Gay Babies: The New Man-Purse?

Here's s new twist on two old themes:  One, the theme of "children-as-status-symbol" and two, the theme of "gays-with-babies-are-conservative."

To give you a fair warning, both drive me nuts.

Anyone who thinks a child is a status symbol (for anyone besides a multiple-nanny-employing movie star, that is) does not have children.  Much as I'd love to dress my kids in designer clothes and parade them down main street on a boutique shopping spree, this just doesn't work in real life, where kids spew, nappies blow out, potty training takes the better part of a year and I don't have time to separate my darks from my whites from my pastels when I try to tackle the monster laundry pile in the corner of my room.

I think this kids-as-status-symbol thing is a misunderstanding of the shopping habits of new parents.  Yes, sometimes, if we are so privileged to afford it, we spend more than we should on fancy strollers, nursery furnishings, baby shoes and high chairs.  A friend of mine bought beautiful rosewood baby spoons for her only child, looking to eschew plastic.  How my heart longed for those spoons when she emailed me a link to their online supplier!  But by then, I was on my second kid and had realised that I could just use my regular teaspoons to feed the baby without buying anything new or using plastic.

New babies are exciting. We adore them, however much they vomit and their nappues blow out and we want to lavish signs of love upon them.  In our late-capitalist society, signs of love are often materialistic.  How many engaged or married women do you know who don't sport a diamond engagement ring?  This doesn't make a husband a status-symbol (well, most of the time).

Now here's Kevin Sessums, at the Daily Beast claiming that a biologically related child is the new status symbol for gay men.

Sessums go into a brief explanation at how gay men arrive at biologically related children, exploring the details of sperm-washing (for men who are HIV+) and surrogacy contracts.  And yes, all that really is expensive.  But given the opening scene of Sessums's essay &mash; a "drive back to Manhattan from our summer places in Provincetown" what of spending $150,000 to have a baby?  It's still a bargain compared to either a summer place in P'Town or a Manhattan apartment.

Mind you, I am an adoptive, lesbian mother who never gave a moment's thought to getting pregnant.  (Okay, I confess, my partner and I whimsically created a fantasy sperm-donor dream team, but we were only kidding around while googling gay-friendly adoption agencies.)  I have a strong personal prejudice in favour of adoption of existing children over laborious creation of new ones.  But even so, to each her (or his, as the case may be) own.  Everyone has a long and complicated list of reasons for parenting and how to go about it.  I'm glad the technology is available to help people go the biological route when that turns out to be the best option for them.  And given the difficulty and long waits prospective gay dads &mash; especially single ones &mash; often face when trying to adopt, biology might be a good option for those who can afford it.

But I am more bothered than anything else by Sessums's simplistic (and frequently heard) claim that seeking "the right to marry, the right to serve in the military, the right to be ordained as ministers, the right to have or adopt children, the right to be in the Boy Scouts" automatically makes queers conservative.  He posits his history "as a 52-year-old homosexual man who marched against Anita Bryant and survived the AIDS epidemic" in imagined opposition to these queer conservatives.

I don't know when this old chestnut is going to die.  I sometimes think it's just generational bitterness about "kids these days" &mash; a new possibility in a new queer world in which our elders have been out long enough to geeze about the good old days when no one wanted to marry or have kids, because they were too busy dancing the night away at 54.

And that's a blessing.  In spite of it all, I'm grateful that Sessums survived the AIDS epidemic, and I'm glad the generation to follow him has the kind of miraculous medical technology that allows them to live normal and even reproductive lives with HIV.  I'm grateful we have the luxury of these internecine squabbles because it means that our existence &mash; including our history &mash; is being acknowledged.

But don't write me off as a non-radical just because I'm raising children.  Maybe no one in Sessum's day wanted to marry or have children, or maybe no one could imagine ever having that option anyway.  In another generation, my kids will be part of the insider queer conversation, as some adult children of GLBT parents are already.  And the conversation will be richer and the movement for justice will be more powerful because of that.

Image: In the interest of full disclosure, that's my adopted daughter and her non-biologically-related but gay godfather!