The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant by Dan Savage Read Free Book Online Page A

health club membership. The line about not being able to wait to get to know each other before we created a lifelong, everlasting bond was a little high-pressure. On the other hand, meeting someone who wanted to put a rush order on my sperm was a nice change. After a year spent talking to three lesbians who probably couldn't have agreed to rush out of a burning building, Straight Single's impatience had appeal. And I liked the idea of living right next door to the kid. Maybe with a drink in her, our next-door neighbor would seem less like a health club sales associate.
    But there would be no next meeting. I had to cancel our first date to drink. Then I had to cancel our rescheduled date. Straight Single was a woman in a hurry, so she withdrew her offer and decided to adopt instead. Things were a little strained after that, as if we were living next door to a jilted lover. Eventually, Straight Single adopted a baby girl from China and moved away, and we were both happy for her and more than a little relieved.
    Months later, we ran into Lesbian Couple at a Lesbian Event, a women's basketball game. They'd heard the news about us deciding to adopt. They congratulated us, but they were a little hurt that they hadn't heard the news from us directly, and hoped we could get together sometime and have a little conversation, to bring closure to the discussions we'd had more than two years ago about making a baby. Lesbian Couple was still thinking about kids, and was still thinking of me as their potential sperm donor. The news that my balls had been yanked off the market came as something of a shock.

The Real Reasons

    T here's a question I've been dodging.
    Why were we having a kid? Or kids, plural, I should say, because Terry and I—younger brothers, remember—believed children should have siblings to torment. So, why kids? We were HIV-negative gay men living in America at the end of the twentieth century. Barring some social or economic disaster (like a Steve Forbes administration), we had a long, prosperous DINK future spread out before us. (That's “Double Income, No Kids,” our by-default consumer demographic.) Remaining DINKs meant a future of travel, parties, cheap-if-not-meaningless sex, health clubs, and swank homes. Why would any gay man in his right mind trade DINKdom for dirty diapers?
    “The middle age of buggers is not be contemplated without horror,” Virginia Woolf is reported to have observed. I don't believe there's anything horrid about middle-aged gay men ( provided they don't join men's choruses or the North American Man-Boy Love Association, watch Deep Space Nine , or display teddy bears in little leather harnesses in their living rooms). Nevertheless, at about age thirty, I began to contemplate my impending middle age with a degree of horror. What was I going to do for the next forty or fifty years? It didn't take me long to conclude I would need more in my life than money and men. I would want something meaningful to do with my free time, something besides traveling the world collecting Fiesta Ware and intestinal parasites.
    So, kids.
    Once upon a time, people had kids out of a sense of obligationto family, species, and society; and since they lacked birth control, most sexually active folks weren't in much of a position to prevent themselves from making babies. We've got birth control now, at least in most places, and we've got access to abortion, at least for now. While some couples feel pressured by their families or churches to have kids, for a large number of people in a large part of the world, having children is optional for the first time in history. Why do people have kids today? It's not to do the species a favor: the largest threat to our survival is our out-of-control breeding. The reason people in general (by which I mean straight people, since people in general are straight) have kids today is to give themselves something real and meaningful and important to do. Having children is no longer