Gay Dads: A Celebration of Fatherhood

As we settle into Pride month and move closer to Father’s Day, I’d like to put a spotlight on David Strah’s book, Gay Dads: A Celebration of Fatherhood, published by Tarcher Putnam in 2003. This well-written and poignant book tells the story of 24 gay dads, including the author’s poignant own, with a total of 44 dads. The lovely book also includes poignant black-and-white photographs, depicting the unique journey of gay dads in words and images. 

These stories span the rainbow spectrum in terms of racial, ethnic, and diversity. Yet, despite the differences between the couples, David discovered an important commonality among the men. “Perhaps the most moving theme,” he writes, “is the sense of miracle so many of these men feel at being fathers.” What makes this joy, so bittersweet is that so many of us were taught that “coming out as a gay man was tempered by regret that it meant a public farewell to parenthood.” David’s touching book dispels this myth.

We learn of the many struggles these men faced, spanning struggles around adoption, different kinds of adoption, surrogacy, and coparenting. Yet despite these struggles, all the men in this collection “kept struggling, claimed their rights, and triumphed in the end.” What remains so moving is how David illustrates how gay fatherhood can be psychologically healing “for those men estranged from their families and thus in a way cut off from their own childhoods” and how “becoming a parents appears to be restorative, even therapeutic.”

The book also takes the gay community, in a way, to task. We learn that gay dads can sometimes feel cut off from the gay community at large. In a way that is different for the lesbian community, the male-centric nature of modern life has not necessarily privileged the nurturing and selflessness that seems to be a necessary ingredient for becoming good parents. Lesbians have trailblazed a path for being proud of being queer and also teaching us the various ways that being a proud lesbian and being a proud mother can go hand-in-hand.

For this reason, as David comments, gay dads may, from time-to-time have more in common with straight parents. While this trend is changing. to be sure, David’s book shows how being a gay father connects one to the wider world that had previously been inaccessible to ostracized gay men and how this gay-affirmative reunion with the human family of family-making may also help to repair relations with the extended biological family. It’s interesting to see how David demonstrates how becoming a gay father may eradicate a hidden aspect of internalized homophobia imposed upon us by centuries of real homophobia that has dictated to us subliminally that we have no place in the larger world of parenting. 

One additional feature of this artful compendium is how being a gay father helps to interrogate outdated gender scripts in so far as the two parents may be both “mother” and “father.” As David explains, Gay Dads can write their own, much more functional scripts, related to parenting. The stories illustrate how both dads may contain both “mother” and “father” in their hearts and behaviors. In this way, the new approach to gender expression is explored in Gay Dad, interrupting the hierarchy plaguing many traditional heterosexual families.

In its own very modest way, David’s book takes on a visionary voice—it’s political and forward-thinking. “If coming out was the first step,” of the individuation process, he writes, “and forming a movement was the second,” he adds, then that “perhaps assuming our fundamental right to be parents in the third step in our evolution as a community.” Creating a family as a gay dad helps us, as a community, launch us out from the “ghetto-like colonies many of us understandably walked into when we came out as gay men.” The book, thus, points a new future and a new empowerment.

These are things I had not thought about myself, because I am part of that more ghetto-like community that had disavowed the notion of children when I was coming out as a gay activist. I had really liked the idea, derived from Plato, that gay people have the capacity to procreate “children of the mind” rather than biological children. Now that I have, in my own way, over the last four years, kind of very informally but very responsibly “adopted” a younger person who comes from a different race and a different class and is not demonstrating greater maturity as he moves into being 23-years-of-age—not anything my life had prepared me for but perhaps satisfying a deep need for having the experience of putting someone first—I have begun to appreciate David’s prescience from 2005 now-more-than-ever. We gay men, I believe, needed to break away from the forms of biological procreation informing all human life. But now it seems to me that any ideology can be a straight jacket. 

I have seen David up close and personal in his journey. I interviewed him for the NY Native in the early 80s when he was a vocal member of the NYU gay student union. I saw him again decades later when he became a leading student voice in the LGBT Specialization I founded at Antioch University. Now he is a close colleague, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, and I have met his two now grown and mixed-race children who are born through surrogacy, one of whom is a straight boy, the other one who is a trans gay man. David suffers from the anxieties and joys of most parents. In my own way, I can also relate more so now than ever. His children bring him joy, but also grey hairs. All the same, it’s a true honor to see the whole family work together as a gay-affirmative clan. I can see how the two kids really admire their father and look up to him and their other dad, too.

So, if you want to give someone you love a thoughtful present for Father’s Day, please buy David’s book. It’s beautifully composed and can work as well as a coffee table book as well as an important addition to one’s gay literature library. It’s not just stirring, but also thought-provoking, inviting us to expand our minds about what it means to be gay people going forward.