With same-sex marriage legalised, is the world ready for gay parents?
By Patrick Cash
I remember when I was twenty, I was not long out the closet, and I told a female friend how I would never have a child. I knew there were avenues available for gay parenting, but I just didn’t want to subject my own child to the ridicule of having two dads. The friend slammed down her drink, flicked her hair like Mariah when asked about J.Lo, and snapped: ‘How is anything going to change if you, as a gay man, carry on thinking like that?’
Seven years later, and society itself has changed considerably. Same-sex marriage, and high-profile gay celebrities such as Elton John and Ricky Martin being very visible with their own children, forges a path where gay parenting is no longer a rare concept.
There are many options available for gay fatherhood. Perhaps you have your perfect boyfriend/husband and are ready for a family. But of course there are biological limits as to what can be achieved in the name of science: if you’re going down the IVF route, as of yet, two guys’ sperm can’t be blended together to make a baby. You’ll still need a donor egg from a woman.
Deciding which partner is to become the ‘bio dad’ may be a difficult discussion. But many clinics offer an option for twins with sperm from both fathers. Or you can freeze pre-fertilised embryos, where one partner’s sperm is used for the first child, and then the other’s seed when a little brother or sister is wanted.
Adoption is an alternative option, which enables you to give a rich, loving life to a child who may otherwise grow up in a beige kaleidoscope of revolving foster homes. Or you can donate your sperm to a lesbian couple in need of it.
‘I didn’t want to donate sperm through a sperm bank, since I also wanted some involvement,’ says André Hellström, a flight attendant based in London. ‘I was adamant that the child should know his/her dad.
‘But I also knew that I didn’t want to raise a child on my own or even have shared custody, I wanted the mums to have sole custody. I was lucky to find two amazing women: Lisa and Gaea. Our son Élan was born on the 17th September this year.’
André describes how trust is needed in the ‘menage-a-trois’ pregnancy plan. The women needed to trust that André wouldn’t interfere with their family, and André that Lisa and Gaea wouldn’t cut off access to his son.
‘Signing away the rights to my son wasn’t for the faint-hearted,’ he says, ‘but for me, and the mums, it felt right. I guess you could say that my role is more like an uncle – except that I will be known as ‘daddy’. Being called ‘sperm donor’ feels derogatory.’
I ask André, who is currently single, if he worries having a son may be off-putting to potential partners. ‘I don’t have to worry about this since Élan will be growing up with his two mums,’ he says. ‘I did have a boyfriend during the time we tried for insemination and he was very supportive.
‘But it’s quite fascinating that some gays, even some of my close friends (and no offence to them), weren’t able to relate to my strong paternal instincts. But ‘acquaintances’ from going out, once the word was out, showed huge interest and messaged me on Facebook. It’s beautiful that we are all on different journeys through life.’
It’s interesting, from my own personal perspective, that in the months leading up to the birth André did suffer fears and apprehensions which aligned with my old twenty-year-old thinking: ‘I felt guilty for putting a child into this world knowing he would be more vulnerable living in a gay family.
‘I felt guilty of playing God. We were after all ‘cheating’ the system, having a child through insemination. But once Élan was born, and I saw the first photo of him with his two mums, I forgot all that nonsense, and I felt an inner peace, like a puzzle had been put into place. What more beautiful gift could I give to a lesbian couple other than a child?’
André, Lisa and Gaea all seem harmoniously happy with their arrangement, and it sparked a long-lost flint of emotion even in our stone-cold chars of hearts at QX to see the pictures of André and his baby son together. We wish them all the best of luck.
But, whether in a relationship or single, there still stands a pertinent issue that disproportionately affects the gay male community: can you become a father if you’re HIV positive?
Brian Rosenberg and Ferd van Gameren are a couple, and run the parenting website ‘Gays With Kids’. Living in New York City, and both around 40, they realised that having a pet couldn’t replace their long-buried desires to become dads. However, after making no progress with adoption, and Ferd adamant that both men should be ‘bio dads’, an obstacle in their path to family life was that Brian was HIV-positive.
‘[When I was diagnosed] in the early 90s, fatherhood for gay men was virtually unheard of, and certainly not even within the realm of consideration for someone with HIV,’ says Brian. ‘But Ferd went online and found a research lab in Boston that helped HIV-positive men become biological dads to HIV-negative women who remained negative after the pregnancy.’
The HIV infection is actually carried by the seminal fluid itself of semen, rather than the sperm. ‘Sperm washing’ is a laboratory process that separates those two substances via centrifugation or a ‘direct swim-up technique’. If the HIV+ father is on medication and has a non-detectable viral load, then sperm washing will effectively cleanse away the potential for transmission.
The Boston IVF’s precaution is to select a single washed sperm and, using a glass needle, inject it directly into a single ovum to test for the virus. From thousands of successful pregnancies, there has never been a case of HIV transmission to either surrogate mother or baby.
As the world’s great roulette wheel would have it, just after Brian and Ferd had finalised the surrogacy, they got a call from an adoption agency saying that Levi had been born in Brooklyn.
‘We brought Levi home from the hospital on the fifth day of his life,’ Brian says proudly. ‘We didn’t want Levi to be an only child, and so we decided to continue down the path of surrogacy. Our twins Ella and Sadie were born 17 months after Levi’s birth.’
Brian and Ferd now run ‘Gays With Kids’ because they couldn’t find resources available online providing an opportunity for gay dads to come together as a community. By normalising the gay family experience, and sharing stories of happy gay couples creating and raising their families, they hope to inspire a new generation of gay dads.
And what do I think of fatherhood now? I’m still relatively young yet, but one day, I can’t wait to become a dad.
