The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant by Dan Savage Page A

Jack. “You two will get picked before anyone else.”

DG Kids

    I f Carol and Jack were wrong—if we weren't picked right away or if we never got picked at all—Terry and I had other options. Talking with Bob and Kate made quick converts of us, and we'd come to view closed adoptions as unfair to birth mothers and adopted children. That meant traditional closed agency adoptions were out. But if we weren't picked by a birth mom in an open adoption, we would have to consider some other route to parenthood. We could do a foreign adoption, but we'd have to be “ discreet,” i.e., closeted, something neither of us do well. Or we could adopt an abused or neglected kid from the state, some poor kid languishing in foster care, and attempt to undo the damage done by the kid's biological family. We called this route, indelicately, our damaged-goods adoption option.
    Without exception, children in the custody of the state were abused or neglected by their heterosexual parents. When straight parents beat, rape, or abandon their biological children, the state steps in. If the kids can't be returned to their biological parents, the state goes looking for homes for these kids. In adoption-speak, these kids are called “hard-to-place” or “special-needs.” They are hard-to-place because most couples doing adoptions want the same thing: the Great White Infant. Couples want a healthy baby, one without emotional and physical scars. DG kids are generally not healthy, often not white, and by the time their biological parents have been stripped of their rights, they're usually not infants. When Terry and I started talking about adoption, we concluded that—as shameful as it sounds—we wanted the same kid everyone else wanted. We weren't hung up on race, but we wanted that healthy infant.
    But when you read in straight newspapers about gay couples who've adopted, it's almost always a damaged goods adoption: Good Gay Couple plays foster parents to Damaged Goods Kid, nurses DG kid back to health, and having grown attached, moves to adopt DG kid. GG couple saves DG kid from the system. The subtext? If not for the GG couple, this DG kid wouldn't have a home at all, so . . . if gay men aren't taking optimal babies (healthy white infants) from optimal homes (straight white parents), why not let the fags keep the baby? Gay men are damaged goods, too, so why shouldn't they settle for damaged goods?
    Admitting we were just as selfish as every other straight couple trying to adopt wasn't easy. Besides the ease and relative rapidity, there were other perks to adopting the DG kid: First, it's tremendously good karma, and that has to count for something. Also, gay men are constantly told we're morally inferior, so any opportunity to claim a chunk of the moral high ground would be tempting. In addition to being told we're morally inferior, gay men are accused of being a danger to children. Adopting a child endangered by straight parents would allow us to refute that particular lie more dramatically than any citation of child abuse statistics demonstrating that it's straight-identified men who sexually abuse children, not gay-identified men.
    Not too long ago, a Good Gay Couple made news in New Jersey. GG couple wanted to adopt Adam, a DG kid born addicted to drugs, with lung damage and heart problems. GG couple had been Adam's foster parents, and under their care, Adam made a remarkable recovery, and wasn't really a DG kid anymore. Then GG couple sued for the right to adopt Adam as a couple rather than going through the expense of doing separate single-parent adoptions. The court ruled in their favor, placing gay couples in New Jersey on the same legal footing as straight couples (which already was the law in Oregon and Washington, and other states). After their victory, “Good Gay Couple Adopts Damaged Goods Kid” stories ran in papers across the country.
    Christian conservatives weren't pleased by the news about Adam, but it was difficult for