Chapter 1

Naysayers, False Starts, and Works of Art

   Sometimes, "the whole process is fraught with naysayers," says Larry Leon. He and his partner, Marc Salans, should know. Throughout their process of adopting children, they were confronted by negative attitudes, doubts, and would-be dissuaders.
   Starting with themselves.
   Salans and Leon had been together some six years when they began to talk about becoming parents. At first, they couldn’t even get together on whether this was something they wanted or not. When one of them was up on the idea, the other was down. Then vice versa. Finally, the pendulum steadied, and they were together in their determination to go forward.
   There followed a year of research into what Salans calls "the options for potential gay dads." A lawyer for the government, Salans is adept at such research. He "read everything he could get his hands on and talked to every person and every agency he could find," his partner says. The result was "a stack six feet tall sitting in the kitchen," but the work paid off. As the stack expanded, the men’s focus on what they wanted and how to go about it grew sharper.
   They nixed the idea of surrogacy. For one thing, says Marc, "we lived in D.C. at the time, where surrogacy did not seem legal." Cost was another concern; their calculations reckoned surrogacy at twice the price of adoption. They also were uneasy about public adoption through a welfare agency. For one thing, "having an infant in the house was important to us," says Larry Leon, and they would not necessarily be able to "order" a newborn if they went through the public system. They also had concerns about what Leon calls the "risk" of public adoption. In the management lingo that comes naturally to him—Leon runs a large commercial landscaping company—he explains their view "that raising a kid was already a risk-laden adjustment with no guarantees. With public adoption, the risk would be even greater."
They were leaning to the choice of open adoption, but when a gay parenting conference was held in nearby Baltimore, they went along to learn what they could. They "learned" that their "only option," according to the social worker at the lectern, was "to adopt a special-needs child." Marc raised his hand. "What about open adoption?" he asked. "Good luck," retorted the social worker. "No one will turn over a baby to a gay couple."
   "That was 1996," Marc remarks. "A lot has changed since then."
Meanwhile, the men had signed on with an agency referred by New York’s Center Kids, which advocates at state and local levels for the rights of alternative families. The agency, Vermont-based Friends in Adoption, specializes in domestic open adoption and sponsored a week-end on the subject for prospective parents—gay and straight. As it turned out, Marc and Larry were the only gay couple there, but after all the nay saying they had been through, the positive things they heard at the week-end made it a "great experience." What they heard was how psychologically healthy open adoption can be for both the birthmother and the child: the birthmother can both choose her child’s parents and decide whether and how much to develop or maintain a relationship with them, while the adoptive parents can find out what they need to know about their child’s birth parents.
   Leon and Salans were sold. They "put together a brochure for the prospective birthmother," Leon relates. "It had pictures of our life, an explanation of who we were and what we’re about, and our hopes and dreams for our child." The adoption brochure also went on-line, under the search term "seeking to adopt." They got an 800 number at the house so they could answer the responses themselves, but after nightly harassing calls, had all responses forwarded to the agency in Vermont. And they advertised in Rolling Stone, among whose hip and forward-thinking readership they hoped to find a sympathetic ear.
They did. But first there were two false starts. In both cases, they had prolonged involvements with the women, both of whom seemed intelligent, rational, and amiable. Yet one was "a total kook playing us like a fiddle," says Salans, and the other turned out to be "a crazy woman who worked in a hospital and falsified medical records confirming her pregnancy." There was no such pregnancy, and even though the men had been warned by their agency that these kinds of things could happen, the experiences brought them to their "emotional bottom."
   "By now we were two years into the process," Larry says. "We were frustrated and beginning to think it was all fruitless. And we were at our wits’ end about what to do next. We were thinking about changing gears, maybe going the international adoption route, or surrogacy. We were just second-guessing ourselves all over the place." They decided to go up to Vermont, meet with the adoption agency staff, and re-assess everything.
   "You’re never going to believe this," the head of the agency said to them when they arrived in the southwestern corner of Vermont on a sparkling spring day. There had been a response to the Rolling Stone ad from a 17-year old girl in Georgia. She was white, her boyfriend was black, and neither was prepared or equipped to take on the responsibilities of parenthood. What’s more, the expectant mother had been particularly attracted by the fact that a pair of "hopeful" gay Dads, as the ad put it, "want to share their life with your newborn."
   Marc and Larry had been adamant that the ad make clear they were gay. That was "very important to us both," Larry explains. One of the reasons they had ruled out international adoption, for example, "was that we would have had to lie about being gay, about who and what we are. And we refused to do that. We wanted to go through the process openly and honestly."
   To the 17-year-old pregnant girl in Georgia, their being gay was a plus. She lived with her lesbian mother and the mother’s partner and was comfortable with that. She also knew that gay couples had a harder time adopting than straight couples, so to her, "this was the right thing to do." And perhaps also, like the staff at the adoption agency, she felt that a biracial child would do best with adoptive parents who were likely to have had personal knowledge of intolerance.
   There was one catch. It’s what the agency head had meant when she said "You’re never going to believe this." The expected biracial child was actually twins—a boy and a girl.
Marc and Larry didn’t think about it too long. They had talked about having two kids—eventually. Now "eventually" would come right away; that was all.
But the men remained wary about the pregnancy. They had been badly burned before, so when "a couple of things didn’t add up" in their phone conversations with the Georgia teenager, the agency suggested they fly there to meet with her face to face.
   In the poem-story Marc wrote to tell his children about their adoption, he speaks of the meeting at a Red Lobster restaurant, how they talked with the young woman

… for two hours about things serious and funny.
They talked about (her) interests, like photography and crocheting,
About her plans for the future, about the options she was weighing.
(She) said: "I’m not ready to raise a child, let alone two.
"I’m only seventeen, and wouldn’t know what to do.
"Through adoption I can give them the life they deserve,
"Full of laughter and joy, and love without reserve."

Marc and Larry liked the young woman. They found her smart, pretty, and engaging—and they confirmed that she was pregnant. Six months pregnant. The men went home to Washington to wait.
The call came from their birthmother’s mother’s partner. By the time Leon and Salans arrived at the hospital in Atlanta, the babies had been born. "They were," says Larry, "the two most beautiful babies you’d ever want to see." Marc agrees.
   They spent two days at the hospital with the birthmother and a number of her family members. It was "very intimate," Salans says, "unique, different from anything we expected." Yet the two men remained on tenterhooks. They knew that the birthmother could still change her mind. Their lawyer in Georgia had told them that many obstetric nurses tended to be "anti-adoption" and tried to dissuade birthmothers from signing relinquishment papers. In fact, that’s exactly what was going on in their case. And the twins’ birthmother had plenty of time to listen. Because the delivery had been by C-section, she was still under the influence of painkillers, which meant that she couldn’t sign any papers lest they be legally challenged. Against the nurses’ importunings, the men felt impotent. All they had to counter the anti-adoption argument was their yearning to be parents and the intense love they already felt for these babies.
   It was like waiting for the jury to decide your fate. Tired of sitting by the phone in their hotel room, Salans and Leon headed for the mall, cell phone in hand. When it rang, they held their breath. It was their lawyer, telling them that the papers had been signed. In the middle of the mall, the two men hugged and wept. They were the legal guardians of Jonathan and Emily.
   They also got a call from the birthmother as she was leaving the hospital. She wanted to say good-by and thanks but broke down as she did so. Larry broke down too, "realizing the enormity of what she had done." In the story-poem, the men thank her in these words:

"You’ve given us the most precious gifts we’ve ever received before.
"Whenever we lay eyes on them, our hearts begin to soar.
"We’ve only known them a few short days, but already we love them so.
"Thank you for making our dreams come true, like some angel with a halo."

   Their dreams had come true, but so had the reality of being stuck in a hotel room with two newborns for ten days while the adoption was processed. "My God," Marc thought, "what have we done? Overnight, life flipped 180 degrees." But in fact, the ten days were "neat." A sister of a co-worker came to visit and brought dinners. They remembered that people they had met on a vacation lived in Atlanta. And rank strangers "were very supportive and loving," including all the women who worked at the hotel who wanted to "see the twins."
   The one fly in the ointment was the grandparents—both sets. Although Marc’s parents are "enlightened and pretty liberal about most things, there is an ingrained homophobia there, an old-fashioned belief about what it means to be gay—namely, that all gay people are unhappy." That "homophobia" surfaced early on in the adoption process when Marc wrote them about his plans to adopt and asked if they would be willing to help financially. They were not, and the reason, as Marc eventually elicited it, was their fear that a child of gay parents could not grow up happy, would not be accepted by his peers, and would be forever scarred psychologically. After an exchange of letters, the relationship was sorely strained, and Marc’s father began to ask what he could do to mend it.
   Larry’s father, who originally claimed he found the adoption "no big deal," made a number of objections once the reality loomed. These kids will have enough problems being biracial, he warned his son; their troubles will multiply if they have gay parents.
Both men communicated back to their parents that "this is what we’re doing," in Larry’s words. "This is what we’re doing, and you’re going to have to accept it." When the men returned home from Atlanta with Jonathan and Emily, Larry’s parents were there, and "the minute they set eyes on the kids, they were their grandparents." Marc’s parents, who live in France, also came around. They loved the children sight unseen; when they finally did see them, as they do annually when the Leon-Salans family visits Paris, they waxed ecstatic about children who "could not look better or happier," and about the fine job of parenting by their fathers.
   The kids are totally different from one another, says Larry. Emily is "very feminine and flirtatious. She loves to dress up and play the coquette. Jonathan is a rough-and-tumble bundle of testosterone. On the other hand, Emily is fearless and absolutely stoic, while Jonathan is frightened of the dark and cries more readily."
   The family lives a life that Marc describes as "pretty boring, pretty regular." They have a station wagon and a Golden Retriever and are friends with all the other parents in the neighborhood. They’re the only gay dads in the neighborhood, and Marc says "it’s been a non-issue." They take the kids to the playground and the swimming pool, read to them a lot, hope to expose them to a range of life’s possibilities. "They’ve been to France three times by the age of four," Marc says. "That’s what we want to do for our kids. It has nothing to do with our being gay dads."
   Naturally, it isn’t all unalloyed joy. Larry remembers the "abject despair" he felt when the twins were mis-diagnosed with a disease found in HIV-positive babies. "We went through ten days of finding out what was wrong. It was horrible, stressful. Waiting for the results of their AIDS tests was agony." It all turned out all right, but Larry says that the range of emotions he experienced was "eye-opening."
   "I grew up with a lot of angst about being gay," Larry explains. "It was difficult coming to terms with it over the years, and I may not be totally at terms with it now. But having kids has been a healing experience. It has allowed me to recognize that I really am no different from everybody else. All the things you know intellectually I now experience. I am more at ease with myself, more at ease in the world." For Marc, being a parent is harder than he expected—"not because I’m a gay man, just because it’s hard—but it "surpasses anything" he ever imagined.
   Sometimes, people ask if the kids have a Latino mother. "No," one or the other will answer. "She’s white." "Then who’s that other guy?" people will want to know. "What’s going on?" "That’s my partner," they will answer. "It’s important," says Larry, "for the kids never to sense discomfort about us being gay." He wishes they had "more interaction with gay families," and they’ve made a point of trying to find other gay and lesbian couples with children, and of exposing the kids to African-Americans and biracial individuals. It’s a "conscious decision to show them other families like theirs and other people like themselves."