The New American Family

My partner, Barry Miguel, has a penchant for statistics. He recently announced tome that “only 24 percent of American families are the so-called ‘traditional’ configurationof mother, father, and kids living under one roof.” The implication was that our family— Barry and I, our son and daughter, Zev and Summer, both adopted, both biracial—are part of the majority. “We have two kids, two dogs, and an SUV with three rows of seatsto carry us all,” Barry says, and he concludes: “

are the American family.” Now thatour son has started playing soccer, Barry even quips that I’ve become the quintessential“soccer mom.” Nothing could have been further from our minds when we first got together inearly 1993. At the time, we were both happily pursuing interesting careers. Barry, possessing a unique combination of management savvy and inherent creativity, wasalready well established as a major player in the apparel industry, and I, with an interestin public advocacy and not-for-profit management, was director of fund-raising for theEmpire State Pride Agenda, New York’s lesbian and gay rights organization. I was 25,and Barry was 38. He had carved out a lifestyle for himself that was both gratifying andfulfilling; I, born of that generation of gay men who felt there were no constraints on us,no limit to our possibilities, thought I had a good sense of the direction I wanted my lifeto take. It in no way included fatherhood. So many of the men featured in this book talk movingly of having always harbored a yearning for parenthood, of having regretted thatcoming out, so liberating in so many ways, would—theoretically—close the door on thatdream forever. For me, there was no such dream.

Barry and I had a full life that seemed to neither of us to be lacking in any way.We had a nice apartment and a wide circle of friends, availed ourselves of New York’srich cultural opportunities, and traveled to faraway places for vacations. We even had twodogs, one big, one small.Granted, we were cushioned by living in a city whose name is virtuallysynonymous with diversity and in a neighborhood of that city that has long been a havenfor gays. Barry describes our life back then as “very gay—with a gay doctor, a gaylawyer, and friends who were almost all gay.” Still, everyone lives in some version of acommunity; within the community we inhabited, we flourished.We were certainly happy together. Over the course of five years as a couple, weweathered two major relocations, an indication that our relationship was mature andstable. The first relocation, to accommodate Barry’s work, took us across the country toPortland, Oregon. It was a great career move for Barry, and I was able to find a wonderful job there as well. And Portland, as Barry succinctly puts it, “changed our life.”The people to whom we were drawn in Portland—and the people who weredrawn to us—were folks who shared our tastes and values, reflected our urbansensibilities, had the same interests as we had. They were thus in many respects muchlike the people we had left behind in New York, with one startling difference: almostnone of them were gay. In fact, the friends we made in Portland—good friends to this day —were almost all straight couples with young children. There was no method to this, andit was certainly not deliberate; it’s just the way things worked out, and it offered us both afresh context.

After we had been in Portland nearly two years, Barry was transferred again—thistime overseas, to Amsterdam. He moved there in the fall of 1996, and the plan was that Iwould join him in early 1997, following our traditional New Year’s vacation. It had beenour custom, virtually since we met, to spend the holiday with a circle of close friends insome warm place. That year, the place was a villa on St. Bart’s, in the French West Indies.The setting, overlooking the fabulous Saline Beach, was perfect; the villa was equippedwith every comfort and convenience; and we were in the good company of good friends —ten men in their late 30s and early 40s, all in the prime of their careers and at the peak of their powers. Yet in the midst of all this, I felt a sense of personal disquiet, anunsettled, almost displaced feeling.I was nearing my thirtieth birthday, which I saw as a milestone of sorts, and I had begun to wonder what would happen over the next 30 years, what would bring meaningto my life, and how I would measure my life’s value. I looked around at my fellow-vacationers—all wonderful, intelligent men, all well on their way to considerable wealth —and the lives they were living, successful by almost any definition, simply did notresonate with meaning for me. Instead, I thought about my parents, whose lives seemedto me to ring out with rich meaning. At the heart of that richness, as I analyzed it, weretheir children—my sister and me—and the family that the four of us created. For the firsttime in my life, I thought about having a child.So I suggested as much to Barry—whose response was a decided “Absolutelynot.” He was, he said, in an almost curmudgeonly tone, “too old, too set in my ways, tooselfish.” He had five nieces whom he loved very much, and he had felt very involved asan uncle, but fatherhood, he insisted, “is

not

what I want to do.” I retreated. “All right,” I