlene told her to go ask her father. Fran

recounts,

So, she comes over and says, ―Dad, Mom says you like to dress in women‘s

clothes.‖ [Harriet], she‘s very direct…so I says, ―Yeah, well, I do.‖ I says, ―How

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 do you feel about it?‖ She says…she wouldn‘t want to see it at all, she said ―just

do what you want.‖

Eventually both kids did see her dressed up before a Tri-Ess meeting rather than waiting

in another room when Fran and Darlene left. While Harriet was hurt and perplexed, their

younger daughter, Alice, was more curious than anything else.

[Alice] says, ―Mom, I want to see Dad.‖ So [Alice] comes out and she gives me

the look up and down, up and down, and then she says, ―Cool shoes, Dad.‖ She

says, ―I‘m going back to watch TV now.‖ That was it! I said, ―Okay…‖

[laughing] and I think the following evening [Harriet] said, ―Okay, I want to see

Dad now. If [Alice] says it‘s okay, then it‘s okay.‖ And after that they were kind

of fine with it.

Being in Tri-Ess reiterated to Fran that ―crossdressing‖ was something only to be done in

secret. After she came out to her kids, and it went pretty well, she started to question the

shame that seemed to be at the group‘s foundation. She sought out a more celebratory

setting for people who were gender non-normative and went, by herself, to Fantasia Fair

in Provincetown, some six and a half hours from her home. According to

Provincetown.com,

Fantasia Fair is a week-long transgender event held every October in the LGBT

resort town of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Part conference, part social

gathering, the Fair is a ―full immersion‖ experience, meaning that attendees can

and usually do spend an entire week 24/7 presenting their gender as they wish.

For this one week, she didn‘t have to sneak around or worry that other people were

judging her. It was like the night of the ―he/she‖ dance for seven days in a row. For the

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first time, she was comfortable in her own skin. She met people, she danced, she learned

make-up tips. And every year she kept going back. But, when it came time to return

home, and return to her life as Frank, Fran fell into a depression. It was no longer enough

for her to occasionally crossdress at Tri-Ess meetings after she knew how good it felt to

her to present as a woman fulltime. Fran says,

And, we did that for 6 or 7 years before [Darlene] finally decided I had to go this

route [transitioning to female]. She said, ―You‘re too happy when you go [to

Fantasia Fair].‖ I would go to Fantasia Fair and come home and she could see me,

I would just go into a funk for two weeks after I came home because I was so

happy up there and then [I‘d] go home and put everything away again until next

year.

Fantasia Fair was the catalyst Fran needed. It showed her that things could be different;

she could have a community and live as she pleased.

Though it was Darlene who ―decided‖ Fran had to transition, actually following

through cost Fran her marriage and threatened her relationships with her children.

Though Fran was still very much in love with her wife, changing her gender meant a

sudden shift from a heterosexual relationship to a lesbian one. They were essentially the

same people in the same relationship, but what everyone else saw would be

fundamentally different and, for Darlene, it was too much. She was fine with the

occasional cross dressing, but Fran coming out would jeopardize the comfort of the

unremarkable, heteronormative exterior she‘d been trying to maintain. They bumped up

against the rigidity of binary categories of sexuality: Fran was attracted to women, as

Frank this made her straight, but now as Fran she was suddenly a lesbian even though it

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was her gender that changed and not her sexual ―orientation.‖ Fran didn‘t know any more

about being a lesbian than Darlene did, but Darlene wasn‘t willing to go on that journey

with her. Recounting the split six year later, Fran says,

[Darlene] says she‘s not a lesbian and she can‘t be with a lesbian and so, we

decided to split and it‘s an amicable split and we went our separate ways and

so…it was a heart-wrenching process because I still care for her.

This sentiment is echoed by many ciswomen formerly married to transwomen. It‘s fairly

common for relationships (particularly heterosexual marriages) to dissolve when a

partner transitions (Haines, Ajayi, and Boyd 2014). In addition to the changes to labels

and physical and hormonal changes that happen during transitioning, the non-

transitioning partner can feel a sense of betrayal, like if they didn‘t know something so

fundamental—their own partner‘s gender identity— they really didn‘t know who they

married. Cisgender, heterosexual women may not want to lose their heterosexual

identities. It‘s like the opposite of Carla Pfeffer‘s study of the cisgender women partners

of trans men who go out of their way to signal they are queer for fear they might be

mistaken for heterosexuals now that they were with men (Pfeffer 2017).

Harriet and Alice Meet Fran and Avril

After twenty-two years of marriage, Fran found the idea of moving on difficult.

Not only had she had little experience being a woman herself, she was very far outside

anything resembling a lesbian community. Nothing about Fran‘s attractions changed, but

the relationships themselves, and how they would be seen, changed irrevocably. Changed

too were her relationships to her children. She was becoming a woman, but was still, in

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her eyes, a father. Fran says, ―I told [Harriet and Alice] I would always be ‗Dad‘ and so if

that‘s what they‘re comfortable calling me, then fine, they could call me Dad. You know,

I still act like Dad to them.‖ But, initially, Alice didn‘t feel that way, she was losing her

dad in a few ways: Fran was divorcing her mom, moving out of the family home, and

becoming a woman. Fran‘s appearance over the next few years would change

dramatically. At the same time, teenage Alice was hitting puberty and going through

emotional and physical changes herself. She didn‘t want anyone at school to know her

dad was a woman and hardly wanted to see Fran herself. She would skip their planned

monthly visits and insist on meeting in public when she agreed to them and loudly called

Fran ―Dad‖ to intentionally try to out Fran in public. Alice was doling out the kind of

punishment that was commonly court-ordered for parents who came out as gay and

lesbian and legally lost all but a tenuous connection to their kids: no overnight visits, no

―exposure‖ to the LGBTQ ―lifestyle‖ by meeting the parents‘ new partners, and visits in

public, presumably to guard against the kind of abuse Darlene‘s mind immediately went

to when Fran came out to her. Courts argued that it was ―in the best interests of the child‖

to guard them against their queer parents. Concerns over these parents, fueled by dubious

studies funded by conservative lobbies like Focus on the Family, ranged from queer

influence that threatened to ―turn‖ their kids gay or trans, to potential psychological

trauma, to the contraction of HIV.

Harriet, a few years older than Alice, took the news of her changing family much

better. Within a year of her father coming out to her, Harriet‘s close friend came out to

her as a trans guy. There were no resources for LGBTQ youth at her high school, so

Harriet organized a GSA herself against the protests of the administration. In Fran‘s

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proud retelling, Harriet has been a vocal trans advocate for most of her life. When she

saw a lack of material on trans people being taught in her small college‘s introduction to

women‘s studies course, she took it upon herself to educate her classmates. Avril, Fran‘

current partner, prompts Fran, ―tell the story about when [Harriet] held the picture of you

up in class.‖ This story has achieved the level of family myth, being retold some ten years

later. It is meant to be emblematic of Harriet‘s bravery and ability to point out injustice.

Harriet stood in front of the class and held up a magazine. Referencing the cover model,

she asked, ―How many of you think this is a beautiful woman?‖ She paused to let people

nod and put up their hands in agreement and then told them, ―that‘s my dad.‖ It‘s unclear

if Harriet meant for the students in the class to be right—"yes, this is a beautiful woman

and also my dad‖—or wrong—"you thought this was a beautiful woman and it isn‘t, it‘s

my dad.‖ In any case, the event caused enough of a stir that Harriet felt unwelcome at her

right-of-center liberal arts college and she dropped out. The next year she started going to

a state school and was much happier blending in with the crowd.

Fran had shared custody of Alice after the divorce and, in time, Alice started

spending alternating weeks with Fran. Fran still loved being a dad, but she was also

building a new life for herself. She started going out to meet new people and was

accepted into a circle of women at a lesbian bar she‘d commute to in Philadelphia. She

loved this bar also for its dancefloor. That‘s where she met Avril. Remembering the

evening, Fran says, ―So, I‘m up on the floor and I‘m dancing on the floor and [Avril] was

coming at me, I saw her coming at me and I was like, ‗Oh, no, this is not good.‘‖ Fran

hadn‘t started dating yet and wasn‘t particularly ready. She was focused on fitting in with

her new community and was also pretty oblivious to flirtation. Avril said, ―I saw her on

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the dance floor and I was like, ‗I have got to ask her to dance.‘‖ They dance for a while

and Avril asks if she can buy Fran a drink. Fran got nervous then, she was worried the

illusion of them just being two women dancing at a gay bar would be broken once they

started talking. ―One of the first things I said to her,‖ says Fran, ―I said, ‗Firstly, you

know I‘m a guy…‘‖ Without missing a beat Avril said, ―Yeah I kind of picked that up

with your voice‖ and kept on going. Avril says of their first conversation, ―it was as

natural as anything.‖

A year and a half later they married. Around that time Fran decided she wanted to

surgically transition. Though Fran identified as a woman, was on hormones and going

through a painful and drawn-out electrolysis process, her transition hadn‘t reached the

level of legal recognition (at the time) since her sex change surgery was scheduled for

another six months later. This was 2006 and the Defense of Marriage Act had not yet

been ruled unconstitutional. Fran and Avril were planning to move to Massachusetts

anyway, where gay marriage was legal, but they were afraid of their marriage being

nullified by moving somewhere else or having it found ―illegitimate‖ in some other way.

They registered as a heterosexually-married couple and were legally married at a local

courthouse, but both women wore wedding dresses to their church ceremony four months

later, during Fantasia Fair week, in Provincetown.

“Love, Your P-town Moms”

Once Alice left for college, Fran and Avril made their move to Provincetown

official. They sold most of their possessions, including Fran‘s motorcycle and sailboat,

and Fran convinced her brother to buy her out of the fence business, so she could invest

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in a bed and breakfast in the heart of the place she first got to feel like herself. Fitting in,

it turns out, is not the same as blending in. Though Fran identifies as a woman and a

lesbian, she‘s also openly trans in Provincetown. In part, this is an effect of the space,

Fran says,

Well, part of the problem here [in Provincetown] is that everyone is so attuned to

it [the possibility of other people being trans] that it‘s very hard to pass here. So,

they just…they zero in right away. It‘s kind of like gaydar—transdar, so they

know right away [that I‘m trans] and it‘s like, ―Oh why even bother [trying to

pass as a ciswoman]?‖ It‘s easier just to let my voice fall… I look like most of the

lesbians in town, you know?

Since Fran serves as the handywoman of the inn, she‘s most often seen in what Avril

calls ―dyke gear‖—a t-shirt and cargo shorts with a tool belt and work boots. She doesn‘t

wear make-up, but has long hair she pulls back into a ponytail. Essentially, she dresses

and acts as she always has—her gender identity isn‘t expressed in the clothes she wears

or any new interests she can more comfortably pursue now, as a woman. She‘s still fixing

things, going to the hardware store, and working with her hands. ―Passing‖ as a

ciswoman, as opposed to a transwoman people can pick up with their transdar, is not

something she bothers to do where she lives.

Going out of town, though, presents the possibility of danger, Fran says, ―But,

when we go out of town…I try much harder [to pass]. Especially on vacations and stuff.‖

She told me about a particular incident in the airport when she was traveling with her

mother to Harriet‘s college graduation:

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 We went out for [Harriet‘s] graduation…and we‘re going through the airport and

my mom, when she‘s traveling, she has a tendency to babble…We‘re walking

through the airport and she‘s like, ―Oh, [Frank], look at this. Oh, [Frank], look at

that. Oh, Frank!‖ I‘m like, I finally had to tell her, I says, ―Mom, quit calling me

[Frank], either call me [Fran] or don‘t call me anything at all.‖ I said, ―Because

the TSA people are gonna hear you calling me [Frank] and that‘s not what my

passport says, or any of my ID says, and they‘re gonna throw me in the glass cage

and be doing all kinds of stuff.‖

At airport security across the US, passengers are most likely to be asked to go through

full-body scanners, which utilize Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT). Though the AIT

is meant to use the image of a ―generic passenger‖ to scan and locate potential

―anomalies,‖ operators must choose between ―male‖ and ―female‖ when a person enters

the booth, typically done without asking and based on the operators assessment of the

person‘s gender, so the machine can search for ―unusual contours‖ in a person‘s

(gendered) body. The machine will detect things considered to be prostheses, including

breast forms and packers. When asked, and the passenger will be asked, the trans

passenger must explain. Passengers can opt-out of AIT scans, but the alternative is a

thorough pat-down, which may make the trans passenger even less comfortable. To the

TSA‘s credit, they include training and guidelines on how to interact with transgender

passengers (https://www.tsa.gov/transgender-passengers) which indicates that passengers

should be treated with respect and not asked to remove any prostheses for further

inspection if they have adequately explained it. In practice, of course, trans passengers

are understandably nervous that they will not be ―treated with respect and courtesy‖ and

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be subject to humiliation and disrespect. Fran, though typically very accommodating of

her mother‘s struggle to understand her gender, draws the line here and is right to

highlight the importance of having all documentation line up to avoid suspicion of

wrongdoing and any subsequent invasive procedures.

Avril‘s mom is similarly well-meaning but not exactly attuned to trans identities.

Avril came out to her mom as a lesbian many years before, so that part was no problem,

but sometime during their first conversation when Fran met Avril‘s mom, Avril says,

―She started talking about menstrual cycles and says to [Fran], ‗Well, you understand

what I‘m talking about.‘ And my younger sister is like, ‗Mom, did you forget who you‘re

talking to?‘ [And my mom says,] ‗Well, actually, I did.‘‖

In time, Harriet and Alice have come to accept Avril‘s presence, though not her

place, in their lives. Avril says about her relationship with the two girls,

We‘ve always been on good terms… it was a really easy transition being dad‘s

girlfriend and now dad‘s wife. Although one time I signed [Harriet‘s] birthday

card, ―love Dad and your stepmom [Avril]‖ or ―your rockin‘ stepmom [Avril],‖

and she got all upset [and said], ―You‘re not my stepmother!‖

Following up on this retelling, Fran says, ―[Avril] learned you know, she doesn‘t refer to

herself as stepmother at all. That‘s probably the only point of contention…It hit a button

with [Harriet and Alice] and if that‘s the concession well, it‘s no big deal.‖ It may be no

big deal to Fran, but it might be for Avril. Avril is legally married to Harriet and Alice‘s

parent—how would she not be a step-mother? It‘s possible that Harriet was just being

oppositional at that moment, not willing to recognize Avril as her step-mom because

doing so would admit that her dad has moved on, but this is something that has persisted,

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something Avril has ―learned‖ not to say. It may also be that Avril has become the

undeniable symbol of the changes in Fran‘s life. Avril isn‘t just ―dad‘s wife,‖ but the

lesbian partner of their dad who is now a woman. Fran is pushing back in her own subtle

way and tells me that they have already decided that if Harriet ever has kids, they want to

honor her discomfort with Avril by not giving her the designation ―grandmother,‖ but

that both women, Fran and Avril will take the designation ―alma‖ which is

―grandmother‖ in German. Explaining their thought process, Fran and Avril switch off

saying,

Fran: We already decided that we won‘t refer to her [Avril] as Grandma because

it, you know, that‘s my ex‘s spot.

Avril: I‘m going to be an Alma, which is…

Fran (finishing Avril’s sentence): …Grandma in German. So…

Avril (finishing Fran’s sentence): …it‘ll be Alma [Fran] and Alma [Avril].

Fran: At least this way they‘ll have something to refer to her by rather than just

[Avril]. Because little kids need to…show respect for the older people, so you

have a title, and that will give them a decent title to use. Yet, it‘s not really

stepping on my ex‘s toes at all. We try to make sure we work well with everybody.

Avril: And that will get them acclimated to the fact you’re female in the

beginning. And then, as they get older and they can understand more, eventually

you can say, ―Nope, trans…trans woman.‖ (All emphasis mine.)

Thus, Fran and Avril have worked out a compromise: if Harriet and Alice have children,

they don‘t have call Avril ‗grandma‘, but they do have to give both women respectful

alternative titles that acknowledge both Avril‘s official position in the kids‘ lives and

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Fran‘s female identity. When Fran says, ―We try to make sure we work well with

everybody‖ and acknowledges that she doesn‘t want to step on anyone‘s toes, she puts a

fine point on her and Avril‘s seemingly tenuous place in the family. They try to be as

accommodating as possible, while they (mostly Avril) also insist on limits. The

recognition they have not yet received is being postponed to the next generation, their

future grandchildren, where they hope to establish different terms from the start.

A set of relationships on even shakier ground are those Fran and Avril have with

Fran‘s brother, Steve, and his family. While Fran‘s brother has, for the most part, come

around and accepted Fran‘s transition, his wife Helen has been her greatest critic. Once

Fran transitioned, Helen, a devout Catholic, insisted that she and her nine children—

Fran‘s niece and eight nephews—could no longer be around her. Helen was able to cut

Fran and Avril out of larger family gatherings, like Christmas at Fran‘s parents‘ house,

using the kids as leverage. Fran says,

I don‘t see my nephews [and niece] at all because I‘m not allowed over [to their

house], [Helen] wants no part of me…once I transitioned, then that was it. I was

off the radar. [She said to me], ―How am I going to explain that to the kids?‖ and

stuff like this. If she was visiting my parents like on holidays and stuff, I wasn‘t

allowed to be there. Because she would tell my mother, ―Well, if [Frank]‘s (sic)

going to be there, we‘re not coming then because I‘m not going to expose the kids

to that.‖ So, my mother would say [to me], ―Look, I wanna see the grandkids, so

would you mind [not coming]?‖

So, not only is Fran banned from her brother‘s home, she‘s also been essentially cut out

of the family. Fran insists that Helen has single-handedly ruined her relationships with

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her family of origin, including being a motivating factor behind Fran selling her stake in

the family business and moving away. Fran says of Helen‘s role, ―[Helen] put a lot of

stress on my brother...[Tony] and I ran the whole [business] and, you know, because he

was pulled both ways he was kind of—it weighed very heavily on him…so it was easier

for me to step aside‖ (emphasis mine). Though Helen is the focal point for this family

pain, Helen‘s transphobia is being enabled by Fran‘s own parents and brother with the

consequence of Fran fading out of their lives.

With these examples, Fran gives two examples of her making accommodations in

order for other people to feel more comfortable with her being trans by basically going

away. In saying ―it was easier for me to step aside,‖ she means it was easier for everyone

else if she wasn‘t around. But, Helen and Tony‘s kids have ―been exposed‖ to their Aunt

Fran. Prior to the move to Provincetown, Fran was training her oldest nephew to take

over her spot in the family business, Fran says, ―He trained under me and he really

admires me and, you know, when he has a problem he calls me and talks to me and stuff.

He kind of thinks his mother‘s a jerk too.‖ This relationship with her nephew offers Fran

a small sense of vindication. Adding to this, Avril is also sure to let me know that

everyone thinks one of the nephews is gay, she says, ―Everybody thinks he‘s gay, even

[Fran‘s] parents think he‘s gay…and the irony [is] he‘s [Helen‘s] favorite!‖ Giving a nod

to Helen‘s Catholicism, which presumably motivated her anti-LGBTQ stance, Fran

quips, ―God works in mysterious ways!‖

These incidents have changed Fran‘s mind about what family is and what it

should mean. Prior to coming out, she didn‘t have to think much about it; her family was

her wife and children, her parents, and her brother‘s family. A taken-for-granted aspect of

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family is that the relationships endure the trials of life, but when Fran was cut out, and so

easily, she started to question the idea that we should take the families was are given.

Fran says,

My oldest daughter, [Harriet] said one time, she says, ―There‘s a new definition

for family nowadays. It‘s not who you‘re blood related to so much, it‘s who you

can count on to be there when you need them.‖ And that‘s what family should be,

especially in our [the LGBTQ] community. I think that‘s really the real telling

thing. Because so many of us are estranged from our whole families, or parts of

our families and stuff that...they don‘t really matter anymore. But that friend of

yours who also has no family, suddenly becomes your family.

In spite of its radical origins, ―chosen family‖ is now a commonplace idea. It‘s used to

sell cell phone plans (think T-Mobile‘s friends and family, or ―Framily‖ plan) and was

off-handedly employed in an episode of a teen drama, Riverdale, based in the Archie

Comics universe to describe close friendships. For Fran and many people like her though,

this idea—people who you decide are family when your own family has turned its back—

maintains its import. Straight people are welcome to use the term and apply it to their

own lives. But Fran reminds us of its original, Westonian intent: to provide connection

and support to those who have none.

It‘s no wonder why Fran and Avril chose to move to Provincetown, the place that

welcomed them, permanently. Running an inn not only offers them a source of income,

but the opportunity to host the kind of visitors they used to be. Visitors come for Fantasia

Fair, Bear Week, Pride, Leather weekends, Family Week, Girl Splash, and other events

where queer people can be ―fully-immersed‖ in a town of supportive and like-minded

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people without fear of violence or judgment. Fran and Avril get to meet people who are

as thrilled to be visiting and experiencing this alternative landscape as they used to be,

but they‘re now in the position of being able to offer advice and help and home. Running

the inn for almost a decade now has allowed them to form close bonds with repeat

visitors, none more precious to them than Ethan, a shy gay man in his twenties who can

usually be found behind an old film camera. He loves visiting Provincetown but is less

into the party scene than other gay visitors his age. Fran and Avril find this very

endearing and they‘ve taken him under their wings. When he visits, Fran makes his

favorite vegetarian chili and they both encourage him to stay longer, for free. Elaborating

on their closeness, Avril told me,

We call [Ethan] our son. He‘s been here, gosh fifteen, sixteen times at

least…When he came out, his entire family just cut him out, with no contact

whatsoever. So, we kind of try to take care of him when he comes to visit. One

time a couple years ago, we met him at the dock for the ferry and we‘re holding

up a sign [that reads], ―Welcome home, son. Love your P-town moms!‖ and he

comes walking up the gangway and he see this sign and he just breaks out

laughing. Big smile on his face. [Emphasis mine.]

In Ethan, Fran and Avril see an opportunity to do the kind of caretaking they‘re unable to

do for Fran‘s kids. Neither of them is closer to him than the other, and that they are

lesbians, that one of them is trans, that Ethan is gay, have the opposite effect that it did

with their families of origin: these facts facilitate their connection rather than compromise

it. In each other they have found community, friendship, and chosen family. In this

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family drag, that may only last a weekend a few times a year, Avril is a parent, Fran gets

to be a mom, and Ethan is a son who is beloved by his parents.

This connection would probably not have been possible somewhere else.

Provincetown is one of those unique spaces where queer people flock to be around other

queer people. It helps that it is also gorgeous. Talking about the locations of places like

Provincetown, Key West, and other gay tourist destinations that are not big cities, I quip

that gay people just have great taste in real estate. Fran picked up this idea and took it

somewhere else. She said,

That or we‘re trying to get away from everybody, one or the other. We seem to

gravitate towards water. San Francisco is right on the water there. Asbury Park,

Rehobooth Beach, you know?... But this place [Provincetown] was always free

and easy and Norman Mailer used to call it ―the Wild West of the East‖ because

everything went at the time. No matter who or what you were, it didn‘t matter.

You came here, and you were yourself, and you lived life, and everyone left

everyone alone.

Being left alone may not be utopia for everyone, but it is for Fran. After decades of

having to accommodate the emotional needs of others in response to her gender, it feels

like a break to repair toilets, flip beds, and bake muffins for strangers who know she‘s

trans and don‘t care.

Fran has had to practice accommodation of nearly everyone else‘s feelings since

she transitioned. For her wife, it was not dressing up in public, not coming out for years,

hiding it from their kids, moving out of her home, and, finally, getting divorced over it.

For her kids, she moved out, never forced them to see her if they didn‘t want to, allowing

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them to insist Avril not call herself a step-mother, and still being ―Dad.‖ For the rest of

the family she‘s been patient with their misgendering and misnaming her and has

removed herself from family functions altogether because one person feels uncomfortable

around her. Fran wants to maintain connections to the people of her past, but it comes at

the cost of her own comfort. Going to Fantasy Fest, hanging out at the lesbian bar, and

living in Provincetown have allowed her some respite from this constant emotional labor.

Avril, the first person to see her and love her as is, has offered her a new shot at family,

one they get to navigate together.

We usually think of utopia as something that is conceived first and then, with

more or less success, attempted in practice. That is not the case for Fran. Living far

outside any LGBTQ community in the 1980s, she did not see her desire as part of a

political or social movement. In Fran‘s case, practice preceded conviction. By inclination

easy going and deeply accommodating—to her ex-wife, to her daughters, to her sister-in-

law—Fran nonetheless developed a set of convictions about the way she wanted to live

and with whom. Even more generally, if not quite as explicitly, she developed a

conviction about freedom to choose a gender and freedom to choose a way of doing that

gender. This conviction hasn‘t quite overcome her desire to accommodate, but she‘s

much more aware of what she wants and where she‘ll draw the line, particularly when it

comes to family. Fran has found her utopia in Provincetown, with Avril, and with the life

they make together.

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 Queer Blended Family: Liz, Yasmine, Derek, and Sadie

Liz, her ex-partner Sadie, her current partner, Yasmine, and Derek, Yasmine‘s ex-

husband, are the very picture of the queer blended family. Even by Western

Massachusetts standards, where grade school classes can be as full of children with two

mothers as those with one mother and one father, they are pretty unusual. All four live

within a few miles and are committed to staying in proximity. The threat of a potential

job relocation for one of them means the potential relocation of all of them and the three

children they share. Sadie‘s on the academic job market and the prospect of her partner‘s

ex moving away worries Yasmine. She says,

Sadie has to find a job. How that‘s going to work, I don‘t know. If she‘s going to

get to stay close or not or if I‘m going to have a long-distance relationship with

Liz, or like will I feel comfortable moving? And if I move, Derek would have to

move too. Just like, such a terrible mess. It‘s just a big downer… It‘s so rare,

there‘s like four adults who happen to live within a couple miles radius of each

other. Everyone else I know who‘s divorced just doesn‘t even have that, you

know? Even just having the ability to walk there [to Derek‘s] makes life a lot

easier. I wouldn‘t want the kids to have a long-distance relationship with their

dad, but Dylan can‘t have a long-distance relationship with Sadie. I don‘t know

what the answer is.

With this prospect hanging over them, I entered their lives and took a snapshot of how

each adult was processing their current arrangement and their hopes and fears for the

future of their family.

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 Liz Makes Her Case

I‘d known Liz already. When I first saw a pregnant Liz, I must admit, I thought

she was just getting a beer belly. A white, cisgender lesbian in her late twenties, she was

a lot younger than most parents I knew and much snarkier. She was a graduate student

with harsh and thoughtful critiques delivered with a biting wit. I honestly could not

picture her mothering anyone and, beyond that, since she was also queer, I had no idea

why she would want to. But she did, and she had wanted a kid for years before it became

a reality.

Her ex, Sadie, is pleasant and soft-spoken. Tall, with short, dark hair, she has the

kind of Australian accent that drives American women crazy, but she also blushes at the

least bit of attention from them. They were an odd couple, but they complimented each

other: Liz was cynical where Sadie was hopeful, angry where Sadie was excited, and

brash and demanding where Sadie sought polite compromise. But, as much as she usually

went along with what Liz wanted, Sadie was actually very resistant to having a kid. In her

words,

I had been ambivalent for a long time probably since the beginning when we

[first] talked about it. But, it became more and more apparent that my ex [Liz]

really wanted to have a kid. And then my ambivalence became more like, ―Well,

let‘s try one.‖

As Liz tells her experience of the same time in their lives,

I was in a relationship with somebody who didn‘t really want to have a child but

was open to the idea and knew that I did [want to have a child]…So after many

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 years of poking—not many, a few years—of poking and prodding, she decided

that we could do it. (Emphasis mine)

Both Liz and Sadie frame the decision of having a kid as Liz‘s idea, but Sadie, after some

wearing down and convincing, ultimately had to agree for it to happen. Sadie was not

much interested in the process, remarking on how easy the experience was for her

because of the work Liz was doing researching pregnancy methods, sperm banks,

midwives, etc, ―[S]he actually made it easy, well, relatively easy from my perspective.‖ It

was easy for Sadie because Liz took care of things. If I can apply a language of

household chore distribution, Liz was the ―manager‖ and Sadie was the ―helper‖ in their

pregnancy process. Summing up the complex deliberative process in her

characteristically dry sense of humor, Liz said, ―Lots of different possibilities of how to

do it [get pregnant] and I decided pretty quickly about using anonymous, frozen sperm

from the Internet.‖ Some people might want to dress up this process, going through a list

of pros and cons and why one way works for their family more than the others, but Liz

cuts to the heart of the awkward consumptive intimacy of ordering ―frozen sperm from

the Internet‖ by situating it as something akin to ordering a paper towel holder from

Amazon.

Searching for the right sperm donor was actually the part of the process that most

interested Sadie. They had their pick from the hugely expansive catalog available through

the California Cryobank.

[I]t‘s such a commodified process…they give you some information about each

donor, but then little pieces of extra information all cost more money. So, it‘s like

if you want to see a baby photo, it‘s $20, if you want to see their SAT scores, $15.

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 So, for people who have a much wider range [of potential donors] and care about

more things, it‘s just like thousands of dollars of extra money.

As a social scientist, this process of selecting and buying sperm fascinated Liz, but, as a

graduate student, her eye was also on the bottom line. For people (gay or straight)

without access to free donor sperm but the means to ―buy it from the Internet,‖ the

commercial nature of intentional family formation is something they must constantly

confront. Liz saw how someone might get caught up in the sheer number of options and

combination of qualities and end up spending thousands to get ―the perfect donor,‖ and

that companies were more than happy to monetize the alleviation of their anxieties.

But, Sadie‘s preference for a Chinese donor narrowed the field quite a bit. Since

they knew Liz would carry the child, they wanted to make sure the donor incorporated

some of Sadie‘s qualities so the child looked like both of them. While Liz was open to all

Asian donors, Sadie specifically wanted a Chinese donor to reflect her heritage.

According to Liz, ―That was more important to her, I mean I wanted the baby to look like

both of us, it was more important to her than it was to me that it was Chinese.‖ While Liz

was open to considering all Asian donors, Sadie was not. This phenomenon, of matching

donor race/ethnicity/cultural heritage and other qualities, like stature and personal

interests, is present among heterosexual couples looking to use donor sperm as well, the

thought being that by just looking at the family, people wouldn‘t know the children

―weren‘t theirs‖ and assume they were biologically connected. This takes on a certain

irony when two women attempt to have their child look like both of them. But, in a

market of thousands of donors to choose from, narrowing the field to Chinese and

Chinese-American donors was actually a blessing. Compared to the genetic material of

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white men and other men of color, the sperm of Asian men was in low supply, likely

because of a lower demand. The work of David Eng and others suggests stereotypes of

Asian men characterize them as smaller, more feminine, and, most importantly, less virile

than men of other races (Eng 2001). While all men are welcome to try to sell their genetic

material, and vials are not priced according to the race of the donor, sperm banks operate

by a market logic and seek to build up their supplies of some sperm over others to meet

anticipated demands. Hence, a bank may no longer be accepting sperm from, say, Asian

men, because there is not the demand to justify the supply (Almeling 2011). Liz says,

Actually, that made the choice of sperm, a sperm donor, pretty easy because out

of the like maybe eight or so places in the US that it‘s easy to get sperm from, like

total, there was maybe ten Chinese donors. So like we made a little spreadsheet

of them …and I actually did most of this work. I was the motor behind most of

this. She was open to having a kid but I did all of the research, I figured out

everything. I, you know, researched the various options, the various people, made

this little spreadsheet, was going over the pluses and minuses with her and she

was just like, ―Let‘s just choose the tallest one.‖ So, I was like, ―OK.‖

After Liz went to the trouble of putting in all the work, she sums it all up by saying, ―So,

we just chose the tallest Chinese anonymous guy we could find.‖

They tried three times without success and for $800 a pop. In frustration, Liz

decided to take some time off of trying to get pregnant, but she and Sadie met with a

midwife anyway just for information. They knew that insemination by IUI (where the

sperm is actually injected into the uterus) was much more successful, but had worried

about the cost as this was something insurance did not cover unless a woman had

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documented fertility issues, the threshold being that a woman had tried to get pregnant

without success for one year. Obviously, this does not account for the needs of non-

hetero couples and that having sex with someone for months without conception does not

always mean there is trouble with fertility. The midwife, used to assisting with the

pregnancies of queer parents, told her they would actually do it for free. Newly

invigorated, when her fertile period came around next, Liz made the snap decision, alone

in the car on the way to a department Christmas party, to order another vial of sperm

without talking to Sadie first. Sadie hardly had time to be upset because the midwife

came over the next night to perform the IUI.

Weeks later, again when she was alone, Liz went to a WalMart, bought a

pregnancy test, and took the test in the store bathroom: it was positive. Liz said she had

an idea she might be pregnant but didn‘t tell Sadie or ask her to be with her when she

took a test,

I knew [I was pregnant] because we went to Christmas at my grandmother‘s in

Rhode Island and was so emotional I just sort of had this idea the whole time that

something was going on and we came back from Christmas, like the next day or

whatever I went to WalMart, and I bought a test, and I was alone. I actually just

went into the bathroom at WalMart to use it—because like I couldn‘t wait—and it

was positive.

She wanted these moments for herself and perhaps, even then, foresaw the end of her

relationship with Sadie. To Liz, this was ultimately something she was doing basically by

herself, and Sadie, admittedly ambivalent about the whole thing, was along for the ride if

she wanted to be. Liz researched, planned, and managed all aspects of her pregnancy and

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Sadie had little interest other than picking the right donor, but even then Liz did all the

legwork for making that decision. Sadie was much more career-focused and especially

wary because she viewed having a kid in grad school as a possible impediment to her

graduation or her ability to get an academic job, but Liz made it easy for her,

[S]he had also mapped out a plan in terms of the fact that we‘re both graduate

students. She suggested who would take time off when and she would be taking

the bulk of the time off [after the birth] so I would still be able to do my work.

Sadie‘s thought process is not so different from a disengaged dad in a straight

relationship. The fact of her being a woman doesn‘t mean she is any more interested in

the process of getting pregnant and no more likely to prioritize children above everything

else. As we‘ll see though, she is a much more involved co-parent than her male

counterpart, Derek.

When Dylan was born though, Sadie was enamored with her, and Liz convinced

Sadie to file for a second-parent adoption. Liz, a cynical radical who thinks feminists are

both too conservative and too ideological, does not believe marriage is beneficial to

anyone‘s relationship, and especially not queer relationships. In fact, she told me that if

she could shelter her children from learning about marriage and weddings at all, she

would. I‘d seen many gay and lesbian couples marry for convenience since the practice

became legal in Massachusetts in 2003: to be on the same health insurance, pay less in

taxes, or to have a legal connection to their own children. Until then, lesbian co-parent

adoption was the most common way for non-biological moms to ensure any challenges to

their parenting status had a defense, though that didn‘t always work (see Watkins). When

Dylan was born, Liz insisted Sadie file for legal adoption since they were not married and

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Liz never would be. They hadn‘t talked about it before, assuming staying together would

be insurance enough, but Liz, the kernel of doubt growing in the back of her mind,

wanted Sadie to have this legal connection for her own sake. She knew too, that it would

be important for the child she‘d given birth to have a lifelong connection to the Chinese

side of her family. The Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts, while self-

congratulatingly progressive in many ways, is overwhelmingly white and lacks the

Chinese community that might be found in a more integrated space.

Derek and Yasmine‟s Path to Parenthood

Derek and Yasmine‘s path to parenthood was much more traditional. Derek grew

up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, an only child raised strictly Roman Catholic by parents of

Argentine decent. Derek was in Catholic school from Kindergarten to high school. He

was both intensely spiritual and questioning, saying he rejected Catholicism but has

oscillated between identifying as agnostic and atheist throughout his adult life. He grew

up feeling like an outsider, a non-conformist but not a renegade. Even after leaving the

Church entirely, the teachings of his youth dogged Derek enough for him to combine this

passion for questioning it with his passion for fantasy and science fiction and he penned a

novel he worked on for close to a decade and published in his mid-twenties. The book

illustrates the dystopic possibilities inherent in unquestioning conformity, especially

religious conformity.

After college, but before the book‘s publication, he met Yasmine online. She

seemed weird and cool and thought more deeply than the women he‘d known before. She

too had rejected the religious beliefs of her family, who were Muslim and mostly living

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in Lebanon. She moved to the States for school and then stayed. They met in a chat room,

and then started messaging each other privately, building a long-distance relationship

through email and instant messages. They had similar interests and a great chemistry. At

the point he met Yasmine, just out of MSU and in his early 20s, Derek identified as

polyamorous and was dating multiple partners at once. Derek, inherently distrustful of the

blind conventions of others, believed himself to be someone capable of sustaining loving

relationships with multiple people. As they got more serious, Yasmine made him choose:

be monogamous with her, or continue to be poly without her. Derek chose the former and

started flying to Massachusetts for short trips, a week at a time. During his third visit,

they decided he should move there and in with her. Though he was willing to be

monogamous with Yasmine, Derek had no interest in pursuing that zenith of heterosexual

monogamy, marriage. For Derek, marriage was tainted especially by its religious

overtones and was never on the table for their relationship—until it was. According to

Derek,

I didn‘t want to get married, even if it wasn‘t [a] religious [ceremony], and I

ended up doing both: getting married, and in an Islamic ceremony… if I had gone

back in time and told myself I was going to do that, I probably wouldn‘t have

believed it.

For Derek, getting married was a huge compromise of what he thought he wanted in his

life. But being with Yasmine, a non-traditional woman, ironically meant becoming more

normative and traditional. He‘d already become monogamous for her and when

Yasmine‘s parents found out she was living with a man, they began a concerted

campaign of disapproval until Yasmine and Derek agreed they would marry. They

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weren‘t happy that he wasn‘t Muslim, but Yasmine‘s parents liked Derek, a stably-

employed, American man who was in love with their daughter. In order to preserve

Yasmine‘s relationship with her mother, which had begun to deteriorate, Derek relented.

In his words,

[T]he religious part [of the wedding] I agreed to only because I wanted Yasmine

and her mother to continue talking to each other…We got married in Beirut and I

was stuck putting on a show for people who didn‘t know me, and Yasmine‘s

parents knew that I wasn‘t religious.

Derek was so anti-religion that he spent all his adult life up until then writing a scathing,

thinly-veiled critique of organized religion and publishing it as a novel. For the second

time, Derek compromised something significant to himself to stay in his relationship.

In their first year of marriage, Yasmine became pregnant and gave birth to Cecily.

Unlike becoming a husband, becoming a father was something Derek had always wanted.

They‘d started talking about kids early in their relationship and knew they wanted at least

two, eventually. Yasmine also started running a daycare out of their home, so kids were

her business.

It was a way to both raise Cecily and make money by watching other kids too.

One of those kids was Dylan, Liz and Sadie‘s daughter. Dylan started doing daycare with

Yasmine when she was still a toddler. Liz and Yasmine liked each other immediately;

they shared a dry sense of humor and a no-frills approach to motherhood, out crunching

even the crunchiest of Western Mass moms. Liz began potty training Dylan just about

from the day she was born. She‘d learned about a technique to train your baby to

eliminate on a schedule and would just periodically go to the bathroom, (public or

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private), hold baby Dylan above the toilet, and she would go. The women also agreed

Barbies were inappropriate toys for girls that would give them body image issues and

unrealistic beauty expectations. They believed all kids really needed were wooden

blocks, cloth diapers, plain clothes handed down and eventually passed along, a sling to

be carried in, and lots of books. Liz‘s friendship with Yasmine grew, and so did the

sexual tension between them. They‘d hung out a few times on their own. Yasmine got

pregnant again, and Liz loved the way she glowed. When, three months into her

pregnancy, Yasmine had a miscarriage, Liz was the first person she called. The fetus had

died in her womb, but she still had to deliver it. Liz was with her throughout the process.

The experience was intensely emotional and brought them much closer and in unexpected

ways. Yasmine explains,

Then I was going to have this miscarriage and she was just there for me in a way

that I couldn‘t have gotten support from anyone including Derek, my ex, and I

really didn‘t want support from him anyway. It was a really intense couple of

weeks and she was just there for me. It was just hard. I was trying to balance

being sad about this loss but at the same time there were all these emotions going

on. I just didn‘t really know…I needed support and comfort but I was getting a lot

more out of it than just that.

Yasmine felt a mixture of conflicting feelings while Liz took care of her through her loss.

She was sad, of course, but she also reveled in how much attention she was getting from

Liz. It was the most time they‘d ever spent together. When she says ―I needed support

and comfort but I was getting a lot more out of it than just that,‖ she means she was

falling in love.

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 “Sometimes You Want to Do Something Even Though It‟s Hard”

A few weeks later Yasmine opened a dialog with Derek about the possibility of

her dating a woman, specifically Liz. Derek says, ―[S]he wasn‘t like cheating on me

[with Liz]. I basically said, ‗This is OK with me, just tell me what‘s going on.‘‖ Part of

him felt vindicated, this is what he‘d wanted in the beginning of their relationship! Sadie,

on the other hand, was left in the dark and the revelation of the affair after a month of

dishonesty put an immediate end to her partnership with Liz.

So then Liz and Dylan moved in with…Derek, Yasmine, and Cecily. At around

the same time, Yasmine let Derek know she was pregnant again and also wanted a

divorce, ―After about a month [of seeing Liz] Yasmine basically sort of abruptly told me

she couldn‘t have a relationship with me anymore,‖ says Derek. Since Yasmine and

Derek‘s sexual relationship had waned, Yasmine knew the exact night she conceived

Arlo—it was the same night she had her first kiss with Liz. Yasmine sums up the night of

the conception as, ―We kissed in the woods, I came home, I told Derek, he wanted to

have sex, and I said yes.‖ Because of the coincidence, Liz credits herself with being the

first lesbian to get another woman pregnant. Reflecting on this tongue-in-cheek claim,

Yasmine says,

Jude even has [Liz‘s] eyes, I don‘t know how that worked out. That‘s like so

much more miraculous…she definitely got me pregnant and it was kind of a cool

series of events though people really frown on it like it was being irresponsible or

whatever but I don‘t really look at it that way.

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Perhaps out of the same impulse that led Sadie to specify they needed to go with a

Chinese donor, Yasmine wills Arlo‘s biogenetic connection to Liz into existence. That

Arlo would ―have [Liz‘s] eyes‖ is impossible, and Yasmine and Liz both understand that,

but this sentiment has worked as a shorthand for the strength of their connection. Saying

Arlo has Liz‘s eyes works to simplify a complex situation and add some levity to an

origin story people certainly find salacious. It‘s also a way to write Derek out of the

narrative of the pregnancy, a move picked up on by Derek. He says,

Someone on Facebook said [Arlo] looked like [Liz] and I didn‘t know how to

react. I didn‘t want to say, ―he‘s my kid‖ or something like that. I did say

something; I said like, ―well, but he gets this from me,‖ just because I want to get

credit.

When Derek saw the comment on Liz‘s Facebook wall, possibly even a satirical one from

a friend familiar with the situation, he didn‘t want to seem defensive, but he also couldn‘t

let it go. He felt erased and insecure and worked to insert himself back into the story,

informing not only Liz‘s friend, but reminding Liz herself he was Arlo‘s real parent. Liz

may have intended to do this herself or let the comment roll off as an innocent joke or

mistake. But Derek certainly wasn‘t laughing. He continues,

At one point there were some people who thought…that [Liz] had actually given

birth to [Arlo] or something like that. It‘s funny because of the timing of [Arlo‘s]

birth; he almost sort of is a child of three people. I think there were some people

who thought because [Liz] and [Yasmine] were together, that he was theirs and

there was no one else involved. I‘m always like, ―but what about me?‖ [Emphasis

added.]

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Since Liz and Yasmine were together throughout her pregnancy, Derek feels left out and

more distant from Arlo than he‘d like to be. He fights for recognition as Arlo‘s father and

maybe likes the idea of having a foothold in Liz and Yasmine‘s relationship, hoping he‘s

made himself indispensable.

As Yasmine tells it, he was indispensable in the most basic way, saying bluntly,

―Really, the only reason I got together with him was to have kids.‖ Having Derek in her

life now comes with other perks as well, primarily the chance to spend time away from

her kids. Though Derek is insecure about his place in the family, Yasmine and Liz both

appreciate the role he plays. In the tumultuous and difficult first years of Arlo‘s life,

when he wasn‘t sleeping through the night and when he hit the terrible twos, Yasmine

says that the ability to have Derek care for him overnight even a couple of nights a week

made it ―actually easier to love him [Arlo]‖ and improved her own connection to him

versus feeling overwhelmed when Cecily was young. It also gave Liz and Yasmine time

to be alone and develop their young relationship. When it got comfortable enough, Derek

would not only take Cecily and Arlo for the night, but Dylan as well, and quickly became

her de facto ―Dad,‖

And actually Dylan spends time with us sometimes because she‘s around them so

much, she‘s basically their sister now, and every once in a while Dylan calls me

Dad as well because there‘s really no one else that she would call Dad, so might

as well.

Derek is flattered to have another kid in his life calling him ―Dad,‖ but he doesn‘t see his

days without his bio kids as a break,

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 I know it [having multiple households] makes it easier, but it doesn‘t change the

fact that I would like to be with them. Sometimes you want to do something even

though it’s hard.

While the women see shared childrearing as a positive for their relationship and the

relationships they have with their children, Derek doesn‘t. Seeing them less makes him

feel more distant. In this case, he would rather do the harder thing, taking on more

childcare responsibilities, than share the load and have his kids mostly live with their

mother(s).

On the other hand, Liz and Yasmine also separately criticized what they saw as

Derek‘s minimal involvement with his kids, for all he talks about wanting to see them

more. They are happy for the times he‘s there but feel like he makes a big deal of the

effort he puts in even though it is much less than theirs. While he has the kids two nights

a week, they have them the other five. Although they are away just a couple of nights a

week, Yasmine feels judged for not wanting to be with them every night. She had a

strange encounter with another mom at Cecily‘s school who had a second child around

Arlo‘s age. The mother was looking for some shared misery with Yasmine about not

getting any sleep, and Yasmine said, ―Well, that‘s the convenience of having another

parent living in another house, like one or two times a week I get to sleep in.‖ In

response, Yasmine says the woman laughed uncomfortably, ―She just laughed in this

really uncomfortable way like trying to make me feel better, trying to seem like she was

cool with that, but she wasn‘t.‖ Yasmine says she feels more judged for parenting while

divorced with young kids than she does for parenting in a lesbian relationship.

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 The ability to share childcare labor is something all the adults in this family value,

but members put in different amounts of work, not just in spending time with the kids,

but in actually parenting them—making decisions and setting the boundaries that shape

their lives. Similar to how Liz did all the research to find a sperm donor and Sadie

benefitted, Derek takes his cues from Yasmine. According to her, ―We don‘t really have

a co-parenting relationship when I hand [the kids] off. And he also like…does whatever I

tell him to do.‖ In the co-parenting, Derek is the ―helper‖ to Yasmine‘s ―manager‖—she

tells him what to feed them, when to put them to bed, and manages the Google calendar

they share to coordinate handoffs.

She sees this in contrast to Liz and Sadie‘s co-parenting relationship. Yasmine

envies the strength of the relationship Sadie has with Dylan. Unlike the emotional space

Derek has left for Liz to parent his children, Yasmine doesn‘t feel like she has the same

opportunity, saying ―I kind of feel like I don‘t have as much of a role in [Dylan‘s] life as

[Liz] does in [Cecily] and [Arlo‘s] lives.‖ At the same time, she‘s jealous of Liz and

Sadie‘s more equitable approach to co-parenting: ―[Liz] and [Sadie] co-parent [Dylan]

really efficiently and evenly. I don‘t really have that relationship with [Derek].‖ So, while

it is clear that Liz has a significant place in the lives of Cecily and Arlo, Yasmine doesn‘t

quite feel secure with her role in Dylan‘s. Yasmine tells me this has been a source of

conflict in her relationship with Liz:

And I struggled with that a lot and that‘s caused us a lot of trouble and I have sort

of bad feelings about it…about not being able to feel like I matter as much in

[Dylan‘s] life and feel like I‘m not given the space to do that…it‘s hard. The

whole blended family thing is just really difficult.

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Though having additional co-parents frees up her time and allows her to get more sleep

and more help, Yasmine finds it more emotionally taxing than raising kids only with

Derek. She is used to being the primary caretaker for Arlo and Cecily, but when it comes

to Dylan, she feels like she comes in third place. Though both Yasmine and Liz are what

Mignon Moore would consider ―lesbian step parents,‖ parenting the other‘s

child/children Yasmine shows more of the emotional toll Moore documents of having the

responsibility of child but not the authority to make decisions about how it is raised.

―The whole blended family thing‖ has been hard for Derek too. He finds it hard to

remember when to pick the kids up, ―especially around holidays, forget it,‖ so now

everyone shares a calendar. When he thinks of the possibility of the arrangement with

Liz, Sadie, and Yasmine changing in the future, he says, ―I don‘t mind if it gets more

complicated, but I don‘t want it to get more difficult.‖ For Derek, ―more complicated‖

might be Sadie moving away, but ―more difficult‖ would be if this initiated a chain

migration to wherever Sadie moved because Liz would move to bring Dylan closer to

Sadie, and Yasmine would move to be closer to Liz, so then he would have to move to be

near his children.

Claiming Narratives

Derek‘s ―complications,‖ began with the messiness of the divorce. While dealing

with his own heartache, Derek also had to field calls from Yasmine‘s distressed parents

who were processing the double whammy of their daughter getting divorced and leaving

her husband for a woman. As Derek tells it,

When Yasmine and I separated, there was a period when her family almost

wouldn‘t talk to her at all, and they would talk to me. They…basically blamed

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 everything on her, were upset with her, and I was in the bizarre position of

actually defending her most of the time.

Especially because of the circumstances surrounding their separation, Yasmine leaving

Derek to be with a woman, Yasmine‘s parents felt a further distance from their own

daughter than they did for their son-in-law of four years. Though they‘d known Derek for

only a handful of years, the revelation left Yasmine‘s parents feeling like they didn‘t

know her at all.

Derek found himself acting as Yasmine‘s advocate to her family, explaining how

this could happen in terms he knew to be too simple to actually be true. Here he is

working through his thought process about how he could be left suddenly for Liz:

I could just assume that she sort of discovered at that point that she was really

more…I don‘t know the right way to say it, that she was really more of a lesbian

than heterosexual, but I don‘t know, I feel like that would kind of be too easy of

an answer. It played some role, I am sure, but I don‘t know. It just really, it‘s been

a longstanding mystery to me, and it‘s been over five years.

Derek struggled to articulate to me his understanding of Yasmine‘s identity. He described

Yasmine‘s decision to her parents, and himself, in essentialist terms—as beyond her

control—but there is also something nagging him. To say she was now ―more of a

lesbian‖ takes any responsibility for their separation, and eventual divorce, off of Derek

himself.

When I first asked Yasmine how she would label her own sexuality, she told me

she didn‘t believe in labels. But, I pushed her on it and she told me,

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 Well, if I had to label myself, I guess I would say I‘m a lesbian…[but] I wasn‘t a

lesbian until I became a lesbian. It was never an option as far as I could see,

especially growing up in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, it just wasn‘t an option.

Although Yasmine had claimed she was only ever interested in being with Derek as a

way to have kids, she‘s unwilling to say she‘s always been a lesbian as though it were

some ―natural‖ part of her she‘s only recently tapped into. To Yasmine, though she‘s

been interested in women since she was young, she only had the ―option‖ of ―becoming a

lesbian‖ when she moved from the Middle East, met Liz, and chose to be one. Growing

up, her home was full of life, many cousins coming and going. She had a happy

childhood, she didn‘t ―become a lesbian‖ later in life because she felt oppressed, it just

literally was not an option for her to consider. Her father has died, but her relationship

with her mother and sisters has been strained since she told them about Liz. She‘s not

even sure if her mother has told family and friends in Lebanon she‘s divorced let alone

that she‘s with a woman now. Recently, her mother and sister came to visit and actually

stayed in the house with her and Liz, something that hadn‘t happened in the four years

they had been together and Yasmine says was ―a really big deal.‖

If it were up to Derek though, they‘d still be together, even if Yasmine were still

with Liz. Derek says that Yasmine dating a woman within the context of their marriage

would have been fine and he would have stayed with her, ―Yeah, that didn‘t end it for

me. It was entirely her decision,‖ he said. But, in retrospect, Derek says he‘s actually

better off no longer being with Yasmine who he considers sometimes to be thoughtlessly

cruel. By way of example, he offers me a story,

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 Like one time [Liz] fell down the stairs and [Yasmine] came over at the top of the

stairs and instead of asking, ―Hey, are you OK?‖ she said, ―Why are you making

so much noise?‖ and it made perfect sense to me.

He laughs when he tells me this, but also seems to be clearly saying, ―See? She‘s awful.‖

Derek spent a lot of the interview telling me how hurt he is, not by Liz‘s actions, but by

Yasmine‘s. He says Yasmine has barely spoken to him since the split. She only talks to

him via email and delivers the essential information she thinks he needs. Derek sees this

as a form of emotional blackmail, Yasmine withholding herself from him, but Yasmine

tells me she stopped talking to him in person for his own good because she gets mean and

upset with him when she does. Derek actually now feels like he has a better relationship

with Liz who he‘ll sometimes meet up with at a bar for a beer, or see a movie. Yasmine

refers to these outings as their dates. As in, ―[Liz] and [Derek] recently went on a date to

see [a movie] and I babysat the children.‖ In these visits, Liz and Derek talk more openly

about the kids and about Yasmine. Derek tells me he is able to do this because Liz ―never

meant to‖ break up his marriage and he doesn‘t see her as his enemy. What Derek feels

betrayed by is not the affair itself, which he was clearly OK with, but the sudden loss of

someone he was in love with without what he saw as an adequate explanation. To him,

Yasmine left a perfectly healthy relationship to gamble on having ―a little bit better of a

relationship with someone else.‖ Derek says,

I don‘t think people should just stay together no matter what, but I also think

whether you stay together should be influenced by some rational decision. I feel

like there‘s…it‘s hard to…I guess I don‘t feel like relationships that adults have

with each other are like the most important thing in their lives…like if you think

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 that you would have a little bit better of a relationship with someone else, it sort

of, I think there‘s a trade-off. You have to consider is it worth it to end what you

have and possibly make things more difficult for your children for what might not

be the biggest improvement.

Derek‘s torn between what he sees as parental duty versus pursuing one‘s own happiness.

Though he speaks in general, he seems to be coming, very specifically, to a conclusion

about what happened in his relationship—that Yasmine chose Liz over her children. That

raising children in two homes or in the context of a lesbian relationship is ―more

difficult‖ is taken for granted. Though Derek considers himself a politically progressive

person, he marshals an all-to-familiar argument about gay sexuality being selfish and

antithetical to a child‘s happiness. He sees Yasmine‘s decision to leave him for a woman

as irrational and impulsive even though he also knows it was something she‘d wanted,

and waited for, for decades.

At the Gates of Queer Heaven

To his credit, Derek was not intimidated by the prospect of dating again and having to

explain that he was separated, but living with his ex-wife and her girlfriend. This, of

course, put one or two women off when they accused him of being ―just a married guy

cheating on his wife.‖ But this assessment was more rare than people might think,

because of the women Derek dates. By his own admission, Derek has the tendency to be

attracted to women who are queer. He also feels queer because of this attraction, his

preference for polyamory, and his interest in ―kink.‖ He says,

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 There‘s this phenomenon in my life. It‘s not intentional, but I keep ending up with

women who are bisexual or almost always attracted to women but want to date

me. Sometimes I joke that I‘m a butch lesbian in a man‘s body…I‘ve never like

dated a man or anything like that, but I sort of feel like I identify with people who

are queer…I‘m sort of a kinky person, I guess I feel like they [bisexual and

lesbian women] are more likely to accept me being unusual in that way. I‘ve also

identified as polyamorous and I think like if you are a person who‘s experienced

what its like not to conform to other people‘s norms, you‘re more likely to not

reject someone when they‘re not normal.

Derek, though in some ways having his life turned upside down by his wife‘s queerness,

has a genuine appreciation for queer culture. He finds it more open to the ―unusual‖—

people and behavior that don‘t belong to ―other people‘s norms.‖ He finds queer people

he‘s interested in dating more understanding of his non-traditional family structure,

preference for non-monogamy, and interest in kink, than strictly heterosexual women are.

And he wonders if this means he fits under the queer umbrella himself.

I sometimes wonder whether I‘m allowed to say that I am [queer]. Usually I kind

of think of myself as being queer. I feel like if you had to have an ID card and

pass a test, I might not pass the test, or they might not let me in to queer heaven or

something.

Derek has a serious girlfriend now. Misty lives with him and he says the kids love her,

especially Cecily. Misty is slowly being woven into the fabric of this blended family. I

asked Yasmine if she thinks Derek and Misty will have kids as well and she tells me they

probably will and the thought terrifies her, but she isn‘t unprepared for it. The effect of

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Derek having additional children, or Sadie, or even Liz and Yasmine themselves, would

have a ripple effect and shift the priorities and schedules in all of their lives.

Moving into the future, there‘s worry about Sadie relocating, of course, and if it

will lead to a caravanning of all of them across the country so they can stay together.

They all live with a constant underlying state of uncertainty. Describing her own thoughts

about further complications, not to mention the potential for further difficulty, Yasmine

says,

I don‘t know how it will work out…[not knowing] used to sort of really wreck

me, it used to be a much bigger deal and now I‘m just, I don‘t know, I found this

place of calm and peace, like whatever happens it’ll work out.

Beyond the fear at the potential of what could happen, Yasmine has trust and faith in the

other members of her blended family. She‘s learning to give up some control and

surrender to possibility.

When social scientists and journalists write about LGBTQ people in families, it

tends to be through lens of exceptional purity. Andrew Sullivan (1996) has touted the

civilizing potential of marriage and family on queer people, gay men in particular.

Parenting itself is said to be a normalizing process: it shifts an individual‘s priorities and

atomizes family groups into heteronormative nuclear units of legal parents (maximum:

two) and their custodial children. But this is not how queer families began, and it‘s not

how they live now. More often than not they were, and still are, queer blended families.

The Williams Institute found that, numerically, the most common form of queer

parenting in the 21st Century is in the context of a blended family. The majority of queer

parents in the US live in the South and are people of color, often of limited means.

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 While the archetype of a queer family—the ones pictured on the front of travel

brochures and shown on TV— is the white, urbane, monogamous queer couple

unburdened by the needs of people outside their homes, the reality is far more complex.

Needs change and so do people. For Yasmine, it was a matter of opportunity. She‘d

grown up thinking the only want to have children would be in the context of a

heterosexual marriage. Anything else would risk her inclusion in her religion, culture and

family of origin. Sure, she was attracted to women, but what did that matter? Derek has

convinced himself that all the sacrifices have been his. He sacrificed non-monogamy, his

stance against marriage, not wanting a religious wedding, and lost his family so his ex

could be, in his words, ―a little bit happier.‖ He‘s turned his twice a week parenting into

sad narrative of not seeing his kids more. Yasmine is angry about this. From her

perspective, she and Liz do a lot more of the parenting and even when the kids are with

him, Derek is only following her instruction. Liz is their broker. She hangs out with

Derek, catching him up on new developments at home or in school, and she is fully co-

parenting in two households. Yasmine is also mad because she can make a direct

comparison between Derek and Sadie. Sadie is more invested in the decision-making

about Dylan‘s life than Derek is in the lives of his children, negotiating with Liz even

though it is uncomfortable. This closer bond, with Dylan and with Liz, is threatening to

Yasmine, but she is working through her jealousy. She sees Derek is incompetent and ―a

little bit pathetic,‖ but she trusts him as a sort-of babysitter, and his involvement affords

her and Liz some intimate time together. The bar may very well be lower though, because

he is a man and has fewer cultural demands about how competent a parent he should be.

This doesn‘t keep Derek from ―wanting the credit‖ though and becoming offended when

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it is suggested that Liz is more a parent to his children than he is: biologically and

practically. It bothers him, this assumption that Liz carried his child, because it stands in

for what she does do and the guilt he has around it. The queer blended family shows us

all the mess, inequality, and jealousy in relationships between parents, but it also shows

us how these obstacles can be addressed in unconventional ways. Derek feels frozen out

by Yasmine, so Liz brings him back in. Cecily and Arlo have come to know Dylan as a

sister, so Derek takes all three when Dylan is not with Sadie. Sadie‘s a bit more removed,

but it was her instinct to want a child who looked like her. Initially this may partly have

been so she and Liz and Dylan looked more like ―a family‖ together, without her seeming

to be the odd one out. But, since the separation, it‘s also helped to secure a place in

Dylan‘s life as she grows up seldom coming into contact with other Chinese-Americans.

That Dylan does look more like Sadie than she looks like Liz is also a constant

reminder—to Liz, to Yasmine, and to outsiders—that Sadie is present even when she is

not, and that she also deserves the ―credit.‖

Both Liz and Derek were once ideologues with very clear, utopian, ideas about

how people can and should live. They saw themselves as outsiders, rebels against

normativity. In practice, life turned out differently. Derek, in particular, surrendered his

utopian convictions, abandoning polyamory and accommodating to both the pressures of

religion and marriage. Much in the lives of Derek, Liz, Sadie, and Yasmine is far from

perfect; in this unconventional reality, things are messy. There‘s jealousy, hurt feelings,

missteps, and a lot of work, but there‘s also room for exploration, non-monogamy,

continued personal growth, alone time, boundaries, and the ability to choose to prioritize

one‘s own happiness over their children‘s or parents‘. Things are free to be complex. But,

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at the core there is an understanding that the boundaries and contours of the family and

identity are subject to change and that this is okay and expected. If that‘s not queer

heaven, I don‘t know what is.

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 CHAPTER 4

QUEER OTHERHOODS

In the course of my study, I became more and more interested in those parents

whose experiences could not be fully captured in the terms ―motherhood‖ and

―fatherhood.‖ These included trans women who still identified as ―dads,‖ trans men who

carried gave birth to their children, and known donors who waived their rights to legal

parentage who were still part of the lives of their children, but both benefitted and

suffered from not having the security of a legal relationship. In what follows, I pull

together some narratives about these experiences from across my interviews to delve

deeper into how meanings of parenthood, and what it entails, differs for LGBTQ people.

I propose the term ―queer otherhoods‖ as a way of organizing these people on the

margins of the LGBTQ parenting margin under an umbrella.

One form of queer ―otherhood‖ that has been explored in some depth is the

―lesbian other mother‖ (Lewin 1993; Dalton and Bielby 2000; Sullivan 2004; Gabb 2005;

Mamo 2007; Padavic and Butterfield 2011; Butterfield and Padavic 2014), and similarly,

but to a lesser extent, the lesbian step mother (Moore 2011; Acosta 2017). These studies

have helped shaped our understanding of the power dynamics in queer families when one

parent is biogenetically connected to a child and the other is not. To a lesser extent, other

forms of what I would call queer parenting ―otherhoods‖ have been explored: gay sperm

donors (Sullivan 2004; Mamo 2007), transwomen who transition after having kids (Hines

2006 and Haines, Ajayi, and Boyd 2014) and gestational fathers (More 1998; Riggs

2014). It is to these three forms of parenting I turn my attention in the chapter that

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follows. I don‘t claim that this exhausts the list of parenting forms at all, as there are

other varieties of ways people engage in queer parenting still emerging.

Transwomen Dads

Too much research on trans people, important as it is, has focused on the

harassment, discrimination, violence, and other harms they routinely suffer. In the

National Transgender Discrimination Survey, a survey of 6,450 transgender and gender

non-conforming adults in the US, 41% reported attempting suicide at some point in their

lives (Grant, et al. 2011). The average rate of suicide attempts for cisgender people is

around 4%. The report, titled ―Injustice at Every Turn‖ paints a pretty bleak picture.

Trans people reported harassment and discrimination in education, employment, housing,

the criminal justice system, medical treatment, and in public accommodations, like retail

stores. Most trans people (57%) also faced significant discrimination at home, but the

study reports family acceptance makes a big difference in health outcomes and risk of

suicide:

In the face of extensive institutional discrimination, family acceptance had a

protective affect against many threats to well-being including health risks such as

HIV infection and suicide…Those who were rejected by family members had

considerably elevated negative outcomes, including homelessness (three times the

frequency), sex work (double the rate), and suicidality (almost double), compared

to those that were accepted by their family members. (Grant, et.al 2011:7-88)

Thus, family acceptance and support are not luxuries but may be necessary to the survival

of trans people. Beyond this, families are an important site of joy and fulfillment in the

lives of trans people who are more likely to face discrimination than not (Grant, et al.

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2011). Even when families of origin prove unsupportive, chosen families are a key way

in which trans people create alternatives to the negativity they encounter in institutions

and public life. Family life in quotidian practice holds the ability to make new worlds for

trans people in which their lives are valuable, meaningful, and fulfilling.

Very little sociological literature addresses the family lives of transgender and

gender non-conforming people. Even in review articles under the somewhat misleading

banner of ―LGBT families,‖ trans families seldom receive more than a paragraph‘s worth

of attention usually consisting of a proverbial shrug. For instance, in Biblarz and Stavci‘s

2010 review piece, ―Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Families,‖ this is what the

authors have to say regarding trans families:

Academic research on transgender people and their family relationships is almost

nonexistent...These issues are obviously vastly different than one‘s child, partner,

or parent coming out as gay and point out the need for research in this realm while

complicating the idea of LGBT families as an umbrella term.

Thus, the families of trans people are expected to be fundamentally different that LGB

people‘s families, but since there is almost no research on these populations, we cannot

be sure.

Three years of research later, in the piece titled, ―LGBT Families at the Start of

the Twenty-first Century,‖ Moore and Strambolis-Ruhstorfer sounds a little more hopeful

(2013). The authors report:

After a paucity of research on transgender families, recent scholarship has begun

to fill this gap (Hines 2006; Schilt &Westbrook 2009; Pfeffer 2010, 2012; Sanger

2010; Ward 2010). These sociologists investigate intimate relationships in which

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 at least one of the partners has changed or is in the process of changing sexes and

how that transition impacts aspects of families such as the division of household

labor, relationship formation and dissolution, communication to family and

outsiders, the management of self understandings, and the negotiation of

institutions.

Indeed, the works of these authors have become essential in understanding the relational

lives of trans people, though with the exception of Hines, they are not studying families

with children. Beemyn and Rankin (2011) conducted a large-scale survey (n=1500) or

trans people that explores all aspects of their lives: employment, housing, schooling,

family life, etc. Haines, Ajayi, and Boyd‘s (2014) explicit study of trans parents presents

a pretty bleak picture. Trans parents often preferred to be closeted to their children‘s

friends and the teachers at their schools. They feared, justifiably, that their children, even

more than kids of LGB folks would be bullied and harasses because of their identities.

Transitioning after becoming a parent can produce conflict between the parent and their

children and with their partner or spouse, often leading to relationship dissolution.

Conflict with a co-parent/former partner is especially consequential and is the source of

anxiety; the authors state, ―parents reported that their trans identity was used against them

in conflicts over visitation or custody. Fear of or experienced discrimination in family

court is a major stressor that can interfere with trans parents‘ ability to parent‖ (Haines,

Ajayi, and Boyd 2014: 243). There is little guidance or support of trans parents in the

realm of family therapy and these families are often left fending for themselves.

Sociological narratives of transwomen in general focus on their vulnerability to

violence, underemployment, participation in sex work, and early deaths. This is certainly

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an improvement from the wolf in sheep‘s clothing narrative of radical feminists in the 80s

recently taken up by conservatives in the present. The Janice Raymond theory of

transsexual women asserts that the people who occupy this identity have experienced

male privilege all their lives and are now dressing as women and invading women‘s

spaces in order to coopt those spaces and potentially to harass and, specifically, sexually

assault women. Though this thinking was controversial at the time and wholly refuted by

scholars of gender today, this same thought process is at work in contemporary multi-

state efforts to block transpeople from accessing the bathrooms that correspond with their

gender identities rather than the genders they were assigned at birth. The peculiar notion

that trans women are the key threat to cis women‘s safety is a political red herring with

the sole goal of restricting the rights of transgender people (and sometimes, by extension,

LGB people as well). The ―logic‖ refutes the possibility that anyone could actually be

transgender by suggesting trans women are actually cisgender heterosexual men who

would ―abuse‖ the right to use the restroom of one‘s choice in order to sexually assault

cisgender women. Not only does this policy create the ironic result of forcing transgender

men into the women‘s room, but it has encouraged the active gender policing of people

entering women‘s rooms such that cisgender men, in an effort to ―protect‖ women and

girls end up harassing gender non-conforming women and masculine-presenting

genderqueer people. Transgender advocates are quick to point out that a) it is already

illegal to harass, assault, and rape women, and b) forcing transwomen to use men‘s rooms

is a huge threat to their safety. While statistically there have been no assaults by

transgender women against ciswomen, transwomen (and ciswomen, for that matter) are at

significant risk of being beaten, assaulted, and murdered by cisgender men.

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 The more difficult experiences associated with transwomen may account for the

near decade longer they take before coming out. In a national survey of over 1500

transgender people, transwomen and transmen report roughly recognizing they were

―different‖ and beginning to recognize themselves as trans at similar ages (the preteen to

teen years and teen years respectively for both groups), there was a statistically

significant difference between the ages they came out. Transmen, on average, report

being open about their trans identities in their twenties, while transwomen do not report

having the same experience until their thirties (Beemyn and Rankin 2011). While the

transmen in my sample tended to come out as trans prior to becoming parents, the three

transwomen I interviewed (as well as numerous others, with one exception) had children

prior to coming out.

“I Told Them I Would Always Be „Dad‟”

Fran is an older transwoman in charge of all the repairs to the northeastern seaside

bed and breakfast she co-runs with her wife, Avril (see their case in Chapter 3). Though

they barely have time since they started the b&b, sailing is passion they share, and Fran is

sure to let me know she confidently out-butches the men at the boat club, who once

called her ―little lady‖ but now know better. Standing above six feet tall, she is a

commanding presence most often found working in the b&b‘s basement, in a plain t-shirt

and cargo shorts, sporting a long, dirty blonde ponytail. She comes up every morning,

with a plate of mini-quiches, to socialize with guests, pour them tea, and tell them the

best tours for guaranteed whale sightings. She is unflappably pleasant and you get the

sense by watching her that she is exactly where she wants to be, doing exactly what she

wants to be doing.

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 Fran‘s kids still call her ―Dad,‖ but she doesn‘t mind, saying ―I told them I would

always be ―Dad‖ and so if that‘s what they‘re comfortable calling me, then fine, they

could call me Dad...I still act like Dad to them.‖ Fran continues to do what she considers

―dad things‖ including fixing her older daughter‘s sink and, recently, flying across the

country to help Alice and her husband install a six-foot fence around their home. Fran

takes pride in her proficiencies and shows her daughters care by helping them.

Compared to her former life as a closeted crossdressing man, Fran‘s gender

expression as a woman is much broader. Though she‘s a woman, she‘s never been

particularly ―girlie.‖ However, Fran‘s transition came at a time when it was necessary to

be diagnosed with a mental illness (gender identity disorder) in order to begin physically

transitioning under a doctor‘s care. Fran was required to see a counsellor for a year as she

began socially transitioning and taking estrogen. Fran had to show that she was a

woman‘s woman- wearing makeup and skirts, changing the way she walked, and talking

in a higher register. Fran was required to perform a narrow definition of feminine identity

in order to become the low-maintenance, butch lesbian she ultimately was. Though she

progressed through various identities, her gender expression was policed, by her

intimates and the general public, at each one: man, crossdresser, woman. Finally, Fran is

able to be the woman she wants to be, exactly where she wants to be, doing exactly what

she wants to be doing.

“I was exhausted, so I wasn‟t a good parent”

When I met Margot, she was checking her stocks in the Wall Street Journal. We

met in a hotel in Atlanta where Margot had come for the Southern Comfort Conference,

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an annual transgender conference which offered panels where people talked about their

own transitions, shared strategies for how to be out at work, gave legal advice, and

doctors offered panels on feminizing facial surgeries and other biomedical steps

transpeople could take. There were dozens of tables offering literature on healthcare

centers, financial planning, and family planning. There were also craftspeople selling

screen-printed t-shirts with slogans like ―Nobody Knows I‘m Trans‖ and ―Reclaim Your

Gender.‖ Walking the halls of the hotel, it was like I was dropped into an alternate trans

universe where the men were shorter than usual and the women were all tall and

gorgeous. The conference was held in a big, nationally-recognized chain hotel. There

were a few people I saw who were not with the conference and looked around with wide

eyes, but they seemed more amused than upset.

Transpeople had travelled from all over the country to be there. Margot herself

has been coming down from Pennsylvania for years. Gwen, a transwoman I met in a

panel on writing memoir, introduced Margot to me as her ―trans mother‖- the person

from whom she learned the ropes about coming out as trans. After I explained that I was

a researcher wanting to talk to transgender parents about parenting, Gwen said, ―You

have to meet Margot.‖ Though it seemed like at this event many transwomen, in

particular, were relishing the opportunity to be dressed to the nines in a supportive space,

Margot, a 56-year-old white transwoman, was much more reserved. Gwen commented

that Margot was ―stealth,‖ meaning she was recognized as a woman wherever she went

(see Pfeffer 2017 for a discussion of ―passing‖ versus ―being recognized‖). She wore a

long-sleeved light-colored t-shirt with pants and sneakers and very little make up. Her

hair was a distinctive mop of tight shoulder-length dark blond curls that immediately

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reminded me of Mia Farrow in the 90s. She was relaxed and seemed to not give a damn

how other people saw her. She put down her newspaper and took off her colorful reading

glasses to talk to me.

At the time, I had a habit of wearing a short-brimmed chambray fedora, and she

told me she liked my style- that it reminded her of how she used to dress. Margot, prior to

her transition, dressed like a dandy in bespoke suits in loud patterns—paisley, hound‘s-

tooth, and plaid—and handmade Italian wingtips. She smiles as she tells me how

expensive it was to dress that way. I picture her as a younger person, looking the

embodiment of American Psycho yuppie masculinity, while working on Wall Street in

the 1980s. She was successful, serving as Senior Vice President for a large investment

management firm. She would commute into the city from Connecticut and work long, 14

or 15-hour days. She never got home before sundown, if she went home at all, and barely

saw her wife and two kids. In Margot‘s words, ―That barely left enough time for sleep

and meals. I was exhausted, so I wasn‘t a good parent.‖ Putting a finer point on her

commitment to her job back then, she tells me she actually came out at work before she

came out at home. She told her boss and made an announcement to the over one hundred

employees in the office that she would be transitioning. She then went home to tell her

wife and kids.

Like Fran, Margot‘s family life was turned upside down when she transitioned.

Her wife lived in denial at first and told Margot that she would ―never be passable as a

woman‖ as a backhanded way to keep her from transitioning. Her children were upset

and barely spoke to her. Margot moved out, but that first Christmas after she started

living as a woman, was hard. She felt extremely guilty for prioritizing her own needs

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over her family‘s, something she was learning not to do after losing her job, so she

attempted to take it all back:

I felt so bad about it, I wanted to give my kids back their father, so I de-

transitioned for a month...I was suicidal for a couple of weeks, so I went back [to

being a woman] the day after Christmas. I gave them their father for Christmas.

Margot realized that her attempt to de-transition nearly cost her children their parent

entirely, but she still felt guilt and shame. She signed her son and daughter up for therapy,

which they ended up resenting, and mostly stayed away.

Her transition eventually cost her her job as she was deemed ―too distracting‖ to

clients at the firm. Margot now frames losing her job because of discrimination as a gift

she wouldn‘t have had if she had stayed in her old life. Unemployment brought her much

closer to the children she felt she barely knew.

Prior to my losing my job because of my transition, I was working long hours,

long commute to New York City…I was gone 14, 15 hours a day. That barely

left enough time for sleep and meals. I was exhausted, so I wasn‘t a good parent.

Fortunately, she had socked away quite a bit of money from her Wall Street days and was

free to be around more for her children; she considers this ―one of the pluses of getting

canned.‖ She allowed her kids to ―set the pace‖ of their new relationship, which mended

over time. When her kids applied for college, she helped with their applications and is

incredibly proud of her son going to Yale. As she tells it, ―Losing my job gave me more

time to be a good parent and...that was much more important to me [than keeping my

job].‖

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 Losing her job also helped Margot reconnect with her ex-wife. Though they

divorced some twenty years ago, at this point, Margot is still in love and considers her ex

to be her best friend. As Margot says, ―[We] hug and kiss probably a little bit longer than

most divorced couples...It would have been nice if we could have stayed together.‖ Like

Fran‘s ex, Margot‘s ex had a problem with the identity shift that would go along with

their continued, post-transition relationship. As Margot put it simply, ―She would just

never identify as a lesbian. She would only identify as a heterosexual.‖ For Margot, this

decision feels arbitrary, they are still in love and Margot considers herself to be

fundamentally improved as a potential partner, more committed to her family. The fact of

Margot‘s female identity, however, and the implication on not only hers, but her wife‘s

sexual identity, seems to be too much to overcome.

Trans Mothering

Margot has been able to use her own family experiences to help other trans

women parents. Her friend, roommate, and trans ―daughter,‖ Gwen (46), only recently

came out to her family. She and her wife had been staying with her mother-in-law until

they could get settled in a new place, but, after she came out, her wife stopped speaking

to her for a time, and her mother-in-law kicked her out. Since then, she has been crashing

with Margot. When she identified as a man, Gwen describes herself as being an angry

alcoholic who would instigate bar fights instead of going home at night. She was laid off

from her entry-level office job and slumped into a deep depression. When she began her

transition, her life improved dramatically. Gwen feels her relationship with her wife and

five-year-old daughter has improved since she came out.

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 [My wife] said, ―You‘re just a 180 degree different person, you seem happy to be

with your daughter now. You make time for her, you play together, and you‘re

just more present.‖

Gwen feels that she and her wife have a real chance at reconciliation and has been

working as an administrative assistant trying to save money for an apartment so her

family can be reunited. There is no question in her mind that transitioning was the best

thing she could do not only for herself but also for her family. She is now able spend time

more quality time with her daughter, and is looking for ways to talk about her transition

in ways that reflect its positivity.

How do I take these experiences, and the experiences I have now and filter them

in a positive way to my daughter? And so she can grow from them, so this

[transitioning] is a positive experience, a strength? I want to make sure my

daughter has the best possible life.

To Gwen, her transition is an unqualified good, even though it made her family life more

complicated. She sees it as a learning experience and improvement in her daughter‘s life.

By honoring herself, Gwen is now able to model for her daughter strength through

authenticity instead of the toxic masculinity she had been displaying before her transition.

In the meantime, Gwen has found Margot who has been an important example of

coming through the process of transitioning after kids and served as an emotional

support. Gwen refers to Margot as her ―trans mom,‖ sleeps on her couch and considers

her a trusted friend. From Gwen, Margot gets to feel needed and that sharing her tough

experiences has meant a great deal. Margot has become the trans mother she‘d never felt

herself to be with her kids, but for Gwen.

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 Conclusion

Fran, Margot, and Gwen are stuggling to free themselves, not just from a male

identity, but the confines of gender more generally. They are women and fathers, and

these identities, in combination, change the meaning of the other. This isn‘t a smooth

process, not because they do not know what they want or who they are, but because

others have a hard time understanding. The resistance to holding these contradictory

identities simultaneously, from now ex-wives, from children, from employers is constant.

They struggle through a notion of gender that doesn‘t just challenge, but transforms it.

Fran becomes a woman but in a way that allows womanhood to include conventionally

masculine skills. Margot becomes a more conventional woman but, in becoming a

woman, frees herself to connect with her kids by freeing herself of some of the most

odious parts of conventional masculinity. Gwen‘s anger has dissipated, by no longer

being a man, she‘s becoming a good dad. In the next chapter, I look at parents who

challenge an even more fundamental basis of gender. While Fran, Margot, and Gwen

were fathers who became women, in the next chapter I look at ―gestational fathers,‖ trans

men who seemingly did the most essentially feminine thing of all and carried a child to

birth.

Gestational Fatherhood

Creating “the Pregnant Man”

Not terribly long ago, in the spring of 2008, Thomas Beatie made international

news from his interview with People Magazine and subsequent appearance on The Opera

Winfrey Show as the ―pregnant man‖: a transgender man with a uterus who achieved

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pregnancy. These public platforms made Beatie a household name, at least in many

queer and transgender hosueholds, and the butt of many bad jokes. He was the subject of

an SNL sketch, some Leno Mother‘s Day jabs, a host of MSNBC‘s Morning Joe saying,

―I‘m going to be sick,‖ and even a Letterman Top Ten list: ―Top Ten Message Left on the

Pregnant Man‘s Answering Machine.‖ Number 1: ―Michael Jackson here—just wanted to

reach out to another androgynous freak show.‖ It‘s safe to say the world was not kind to

Thomas Beatie when he came on to the world stage.

That Beatie‘s debut was an appearance on daytime television, representing an

experience of gender completely novel to middle America, is important. In Freaks Talk

Back, Josh Gamson examines the double-edged sword of queer visibility via daytime TV

(Gamson 1998). While LGBT people were invited onto Sally Jesse or Donahue and able

to represent themselves rather than just be spoken about, their humanity on full display

for the people at home, they were also novelties invited on as sensations the audience was

encouraged to gawk at and to ask rude questions about their sex lives and genitalia. The

hosts of these shows were seldom much more sensitive, and the result was that trans

people were more often humiliated and ridiculed than identified with. Oprah did a little

better with Thomas Beatie, but the result was the same. Beatie‘s body became a subject

of fascination which set off a deeply essentialist conversation about what a man really

was. It opened his subjective experience up to the opining of Internet trolls (before they

were even called that), many of whom refused to see him as a man because of the

pregnancy. That this was the action of a single person, they felt, only lent support to this

assertion. Though the public knew little about the experiences of trans men, they ―knew‖

transgender men wanted to assimilate to gender norms and that pregnancy was anathema

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to this goal. Not only was Beatie not doing manhood right, he wasn‘t doing trans

manhood right either.

In addition to criticism from mainstream news and Internet trolls, Beatie‘s

newfound fame as ―the pregnant man‖ faced a two-pronged backlash among transgender

men. First, many transmen took issue with Beatie‘s claim of being the first transman to

become pregnant and give birth, and pointed specifically to an article in The Village

Voice from 2000 written by Patrick Califia-Rice about his partner, Matt Rice, who, beard

and all, got pregnant via known donor sperm and gave birth to their son. Second, there

was a sentiment from transmen, many of whom had worked very hard to become ―fully‖

men, that Beatie was a harmful representative of ―the movement.‖ They resented that the

world‘s exposure to Beatie, the first transman many people had ever seen, highlighted his

pregnancy and, because of that, threatened his legitimacy as a man. His pregnancy was

framed, both by mainstream media and transmen, as indicative of him being confused

about his gender identity because ―real men‖ don‘t give birth.

Pat Califia and Matt Rice faced the same reaction from other transmen and

consider them their biggest critics:

Our birth families and straight neighbors have been pretty sweet to us. The only

people who‘ve gotten upset are a handful of straight-identified homophobic FTMs

online who started calling Matt by his girl name, because real men don‘t get

pregnant. One of these bigots even said it would be better for our baby to be born

dead than be raised by two people who are ―confused about their gender.‖

(Califia-Rice, 2000)

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 The suggestion that a man can become pregnant and give birth is deeply

threatening, not just in a psychological sense but also in a cognitive sense. It challenges

perhaps the most fundamental assumption of the gender binary: that one sex gives birth

and the other does not. Fairly or unfairly, this fact, from birth, sets a series of

expectations of appearance, personality, desires, and capabilities. How do we then

explain a person who has gone through the steps of becoming socially male (and in many

cases biologically male through the use of hormones and top surgery) but does not give

up his ability to gestate and deliver a child? It turns out that biology is not destiny if you

take both into your own hands. Trans men who give birth both challenge the foundation

of the gender binary and expose that the institutions of society are unprepared to handle

that challenge. Through it all, gestational fathers, in the face of institutions that just do

not know what to do with them, demonstrate the twin strategies Carla Pfeffer (2017) calls

―normative resistance‖ and ―inventive pragmatism.‖ Pfeffer developed this analysis by

interviewing transmen and their cisgender women partners, but, as I show below, the

points still hold. They consciously resist and upend expectations, particularly of gender

performance (normative resistance), but also exploit the loopholes that can be found in

the practices of institutions—hospitals, insurance companies, legal marriage, and

courts—that do not know what to do with them (inventive pragmatism). This presents

them with opportunities to use the systems that exclude them to get the services, care, and

recognition that benefits them.

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 Normative Narratives of Trans Experience

The idea of a man not only becoming pregnant but wanting to become pregnant

confounds people with a strictly binary view of gender. In discussing my research in

classrooms and among friends, I‘ve found that cisgender people (not always straight, but

almost always men) say that men becoming pregnant makes no logical sense. To them,

the fact that someone becomes pregnant, especially if this is something they‘ve chosen

consciously to pursue, makes them women. The teleology goes as follows: because the

students have only ever understood women to become pregnant and give birth, any

pregnant men they do encounter must actually be women because they understand

women to be the only people who become pregnant and give birth. The same is echoed in

Beatie‘s book where talk show hosts and Internet bloggers would reason that a

functioning uterus makes this person a woman and therefore they will address him as

―her.‖ Even trans rights groups Beatie contacted had a hard time getting on his side,

saying basically that his decision to become pregnant undermined his identity as a man

and made it seem like trans people were ―confused‖ about their own identities. The

outside world would mistake Beatie‘s utopian effort to undo gender for confusion.

The words ―pregnancy‖ and ―birth‖ are so closely associated with womanhood

that some trans people have advocated for calling this process ―gestational parenthood.‖ I

use the phrase ―gestational fatherhood‖ to highlight the specificity of transmen‘s unique

roles as the child bearer in these cases and assert that the act of giving birth does not

automatically make someone a mother. The gestational fathers I have spoken with

certainly do not see it that way. To them, their identity as men and their desire to become

pregnant are two separate things. If they still have the ability to become pregnant or carry

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fetuses to term themselves, why should they not do it? Just because cisgender men have

not been presented with the option of birthing children does not mean that none would

choose to if they could (see Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s notably terrible film Junior for a

particularly irreverent example).

Even sympathetic cisgender people often believe the repeated narrative that

transpeople must feel a disconnect between their physical bodies and their ―inner selves,‖

and that transitioning‘s purpose is to bring these things into alignment with the goal of

―passing‖ on the outside as the gender they identify with on the inside. Though some

people certainly do experience things that way, this narrative was developed, at least in

part, out of clinical necessity. Prior to the 2011 international standards of care guidelines

for treating transgender patients published by the World Professional Association for

Transgender Health (WPATH), psychiatrists were guided by the definition of gender

dysphoria, and, later, gender identity disorder, in the DSM (since changed in subsequent

editions) which specified that people suffering from this ―ailment‖ needed to show signs

that they were distressed by their physical bodies in order to be diagnosed with Gender

Identity Disorder (GID) and therefore be able to legally access treatments: hormones and

surgery. Though there was, and still is, an underground medical market for hormones and

the possibility of traveling to other countries for surgeries, a legal path to access has been

incredibly important for mitigating medical and legal risks. For newly transitioning

people, there was an incentive to use the narrative that had worked in helping other trans

people successfully access these treatments. People who wanted to transition learned the

―party line.‖ To be diagnosed with GID, transpeople had to: show an interest in

stereotypical masculine or feminine hobbies, clothing, and occupations; claim a desire to

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be heterosexual post-transition; learn how to change the way they walked or the tenor of

their voices; and then complete a one-year ―real world test‖- dressing and identifying as

the chosen gender, without hormone therapy or surgery to prove this was not a ―phase‖—

prior to approval for medicines or surgical procedures. Trans people had to prove

themselves to be certain kinds of men and women before they could become the men and

women they wanted to be. Just as not all cisgender women wear make-up and dresses,

shave their legs, and experience sexual attraction toward men, not all transwomen do

either. I‘ve known trans, lesbian handywomen and effeminate, pansexual transmen. But

these are not the examples people tend to think of when they picture archetypal, gender-

conforming, transpeople, in part because of this diagnostic history which insisted on

gender conformity and normativity. Trans people‘s gender expressions exist on a

spectrum of masculinity and femininity just as cisgender people‘s genders do. What is

seen and trivialized as ―gender confusion‖ is, in a way, an attempt by transmen to liberate

themselves from gender. That they have also transitioned, even to a binary gender

identity, does not invalidate this effort.

I introduce the term ―gestational father‖ as a way to discuss transgender men who

give birth to their children and distinguish them from transgender fathers who did not

give birth. Gestational fathers-to-be stop testosterone treatments for a few months prior to

attempting to conceive. If they are premenopausal and still producing eggs, transmen can

use their ―original plumbing‖ (the uterus and ovaries with which they were born) to get

pregnant. With egg donation a possibility, they (like anyone with a uterus) can also

participate in in vitro fertilization, and even carry children postmenopausally with the

help of donor eggs, if that is a factor. If they have undergone top surgery – surgery to

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remove breast tissue – transmen will not be able to breastfeed, but their infants can be

formula-fed or fed through informal breastmilk banking communities in which people

who are able to breastfeed deep freeze excess breastmilk and donate it to those in need.

Having to be diagnosed with a mental illness in order to legally access medical

and therapeutic resources was only the most overt barrier for trans people accessing legal

protections and medical access. Most states have no explicit protections for trans people‘s

rights to housing, employment, and public accommodations free from discrimination.

Reflecting on why, after being a butch woman, then a person in transition, and finally

becoming legally male, he would want to complicate all that by getting pregnant, Beatie

says,

Once [my wife and I] decided I was the best person to carry my own child, we

didn‘t let the inevitable complications that lay ahead shake us from our

convictions. I didn‘t let the fact that I was inviting a whole new round of funny

looks and disapproving stares influence my decision. I‘m not saying that I wanted

to pick a fight—all I wanted to do was have a family. But if accomplishing that

goal meant having to fight for my rights as a human being then I was more than

ready to do that. (2008: 249)

Beatie wasn‘t much of an activist before the pregnancy, but the experience of the

pregnancy made him into one. He just wanted to be a man who happened to give birth,

but doing so vaulted him into the global spotlight, for better or worse. He sought the

limited goal of having a child, but became a trans icon. He‘s currently living in Sweden

and is a vocal proponent for LGBTQ family rights.

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 Beatie‘s statement sums up much of the experience of pregnancy the transmen

and masculine genderqueer folks I spoke with reported. While they saw themselves as

simply creating families they wanted in the way they wanted, the institutions and people

around them struggled to keep up. For this reason and others, I prefer to take a broad

approach to who I consider to be a ―gestational father.‖ I include three self-identified

trans men (Tucker, Jack, and Chris) but I also include two people whose gender identities

are genderqueer or non-binary and who gave birth but have not transitioned and are thus

―legally female.‖ These two subjects (Dani and Paris) are butch, masculine people with

short hair, who dress exclusively in men‘s clothing, and are more often called ―sir‖ than

―ma‘am‖ in public. Their pregnancies too challenged conventional notions of

motherhood. In this sense, their experiences are in many ways more akin to transmen

who‘ve given birth than to cisgender women.

Relationship to the Self/Body

When he was identifying as a woman and a lesbian, Tucker never wanted to get

pregnant. He joked that when he was in a relationship with a woman, as a woman, the

assumption was that whoever was less butch would be carrying the children. Tucker:

I never really thought I was going to be pregnant. And I would have relationships

and we‘d talk about kids, with different partners, but whoever was going to carry

the kids, it was usually just like whoever was less butch. It just changed depending

on who I was with. [Emphasis added.]

A baby-faced brunette in his early twenties, sometimes he was the butcher

partner, and sometimes not, but he was never interested in being pregnant. However,

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post-transition, Tucker actually became more interested in giving birth, saying, ―[After

transitioning] I started thinking about [becoming pregnant]…I felt there was no other

experience that compared to [pregnancy].‖ Tucker became more open to the idea of

pregnancy because he transitioned. This may seem ironic, but for Tucker feeling

comfortable in his own body was the catalyst for reevaluating his desire to give birth.

Maybe it wasn‘t that he never wanted to be pregnant, but, instead, didn‘t want to be a

woman who was pregnant. After transitioning, but even prior to becoming pregnant,

Tucker saw the potential of pregnancy to help him reidentify with his body not as male or

female, but as his own. Tucker puts this experience in spiritual terms,

I really felt like going through a pregnancy and giving birth would be like...this

intensive healing process around my female spirit… [but] healing a female spirit,

is not me becoming female again, I‘m still trans…but, I feel really good and really

far more at home in my body, and myself, and my gender than I ever have.

Tucker had the feeling that pregnancy would help him connect to his physical

body. In order to become pregnant, for six months Tucker had to go off of the

testosterone therapy he‘d been on. Prior to the pregnancy, Tucker was on the path toward

having top surgery, but decided to postpone it until after his baby was finished nursing.

Now he isn‘t so sure.

I really am enjoying nursing. I feel like my chest is suddenly just my chest. It does

not cause me nearly as much of the dysphoria as it has in the past…I can‘t bind

[my chest] while I‘m nursing because the milk ducts would get clogged really

easily and that doesn‘t feel good.

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 Binding his chest was an early step Tucker took to feel comfortable in his own

body. While ACE bandages used to be the way to go, there are now products on the

market made for transmasculine people with breasts, ―binders‖ or compression tanks that

smooth the chest by compressing and redistributing breast tissue for a flatter more

masculine chest. Becoming pregnant and then nursing made wearing a binder much too

difficult. Fortunately, through nursing, Tucker was able to experience his chest in a

different way - not as a visual stimulus for others but as a utilitarian source of sustenance

for his child - and reported feeling less dysphoria, or disconnection between his physical

body and how he thought he should look, than before pregnancy. He also wants to leave

open the option of giving birth to a second child in the future, so he‘s put top surgery (the

surgical removal of mammary tissue) off for the foreseeable future. For Tucker,

transitioning to male allowed him to feel more at home in the body he had. It also

changed how he saw pregnancy: not just as a chore for the ―less butch‖ lesbian partner,

but as a wholly different bodily experience he wanted to, and could, have. Tucker‘s

experience as a trans gestational parent is about as utopian as it gets. Through pregnancy

he was able to experience his body in a different way and come out on the other side as

someone whose experience is not captured in the gender binary.

Tucker‘s story also illustrates how difficult this freedom is to achieve. Other than

the jokes about butchness, he‘d hardly given real thought to having children before he

met his wife, Abby. Prior to dating Abby, Tucker felt, ―as a queer, young, poor trans

person, I was like, ―No one wants to reproduce with me!‖…I was like, ―I would [get

pregnant], but I think I‘m going to give birth to an alien.‖ He was still only friends with

Abby when Abby gave birth to her first child. Early on in their dating life, Tucker got to

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accompany Abby on a visit to the hospital to visit her friend, Jack, a transman who had

just given birth. The experience was eye-opening and just a few months into their

relationship, Abby and Tucker began planning Tucker‘s pregnancy. Now a self-described

―stay-at-home sea horse,‖ Tucker has embraced his role as a gestational father and

primary caretaker to his and Abby‘s two young children.

While other people might welcome a pregnancy, especially after pursuing fertility

treatment for years, Dani did not. Dani, a 44-year-old self-identified trans lesbian (―My

gender is trans, and my sexuality is lesbian, and I don‘t care if people think they meet up.

I don‘t have to choose‖) is definitely not the more feminine partner in their relationship.

Dani uses both gender-neutral (they/them) and feminine (she/her) pronouns and was

assigned female at birth [Note: I will use female pronouns for ease of reading but want to

emphasize Dani‘s gender is more complicated than that]. With a close-cut military

haircut, ever-present cargo shorts, and not a stitch of clothing from the women‘s section

for more than twenty years, Dani is as butch as they come. On a daily basis, she is more

likely to be called ―sir‖ than ―ma‘am,‖ and is happy with that. Dani agreed to become

pregnant, but under duress, openly admitting hating the experience. When asked if she

wanted to be pregnant, Dani responded, ―No. I hated [being pregnant]. I actually, the only

reason why...we sort of got stuck, I think.‖ Dani and her partner live in Florida and they

started considering having a child while Florida had an on-going adoption ban, so

adopting was not an option for them.

For two years, Dani‘s partner, Helene, went through a gamut of fertility

treatments attempting to become pregnant. Helene, a bit older than Dani, is

conventionally feminine and had previously only ever dated cisgender men. She assumed

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from a young age that she would carry and give birth to a child and having a partner who

could not provide sperm was not going to stop her. Using sperm from a sperm bank, and

an egg donation from a friend, they tried in vitro with Helene‘s uterus. Helene had a

history of uterine fibroids, and the embryos were not implanting successfully. Dani‘s own

eggs were no longer viable, so they proceeded trying to get pregnant with the same

donors Helene had tried, but with Dani‘s uterus and, to Dani‘s joy and chagrin, it worked.

According to Dani, ―We just really wanted to go with the scenario that seemed most

likely. And, unfortunately for me, that was my uterus...‖ Though they are both overjoyed

at the result, an adorable child, Helene had really wanted to be pregnant and still carries

some sadness about missing out. Instead she suffered the irony of Dani being able to

carry their child and vocally hating every minute of it. In Dani‘s words,

I did not like pregnancy. People were like, ―Oh, how are you enjoying your

pregnancy?‖ And I‘m like, ―Enjoy? Well that‘s an interesting selection of words.‖

It just wasn‘t something I ever wanted to do. It certainly messed with a lot of my

identity about myself in terms of what I didn‘t want to experience with my body.

Dani, though fluid with pronouns, is very invested in a masculine gender display.

Being pregnant was so at odds with how Dani saw herself, she became invested instead in

blending in as a man with an expanding beer belly. Dani insists there‘s nothing inherent

about the need for maternity clothes. Billed as utilitarian, these clothes are built around

accommodating and accentuating the pregnant body - often incorporating a ruffle, capped

shirt sleeves, and fake pockets which, for Dani, is the opposite of utilitarian. Dani balked

at female friends who insisted she would need these special clothes. Dani says,

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 People kept telling me ―you‘re going to need maternity clothes‖…And I started

looking at men‘s bodies…How many pot-bellied men are out there walking

around that look far more pregnant than I ever was? They are all over the place.

And yet they fit in what are described as men‘s clothes, so I just went and bought

a bigger size [of what I already wore], hence, people thought either that I was

getting fat, or they just thought of me as a man. I was probably eight and a half to

nine months pregnant before people recognized it as a pregnancy.

Dani felt uncomfortable in her own skin and tried to maintain normality by

continuing to wear men‘s clothes, but in larger sizes. It‘s clear that for Dani, pregnancy

was not a joy. It was a compromise she was willing to make in order to achieve the goal

of parenthood. It was also a selfless act of love from her to her partner only made

possible by her body‘s ability to gestate in spite of her own desires not to. While for

Tucker becoming pregnant was a surprising and awesome experience of reconnecting to

his body, Dani felt disassociated from hers and being pregnant brought back to the

surface the anxiety and disphoria that decades of Carhardtt wearing helped suppress.

What Dani was not willing to do was breastfeed, so their baby is being raised with

formula and everyone (Dani, Helene, and baby) seems perfectly happy about this.

Fertility Clinics, Man-ternity Care, and Insurance

While Tucker and Dani both met pregnancy with a mix of trepidation and outright

dread, Jack, the man Tucker met in the maternity ward, could not wait to become

pregnant - and it took him almost five years. He‘d started considering getting pregnant

when many of his older gay friends started adopting children. He was worried that he

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wouldn‘t be eligible to adopt because he wasn‘t ―straight enough‖ for the adoption

agencies or the birth mothers who‘d be deciding who raised their kids. Jack is trans and

gay-identified, and prefers to date other trans men. He felt this combination of identities

may be a road too twisty for a (presumably) straight and cisgender birth mother

considering where to place her child in an open adoption. Though he still had a uterus

and ovaries, he didn‘t think about them much until Matt Rice‘s pregnancy gave him an

epiphany:

I was like, ―Oh, I can have a baby!‖ and my ex decided ―No, you couldn‘t!‖ and

he was like, ―You are too…‖ I think his thing was that he thought it would be too

difficult [for me] to be pregnant from an emotional perspective.

Jack‘s partner was worried that being pregnant would feel to Jack like being a

woman again, and back to that place of discomfort in his own body, after he‘d fought so

hard to become a man- he‘d even lost friends and family in the process. But Jack‘s desire

to give birth outlasted that ex-boyfriend. It outlasted a series of sperm donors as well,

who didn‘t work out for one reason or another. It outlasted the first fertility clinic he tried

in Canada (where he is from) and their sperm donor approval process - as a single person,

even with known donor sperm, Jack had to see a psychiatrist to make sure he knew about

donor conception before he started. Two years and several failed attempts to conceive

later, Jack was living in the US and in the market for a new donor. From previous

experience, Jack knew that he would need to conceive through IVF (in vitro fertilization)

which has a higher success rate than attempting to insert donor sperm himself, or having

a nurse inject sperm in what is pejoratively known as the ―turkey-baster method.‖ Jack

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preferred a gay sperm donor and asked his friend Kurt if he knew any potential

candidates and Kurt volunteered himself.

Donor secured, Jack tried going to one fertility clinic that kept coming up with

excuses for why they couldn‘t treat him: examining his medical records, testing his

hormone levels (which he knew to be in the treatable range). Then they wouldn‘t give

him his results and wouldn‘t let him book a follow-up appointment; their doctor stopped

returning Jack‘s calls and eventually the clinic told him he would have to see their in-

house social worker and then they would bring his case before an ethics committee before

agreeing to treat him. Jack says, ―And, it came out of the blue and sucker punched me

because I thought everything was fine…this hospital has an explicit policy of trans-

inclusion.‖ But he agreed to meet with the social worker because he wanted the

treatment. After so many years trying to get pregnant, Jack wasn‘t willing to give up that

easily. He also knew that his problem had nothing to do with his gender. He wasn‘t

―confused,‖ he knew exactly what his body was capable of and that it didn‘t mean he was

no longer a man. But, used to the confusion of others about his desire to be pregnant, Jack

went in to the meeting with the clinic‘s social worker happy to talk about understanding

what it meant to conceive with donor sperm, but not willing to have a therapy session

interrogating his gender identity.

I basically refused to talk to their social worker in the terms that she wanted to

hear…she treated me absolutely horribly at our meeting and asked me questions

like, what kind of clothing I wore as a child and stuff that was mostly directly

related to me being trans. Which then the hospital tried to turn around and say that

they actually wanted to have the meeting just to evaluate me in terms of my

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 suitability because I was using a known donor. Like, it wasn‘t because I was

trans, it was because I had a donor. And I was like, ―Um, except that she didn‘t

ask me a single question about the donor.‖

Uncomfortable interview with the social worker complete, Jack called the hospital to see

how his case was proceeding with the ethics committee,

So, I contacted [the hospital] and said, ―Look I understand my case is being

presented [before the hospital ethics committee] and I want to be there.‖ And they

said, ―Your case isn‘t being presented, what are you talking about?‖ So then what

it boiled down to was basically their lawyer told them to treat me and they

basically said ―No, we won‘t‖… And to add insult to injury around the same time

the hospital got some sort of award from Lambda Legal or GLADD or one of

those organizations for being trans inclusive because they have all of these great

trans inclusion policies.

Though the hospital was commended for its ―trans inclusion policies,‖ those policies

were limited in scope in that they did not include reproductive care. When confronted

with a novel situation in which they had no policy or precedent, the organizational

response was clueless and stymied. But, this hospital was also progressive. Very few

hospitals even acknowledged the existence of trans people when Jack was trying to get

pregnant nearly a decade ago and few do now. The public conversation about

accommodations for trans people has been stuck on which bathrooms they are legally

permitted to use. In this situation of normlessness, where the people there were not

prepared to understand what might be different about Jack‘s pregnancy, the clinic

administration did the only thing it felt able to do, deny him treatment.

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 Jack then tried to appeal to a group he thought would be more sympathetic to his

situation, GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), for help in his

fight against the clinic he felt unlawfully discriminated against him,

And around the same time the GLAAD [chapter in a nearby city] was running a

fundraising campaign focused on trans access to healthcare. So, I got in touch

with them and they pretty much told me that trans access to healthcare, like

fertility care, wasn‘t really part of what they‘d meant by healthcare…It was

directly within their purview and they didn‘t want to touch it with a ten-foot pole.

It seems trans people trying to reproduce are pretty much left on their own. Even in the

2011 ―Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender

Nonconforming People‖ published by the World Professional Association of Transgender

Health (WPATH), there is very little by way of information about the reproductive health

of trans people. It‘s almost as though there is an inherent assumption that trans people

will not want to reproduce, or that it is at least of secondary concern. In this 120-page

document, covering standards of care for treating mental health, hormone therapy, voice

therapy, surgery and post-op care in trans people, trans reproduction is addressed on one

and a half pages. Though this is mostly a bare-bones utilitarian document sometimes

saying roughly, ―treat this in a trans person as you would a person who is not trans,‖ the

content of those pages is extremely unhelpful and approaches the trans person‘s interest

in reproduction as though they must be mistaken either about transitioning or their desire

to parent. Healthcare professionals are advised to mention reproductive options and

potential limitations prior to hormone therapy and surgery even when the patient is

receiving mental healthcare because, ―Cases are known of people who received hormone

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therapy and genital surgery and later regretted their inability to parent genetically related

children.‖ The main advice seems to be to tell transwomen to freeze their sperm before

estrogen treatments and to have transmen freeze eggs or embryos before considering

testosterone and surgery even if ―patients are not interested in these issues at the time of

treatment.‖ They mention the possibility of stopping hormone therapy and allowing the

body to begin producing gametes (eggs and sperm) again, but say that other than ―debate

and opinion pieces‖ very little medical study data has been published on the issue.

Somewhat buried in the text is the very important line, ―Transsexual, transgender, and

gender nonconforming people should not be refused reproductive options for any

reason,‖ which would presumably include options even after the person has gone through

hormone therapy and surgery. Jack eventually hired a lawyer and filed a complaint

against the hospital with the state commission against discrimination, but, at the time of

the interview, it had been a year and a half and he‘d heard nothing in response.

Though he did find a fertility clinic that agreed to treat him, Jack‘s trouble didn‘t

end there. He also had a series of fights with his insurance company about how his

various fertility treatments would be billed. His insurance company listed different billing

codes depending on whether the claimant was male or female, so they had the problem of

figuring out how to make a claim for female fertility treatments performed on a man. This

combination was thought by this agency to be out of the realm of possibility. His need for

this care was unintelligible for an institution unprepared to deal with him. He called the

company so much that he had huge phone bills and a preferred representative.

I had so many fights with them I started being like... ―I know you are going to

find this obnoxious, but you‘re going to need to put me on hold for 5 minutes and

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 read all the notes in my file posted by [Tammy C.]... And so they would put me

on hold and then come back and say, ―Ok, sir, I think I understand, so your

wife…‖ [And I‘d say] ―Nah, nah, nah, put me back on hold, go read the notes, I‘ll

wait.‖ And so eventually, I had like a claim supervisor who was put on my file

and I knew when she was at work, she would give me her schedule and I would

call her up and be like, ―So, Tammy, this is our problem, let‘s fix this.‖

With a master‘s degree, Jack had the knowledge and the class background to advocate for

himself in this way with the fertility clinic and the insurance company. Not every

pregnant transman would have these resources and, and many would be out of luck. In

both cases, it was the very lack of a policy against treating him, or covering his ―female‖

medical treatments, that left the opportunity for him to push his case. He exploited the

normlessness of these institutions to challenge them. It did not work with the clinic, but it

did with the insurance company. Jack was empowered by the experience and has

advocated for and counseled other trans men on navigating the insurance process,

including Tucker.

While Tucker is sweet, shy, young, and reserved, his partner is the perfect

complement: bold, brash, and fierce. Abby‘s also about ten years older, in her early

thirties, and the primary account holder for their health insurance, so she had to do a lot

of arguing on the phone on Tucker‘s behalf. They married so Tucker could benefit from

Abby‘s healthcare (Tucker was on public assistance before that), and Abby sure did get a

kick out of telling people ―my husband is pregnant.‖ Abby quipped, ―Like, it‘s not my

job to explain it and unpack it for them!‖ Sometimes, though, it is on Abby to explain and

unpack Tucker‘s needs, like with the insurance company. Abby describes the typical

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conversation with the front-line representative of their health insurance company while

inquiring about coverage for bills connected to Tucker‘s pregnancy aftercare:

[T]hey‘re like, ―Wait a minute, wait a minute, so who‘s the father?‖ and I‘m like,

―Tucker‘s the father,‖ ―Wait, but wasn‘t he pregnant?‖ ―Yes, but I‘m the mother.‖

And finally, I‘ve just gotten to the point where my soundbite now is like, ―Look,

just because it doesn‘t fit, just because you don’t have these options in your

computer, doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with our family model. Your

computer needs to have an ‗Other.‘ I don‘t know what else to tell you.‖

Since billing codes are connected with gender, Tucker and Abby‘s insurer had the same

problem Jack‘s insurance did with figuring out how to cover procedures they‘ve only

ever accounted for as ―female.‖ But, with Jack having had the experience, and telling

people about it, Abby has the strength to push back using Jack‘s example:

[The insurance company is] telling me that like, so they‘ve switched him to be

male [in their system], but they‘re telling me that he‘s no longer eligible for

OB/GYN appointments. I know that‘s not true, so I‘ve just told them, ―He will go

and, for now, he‘s still under the care of his home-birth midwives, and eventually

he will get the healthcare he needs, and you will get the bill, and you will figure

out how to enter that in your computer, and pay for it! It‘s not our fault that you

don‘t have a category, you know? Just because your computer doesn‘t have a box

for him, doesn‘t mean he doesn‘t exist.‖

When Tucker transitioned, he did not go through the process of seeing a

psychiatrist to diagnose him with GID, but started getting testosterone (T) on the black

market, so he was not considered legally male though he started growing facial hair and

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being seen as a guy. Going off of T to get pregnant allowed Tucker‘s cycle to begin

again, but he was never comfortable taking on female or gender-neutral pronouns.

Because they thought it would just be easier, Abby and Tucker, when they were still

considered domestic partners, kept Tucker listed as ―female‖ with the insurance company

through most of the pregnancy, and had decided to have a home birth accompanied by

local midwives who were more open to the idea of a man being pregnant.

But both Abby and Tucker wanted to be seen as their child‘s legal parents, so they

got married three weeks before Tucker‘s due date. Tucker had gone through the process

of changing his legal name (to his chosen name, Tucker) and gender marker (F to M) on

his driver‘s license, a process that does not require evidence of hormone treatment,

surgery, or GID diagnosis in the state of Massachusetts, just a note from a counselor or

physician. Most of his other legal documents still had him as ―female.‖ Stuck between

two worlds, in some cases ―legally male‖ and others ―legally female,‖ Tucker‘s existence

too confounded the insurance company for whom there existed only two fixed genders

corresponding to two fixed biological sexes. Either one, or the other.

But, as Abby puts it, ―Just because [the insurance company‘s] computer doesn‘t

have a box for him, doesn‘t mean he doesn‘t exist.‖ The current way of doing things has

the effect of denying the very existence of gestational fathers and their choices become:

a) claiming a female identity they do not have (which may be complicated by the

presence of facial hair, a deep voice, a lack of breasts and legal documentation of a

masculine identity) in order to receive the treatment they need, or b) honoring their

gender identities, but not having access to coverage for certain treatments. This leads

transmen to seek alternatives to conventional medical treatments. Tucker‘s hesitancy to

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go through a psychiatrist to prescribe him testosterone led him to take his hormone

treatment into his own hands. Tucker employed a similar avoidance and control

technique when his decided he would give birth at home. According to Tucker:

I found the home-birth process to be very empowering as a trans person, and to

like really be like a safe space, I know [Jack] had a great hospital birth where he

was totally respected, but I feel like, I don‘t know, I feel like there‘s a rise in

midwives working and in like people doing birth work and being doulas that

there‘s a strong queer and trans presence in that would make sense.

Tucker‘s empowering experience of being able to direct his own birth plan leads

him to realize that, perhaps for that reason, queer and trans people would be likely to be

involved in this kind of work professionally. He was able to give birth with only

supportive people around him and avoided the awkwardness he feared he would face in a

hospital. This experience lead to his own interest in practicing alternative medicine

including reiki (a healing art in which the energy from the practitioner is said to pass into

the body of the client) and producing his own ailment-treating tinctures made from

organic ingredients. Tucker planned to use his developing knowledge of DIY healthcare

to treat both himself and other gender non-conforming people.

Throughout their pregnancies, Tucker and Jack were having to continually

confront the limits of the gender binary. Though they had become the men they wanted to

become, and wanted to be able to push what that meant, the experience of being a

gestational father took them to a revolutionary place beyond that. Where once they had

freedom of gender, freedom to choose the gender they wanted, by exploiting the

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normlessness in the situations they confronted, they found freedom from gender—their

experience cannot be captured in the binary as we know it.

Legal and Custodial Challenges

Paris is a Black, early twenties person who identifies as neither man nor woman

and refers to hir gender presentation as androgynous and queer (I will use the gender-

neutral pronouns of ze/hir throughout). Whenever I ran into Paris walking around

campus, it was like encountering a slice of Brooklyn in the otherwise be-cardiganed and

UGG-booted landscape of undergraduates. There were two features of hir wardrobe I

knew I could always count on: a stiff-brimmed ball cap over a close-clipped fade and

(usually color coordinating) hightop sneakers. One of the few undergrads old enough to

get into the university bar, they could be found there regularly, drinking PBRs and

arguing with graduate students, occasionally braving the cold to smoke an American

Spirit, the only concession they seemed to give to the local culture. Paris would get you

into a conversation you might have a hard time getting out of about a TV show about as

often as sociological theory; I had no idea ze had a kid. We‘d met at least four times

before ze mentioned it, probably in response to my talking about my research. ―Oh, yeah,

I‘m a queer parent,‖ seems like something ze would say. Coming to campus was an

escape. Ze said it was hard enough being pregnant and having a child (now a 4-year-old)

as a trans person, but that it has also exacerbated hir experience of mental health issues,

including depression. It‘s also been suggested that Paris has a form of autism, potentially

Aspergers syndrome. It‘s hard enough being a gender-nonconforming person of color,

but these mental health struggles put Paris under a lot more scrutiny. While Paris loves

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hir child ze‘s been treated as a ―bad mother‖ by friends, family, and agents of the State

who still see hir as female. Paris sees these critiques as inherently sexist and feels that if

ze were seen as a man people would not be saying ze is a ―bad father‖ for the same

behaviors.

Describing hir path to parenthood, Paris blithely quotes their grandmother‘s

saying, ―when you get bored, you get pregnant.‖ Paris was an undergrad at a more

prestigious college before transferring to a state school, but in the same mostly-white

New England town. Ze commuted in from an outlying area more affordable to live in

with a much high concentration of people of color. After being expelled for issues

stemming from mental illness (Paris fell into a deep depression and was no longer able to

complete hir assignments), Paris took solace in the small Black community available to

them and met Robert who ze‘s been with nearly five years. Paris had no interest in

becoming a parent and says matter-of-factly, ―I don‘t even really like kids.‖ Ze kept the

pregnancy because the romantic relationship was getting more serious and they knew

Robert wanted a child.

Paris has had a hard time connecting with Roberta (named for her father)

emotionally and relies on Robert to be demonstrative by holding her, playing with her,

and letting her know she is loved and cared for. In describing Robert as a good parent and

―Mr. Mom,‖ Paris says, ―She‘ll crawl all over him and he‘s really good at being

touched.‖ Paris feels that ze will be more involved with Roberta when she gets older:

when ze can take her to museums, eat sushi, and, in Paris‘s words, build her ―cultural

capital.‖ Physicians, social workers, and family members have judged Paris for this

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approach to parenting because ze is interpreted as the child‘s mother even though Paris

doesn‘t feel that way. In Paris‘s words:

There‘s apparently a difference in how attached fathers are supposed to be versus

how attached they want mothers to be and, since it‘s reversed in my case, it‘s very

hard to be treated the way I‘m treated— that I have to prove I love my kid. I can‘t

love her in my way, I have to love her in a Leave It to Beaver, 1950s way, and I

can‘t do that. So, people say things and I‘m just like they‘re not really accepting

of me being queer.

Though this is surely complicated by Paris‘s difficulty with emotional attachment,

Paris interprets always being seen as, in the end, Roberta‘s ―mother‖ with all the weight

that word entails, as a denial of hir queer identity. The relationship they and Robert have

is not a heteronormative one and neither is their parenting style. As Paris says, ―its

reversed in my case,‖ meaning the familial gender roles they and Robert have worked

out. They feel constantly reprimanded for not being the kind of mother people expect

them to be: the self-sacrificing martyr who is the symbol of emotional care in a family.

But, again, Paris does not identify as a mother at all, but feels much more affinity with

the role of a father. While some see this as a failing, Paris is clear that this is better than

the alternative of shifting their focus from their career path to caregiving, which ze is

certain would come with negative consequences.

If it‘s a matter of choosing between my career and my autonomy or being like a

Martha Stewart–assed mom, I‘m going to choose my career every day and my

autonomy every day. My career is more valuable to me because without it I‘d be

bat-shit crazy or in jail. Probably both.

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 The strategy Paris has developed to keep from going ―bat-shit crazy‖ — to show

love in their own way, to prioritize career over family, and to feel no shame about these

choices that more closely mirror traditional fatherhood more than motherhood—has been

a huge point of contention between Paris and State representatives in the form of social

services. As a working-class part-time student, an African-American, and someone who

suffers from mental illness, Paris was already under constant scrutiny and felt like

everyone was just waiting for hir to mess up. From the jump, Paris lived under the threat

of having hir child taken away. But, when representatives from DSS (the Department of

Social Services) came to interview Paris, they diagnosed them with yet another ailment

deemed detrimental to their child: gender identity disorder. The implication of their

gender identity being a ―disorder‖ at all infuriated Paris.

How can [DSS] tell me that because I‘m not dressed as a woman should be

dressed, or that I‘m dressed more androgynously, that there‘s… a pathology

behind that? I just, I don‘t feel like it‘s harmful. I grew up in a harmful parental

environment and abuse is harmful, and neglect is harmful, and presenting the way

I present [my gender] is not harmful, so I‘m kind of mistrusting of the whole

system. I feel disgusted because they‘re focusing on things that are really

superficial, they‘re not really focused on the supports that I need to be [a good]

parent…They‘re looking at me, but they are not looking at the weight of what it is

to raise a family in America…when there is barely a social safety net to do such a

thing.

Paris is clear that interference from DSS, while apparently meant to assist as

much as monitor hir, is not helping Paris become a better parent. The solution, as far as

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Paris is concerned, is at the macro level: to build a social safety net to actually give

parents like Paris the opportunity to parent well. The focus by DSS on Paris‘s gender

presentation and assumption that it is ―distressing‖ to Roberta - they argue, because Paris

does not ―look like a mother‖ - is itself very stressful. That, in addition to their

knowledge of Paris‘s depression and Asperger‘s, has Paris convinced that the State will

take hir child away. This looming threat, in itself, has had a profoundly negative impact

on hir parenting and only worsened hir depression.

I honestly stopped being as attached to my kid as I was when I realized how

precarious my relationship with her was. Seventy to eighty percent of people with

mental difficulties, disabilities, or neurological problems or otherwise, eventually

lose their children. So, I am always counting down the days until I lose her.

Paris‘s intersecting experiences as a low-income, genderqueer, Black parent with mental

illness has put hir parenting under a microscope. Hir trans status, that ze is uninterested in

being the kind of parent social services wants to see, makes hir depression seem all the

more serious to the social service agents of the state. Where Paris is wishing for nuance,

social services sees more evidence of depression and mental illness. On top of that, the

constant policing from healthcare providers and DSS has led Paris to conclude that hir

child will be taken away no matter what ze does, and that‘s only made hir less invested in

parenting. Paris‘s experience throws into relief how much structurally privileged

positions—being white, middle-classed, and gender conforming—allows for more

freedom to challenge established parenting norms. A woman who, like Paris, is very

invested in her career and finds the daily duties of parenthood overwhelming can afford

to outsource her labor to a caretaker. Paris does not have this option.

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 Christopher too got pregnant young and on accident, though the situation was a

bit different. As he notes of the particular night of conception ―I was using Ecstasy,

which was a common feature of my life at that point.‖ Nine years later, Chis is a wiry

white guy who has a 90s soul patch on his chin. He has shaggy, brown hair and seems to

always be smiling. At the time he got pregnant, Chris was identifying as captain of the

butch lesbians. While his unintended pregnancy was alarming to his queer friends, they

quickly spun a myth around him that they could digest.

…I heard this story about how I was a queer martyr. Like I got pregnant the first

time I ever… you know? And that that was what happened. And like, ―oh, poor,

[Chris]‖..I was like, who the hell made up that story? That story is inaccurate.

That was the story they wanted to hear though. Because I was totally unapologetic

about it.. Like, ―So, I had a couple of...‖ You know? That‘s an authentic part of

my history, and you know what? It wasn‘t so great, but it happened. Why should I

lie about it?

Chris‘s friends would rather have thought of him as the queer Virgin Mary than

accept his sexuality was a little more fluid than they thought. It was complicated for Chris

too. Although he says he was ―unapologetic,‖ even in front of me he couldn‘t bring

himself to actually say he‘d had sex with men while a lesbian, twice saying ―you know?‖

instead.

Getting pregnant through intercourse with a man was rendered understandable

through some sort of convoluted Queer Virgin Mary narrative. His friends assumed,

wrongly, that it must have been his one and only sexual encounter with a man. Still quite

young, Christopher tried to live life as it was before his son was born, and he brought him

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everywhere. For the activist queers who were his friends, he was either shunned or

exalted for becoming a young, queer, single parent, ―Like [people would say] ‗It‘s so

awesome; I think it‘s the coolest thing I have ever heard!‘ And I‘m like, ‗Riiight, why

don‘t you try living it and then tell me how cool and radical it is.‘‖ To the young activist

community around him, Chris‘s accidental, fairly heteronormative pregnancy story was

transformed into a heroic queer narrative of struggle, and, therefore, credibility.

Unbeknownst to Chris, while he was changing diapers and buying teething rings, he‘d

become a radical icon.

But, Chris lost his queer parenting credibility among the lesbian community he

was part of once he transitioned to male.

I had quite a chunk of lesbian friends who were not cool with it…like, ―you are a

traitor to the cause‖…I was very high profile, everybody knew me and I was a big

deal [local lesbian activist]. They didn‘t take it well.

While Chris‘s pregnancy was chalked up to a one-time mishap, his decision to become

not just a man, but a (presumably) straight, white man was traitorous behavior. Was Chris

really going to go from fighting the patriarchy to benefitting from it? For Chris, of

course, is was not as easy as seamlessly going from butch lesbian to nondescript white

guy overnight. Friends he could lose, their disapproval wasn‘t going to threaten his

livelihood or his custodial rights to his son, but Chris‘s parents were a different story.

Chris‘s parents were able to weaponize their disapproval of his transitioning to

male by not only informing the rest of the family (aunts, uncles, cousins, etc) without his

consent, but by suing for custody of his son, Ezra, in family court. This came after Chris

told his parents that if they had a problem with his transition, he did not have to see them

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or allow them to see Ezra. Chris was looking for an open dialog, but his parents did not

want to speak with him yet wanted to be able to see their grandchild.

[My mother] refused and I said, ―You know what, until you are ready to talk

about it I don‘t think we should see each other and I don‘t think you should see

[Ezra] either because you don‘t get him without me.‖ So, her response was that

she filed [for custody] in court.

The fact that Chris had Ezra made him extremely vulnerable. His parents couldn‘t

sue or hospitalize him for transitioning, but they could use misconceptions about trans

people to make him look like an unfit parent. Chris‘s parents claimed his transition was

actually endangering his child. They suggested that the process of transitioning showed

that Chris ―didn‘t know who [he] was‖ was making him selfish and unfit to parent. His

own parents painted a picture of Chris in court as an unstable and violent person

incapable of raising his son on his own. They said Chris‘s testosterone therapy,

specifically, was creating a harmful environment.

I also got to hear how I was basically going to have ‗roid rage [from testosterone].

They brought this up in court. And they were like, ―You‘re so hostile‖ and I was

like, ―I‘m hostile because you‘re being an asshole to me! I deserve to be hostile!

You turned my whole family against me!‖

He said the experience of family court was like ―Judge Judy meets Jerry Springer.‖ At

one point Chris‘s dad yelled out, ―Please, your honor, this child is in danger!‖ It didn‘t

help that Chris‘s court-appointed attorney did not show up for the court date. It was like a

worst-case scenario TV movie. Small consolation was the reaction of other people in the

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courtroom awaiting their own hearings; Chris says, ―Everybody in that courtroom looked

disgusted and horrified at my parents.‖

In the end, Chris got to keep primary custody of his son, but the judge granted his

parents visitation rights and he was forced to see them once a month with Ezra. The

judge, using his discretionary power to assess ―the best interests of the child,‖ decided it

was in Ezra‘s interest to spend court-mandated time with his transphobic grandparents.

Chris used some colorful words to describe the judge who was known locally as ―gay

friendly‖ and was quick to point out that this did not make him ―trans friendly.‖ On the

way out of court that day, an attorney there for another client handed him his card. Chris

managed to eventually regain full custody of Ezra after that lawyer put him in contact

with a representative at GLAAD who gave him important legal advice.

The upshot is that these visits, years of them, eventually lead to a truce between

Chris and his parents. In the meantime, Chris met another single parent, Jocelyn, and the

two got married and are raising their children together. When asked how his parents are

with his kids now, Chris admits to being pleased but also having low expectations.

It‘s funny because [my parents] are great with [my kids]. As great as they can be,

you know. I feel like the trans mantra in life is ―you take what you can get.‖ In the

spirit of that, yeah, they‘re great! (Laughs.)

Through it all, Chris has managed to maintain a sense of humor. He‘d had no plan of

becoming a parent, and it turned out that having a child made him very vulnerable to the

judgment of his transition by both his parents and the legal system. But, in the long term,

an unintended consequence of having a kid helped to bring an end to the conflict he was

having with his own parents about his transition.

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 Conclusion

Gestational fathers are paragon practitioners of what Carla Pfeffer calls

―normative resistance‖ and ―inventive pragmatism‖ (2017). Gestational fatherhood is

deeply disruptive to the norms and assumptions about the gender binary and how it

relates to reproduction. The result is frequent bewilderment and routine hostility from

medical institutions, social services, and families of origin—to say nothing of the stares

from strangers attempting to comprehend someone both pregnant and male. But this

bewilderment, institutions confronting normlessness about if and how to interact with

them also provided an opportunity. Because there are few expectations for gestational

fathers, they and their partners got to make up the rules as they went. They all faced

challenges and could certainly have done with better finances, better access to medical

care, more support from their families of origin, and greater sympathy and understanding

from nearly everyone. But all of the gestational fathers—Dani, Tucker, Jack, Chris, and

Paris—were able to make up new versions of fatherhood. In this sense, these are utopian

experiments in family formation facilitated by a queer identity.

Some came to their utopianism reluctantly, like Beatie, whose very public story

began this chapter, who went from simply wanting a child to becoming a living critique

of the gender binary. Most of the gestational fathers I talked to had already rejected

gender norms, and it was this rejection that led them to imagine becoming gestational

fathers in the first place. Becoming a gestational father was claiming more than the

gender of their choosing, it was claiming a freedom from gender, to be neither men nor

women in this area of their lives. They didn‘t always succeed and the certainly ran into

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more than their fair share of obstacles. Each encountered people and institutions that

asked them to choose a gender. Sometimes, for the sake of inventive pragmatism, in the

moment, they did (it wasn‘t always consistent, of course), but others held strong and

asked the institutions to come to them.

Known Gay Sperm Donors

Looking Beyond the Two-parent Family

Nearly all of the research on LGBTQ families has focused on two-parent

households with children. Part of the motivation for this was political: Liberal social

scientists have an investment in portraying LGBTQ families as non-threatening to

heteronormative family traditions—―just like everyone else‖ (Stacey and Biblarz 2001).

Nevermind that ―everyone else‖ turns out to be a mostly-empty category as the ideal

heterosexually-married breadwinner and homemaker couple is rarer than ever. The

premise was misguided from the start. The implied comparison, argued from a defensive

position, has kept us from exploring what might be extraordinary about LGBTQ

families—which cannot help but be different (Hicks 2005). Some have argued that this is

a quasi-cultural difference: LGBTQ people bring different experiences to bear on

institutions of the family not built with them in mind. Others have argued that LGBTQ

people, by experiencing oppression themselves (as though it were unilaterally the same

for all non-straight people), have insight into power and inequality, helping them to raise

more sensitive children and situating them well to care for transracial and transcultural

adoptees, children with disabilities, and children who are gender and sexual minorities

themselves. While these predispositions are likely real, I would suggest that a more

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fruitful angle of inquiry comes from the structural variance from the two-parent ideal,

which, while certainly present among straight couples, is inherent to LGBTQ families.

This structural variance is particularly evident in those families where gay men have

donated sperm to queer (including lesbian and trans) couples.

Looking at the gay men who donate their sperm to queer couples allows us to

consider a) the role of family members who live outside the household, b) the importance

(or not) of genetic connection in LGBTQ families, and c) the permeability of queer

fatherhood identities. Specifically, this chapter will focus on how these things come

together for the donor by exploring the fissure between the pre-birth negotiations of a

sperm donor‘s place in the family versus the lived reality.

Pregnancy through the use of donated sperm is nothing new. There are sperm

banks across the country which compensate men for a sample of their sperm and

regulations around who can donate, how many times, and how many children can be

borne of each donor (Almeling 2011). Sperm banks protect the identities of their clients

and pay small fees in order to encourage more men to donate. Studies of anonymous

sperm donors suggest these men do not consider themselves to be fathers, but recognize

the exchange as strictly commercial. Some banks allow men to release their names to

children upon kids‘ 18th birthdays at which point they are free to establish relationships

with each other. Some sperm donors are chosen on the basis of their willingness to be

known while others are chosen because they would like their identities to remain

unknown.

But sperm banks are only one way to acquire sperm for the purpose of

conception. Other donations are informally arranged through friends and social networks.

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This method is preferred by those who wish for their children and donors to have a

relationship early on in life and in order to avoid paying for sperm or interacting with the

―sperm industrial complex.‖ This approach has its own dangers as donors and sperm-

seekers have to map out their own relationship agreements, which may or may not hold

up under legal scrutiny. To better shore up their desired rights, donors and sperm-seekers

sign contracts wherein the donor gives up their claims to custody of the child. This move

has been intensified by a few publicized legal cases in which donors sued for rights after

only orally relinquishing custody claims. On a less litigious note, donors and parents also

have to navigate their relationships to each other as well as the donor‘s relationship to

children, including the labels the family uses to refer to the donor and communicate his

involvement to others. While anonymous donors seldom end up having relationships with

the children biologically connected to them, known donors can and often do, but, as I will

show, the range of donor involvement in the daily lives of children is enormous.

A donor to an LGBTQ family is often framed as providing a ―necessary

ingredient‖ that makes family formation possible. For cisgender men, the donation effort

is minimal, but, unlike the case for sperm bank donors, carries an oversized significance.

The process of donating sperm turns the product of masturbation into ―the gift of life‖

and the donor into someone who has ―fathered‖ a child. He feels integral to the

mechanics of getting pregnant and the family that forms as a result. Like the birth

mothers who choose gay men as their child‘s adoptive parents and relish the idea they

will be the child‘s one and only mother, men providing sperm to lesbian couples might

embrace the label of father more confidently and readily than if they donated to an

unknown heterosexual couple. But, what if that donor is donating sperm to a transman, to

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help another man become pregnant and become a dad? Though just as necessary, the

donor is not as unique in the life of the child, if he chooses to identify as a father of a

child who already has another father. One response is to undermine the transman‘s claim

to fatherhood (and manhood) to take on the label of ―true father.‖ Another is to honor the

gestational father‘s claim to fatherhood, denying it for the sperm donor. There is, of

course, a third option—to accept that a child might have two biological fathers. It is,

however, easier to recognize that a child can have two biological mothers: one that

provides an ovum and another that gestates the fetus. Acknowledging that a child might

have two biological fathers challenges our notion of the sex/gender system.

The Origin of the Known Donor

Barry is a gay, white, architect in his late 30s who has donated sperm twice, once

to his friend from high school, Abby, and once to her partner, Tucker, a trans man. Barry

had been close to Abby since high school. Together they drank, did drugs, and hopped

trains for fun. They bonded over their shared radical politics and were openly queer in a

rural community where sexuality was never talked about, much less celebrated. Barry

was a self-described ―club kid‖ in the 90s, partying in Boston and New York scenes and

fell out of touch with Abby for a time. Barry was jealous when Abby had initially asked

his high school ex, Tom, to donate. Fortunately, according to Barry, Tom‘s sperm was

―broken,‖ so she had to call upon him for a viable donation. (The truth is that Tom did

not realize he had to abstain from masturbating for more than 24 hours before donating,

and had been giving Abby bad samples for over a year.) Abby tracked her basal

temperature, and, when the time was right, Abby had Barry ejaculate into a jar and then

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injected the semen into her own body with a syringe. Via this DIY method, Abby was

able to become pregnant and give birth to Ember, who was three at the time of the

interview.

Two years after Abby‘s son Ember was born she approached Barry again and

asked if he would serve as a sperm donor to Tucker, Abby‘s trans male partner of only a

few months. Barry was more hesitant this time and had certain conditions,

I was like, ―[The kids] need to have a stable upbringing and I would like them to

be in a house, a home, with a family‖ and that sort of thing and so, I was like

―These are the conditions that I‘m wanting out there…Tucker if you‘re going to

have a child, you‘re going to be part of a family with Abby for the long haul,‖ you

know what I mean?

Barry wanted assurances that Tucker would be there for ―the long haul‖: get married to

Abby, live in a stable home, and raise their kids together. Barry‘s insistence that Abby

and Tucker raise his progeny heteronormatively is a bit ironic given the radical politics

and outlaw past he shared with Abby that was the basis of their friendship. Though Barry

had agreed that Tucker and Abby would be raising the children, and he would not be

responsible for them, Barry wanted to know they were being raised ―right.‖ Tucker and

Abby actually did get married and move in to a house and were raising Ember and Ray

(Tucker‘s biological child) together, though it is unclear if this was in any way because of

Barry‘s requests. Because of the presence of children, and his ability to exercise control

by setting conditions on who can use his sperm, Barry attempts to superimpose a

heteronormative narrative on Tucker and Abby‘s romance. He now thinks their

relationship will reflect on him. The result is awkward and patronizing. Barry is claiming

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a parental right—having a say in how the child is raised—as a condition of relinquishing

his rights. The examples that follow hit on different points, but this story perhaps orients

us to the contradictions and conflicts a normless relationship like that between a donor

and a birth parent can have.

None of the other men I interviewed mentioned placing conditions on the use of

their sperm. In fact, the concern seemed to be quite the opposite. Known donor contracts,

agreements between sperm donors and the recipients of their donations, are typically

drawn up to affirm the rights of the primary parents: the donor agrees to give up legal

claims to custody and submits full control over decision-making in regards to the child to

the legal guardians. But, donor agreements protect donors as well in terms of their legal

and financial responsibilities to their children.

Dominic is a 49-year-old, white non-profit worker, and known donor to two

families- one lesbian couple and one single lesbian—producing three children (aged 6 to

12). He describes the legal landscape for those moms this way:

So, for the moms to be able to adopt…I had to give up my legal standing as a

parent…which was fine, because that‘s what we talked about originally in the

donor agreements, that there wouldn‘t be any kind of financial

responsibility…especially with Keisha when she was a single mom…if she had

gone on any type of public assistance, [the State] would have gone after me [to

help support her].

Although Dominic considers himself to be a full parent to the children he brought into the

world (and the moms do too), he legally gave up that status so that the partners of the

women who gave birth could legally adopt their own children. Dominic frames this

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magnanimously- he‘s giving up his rights- but also mentions how he is protected from

having to provide child support (to children he considers his own, mind you) in the event

that the mothers of his children fall on hard times, specifically the woman who gave birth

as a single mother. But Dominic‘s kids call him ―Dad‖ and he does things dads do: he

attends their softball games and sees them at birthday parties and holidays. Structurally

his role is more akin to a divorced father than an equal co-parent at one extreme, or uncle

on the other. Recently, Dominic took in one of his children for several months while her

sister (of a different donor) was recovering from an automobile accident. He was happy

to do it, but it was clear that these were special circumstances.

A Rose is a Rose?

Among known sperm donors and their families, who is a dad, and what his

parenting responsibilities are, is not always clear. Terminology isn‘t much help either

given that no label really exists that might encompass these men‘s roles in their families.

After calling himself a ―known donor,‖ Barry asked me the term I would use for him.

When I turned the question back around, he got into why it was complicated to say:

I don‘t know, on my inner level, I consider myself a father. But…I don‘t know if

I’m a dad…I have fathered a child. I don‘t know what the difference is…Because

Tucker’s the Papa, that‘s what [Abby and Tucker] say. Essentially, what we‘ve

decided…I am whatever Ember decides to term me. Right now I’m Baba, so

whatever…Okay, I‘m Baba… There‘s nothing suggestive, no one ever says

anything like ―this is your father‖ or anything like that. They‘re the parents, this

[Baba label] is for them… I mean I would like to be thought of as “Dad‖ you

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 know, when they‘re of an age to understand and recognize that… And I don‘t

know what Abby and Tucker think about it, I just don‘t. (emphasis added)

In these few sentences Barry maps out four discrete fatherhood identities that could each

apply to him. First is what he considers himself to be: a father through procreation. To

Barry, since he has engaged in the process of fathering, he has earned the title ―father,‖

though he feels this label goes largely unrecognized (―no one ever says…―this is your

father‖‖). Second, he mentions ―Dad‖ as more of a social role and it‘s the title he would

like to earn in his relationship with his kids by developing relationships with them. To

Barry, dads do more than just father. Third, he also wants to honor whatever Ember calls

him, currently ―Baba,‖ but he is quick to point out that this is a label developed by the

parents, to make them more comfortable. Barry wants to be ―Dad.‖ Finally, there‘s the

other label Barry seems to have hesitation about—―Papa‖ (―that‘s what they say‖)—the

term his daughter uses to address the male parent she lives with. In sum, Barry considers

himself a father, aspires to be a dad, is called Baba, and has to share the role with

someone called Papa. Barry has some confusion about his label, and, by extension,

perhaps, his place in the family. He is dissatisfied with the invented term that might

signal his non-traditional role, Baba, and wants to be ―Dad,‖ though there is someone else

who might lay claim to the title by an alternate iteration—Papa. He ends by saying he

doesn‘t know what Abby and Tucker think about his label/place in the family, but Abby

clearly told me his relationship was more akin to an uncle than a father.

Yeah, [Ember] has a different relationship with [Barry] than with other friends.

And I wasn‘t really sure how I felt about it at first…Everyone would be like,

―Look at her…she‘s so fixated on him, every time he walks into the room.‖ [I

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 thought] people are just reading shit into it [because he‘s the donor], but now…he

really plays for her that super playful uncle role…at this point she just knows that

he‘s Baba…and his parents are her grandparents…[T]he way I‘ve always

envisioned explaining [that he is the sperm donor] is just that like [Barry] wanted

[Tucker and I] to be able to be parents and he gave us this gift so that you could

be here.

In this quote, Abby works to play down Barry‘s role and expresses irritation that other

people would be looking for a stronger connection between her daughter and her donor.

She remarks that, in the beginning, she was ―not sure how she felt‖ about a significant

connection between Barry and Ember. That Barry was the sperm donor seems significant

to other people in her life, presumably because of the biological connection that signals,

and Abby sees this as threatening to the family she is trying to build. She does not

consider Barry to be a parent to her daughter, but rather someone who gave her and her

partner the ability to become parents themselves. However, Abby is not immune to the

specter of Barry‘s biological connection when she acknowledges the relationship Ember

has with Barry is stronger than the relationship she has with other people. She seems to

cave into the explanation, from outsiders, that they are so close because of their shared

biology over other explanations such as his increased presence and personal investment

in Ember. Still, Abby stops short of seeing Barry as a father, or dad figure, and makes

him analogous to an uncle by explicitly comparing him to her brother. That Barry‘s

parents are considered grandparents also makes sense if he is her ―brother‖; after all one‘s

uncles‘ parents are still one‘s grandparents, even if an uncle is not a dad.

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 While there is some disagreement about what role Barry plays (father or uncle) in

his family, and how much dad-duty Dominic is actually doing for his kids, Kurt is in

solid ―uncle‖ territory. Kurt and Jack were co-workers when they decided to produce a

kid together. Both identify as gay men, but Jack is also trans and had a long-standing

desire to give birth. After trying to become pregnant for about three years to no avail,

with a different sperm donor, Jack was looking for a new donor to try with, and was

mentioning this to Kurt one day in their shared office. Kurt explains what happened next:

So, Jack had been trying to get pregnant for several years, for about three years at

that point, since well before he‘d come to [workplace], and he had a particular

donor he‘d been working with who was about to move away and he basically

said, it wasn‘t a ―Will you be my new donor?‖ it was a ―Hey, keep your ear to the

ground and let me know if you hear of anyone who might want to be a sperm

donor.‖

Kurt took some time to think about it, but pretty quickly offered his own services. Kurt

saw the experience as an opportunity to do something he didn‘t think he‘d ever get to do

as a gay man: father a child. Kurt and Jack weren‘t especially close before they began

trying to get Jack pregnant. Jack was in his mid-thirties and had gone off of testosterone

injections just three months prior to trying to conceive, and the ―turkey baster method‖

ended up not being an option for him. While Barry‘s and Dominic‘s participation in the

conception of their children ended at successful ejaculations, Kurt was intimately

involved in Jack‘s becoming pregnant, learning about terminology and fertility cycles and

attending and participating in the in vitro process.

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 We tried a few different times, a few different methods, none of which worked.

Until finally, I guess we‘d been at it for about half a year or so…It was January of

2010 when he went for in vitro fertilization treatment in Boston, and so, of course,

I had to go out there with him [to provide a fresh sperm sample]. And the first try

was a success, we had viable embryos, they implanted, and one of them stuck and

took and grew.

Though they weren‘t close before, Jack and Kurt‘s bond grew through spending time

together on the road to pregnancy and through the pregnancy as well. When Jack went

into the hospital to give birth, Kurt not only visited him there but was the second face the

baby, Ginger, saw. He organized a team of friends to clean Jack‘s house and stock his

refrigerator so he could come home to a clean home with meals already prepared.

While Kurt playfully referred to himself as a ―spunkle‖ (a hybrid of the words

―sperm,‖ or ―spunk,‖ and ―uncle‖) during the pregnancy, it felt a bit too flippant after the

birth. Kurt at first underestimated the connection he would feel to Ginger, and, welling up

with tears, told me his first thought upon seeing her was ―she has my eyes.‖ Jack and

Kurt both realized that Kurt would be a serious part of Ginger‘s family now that she was

born, and settled on the title ―Uncle Kurt.‖ Growing up close to his Puerto Rican aunts

and uncles, Kurt did not consider ―uncle‖ to be an insult or a suggestion he was distant

from Ginger. Here‘s how Kurt understood it:

We decided ―uncle‖ worked really well, because…[an uncle] was someone who

was connected to this child, who was involved in this child‘s life, but who was not

parenting in this child‘s life. And the nice thing about the term uncle is [that

it]…cover[s] a wide range of possible interactions.

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For Kurt, the term ―uncle‖ helped maintain boundaries around his participation in

Ginger‘s life. ―Uncle‖ was also a term open for interpretation I and had a flexibility that

other familial roles (mother and father, in particular) may not. ―You could be an uncle

who you saw maybe once every five years or you could be the uncle that lived down the

street and you saw a lot or you could be somewhere in the middle and we knew that I

would be somewhere in that middle to a lot range.‖

Kurt did more ―work‖ to produce a child than either Barry or Dominic, but he was

also happier settling into an uncle roll and his role was understood more clearly from the

beginning. Barry was asked to be both Abby and Tucker‘s donor, and had to be reassured

that they would use his sperm to create a happy nuclear family. Dominic, also asked by

people in his life to donate, had to be reassured he would have no financial

responsibilities for his offspring. In contrast to these cases of exchange and reassurance,

Kurt volunteered his sperm without preconditions, but was more intimately involved in

the pregnancy, birth, and early life of Ember, the child his sperm helped create.

Another angle that may have affected Kurt‘s comfort, and Barry‘s seeming

discomfort, with being an uncle rather than a father, is that Kurt had no question that Jack

was a man and the fact of Jack‘s pregnancy and giving birth didn‘t change that. Kurt

expanded his personal idea of who could become pregnant to include transmen rather

than using pregnancy as a marker of Jack‘s ―true‖ femininity. This was not true for Barry

who struggled to rectify what he thought he knew about womanhood with the transman

who was carrying his child. This hadn‘t even occurred to me until I semi-jokingly asked

Barry what it was like to get another guy pregnant.

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 I mean, I thought of Tucker as a male, but then when he was pregnant I had an

issue with that because there is a womb and it is there for a woman, you know

what I mean? And…I was like, well yes, you can psychologically identify as such

a thing and I respect and honor that fully, but then there is this other reality…I

didn‘t think of it necessarily as getting a man pregnant.

Barry agreed that Tucker was a man before he got pregnant, but it was Tucker‘s

pregnancy itself, and not a change in self-identity, that, to Barry, undermined Tucker‘s

male identity. He seems to be saying that because Tucker either had a uterus, or was

using it, that that made him a woman. One cannot ―respect and honor‖ someone‘s self-

identity and simultaneously ―have a problem‖ with how they choose to identify based on

biology. In a culture in which genders are defined as binary wherein women are seen as

childbearers (even if they are lesbians, don‘t want children, or can‘t have them) and men

are not, Barry is perhaps understandably confused. Just as Barry and Tucker/Abby do not

agree on Barry‘s place in their children‘s lives, Abby and Tucker would strongly refute

the claim that because Tucker was pregnant, he is a woman and would likely be deeply

hurt by the knowledge that Barry thinks this.

But, Barry‘s response is consistent with an investment in biology and seeing

himself, as a biogenetic donor, as a critical participant in the creation of these children

with an indelible connection. In Barry‘s mind, as the provider of sperm, he is the only

―true‖ father of these children, and that defines his place in the family, which could

otherwise be seen as very tenuous. His involvement goes beyond just donating sperm, by

visiting and playing with them and developing a relationship with the children he helped

to create, but if the family packed up and moved away, he would have no legal recourse.

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He has to rely on their trust and permission to see Ember and Ray, and this is a

relationally precarious position to be in. Barry is deeply invested in his role as the father

of these kids, which may motivate his undermining Tucker‘s own claims to fatherhood.

Barry may not think all people who reproductively father children are dads, but he does

believe they are the only ones who can stake the claim. Later, I will take to task the idea

that people with uteruses cannot ―father‖ children in my deeper discussion of gestational

fatherhood.

Creating “Our Own” Kids

The gay sperm donors in my study not only see donating sperm as a way to create

children they may not otherwise have created, but see choosing to donate to other queer

people as an opportunity for LGBTQ people to create their own families together.

Explaining that although they are gay and have a child together, Kurt has never been

sexually involved with Jack, Kurt quips:

I made some comment [to Jack] about we‘ve just proven that [by getting pregnant

without sex] abstinence is not 100% effective at preventing pregnancy, to which

Jack said, ―It‘s an immaculate conception!‖

Known sperm donors are not typically who we think of as family members, but LGBTQ

families are not typical. They are making families from whole cloth and figuring things

out along the way. In hetero-couples, who supplies the egg and who supplies the sperm

are fairly straight forward in most cases- this is the ―traditional family‖ enshrined in

American law and policy, though straight people also use reproductive technologies,

surrogates, and adoption agencies and foster care. These alternatives to reproduction

through hetero intercourse each carry the stigma of deligitimacy: when straight couples

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don‘t bring all components- sperm, egg, uterus, insemination, conception- to the table

without medical assistance, this is seen as a failure. When straight couples adopt, it is

typically (though not always) their second choice to having kids of ―their own.‖

For queer people, creating ―our own‖ families has a different meaning. In

practical terms, it is bringing into the mix other queer people to assist with reproduction.

Symbolically these partnerships to create children challenge the assumption that LGBT

people cannot reproduce, especially with each other. As Dominic put it:

[Becoming a father] was really never in my realm of possibilities growing up as a

young gay man in the ‗80s… The gay men that I knew that had kids were men

that were married to women, and then came out later in life. So, there was nothing

particularly deliberate in the same way as [having children] through our identities

as…gay and lesbian people… [donating sperm to lesbians] was like taking control

as gays and lesbians and creating kids and having families.

For Dominic, the thought of having children was once completely out of the question.

The 1980s, when Dominic was growing up, was still very much a time of ―straight is to

family as gay is to no family.‖ The only examples he saw of gay men parenting were in

those cases in which formerly hetero-married men came out as gay. These were also

cases in which custody was likely challenged, and often denied to gay men by

unsympathetic family court judges. Judges saw gay men as inherently psychologically

unfit, because homosexuality had been classified as a mental illness until 1973 and, in

some ways, has still not shed that stigma. Since gay sex acts were officially criminalized

in many states until 2003, gay fathers were also seen as inherently criminal, and therefore

as bad influences on their children. Dominic sees the choice to deliberately parent as a

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gay person as a different, and empowering, experience by contrast, particularly when

gays and lesbians could come together and have children without needing the assistance

of straight people. A gay man providing sperm to a lesbian woman using her own eggs

and uterus makes gay reproduction possible. Dominic sees this as gays and lesbians

―taking control‖ of the creation of their own families. By extension, we might also

include trans and gender-variant people in this calculus and say that any LGBTQ people

with viable sperm, eggs, or uterus, can find other LGBTQ people to provide the other

―ingredients‖ of biogenetic reproduction and create life.

Creating ―our own‖ families also offers opportunities to LGBTQ folks to engage

in the mysterious process of reproduction and learn more about themselves. This can be

especially important for gay men whose bodies, as a result of the HIV/AIDS crisis, have

been framed as sites of disease. For instance, before Abby had Barry donate sperm, she

was working with Tom to see if he might. Abby tells a brief story about Tom discovering

a new source of pride: his sperm count.

He had a lot of internalized homophobia and he just believed that he wasn‘t really

fertile. So, we found a do-it-[yourself]…like a home sperm count test where he

could just like drop some sperm on a little slip and it would be bright blue if there

were lots of little spermies that swam across the strip or light blue if there weren‘t

a lot. We did one of those and he scored ―aqua‖ and he was feeling really good

about it and walked around with his chest puffed out for a few days.

Sperm count is a measure of masculine virility that only really makes sense for men

wanting to get someone pregnant. This wasn‘t a prospect for Tom before Abby asked, but

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it meant something to him that translated to masculinity, which helped assuage some of

his internalized homophobia.

Creating ―our own‖ families is also about navigating into uncharted relational

territory with friends and donors. Kurt and Jack had no analogs to look to for guidance

when they decided to have a child: a) borne of two men, b) created without romance or

intercourse, and c) in which only one of them acted as the parent. Kurt describes their

continued relationship as a process rather than a static connection.

[I]t just became a matter of continually refining what is this relationship going to

look like, how are we going to treat it, it‘s a very non-traditional, non-normative

way to form a family…for better or worse, the three of us are bound as a family

for the rest of our lives, from this point out. Yeah, it, you know, we‘ve never had

sex with each other, but we‘ve produced a child and that is an intimate act and we

are bound as a family in some way. But it‘s not a normal family, in your

traditional husband-wife-white picket fence kind of mentality, it‘s very very

different [laughs].

Conclusion

In these examples we can see that sperm donors both unsettle heteronomativity

and allow opportunity for heteronormativity to reassert itself. A man giving up his rights

to a child also means he doesn‘t need to worry about any financial responsibilities to that

child nor any kind of given that he will raise the child in the event of death. This seems

like kind of the perfect no-strings-attached set up: a man can be a father without any

responsibility at all and not be considered a ―dead-beat.‖ Utopian for some, to be sure.

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But the known gay sperm donor brings an inherently different structure to the queer

family. The family extends beyond the home, queer people are creating life-long ties to

each other, biological fatherhood and social fatherhood are separated within an ongoing

relationship, and forces everyone concerned to evaluate what makes a father, and, by

extension, a parent. The known gay sperm donor is emblematic of an attempt to

undermine heteronormative fatherhood. There‘s plenty of evidence of heteronormtivity

sneaking its way back in, most evidently in Barry‘s case. That said, the structure of these

families makes it hard for heteronormativity to sneak in unseen. All of the families wind

up reconsidering both the rights (visitation, authority) and obligations (financial,

emotional) of fatherhood in ways that are, if not exactly utopian, at very least departures

from the Standard North American Family. From family to family, fatherhood can be

assigned to a donor, or to a gestational father, both of which, although in different ways,

reinscribe conventional fatherhood. Or, the notion of a ―unified‖ fatherhood can be

dropped altogether (of which Kurt is the best example. The lesson we might take away is

that alternate family structures may unsettle heteronormativity, but does not, in itself,

undo it as even trans and queer people occasionally make efforts to reassert it. Others,

though, resist that temptation, and in that resistance develop new family forms that

stretch the boundaries of the possible.

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