The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant Read Online Free PDF Page B

abortions. On this one point they agreed that being gay was better than being straight. Then the tables turned, of course, and I was spending more time worrying about death control than my straight friends ever spent worrying about birth control. And if their birth control failed and they got pregnant, they could always have abortions; if my death control failed, and I got infected, there was no way to abort the virus. I would die. Advantage, straight.
    After years of careful birth control it must have come as a shock to the straight couples around the table to learn that they needn't have bothered. Unable to have “their own” kids, they'd had to reconcile themselves to having someone else's before they could walk into this conference room. As we went around the table and introduced ourselves, everyone put on brave faces, trying to get to Ruth's “place of abundance,” but it was clear from some watery eyes and thrust-out chins that having to sit in this room represented a painfully humiliating defeat. Each told or hinted at horror stories: tens of thousands of dollars spent on unsuccessful fertility treatments, in-vitro this, test-tube that, egg harvesting. Years wasted. Even calm and centered Ruth hadpumped money and drugs into her uterus in a failed attempt to have her own bio-kid.
    Ruth explained how infertility placed an enormous strain on her marriage, and how during treatments she fell into a deep depression. One day, at the end of her rope, she read about the side effects of an infertility drug she'd been taking. Third on the list was “mild insanity.” She decided that having her own biological child was not worth her sanity, and stopped taking the drugs. This was how Ruth “arrived at” adoption, and her story was very similar to the others we heard that day as we went around the table telling our stories.
    When it came time for Terry and me to introduce ourselves, what were we supposed to say? “Thrilled to be here, couldn't be happier?” We couldn't seem too upbeat, but we were feeling pretty up. When I came out, my straight friends told me I'd never have kids; a guy I knew to be gay in 1980 (we slept together) told me he'd never come out because he wanted a family. He died in 1986, never having come out, and never having that family he wanted. In Florida it's illegal for gays to adopt, and soon it may be illegal in other states. In some, our bio-kids are taken from us by homophobic courts in cahoots with homophobic relatives.
    So sitting in this room, looking into adoption, living in a free state, being taken seriously by this agency—this was no defeat for us. This was a great, big, honkin' victory. A triumph. And while adoption was where the straight couples at the table ended up after a long and painful journey, it was practically where we began. So what did we say?
    The wrong thing, naturally. When I'm under pressure and feeling awkward, my mouth opens and something idiotic, something totally Tourette's-y, drops right out. This day was no exception. We were the next-to-last couple to speak, and we'd heard five very sad stories. Some wayward synapse in my pea-brain told me a joke might be in order, something to lighten the mood and cheer up the straight folks.
    “Hi, I'm Dan, and this is Terry, and as you can see, we have some fertility issues of our own.”
    If there was any way to take it back, I would. No one laughed, no one smiled—and why should they? Thankfully, the couple after us, Carol and Jack, cracked a couple of jokes, too. Jack wasan engineer, Carol a business executive. They'd spent years trying to get pregnant, to no avail.
    “We're here, ” Jack explained, “because I finally scored a zero on a test.”

    Heterosexual identity is all wrapped up in the ability of heterosexuals to make babies. Straight sex can do what gay sex cannot, make “miracles.” The straights at our seminar had expected to grow up, fall in love, get married, make love for fun, and sooner or later make