Tomorrow's Parents, todayMen may be able to make babies, but we still can’t have them. And for gays, giving birth is admittedly a bit of a barrier when it comes to having children. But thanks to science, surrogate mothers, and increasingly inclusive adoption agencies, that’s beginning to change.
Still, what keeps many queers from having kids has nothing to do with insemination. It’s often that we don’t see ourselves as parental. The nuclear hub we know as the family has always been projected at heterosexual. Even when blended families started to mainstream, the Brady Bunch featured Mike and Carol, not Mike and Carl.
Each network series now seems to have a requisite LGBT character, but most still fill one-dimensional, requisite roles. Television’s gay characters also tend to be young, if not teenaged, making it seem reasonable there are very few fathers.
Luckily, the gays have their own media. Though it's not a heart-felt personal essay about fatherhood, nor a hard pressing feature on bringing PFLAG to the PTA, your boyfriend’s favourite magazine, OUT, recently published a well-styled editorial photo shoot of a series of male models posing with babies.
The magazine’s site lists few details about the concept behind the shoot, but Trend Hunter reported that the babies are the model’s true sons. Though many of the models may be straight, this is OUT, and the omnipresent homo undertones got me thinking.
Could the hordes of mini vans bustling through the suburbs en route to soccer practice one day be driven by dual-dads? Or have the gays tainted the term “daddy” with dominant-submissive sexual practices for too many years?
So when an e-mail showed up in my inbox inviting me to “make my own cover” of Today’s Parent, (as part of an initiative aimed at subscribers and shared with the publisher’s employees) I thought back to the OUT spread. What if I really were in the position to pose? And will that ever happen?
When the photo of Alex and I eventually loaded, I thought: Wow, no .
Or, at least not yet. Maybe one day. We look kind of good, right? Someone toss us a baby, we could use a prop.
1 comment:
My ex-husband is gay and he's a great dad. He says he went through the whole sham of marrying me so that he could have a conventional family, which is the basis for this article. Gay people do not have many role gay parental role models. Hopefully the tide is turning and that will change.
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