This Book is Gay (23 page)

3. Surrogacy:
Sometimes gay men (or women who do not wish to be preggers) will enlist a surrogate to carry an egg they have fertilised. In the UK, this is painfully hard to do. While legal, the system isn't making it at ALL easy. For one thing, the prospective parents can't advertise for a surrogate nor can they pay a woman anything beyond expenses. At the end of the pregnancy, the surrogate is not forced to hand over the child, either, which means the process is fraught with uncertainty.

4. Adoption:
Adoption is now available to gay and lesbian couples in the UK, and local authorities and agencies are crying out for new parents. The challenge with adoption is that many children needing adoptive parents have traumatic backgrounds and will often have behavioural difficulties.

So as you can see, becoming same-sex parents is something you have to really want to do. To me, it hardly seems fair that straight people only need neglect a condom and BOOM, they get a family. Alas, them's the breaks.

Parenting, should you want to embark down that road, is the most amazing gift a human can give.

Mathew and his partner started a family in South Africa but have lived in London for the past few years.

We were not unusual in our position of wanting to have a family – I think that this is a desire most people have to some extent or another. Our challenge was that the only way this could be achieved was through pursuing the surrogacy route. We knew it would be challenging and costly, both financially and emotionally. But our desire for a family was strong and this pushed us along.

Having children with a surrogate mother broadly falls into two categories – either using the eggs of the surrogate mother or using an egg donor. The decision to pursue either route has a number of pros and cons and in the end we chose the latter approach – that of sourcing a separate egg donor. We set out to find three key people to assist us in our journey. We needed a social worker to help us with all of the legal requirements, an egg donor and a surrogate mother. Additionally, we needed a facility to help with all of the necessary laboratory requirements. With the help of friends and acquaintances, we managed to find a surrogate mother who was available and met our requirements. Additionally, we made contact with a helpful and encouraging social worker, and through the fertility clinic and the wonderful assistance of our appointed nurse, an egg donor was sourced, as well as a facility to get our surrogate pregnant.

Once all of these people were in place, we met with a specialised lawyer who helped us draw up a contract with the surrogate mother and all that this entailed. The current legal situation is a little different from what it was when we did our contract, but there were certain requirements that we had to meet, including undergoing medicals, financial assessments, etc., for the adoption process that would have to be followed once the baby or babies were born.

With everything in place, the clinic soon organised the donor and surrogate and got them both on a series of regular injections to ensure the synchronisation of their cycles. Everything seemed to happen really fast all of a sudden after years of thinking about pursuing surrogacy and then months of planning and organising. Eight eggs were harvested from the egg donor, and we were called in to provide the semen sample. A few days later, we had a number of healthy embryos ready to be implanted into the surrogate. With the arrival of the big day, we were both nervous and excited. We were also very keen to ensure that we had twins – after all it entailed going through the surrogacy route, having twins seemed to be ideal for us.

We were present at the insertion and urged the doctor to implant three embryos in order to increase the chance of twins. The doctor, however, was of the opinion that the blobs of eight cells we could see on the screen were of excellent quality, and the decision was made to only implant two embryos. There would, in his opinion, be a thirty per cent chance of twins. We were hoping for a positive pregnancy with the dream of both embryos implanting.

Seven days later, our surrogate called to say she had done a home pregnancy test which had a positive result. A few days after that, she went into the clinic and a blood test confirmed the pregnancy. At six weeks, we went with the surrogate for the first scan. It was an exciting time, and our excitement doubled when the doctor confirmed that we were expecting twins. We were fortunate that the pregnancy had taken on the first try.

The pregnancy was a roller-coaster ride. We were hoping for the pregnancy to be viable, that both twins would be okay and that they would reach a decent term. Week after week passed with regular scans and regular contact with the surrogate. Two incidents required hospitalisation of the surrogate for a short time but, all things considered, the pregnancy went fairly smoothly. Our babies grew well, and we knew that we were expecting two girls. During this time, we started to prepare a room for the girls and attended a multiple-births parenting seminar which was informative and nerve-racking.

We reached thirty-eight weeks (considered term for twins) and had a C-section date booked. The night before the delivery, we visited our surrogate in hospital. She was excited and nervous – a feeling that mirrored ours. Early next morning, we arrived at the hospital, changed into theatre scrubs and went into theatre.

The delivery was quick, and we were handed one baby and then the next. At 2.1 kg and 1.9 kg, they were small babies, but perfect and healthy. The relief was immense. We accompanied them down to the maternity ward, where we were both booked in for the duration of the babies' stay in hospital. Our daughters thrived under the care of the wonderful nurses, and after five days and a plethora of visitors, we headed home with Erin and Ariella. Having twins has been a wonderful and very challenging experience. Both of our girls are doing very well and growing up fast. They are now six years old, and in grade 1 at their school.

We have carefully considered how we tell our family story, both to them and the world at large – we talk about our family having two parents, like many others, and our gay relationship has meant that we allocate parental roles based on our ability, which has been very liberating. While of course many people are curious or unfamiliar with a gay family like ours, we have generally found, for the most part, a lot of warmth and support, and our children are certainly very well integrated into their school and community. There are fortunately more and more children's books that break the heteronormative and gender-normative stereotypes, and this has been extremely helpful both to our children and to the children that they go to school with.

We first embarked on having children through surrogacy so many years ago, and today it feels like we are just another regular family, with the day-today challenges that most families face. What we do know is that being gay doesn't mean not having a family of your own.

When you first come out or go public with a new identity – be it LGBT* or a massive
Project Runway
fan – there's a novelty and, perhaps once the initial nerves are over, a desire to shout it from the rooftops. And you should, because, eventually, you'll be
proud
of who you are.

I'm already proud of you.

There are days when I think, ‘God, life would be so much easier if I were straight,' but those days are few and far between. I love being gay. I love my freedom. I love making my own rules. I love that I don't have to keep secrets from my friends and family. I love being part of a subculture and a minority group. I even look back on the difficult years at school and feel sorry for how small-minded some of my bullies were. I look at them now and laugh at how sad and TINY their lives are as a result of that.

However, an almost cautionary note to end on:

You are joining this amazing global club filled with awesome people, but you are also just you, and you are so much more than just a lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer or trans person.

OK, you need to imagine yourself as something with lots of parts, perhaps a HARP or a SQUID. You can totally think of your own example. You're basically a HARP SQUID, and one of your tentacles or strings is being lesbian or gay, etc., but you have many more parts.

You are a complex, multifaceted person. Yes, you. Even if you spend as much time as I do watching
Next Top Model
while eating chocolate buttons, that is still part of what makes you YOU, and it has nothing to do with your sexual identity.

Some of your tentacles will affect your life more than others and, frankly, some are a little weightier than others. As well as being e.g. gay, you may also be Asian, physically disabled and a tap dancer. In this instance, the tap-dancing, although fancy, might not define you as much as the other three. This is called
intersectionality
– the study of how much these overlapping identities will influence your life.

However, the fact of the matter is, simply identifying as gay, lesbian, bi, queer or trans isn't going to get you particularly far by itself. Engaging with a gay scene is fun, but it's not a way of life or, for that many people, a career. If we're honest, it's probably not enormously healthy to spend every waking hour thinking about where your next orgasm is coming from, either.

What I'm saying is, now that we've sorted your identity, you're going to have to develop a life. A whole life, of which being LGBT* is just a little bit. Open today's newspaper to the job ads. I'm willing to bet there isn't a full-page splash advertising, WANTED: GAY PERSON TO BE GAY. 40 HOURS A WEEK WITH OVERTIME/BENEFITS.

I'm afraid that, alongside being LGBT*, you're in the real world with everyone else. So now that we've used this book to deal with your identity, we need to turn our attention to far bigger issues. Your future, your career, your family, your kids, your aspirations and ambitions. Your hopes and dreams.

Of course, your love life is a deservedly big slice of your life pie, but if you shunt the homo bit to one side, you're in the same dating pool as everyone else. We're all having the same heartaches, first loves, dumpings, WHY HAVEN'T THEY RETURNED MY TEXT moments, bad dates and great kisses.

This is the final message. We are NOT in a bitter war with ‘THE STRAIGHTS'. It isn't like that at all. Yeah, there are some homophobic straight people out there, but there are also some deeply homophobic gay people too. Don't go out into the real world thinking all straight people hate you, because they really don't, and you'll only end limiting yourself to what are essentially LGBT* ghettos.

As LGBT* people gain better rights and higher media visibility, the divide between gay and straight narrows. A generation of small-minded people are basically dying and being replaced by teenagers who grew up on Will Young, Graham Norton and Ellen. Certainly in the West, although we have a long way to go, things are better for LGBT* people than they ever have been.