The Selfish-Enough Father: Gay Adoption and the Late-Capitalist Family

The appearance in 1999 of two memoirs by gay men about their experiences of adopting children marked a new moment in the discourse about gay families. Jesse Green, in The Velveteen Father: An Unexpected Journey to Parenthood, and Dan Savage, in The Kid: What Happened after My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant, both perceived a social victory in their ability to navigate the adoption process with their partners; for them, coming home with a child made a major statement about gay couples’ being taken seriously as prospective parents and, perhaps most significant, about men being taken seriously as primary caretakers of children.¹ Examining the psychic journey to fatherhood as experienced by men for whom birth is not a biological project, these narratives reflect on the issue of what adopting a child—indeed, just having a child—symbolizes for people who have experienced coming out as tantamount to cutting family ties and to rejecting traditional family structures. In this context, the possibility of formal legal adoption represents for gay parents—in some ways even more than the prospect of marriage or civil unions—a major new public integration into and a more complicated social affiliation with “traditional” family structures.

In this essay I explore a complex affective transformation that becomes visible as the men in these memoirs negotiate what it means to be a “real” father in the context of a family intentionally constructed without a mother. I explore a psychological moment of selfishness, as I call it, that emerges in both accounts. It is perhaps only logical that highly self-conscious examinations of paternity would find form in memoir—the genre of self-centeredness, as it were—given memoir’s powerful claim on the authority of personal experience. Yet it is suggestive that a genre that seems to privilege experiential knowledge—and thereby to legitimize and enable the politics of difference—is here used to contrary ends, to reclaim and reinhabit the very forms of entitlement that these memoirs explicitly associate with normative heterosexuality. In effect, these texts become commentaries on how the experience of gay fatherhood is inevitably shaped by the same expectations, desires, preconceived notions, and psychic compensations of all fatherhood. (Indeed, both texts speak as much to straight audiences as to gay ones.) My purpose in analyzing these narratives is neither to denounce the authors’ self-positionings as insufficiently queer nor to fault their “selfish” investments in paternity. Instead, it is to examine how they represent the family as an increasingly dense and rich site of self-actualization within the structures of late-capitalist identity.

The use of memoir to normalize and legitimize gay fatherhood is a noteworthy development in itself. These texts do not fit easily into commonly recognized genres and subgenres of gay autobiography, such as coming-out narratives, sexual confessionals, and AIDS memoirs, or into the many visual and new-media avenues through which gay-identified artists have foregrounded the self as an act of performance. Unlike “queer autobiography,” for instance, with its proclaimed project of disrupting normative subjectivity, the texts under consideration here can be read as insisting on a stable speaking subject and coherent sense of identity. Instead of enabling a separation or individualization of the self against a world of heteronormativity, and therefore possibly questioning and denaturalizing our understanding of subjectivity in general, these memoirs offer a willful self-insertion into the collective social body, a sometimes uneasy but nonetheless insistent identification with the mainstream. If “queer” refers to those who, as Gloria Anzaldúa writes, know oppression and yet “don’t belong anywhere,” then the performance of selfishness in these accounts serves a counter political function: namely, to organize the writer’s sense of shared social entitlement.²

The affect of selfishness works similarly in both texts, I argue, as a way to actively negotiate and compensate for being at a double remove from the “natural” model of the biological family. As gay men who adopt, these authors describe a different experience of becoming a family than that of most other gay or straight people. Unlike lesbian couples, many...