'Quiet, Queer Paternity: Life Below the Radar'

Terwijl het homohuwelijk in Noord-Amerika en Europa steeds meer terrein wint, blijft adoptie door homostellen internationaal een heikel punt. LOVER-gastschrijver Fabio Ferrari komt uit Italiaans Zwitserland en is een trotse “queer vader”. In een documentaire over LGBT-families zette hij uiteen hoe de wet, de samenleving en de politiek bijdragen aan de voortdurende onzichtbaarheid van queer-families, en hoe vooroordelen vanuit het feministisch gedachtegoed daar soms aan meewerken. Bij een persoonlijk verhaal dat politiek gevoelig ligt, bleek het niet altijd makkelijk om de juiste woorden te vinden. Daarom herschrijft hij het interview in deze column voor LOVER.

With some reluctance, last July I decided to participate in a televised documentary on the growing demographic presence of LGBT families in Switzerland. The lead journalists heading the project met me for an initial chat, over coffee, in our town’s main square. We shook hands in front of the town hall and settled into a nearby cafe. A cameraman was present but I made it clear, from the start, that I did not want my image to be recorded. The journalists fully understood my desire to protect my family from public scrutiny, but said they wanted to find a solution that would provide the Swiss television public with a more complete picture of LGBT families, specifically Swiss gay male parents. In preparing their documentary, the journalists explained that they had found gay fathers, compared to lesbian mothers, to be much more reticent about going on the record with their family stories.

Why might lesbian mothers be more open to public exposure? Does this openness signal a difference between lesbian and gay parents at the level of political engagement? Are there different kinds of social stigmas faced by lesbian-parented and gay-parented families? Is the public more suspicious of gay men when it comes to caring for children because of the prevailing cultural view, fair or unfair as it may be, that women are more naturally predisposed to nurturing small children? 

These were the kinds of questions the Swiss television journalists asked me on our first informal meeting, off the record. As I walked away from the interview, I reflected on the sad fact that gay paternal love resides in the shadow of so many unanswered questions and tiresome stereotypes about so-called natural gender roles. It occurred to me, then, that a part of me very much wanted to share my story as a gay father, as nervous as the idea of outing my entire family made me.

I contacted the journalists again and agreed to pay a visit to the television studio where an audio interview was recorded over two days. Despite my agitation, I did my best to answer the journalists’ questions as clearly as possible. This was not an easy process for me. The audio technician at the studio repeatedly informed me that my voice was shaky, broken with emotion.

Once again, the first question posed to me regarded the motivation of Swiss gay fathers to protect their family lives with a sense of rigorous privacy that distinguished them from their Swiss lesbian counterparts who, it seemed, were generally more forthcoming and less fearful. “Why is that?” I was asked.

In my case, the perceived threat of public exposure is a direct result of a legal system that, despite gestures of partial recognition by the Swiss federal government, still persists in keeping LGBT families in a state of anxiety and limbo. This uncertainty is the main reason, I think, why a gay father may feel pressured, in the best interest of his family, to remain silent or invisible.

As the situation stands now, joint adoption by same-sex parents has been approved by both houses of the Swiss parliament, but only if the child in question already exists in the family unit. Stated otherwise, a gay man may someday soon be able to adopt his partner’s children but same-sex couples would not be able to create a family from “scratch.” In short, the law denies both Swiss lesbians and gay men a full extension of adoption rights. However, unlike lesbians who desire to be parents, gay men cannot, for obvious reasons, patronize a clinic for anonymous donation: sperm is donated anonymously but human “eggs” are, rightly, I believe, not for sale in Swiss clinics. And so the last option available to Swiss gay men who desire to create a family is surrogacy. But, of course, surrogacy is illegal in Switzerland and international surrogacy is, besides being illegal, also fraught with many stigmas for gay parents who are condemned in the press and in academic discourse with derogatory labels such as “reproductive tourists.” In Italian-speaking Switzerland, the most common descriptor of a gay man like me is “womb renter.” In sum, these factors help explain my initial reluctance, as a gay man, to make a public outing as a gay dad on Swiss TV. The very fact that I admit to being a gay dad puts me and my family in potential legal jeopardy because the logical question - for Swiss gay fathers - is always placed within an implied legal context that asks us to justify the all-important question: “How did you get this baby?” Swiss gay fathers may then feel like outlaws on several levels: we’re breaking widely-uncontested “natural laws” and gender boundaries that ideally position the child-symbol in the arms of a quasi-holy Mother figure, we’re challenging surrogacy laws that link gay paternity conceptually to the notion of a new “market” and so, looked at from Right or Left, gay-parented households represent something disturbing, even monstrous, something so “artificial” that the Law or public opinion seemingly can’t or won’t accept in the current Swiss context.

“It may surprise you,” I was informed by my interviewers, “to know that some of the lesbian parents we have spoken to are also strongly opposed to surrogacy, on principle, and see the trend of gay men contracting surrogate women as a vile form of sexist oppression: an abuse of the Western gay man’s economic privilege to use women‘s bodies as baby-making machines. How would you respond to the accusation that you, as a gay man, bought your two children and exploited women in the process by outsourcing their wombs?"

“As a father,” I replied, “I am pained by these kinds of accusations, which I regret to say I have heard many times before. As a gay father, I am always shocked, however, when these accusations come from within the LGBT community. As a feminist, I nevertheless recognize a degree of legitimacy in the accusation and continue to advocate for just laws that would regulate surrogacy and guard against any abuses that would compromise a woman’s free choice on matters that concern her body and emotional health. I know that abuses of women are increasing in certain areas of the world because of an unregulated international surrogacy industry, as is the case in certain countries in Asia and Eastern Europe. I saw the horrors of this unregulated market with my own eyes when my partner and I traveled to the Ukraine several years ago. We left Kiev abruptly, as soon as we realized the ethical implications of “the deal“ that was being put on the table before us. We then turned to the United States where women choose to donate their ova and become surrogates for many reasons: the key word in that last sentence being choose. Yes, there is likely to be a financial motivation implicit to the American surrogate mother’s choice to work as a surrogate: this is almost incontestable. Having said that, the surrogate mothers I encountered in the United States were neither poor nor uneducated. The egg donors my partner and I talked to, in most cases, were college students wishing to subsidize the cost of their education through “donation.” For me, it was most important that a transparent dialogue existed between myself, my partner, the biological mother, and the surrogate mothers with whom we ultimately worked to create our family. Again, as a feminist, I based my family planning on ethical principles that placed paramount importance on the free agency underscoring these women’s choices. My moral stance on the question of surrogacy is framed by a deep respect for motherhood in general. These women are the genitors of my children, though they have families of their own and live their own lives. I will forever be indebted to and amazed by the generosity of these women’s spirits as empowered life-givers. The egg donors and surrogates associated with my family do not deserve to be relegated to the category of victim on any principle I support, but especially not on feminist grounds.”

“Speaking of these ‘mothers,’ as you call them,” asked the interviewer, “what kind of relationship, if any, do your children have with the egg donor and carriers with whom you worked?”

“Our children are still very young,” I answered, “there are pictures of their biological and surrogate mothers that my partner and I have placed around the house and which have been with us since before our children were even conceived. Whenever one of my children expresses interest in one those pictures, as they do more and more as time passes, I do my best to explain how special these women are to our family. Just the other day, my four-year-old son asked me if his egg donor was more like a princess or a fairy-godmother. ‘Neither one,’ I told him, proud of his inquisitiveness, ‘she is a Ph.D. student of English Literature from California.”

“Now,” interjected the journalist, “I imagine that our television viewers might say that you are trying to charm them with your paternal dolcezza [zoetheid; zachtheid] to win their approval through emotional manipulation. How would you respond to this in conclusion?”

“Charming people with tenderness is a method of persuasion that I am proud to say I re-learned from observing my children. Charming or not, however, I strongly reject any suggestion that the position on surrogacy that I am illustrating is manipulative just because its tone and logic are “tainted” by emotion. For me, the deep pride I feel for my children and the queer story of their conception comes from a place of love; a site that I guard as my most precious human treasure. For some people, my paternity as a gay man and my children’s queer conception will always be complicated by moral-political-legal issues of one kind or another. I have reconciled myself to this and yet seek to be alert as a thinker and vocal as a writer on this topic in order not to become complacent. For me, what is most important is to conduct my life according to ethical principles that I can stand by and which, in turn, support my sense of human dignity. As a as a global citizen and as a queer father, I believe that a moral feminist position on surrogacy is possible and I advocate for enlightened lawmakers to formally guard against unregulated markets for human reproduction and, in so doing, to open another closet door for gay fathers who, in Switzerland, may yet be living life in fear of public outing, silently waiting, quietly existing, below the radar.”