This post was submitted by Philip Clark

Here’s a case where the subtitle tells you a lot:  What Happened When My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant.  In one sense, that’s about it for The Kid, sex-advice columnist Dan Savage’s recollection of the process he and his boyfriend Terry went through in order to adopt a child.  As might be expected from Savage’s columns, the book is extremely funny, especially in its opening stages, as it describes Dan and Terry’s motivations, the reactions of their families, and the tortuous, convoluted rigmarole that all couples, gay and straight, must go through to adopt.

 

But in another way, such a simple summary of the book reduces the issues it raises.  Savage has managed to embed some important questions in the midst of the jokes: why do some gay people have an urge to adopt?  Is this urge an attempt to mimic straight couples?  Are a couple of gay guys with explicit sexual pasts the “right people” to adopt?  Should gays who adopt have to be model citizens so as not to endanger gay adoption’s tenuous status?  what makes a “model citizen”—or a model parent—anyway?  Is gay adoption purely a personal choice, or are there political implications as well?

 

None of these admittedly serious questions weigh down the narrative, as Dan and Terry fight about choice of music while driving to the adoption clinic, throw together the proper image for a home visit that will partly determine whether they are allowed to adopt, or try to figure out how to write the perfect “parent letter” for their adoption file.  But it certainly doesn’t hurt that the book inspires thought along with the laughs.

 

I’m throwing in an interview I did with Dan Savage at the time of the book’s 1999 release, originally released in Lambda Book Report; he can tell you what the book is about better than I can:

 

Philip Clark:  Was writing a book more difficult than creating your regular sex-advice column, “Savage Love”?

 

Dan Savage:  People send me hundreds of questions a week, so 30 to 40 percent of the column is really not by me.  It’s much more of a challenge to sustain a narrative over thousands of words, but my editors at Dutton, Carole DeSanti and Brian Tart, were very helpful.

 

PC:  While you were writing, how much of the manuscript did your boyfriend, Terry, get to see?

 

DS:  Terry doesn’t like to read the things I write about him.  He recuses himself, which gives me more freedom.  Having your lover peering over your shoulder makes it more difficult to write the draft.  He didn’t read what I said about him until after the galleys copies came.

 

PC:  But, by now, he knows you wrote that he looks like Kate Moss with broad shoulders and a dick?

 

DS:  Oh, yeah!  [Laughter]  I used to write about him occasionally in the column, and he didn’t appreciate it.  I told him before too long in the relationship that if he didn’t want it to happen, [he should] marry an accountant.  If you’re with a writer, you’re going to get written about.

 

PC:  From parenting, to your relationship with Terry, to your reasons for adoption, the book frequently uses an irreverent tone.  Was it difficult tackling serious topics in that manner?

 

DS:  No, it really wasn’t.  I come from a family with a sense of humor about everything.  In an Irish-Catholic family, a wake is a laugh riot.  That doesn’t mean it isn’t serious, it just means that you don’t have to approach pain in a painful way.  Besides, there’s no use writing a somber book about a joyful experience.

 

PC:  In The Kid, you briefly discuss your relationship with your father.  Will those difficulties have an effect on the way you parent?

 

DS:  It would be whistling past the graveyard to say that it will have no impact.  Hopefully, I can mitigate the effects, although I’ll try not to overcompensate and make things worse…

 

A lot of the strains on the relationship with my father were about my sexual identity.  He was very disappointed in me.  Our child won’t be burdened in that way.  We certainly won’t be disappointed if he gay or if he’s straight.

 

PC:  You write that it was sometimes fellow gays, not straights, who had trouble with your adopting.  Will you expand on that?

 

DS:  Most of our gay friends were wildly supportive, but a few political people said that we shouldn’t adopt because we’re not the right type of gay people.  We’re not lawyers, we don’t have a dog, we don’t live in a big house, there is a monumental paper trail about what I’ve done sexually; their attitude is that we don’t put the best face on gay adoption.  I reject that out of hand – it’s bullshit.  It’s interesting to encounter [gay] people who have no life but one defined by the prejudices of certain straights.  We can’t, as gay people, succumb to stereotypes – that we’re boy rapists, etc., etc.

 

But I also think it’s important for people to know that when gay men adopt, there’s no quid pro quo.  You don’t have to deny who you were or who you are.  One thing I don’t do in the book is promise my mother or the readers there will be no more three-ways, no more drugs.  I’ve lived an urban gay male life.  The parties, the sex, the drugs are now less possible logistically, but I look fondly on the times I did [those things], and I can’t promise I won’t do it again, as long as it won’t be endangering the baby in any way.

 

PC:  What’s your best guess as to the future of gay adoption?

 

DS:  I think it’s going to, as I say in the book, shake out into slave states and free states…states where you can, states where you cannot.  Just as years ago, there were states in which people of different races couldn’t marry, and states where they could…

 

We don’t want something that other people don’t have, just the same choices.  When I was twenty and coming out, I accepted it as a given that I was giving up kids.  Now, the options are increasingly more open, and also more sought after.  I get more mail to my column now from young gay people who imagine lives without boundaries.

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