Out of the disco, into the nursery
How kids are changing gay culture
by Ted Flett
photo: David Hawe

Shawn Atlee leans on a fence post, watching Bruce Whitaker play basketball with their son Andrew at a queer family picnic at Dufferin Grove Park.

“There’s been a lot of change,” says Atlee, 34. He and Whitaker adopted eight-year-old Andrew in June. Since then, Atlee has taken parental leave from his job as an operating room nurse and they moved to a new house in Parkdale to accommodate the new family member.

“Suddenly we’re raising an eight year old and we’ve never been parents before,” says Whitaker, coming off the basketball court.

The couple met at the now-defunct lüb lounge on Valentine’s Day 2003 but now have difficulty remembering the last time they ventured to the village. “We went out a lot before we started dating,” says Atlee, “but now since we had Andrew, rarely.” Whitaker, a 43-year-old entrepreneur, has also noticed a shift in who his peers are. His family puts in more time practicing moves on the basketball court than on the dancefloor.

“We’re probably less active now with our friends that are gay and single, whereas we do more with friends who have children and that’s mostly the straight community,” he says.

Atlee and Whitaker are part of a new wave of gay men who have chosen to be parents. It’s left them between worlds. They’re not quite standardissue heterosexual parents, but they are no longer the swinging singles gay life has been built on. With more and more men taking the plunge, is the gay identity trembling like an unsteady toddler? Are late-night feedings replacing latenight partying?

Jay Poitras, 30, is happy that social and legal changes have allowed more gay men to create families if they want to. But it’s certainly made single life more complicated for him.

“In meeting someone, there’s already the whole issue of sexual preference, then sexual compatibility, compatibility in general, the person’s desire for marriage and now whether they want kids or not,” says Poitras. “I feel like the pool of single men is becoming smaller and smaller.”

Poitras gets the urge to be a father when he’s spending time with younger cousins or children in the neighbourhood. But he hasn’t made plans. He tries to distinguish between a sincere desire to parent and a pressure to do it just because others are doing it. Advertisements for hedonist gay nightlife are slowly being overshadowed by the celebration of endeavours like Rosie O’Donnell’s R Family Vacations.

“I don’t undermine anyone else wanting to have children. I just don’t think it’s in the cards for me and when people ask me now if marriage and children are part of my plans, I begin to feel like that’s the expectation,” says Poitras. “It’s as though choosing not to have children is somehow selfish or makes me incomplete.”

David Rayside, director of the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity at the University of Toronto, has been looking at how gay parenting has changed straight perceptions of us— and our own perceptions of ourselves. He disputes theories that forming a family is becoming the new normal. Statistics from the last census show that of the 45,345 declared samesex couples, 24,740 of those male. More than 800 of those households had kids living with them (Statistics Canada doesn’t indicate the nature of the relationship of the adults to the kids—it just knows that are in the residence), which amounts to 3.5 percent of gay male couples living with kids. About 17 percent of female-led same-sex homes have kids.)

“For the foreseeable future, it’s still going to be left to those who really do want to have kids and not just because the people next door have them,” says Rayside, who is about to release a new book, Queer Inclusions, Continental Divisions: Public Recognition of Sexual Diversity in Canada and the United States. “I don’t imagine it will ever be faddish and we’re still acres away from any sense of social expectation that same-sex couples without children are incomplete. Not like we see in heterosexual couples.”

Of course, it’s not like gay men have never raised children. It’s that they usually didn’t do it openly or while connected to the fabric of gay life. The 519 Church Street Community Centre’s Chris Veldhoven advocates gay parenting for a living; since 2003, he’s seen 120 men graduate from his Daddies and Papas 2B program. But he has personal knowledge of how difficult it’s been for gay men. His own father, who is gay, stayed in an inauthentic straight relationship in the ’60s, in part because he was determined to have children.

“He was an immigrant to Canada at a time when it was criminal to be a homosexual,” Veldhoven says. “So he had to separate from his homosexual desire to maintain safety in society, marry a woman and have two children.”

Veldhoven has noticed a few twists to the gayby boom. The first is the anatomic reality that it’s easier to obtain sperm than a womb and egg, making things easier for lesbians than for gay men. Time and money become considerations and can make the pursuit prohibitive. Paid surrogacy is illegal in Canada so some gay men find surrogates in the USA, specifically California where case law supports surrogate and egg donation contracts—an important legal protection for gay parents. Veldhoven says the costs of such this kind of parenting, including the initial fee, legal expenses and travel, can be more than $100,000. For gay men to have a child that’s biologically related to at least one of her dads is going to cost. Status becomes an issue.

One gay couple I spoke to have four children—one daughter and three sons—who are the products of surrogacy with different mothers. “We opted for surrogacy because it was important to us that our kids had a mom in their lives,” says one dad who didn’t want his name used for this story. Three of the children’s mothers have a good co-parenting arrangement with the dads, but one has had a change of heart since the birth and creeps closer and closer to full custody with each court appearance. “We have been in and out of court for the last seven years with our case and the way they treat dads is criminal,” says the father. The thought of this battle must scare many Canadian gay dads away from the surrogacy option.

Most gay men in Canada opt for adoption through private agencies or, even more affordably, children’s aid societies. Though more viably financially, it requires patience and personal scrutiny, including a home study. The system wants to know why a gay man wants kids, a question rarely asked of straight people.

“With adoption, there are a lot of hoops to go through. You’re monitored, you’re interviewed and you’re judged by standards that biological parents don’t have to face so it’s natural that I feel hard done by,” says Jason (who didn’t want his last name used for this story). The 37-year-old software developer, along with his partner of 11 years, is in the final stages of adopting a four-month-old son.

At a recent adoption resource conference, where agencies from across the province liaise with parent candidates, Jason and his partner picked up signs of homophobia. Some booths displayed Pride flags and shared information regarding a child’s openness to same-sex parents; others were notably silent. And it’s not just the paper pushers who are skeptical. Though friends and family have been supportive and positive, public reactions can be a hassle—on Church Street as much as in their home neighbourhood of Bloor and Dufferin.

“Two men with a baby in public is a strange sight to many,” says Jason. “It’s not a question of hostility, you’re just looked at and I’m not particularly fond of attention…I feel more scrutinized and more anxiety from others because we’re two men and there’s a sense that we can’t do it…If the baby is crying in a restaurant and we’re trying to settle him, people will voluntarily start to tell us what to do.”

For Tim Wilson, the gay village is not the most welcoming place to take his son, three-year-old Alex. The two live nearby and frequently visit the 519 Community Centre, parks, coffee shops, restaurants and Alex’s favourite destination, Baskin-Robbins.

“It’s really quite interesting to see how oblivious people are to the fact that there is a child there,” says Wilson. “There’s this indifference to people who aren’t of adult height. We’ve tripped a lot of guys.” Wilson has realized that gay life is not set up for kids. Church Street restaurants don’t have kids menus, and local parks like Cawthra Square can be overrun with dogs and polluted with cigarette butts.

Wilson has been turning heads since he adopted Alex in 2005. He’s single, gay, older (48) and HIV-positive but unwavering in his credentials. “I’m providing a stable environment with decent people that we hang around with and it’s the best atmosphere I can provide,” he says.

Wilson, the classic doting uncle to five nieces, has always wanted children. But the world he grew up in told him that homosexuality and parenting were mutually exclusive. He has also assumed his HIV status would be a barrier. He discovered the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, through which Wilson arranged his adoption, has a non-discrimination policy which treats HIV the same as any other chronic manageable illness. But Wilson suspects that bias still lingers.

“I think when there is a child in the system, they may subconsciously look for a mom and dad situation, then a mom-mom or dad-dad, then turn to a single woman and then a single man,” says Wilson, who waited 14 months for a child, longer than what many of his coupled friends experienced.

Despite Alex’s priority in his life, Wilson is not battening down the hatches. “It doesn’t stop the libido by any stretch of the imagination and now that his needs are taken care of, daddy needs a little nookie,” he says. With Alex beyond the diaper stage, Wilson is ready to venture back into the dating scene. He’ll cruise at Woody’s, though he finds meeting guys online is more convenient; no babysitter required.

“I can do it from home and say up front, ‘Look, I’ve got a kid and if you have a problem with that, take a pass.’” Casual hookups, though, are out. “I’m not going to be bringing somebody back here with Alex sleeping.”

For Atlee and Whitaker, lifestyle was also a consideration in how they went about adopting. Prior to coming out, Atlee had already experienced raising a young child with a girlfriend. Whitaker wanted to help a disadvantaged and less sought-after older child. So they adopted Andrew through the Children’s Aid Society, which gave them a choice of age for their new family member. “The diaper and toddler stages are a lot of work and I didn’t know if I was up for it again,” says Atlee. “An older child can dress themselves and just go along with things.”

The idea was equally agreeable for Andrew; his foster parents had recommended gay dads for Andrew given the boy’s difficult experience with mother figures in his eight previous families.

In the end, their arrangement is not traditional, but it doesn’t make the trio less of a family. Maybe that’s what gay parenting is all about—turning the challenges into virtues. So just because gay dads spend more time carting through the aisles at Toys R Us doesn’t mean cruising through the village is out of the question.

Ted Flett is a Toronto-based freelance writer.