Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?: Confessions of a Gay Dad by Dan Bucatinsky Page A

farther toward the bridge of his nose. He’d bite his lip and dive toward me. All the other guys would surround the mat screaming, “Kill him!” I’d look up at them and explain, “I’m trying!” But inevitably they’d scream back, “Not you! Warren! Kill him !” Meaning me . Those guys, for some reason, wanted him to kill me. “Those” guys.
    They all had a particular strut I was never able to perfect. A little bowlegged, carrying their books as though they could take them or leave them. Like they were doing the books a favor by letting them rest against their thighs. Just walk , I’d tell myself. But then my books would get knocked out of my arms. “Faggot!”
    I’d pretend it was what I had intended to do. “Oh good. Thank you, actually, I was literally about to lay my biology textbook in the mud. So you saved me the trouble!”
    How did these kids know? Like police helicopters with their giant follow spotlights, they were precocious in their ability to sniff out a homo and at such a young age.
    Jonah has that same familiar bowlegged swagger, the confidence and the mischievous grin. Just walk , I want to tell myself each time he comes bounding toward me down the hall. But luckily, he’s still small enough for me to just scoop him up, kiss his neck, and deflate my junior high school nightmares.
    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