The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant by Dan Savage Read Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Dan Savage
about propagating the species or having someone to leave your lands to, but about self-fulfillment. Kids are a self-actualization project for the parents involved. A lifelong Outward Bound. Something for grownups to do, a pastime, a hobby.
So why not kids? Gay men need hobbies, too.
Our other options as gay men at the end of the twentieth century—how to occupy our time over the next thirty years— were not at all appealing. Terry and I had, basically, three choices:
Option 1: Stay in the Game. Keep going to bars, and parties, and clubs, keep getting laid, keep drinking, keep taking drugs. This option leads, inevitably, to our breakup over some humpy young thing, who would in turn dump us for a humpier younger thing. Eventually we become a couple of fifty-year-old fags hanging out in gay bars full of men too young to care that we, you know, Marched on Washington in '93. To compete with and compete for the annual crop of just-out twenty-one-year-old gay boys, we have to go under the knife again and again, until we are so much scar tissue stitched to scar tissue. Then we die. Our corpses, drug- and silicone-contaminated superfund sites, are denied a decent burial. Distant relatives come to town, crate us up, and haul us to a toxic-waste incinerator.
Option 2: Go Places, See Shit. We stay together and spend our DINK dollars traveling the world. We take a lot of pictures, collect a lot of junk, have a lot of sex with the locals. Provided we don't succumb to Alzheimer's or some as-yet-undiscovered sexually transmitted disease, we have our memories to keep us companywhen we're old and gray. Then we die, our memories dying with us. Distant relatives come to town and haul us and everything else—photo albums, postcard collection, STD meds—off to the dump.
Option 3: Mr. & Mr. Martha Stewart. We buy a house and direct the passion we used to devote to sex to the renovation and decoration of our little manse. We spend the last years of our lives combing junque stores, yard sales, estate sales, and auction houses for that authentic Victorian/Edwardian/Art Deco/Fab Fifties nightstand/hall table/mirror/dinette set that will finally complete our beautiful-but-sterile home. Once we find it, our local news-paper's Sunday magazine does a photo spread of our to-die-for home. Then we die. Distant relatives come to town, sell the house and the furniture, and donate our ancient bodies to science.
I was already planning on having kids when I met Terry, so I'd already thought through all of this. After I walked Terry through what I saw as our options, he agreed that they were pretty depressing. Each ended with distant relatives coming to town and disposing of our remains in a tremendously unsentimental manner. And everything we would have DINKed so hard for—our possessions, our memories, our hair systems—would be busted up and thrown away. Mortality is unsettling, and the more we thought about having kids the more sense they made as hedges against depressing, lonely deaths. We didn't want to be anybody's forgotten old gay uncles.
Kids wouldn't keep us young, but they would keep us relevant, something other hobbies wouldn't do. If we had kids and they managed to outlive us, Terry and I would be hauled off to the dump when our time came by people who knew us and felt obligated to dispose of us.
So, kids.
Yes, I know: kids die, kids turn out rotten, kids grow up to be serial killers, kids abandon their parents, kids kill their parents. (Looking on the bright side, however, Jeffrey Dahmer's father did get a book deal out of it, as did a parent of one of the Columbine victims.) Adopted kids may decide their biological relatives are their real relatives and blow off their adoptive families. Kids are a crapshoot. But even if the only thing your kids give a shit about is getting their hands on your money or your Holden-Wakefieldend tables, even if all your kids want is for you to drop dead, at least someone is giving a specific sort of shit
So why not kids? Gay men need hobbies, too.
Our other options as gay men at the end of the twentieth century—how to occupy our time over the next thirty years— were not at all appealing. Terry and I had, basically, three choices:
Option 1: Stay in the Game. Keep going to bars, and parties, and clubs, keep getting laid, keep drinking, keep taking drugs. This option leads, inevitably, to our breakup over some humpy young thing, who would in turn dump us for a humpier younger thing. Eventually we become a couple of fifty-year-old fags hanging out in gay bars full of men too young to care that we, you know, Marched on Washington in '93. To compete with and compete for the annual crop of just-out twenty-one-year-old gay boys, we have to go under the knife again and again, until we are so much scar tissue stitched to scar tissue. Then we die. Our corpses, drug- and silicone-contaminated superfund sites, are denied a decent burial. Distant relatives come to town, crate us up, and haul us to a toxic-waste incinerator.
Option 2: Go Places, See Shit. We stay together and spend our DINK dollars traveling the world. We take a lot of pictures, collect a lot of junk, have a lot of sex with the locals. Provided we don't succumb to Alzheimer's or some as-yet-undiscovered sexually transmitted disease, we have our memories to keep us companywhen we're old and gray. Then we die, our memories dying with us. Distant relatives come to town and haul us and everything else—photo albums, postcard collection, STD meds—off to the dump.
Option 3: Mr. & Mr. Martha Stewart. We buy a house and direct the passion we used to devote to sex to the renovation and decoration of our little manse. We spend the last years of our lives combing junque stores, yard sales, estate sales, and auction houses for that authentic Victorian/Edwardian/Art Deco/Fab Fifties nightstand/hall table/mirror/dinette set that will finally complete our beautiful-but-sterile home. Once we find it, our local news-paper's Sunday magazine does a photo spread of our to-die-for home. Then we die. Distant relatives come to town, sell the house and the furniture, and donate our ancient bodies to science.
I was already planning on having kids when I met Terry, so I'd already thought through all of this. After I walked Terry through what I saw as our options, he agreed that they were pretty depressing. Each ended with distant relatives coming to town and disposing of our remains in a tremendously unsentimental manner. And everything we would have DINKed so hard for—our possessions, our memories, our hair systems—would be busted up and thrown away. Mortality is unsettling, and the more we thought about having kids the more sense they made as hedges against depressing, lonely deaths. We didn't want to be anybody's forgotten old gay uncles.
Kids wouldn't keep us young, but they would keep us relevant, something other hobbies wouldn't do. If we had kids and they managed to outlive us, Terry and I would be hauled off to the dump when our time came by people who knew us and felt obligated to dispose of us.
So, kids.
Yes, I know: kids die, kids turn out rotten, kids grow up to be serial killers, kids abandon their parents, kids kill their parents. (Looking on the bright side, however, Jeffrey Dahmer's father did get a book deal out of it, as did a parent of one of the Columbine victims.) Adopted kids may decide their biological relatives are their real relatives and blow off their adoptive families. Kids are a crapshoot. But even if the only thing your kids give a shit about is getting their hands on your money or your Holden-Wakefieldend tables, even if all your kids want is for you to drop dead, at least someone is giving a specific sort of shit
Similar Books
The Queen's Gambit
Walter Tevis
The Wreckers
Iain Lawrence
Infected Freaks (Book 2): The Echo of Decay
Jason Borrego
Molly Moon & the Monster Music
Georgia Byng
Existence 01 - Existence
Abbi Glines
Plain Paradise
Beth Wiseman
The Spirit Woman
Margaret Coel
Quest for Justice
Sean Fay Wolfe
Ian's Way
Reese Gabriel
The Take
Martina Cole