Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?: Confessions of a Gay Dad (10 page)

Don and I went back and forth about wanting a boy or a girl. We knew what it was like to have a girl. So fun, familiar, and safe. A boy was scary. Unknown. All that energy . . . and of course, the sports? Don hoped if we had a boy, he’d be just like him: a kid who’d happily stay indoors, reading Jane Austen or darning socks while composing fan mail to Julie Andrews in his head.

But so much of what makes kids who they are—whether they’re good at sports, art, music, or math; whether their eyes are crossed or knees knocked; allergic to peanuts or hate tomatoes; even whether they’ll wind up dreaming of tight pecs or bulbous breasts—rests securely inside them, predetermined.
I’m blown away by how little control they—and I—have over those enormous indicators of how they’ll navigate in the world and how the world will react to them.

“It’s a boy.” Don and I looked at each other.

“Are you positive?”

“Ninety-five percent sure,” the ultrasound technician said. “Otherwise it’s a girl with an oversized labia.”

I bristled. Maybe he was kidding. But he wasn’t smiling. I took it in.
Oversized? Really? Eww
.

“Um, how oversized?” I asked the doctor. “And what exactly would that involve? Is there special paneled underwear?”

It didn’t matter to Don. He clung to that five percent chance and told everyone, “We’re having a girl!”

But I knew it was a boy and I was getting excited about how the new little guy would complete our family. Now we’d have one of each. I was going to be the father of a son. Just like my father was to me. Or maybe not. It suddenly occurred to me that at some point in his life this boy could discover that he might be, you know,
not
gay. Obviously it’s a possibility. Just not one I’d ever entertained. Not because I had any prejudice or predisposition against straight guys. I didn’t. And I don’t. I just don’t think about, you know,
them
that often. Because for me,
them
was who I avoided while walking in school hallways.
Them
wanted me dead in wrestling class. And that’s how it’s always been: there was me . . . and there was
them
. I don’t mean any offense. They’re the ones who set up the system. And some of my best friends are straight guys. A few are gay, actually, but don’t tell their wives.

It’s who this country was built by. And for. George Washington.
Abraham Lincoln. Scratch that. Maybe not Lincoln. I’m talking about the “men among men.” The policy makers. Politicians who twit-pic their balls and hire hookers and score blowjobs in the Oval Office. Men who cheat on their wives and then apologize publicly before doing it again. How about those guys on Wall Street who fucked with our money? Bernie Madoff? Straight. Or the ones who start wars. Donald Rumsfeld? Straight. Osama bin Laden? He doesn’t promise virgins for nothing. What about those guys with big fat pinky rings, or those heavily inked motorcycle guys with iguanas as pets? Or those sweaty pear-shaped drunk guys who can’t dance, and the ones who wear braided leather belts with pleated shorts, or guys who say shit like “That’s what I’m talking about!” Man, I hate that. Guys who call each other “bro” and “boss” and “big guy.” Gay guys don’t like being called “big guy.” Unless, you know, we are. Big.

The year I put tap shoes on the top of my birthday list, I got a basketball hoop. Which wasn’t even on the list. I know it never crossed my dad’s macho Argentinean mind when I was born that the little baby smiling up at him would one day turn out to be gay. So why was it occurring to me now that our son may very well turn out to be—straight? And why does it even matter? Well, because whether I cared to admit it or not, the whole thing just got a tiny bit scarier. Maybe because it made me question if I could do it. Not hold him and rock him and change his diapers and feed him. Of course I could. But would I be able to truly love him? Unconditionally. Having grown up as a boy tortured by other little boys, straight boys, how would I rise to the occasion of being a man who had to raise one and love him no
matter what? How would it feel for, say, a Jew to love a Nazi baby? . . . Too far?

What is “unconditional love” anyway? Does it mean you don’t question the love? Because our little devils have a way of trying the limits of our love every single day. The whining alone, which has clearly survived the evolutionary test of time, is a superior test of us parents to see if we’re really up to the task. For me? Whining’s almost enough to shut down the whole operation. And then there’s the intimate relationship we’re forced to have with every possible bodily function. We’re expected to love despite the vomit. The pee. The middle-of-the-night bed stripping after Jonah had blown mud through his diaper like spin art onto every one of the forty-seven stuffed animals on his bed. And you know what? I’d look at that tiny, stunned face clearly wondering
How the fuck did all that come out of me?
staring up at me, as if to make sure nothing had changed on my end.

I’d smile back at him. “We’re good, you and me. We’re solid. You didn’t shit me away.” He’d nuzzle his head on my shoulder. Heaven. It wasn’t me versus
them
anymore. It was just
us
.

Our four-year-old, hazel-eyed, towheaded baby is now a happy, curious, loving, mischievous, and really big boy. And like I said before, he already walks with a swagger. As if to say, “Don’t fuck with me, faggot, I’ll take you out.” And there’s no question he’ll be able to with just a look. But he won’t, I don’t think. Because even at four he’s already the sweetest, most thoughtful and affectionate of giants. That said, I try to stay on his good side. Win him over. But it’s not easy. Shit. No matter how hard I try to get him to think I’m
cool, he can smell the needy. Jonah is going to see me for who I am. And I him. He’s tough. He’s fearless. He’s a tank. And the worst street fight I had when I was a kid was when I hit Eddie Wade with my clarinet case. May as well have been a knitting bag. Or a tackle box filled with stage makeup (I had one in tenth grade, a prized possession, especially the compartments for medium olive, sallow, and clown white).

I look in his eyes and he in mine. “You’re my favorite little boy,” I tell him.

“And you’re my favorite grown-up,” he started saying recently. What could be better? But I can’t help but wonder, or is it fear: what if one day he looks at me the way
they
looked at me? I worry that he’ll see me, aware of the difference between us, and there will form a divide. Something that keeps him at arm’s length. Something that makes him wish I were different. He’ll always love me. I know that. But a look like that, from him? I don’t know. It would kill me. Then again. Couldn’t the very fact that I’m his daddy and Don his papi teach him that love has no divides? I can only hope.

We turn on the music and Jonah immediately perks up. He starts to shake his groove thang, side to side, banging his feet. Arms in the air. The kid can dance. Don and I look at each other . . . a glimmer of hope in our eyes.
Maybe
. Nah. Probably not. And you think about the radical, right-wing halfwits who think the gays recruit young boys into the church of fabulous—as if. Jesus. They are who they are. It’s like what we say when the kids reach into the prize trunk at the dentist’s office: “You get what you get and you don’t get upset.”

Jonah struts across the room, crawls across the table, spins around to find this motorized car he got for his last birthday. He lifts it over his head like he’s going to throw it.
Just walk
, I think to myself. But he doesn’t throw it. He hits a switch and a canned male voice booms from within the toy: “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” No. We got what we got, and a gay boy, he’s not.

I
have these dear friends, I’ll call them Tim and Ron. They’re among the few gay couples without kids who didn’t drop us the second they saw our daddy diaper bags. They’re actually an old boyfriend of mine and his partner of fifteen years who live in Northern California. And they have a life very different from ours. They spend most of their free time in the great outdoors—weekends hiking with their dog, traveling to spas and gyms and parks and nude beaches. And it’s at these beaches where they occasionally meet others who like to join them for meals, hikes, or—or a shower. Together. After which, they fuck. These guys engage in the occasional
three-way
or two. Not all the time, they assure me, but on vacation or whatever, they’ll meet a guy and, in a scenario that seems completely implausible to me, the guy comes home with them and they all have sex. You believe that?

How on earth does something like that happen? I have trouble imagining it:

Hi, I’m Dan, this is Don. Did you have any trouble finding the house? How do you like that hybrid? Pinot grigio? Which of us
would you like to blow first?
No. It’s preposterous. Who are these guys? They’re not twenty-two. They’re like me, you know, over thirty. And for some reason, I can’t seem to stop thinking about it. Maybe because my life is so markedly different.

I recall the promise I made to myself when we decided to have kids, that not everything in our lives would change. I particularly didn’t want to become one of those parents whose house transforms into a receptacle for plastic toys, bubble wands, big-wheel tricycles, and giant, colorful play kitchens that eat up huge corners of space. I didn’t want to be one of those parents who stopped going out, seeing friends, and having one-on-one time with their spouses beyond the marathons of bad reality TV after the kids have fallen asleep. I didn’t want to become that guy who no longer had regular sex with his spouse because he was so damn tired and so instead lived vicariously through the stories told to him by friends without kids.

I think you can guess what happened.

So. Among other things, we do wind up hearing a great deal about our friends’ libidinous appetites. I don’t think we solicit it. Perhaps there’s a look in our eyes that screams out,
Please tell us it hasn’t ended for everyone!
Or perhaps they insist on telling us every detail of their sex-capades because, well, they’re jealous. That’s right. They are green with envy over the blessings children have brought to our lives. Oh, who am I kidding? I’d kill to be like them.

I do notice they tell only
me
about their adventures. They don’t tell Don. What’s that about? Are they trying to pick me up? That’s so fucked up. And very flattering. How dare they!
I hope they never stop. How lucky they can be so open. It’s bound to end in disaster. Why can’t I be more like
them
?

As if I could ever. Who am I kidding? I never had a three-way even when I was single. And then after I met Don, forget it! Not his cup of tea. I brought it up to him once, over a cup of tea, actually, and he said, “No way. I’ll just wind up being the guy holding the towels.”

I wish I could blame my kids. For all of it. If it weren’t for them, the sky would be the limit, right? Three-ways. Fourgies. Whatever! But as I said, I wasn’t that guy
before
kids, so what makes me think I could be that adventurous now? What bugs me is that now I don’t even have the option. I can’t ever become the kind of guy who has three-ways. It’s over for us. That’s right. Forget holding the towel, Don, we’ve
thrown in
the towel on anything remotely fun in that nude beachy kind of way, at least until the kids are twenty. And by then I’ll be a hundred. And fat—
ter
. And unable to find
one
person who’d want to touch me, let alone two.

And I can’t blame it only on my partner. Although it is pretty much his fault. If I have to be completely honest? My God. I am just too damn tired. Forget a three-way. I’m too exhausted, usually, for a two-way. Or frankly a one-way. Too tired. And the simple truth?
I’m just not that into me
.

Even though I want to be the kind of person who still has a lot of sex, I can’t even imagine how to make that happen given the amount of energy it takes to get into some semiwilling state. Then the energy to remove articles of clothing—buttons, zippers, snaps, watches, socks, oh God—and then to convince my partner in some seemingly spontaneous
but completely strategized plan of attack that a little sex might be a nice idea. And why? ’Cause it’s really that fun? Not really. After a day of kids, I’m a little over the charm of moist human discharges.

We spend most of our one-on-one time telling each other the latest cute thing one of the kids said in the tub. Or analyzing the cut, clarity, and color of our son’s poop while referring to each other as “Daddy” and “Papi” even when the kids aren’t around. Sex isn’t real high on the to-do list for the time being. We’ll settle for being Mr. and Mr. Vicarious, who soak in every last detail of our friends’
sex-tracurricular
activities when we have the chance to see them. Like this past Christmas. Only this time, the topic somehow shifted to another hobby we heard about.

“Wait a minute. You—what? You
shave
your
balls
? Um . . . why?”

“I like it,” Tim says. “I like the way it feels. So does Ron.”

Stop. I don’t want to hear anymore. Sorry I asked. But wait: was this the one thing I’d neglected to do in the endless list of things I’ve tried to keep the spice in my marriage?

New cologne. Check.

New workout equipment. Check.

New haircut. Check.

New story of how some guy flirted with me at Starbucks to make Don jealous. But Don doesn’t get jealous. Check.

Shave balls? No way. What purpose does it serve? And how do you become that guy? Who the fuck is that guy? And is smooth-balled guy the same as three-way guy? ’Cause I wouldn’t mind being him, but if I have to shave my balls? Nope, I’m out.

Don and I drive home in silence. Then I break it: “That was fun.” I’m looking out the window.

“Yeah,” he says, “those guys are great.”

“Yeah. Love them. Love how they’re so . . .” Long beat. I look at Don. Then a longer beat. Then: “Have you ever—?”