Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?: Confessions of a Gay Dad by Dan Bucatinsky Read Free Book Online Page A

mom, Monica, in a room filled with pregnant women and no other men. I’m nervous. So is she. She’s chewed up most of the French manicure we treated her to a few days ago. She stands up and looks at me. “Do we have time?” she asks me. Don stays to fill out paperwork while I take her outside. I notice how much she’s actually showing when we get to the curb for her quarter-hour cigarette break. Several people give her dirty looks as she lights up. She knows full well why she’s getting this rebel attention. She loves it. She’s on her third drag when Don calls me on my cell. She rolls her eyes and puts the cigarette out on the arm of her jacket, pocketing the “halfie” for later.
    Don and I stand next to each other, staring at the ultrasound machine while our doctor rubs the sensor over her belly. We hear that echoey, futuristic, submarine-sounding heartbeat and my eyes well up. The sound is so reflective of how I’m feeling: wow-wow-wow-wow-wow. Holy shit! I think, There really is a baby in there? The doctor turns to Monica.“You want to know the sex?” She looks up at us. “Ask them. They’re the ones you gotta ask.” We nod. It’s a girl.
    We were so excited. A girl! It was going to be so much fun! Girls seemed, at least to us, the better option for first-time parents. We assumed they’d be easier and sweeter and less likely to want us to play something horrible with them like football or smear-the-queer. Girls would be—well, more girly. I was down with that. I was already a bit on the girly side, and Don? Forget it. A kid asks him to play ball and he’s likely to say, “Only if I get to be Cinderella!” With a girl, we’d get to shop for dresses and play with Barbies and twist her hair into different braids and buns and do’s. Girls were made of sugar and spice and everything nice. But as it turns out there was one thing girls have that we were less experienced with. That would be the, you know, “down there” area.
    Let me be clear: I’ve never been one of those gays who have anything against vaginas per se. I was just never particularly interested in them. Seeing them. Touching them. I didn’t ever really get them. I mean, one or two, maybe. But it was just a phase because I just didn’t get them. So many intricate folds. Canals. Wrinkles. So many places to get lost or get things lost in. Even as a kid, a girl’s “down there” was just plain baffling.
    When I was seven Natalie Rovner and I had a sleepover campout one summer in her backyard. She convinced me to show her my penis and I’d get to see her vagina. I would “get to,” her exact words. It was supposed to be the big incentive for exposing my junk. I say Natalie made out like a bandit in the deal. I remember thinking, Geez. Couldn’t I see her vagina and also get a Snickers? But I knew I was supposedto care, so my pants were around my ankles before she could say, “Don’t ever tell a soul.” I flashed her. She flashed me. I zipped up my pants and my sleeping bag and went to sleep. I immediately felt guilty. At the time I thought I’d done something horribly wrong.
    But in hindsight, I think my guilt had more to do with knowing I was supposed to relish the opportunity to see Natalie’s vajayjay and I so didn’t. Something was wrong with me. Clearly. I was ashamed at my inability to pray at the altar of Miss Mary’s snatch. Natalie could’ve offered to show me a frog and I’d have been more excited. And I was scared of frogs. As it turns out, I was much more scared of beavers.
    As I hit puberty, my relationship to the female anatomy got even more complicated. I remember when I was twelve or thirteen my best friend Philip and I would get our parents to let us go from the suburbs into New York City alone on the train to have lunch or see a movie or whatever. Well. I don’t know what my parents thought “whatever” was, but I can tell you it was all about getting the newsstand guys to sell us porn.
    We planned each