Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: ‘Velveteen Father’ insightfully examines gay parenthood

Friday, Aug. 20, 1999 | 5:56 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books/magazine column appears Fridays. Reach him at 990-2446 or dickens@vegas.com

"Agay man needs children like a fish needs a bicycle." So says one friend to Andy, the gay adoptive father described by Jesse Green, author of the new memoir "The Velveteen Father" (Villard, $23.95) and, not coincidentally, Andy's partner.

That's one of many surprises in the book: that adoption by gay men is often as frowned upon by other homosexuals as by aghast heteros. "You're trying to live out a dream that is false," Andy is told. After all, if God or evolution had wanted homosexuals to have kids, they'd be heterosexual, no?

But, Green reminds us, if a dream isn't false, it wouldn't be a dream. Nor is the nurturing urge of fatherhood definitively connected to accidents of one's sexual orientation.

Fortunately, Green resists the understandable urge to spin a saccharine fable from an essentially happy story about a man and his son; he's a journalist here, not a lyric poet (this isn't one of the "crisis memoirs" so prevalent now). He is therefore unstinting in his portrayal of Andy's unhappy childhood under an overbearing, smothering Jewish mother. He's unblinking in his descriptions of an adult Andy listless in the world, uncertain of what he wants or how to get it.

Thinking a kid might do the trick, Andy tries an artificial insemination scheme with a pair of lesbians. Ill-considered from the beginning, it's a debacle, tearing everyone apart. "Is it disloyal of me to surmise that Andy contributed to the disaster, if only through a lack of self-knowledge?" Green wonders.

No. Because the author's straightforwardness is what makes credible Andy's slow realization that a child is, in fact, exactly what he needs. "He wanted a child because he wanted a chance, at last, to love well: not to receive unconditional love, but to give it." The fish finds himself determined to get back on the bike he fell off of.

It's not easy. The decision-making involved is agonizing. The child's mother was a drug addict and the baby has tremors; do you want him? "Adoption gives you choices that biology reserves for itself," Green writes with the quiet authority and aphoristic punch that marks the book, "but in doing so it also exacts a price. Where there is a choice, you must choose."

Andy gets little encouragement, either informally ("God forbid," his mother spits, "wait until I die") or officially. "It cannot be overstated how hamhandedly American culture pushes parenthood on heterosexuals and how stingily it withholds the idea from gay men," Green writes.

Yet there is, of course, no reliable way of knowing who'll make a good or bad parent beforehand, gay, straight or Martian; the alchemy of child-rearing changes everything. Right up to the birth of my first son, I had no intention of engaging in parenthood myself, and no understanding of how to do it. "How long until its eyes open?" I asked my wife shortly before the little guy popped out. (Seriously.) Yet I've done OK; I'm pretty sure none of my offspring will grow up to shoot the president or vote Republican.

But then, I'm not a single gay father; the world isn't rooting against me. "There are few officially sanctioned prejudices left in America but this is one," Green notes. "Behind it lurks the idea that gay men are at heart -- one must say the terrible thing frankly -- pedophiles."

The preposterousness of that sentiment doesn't mute its impact. Gay adoption is a heated topic among people with agendas other than the welfare of the adopted children. It's a screen against which we can project our religious pieties, our crude biases, our fear and loathing of difference, all under the guise of concern about children. Green could surely go on and on.

Thankfully, he doesn't. Although "The Velveteen Father" is carefully backgrounded with gay history and adoption lore, Green writes mostly about people: Andy, himself (a precocious child, "I had, it might now be said, a case of attention surplus disorder"), their families -- and, of course, the baby.

The book's title refers to Margery Williams' classic "The Velveteen Rabbit," in which a stuffed rabbit is brought to life by a child's unequivocal love. So it is here. The task of adopting and raising the infant boy he names Erez pulls the diffuse Andy into self-focus. Rather than a fish on a bicycle, he becomes a man with a son, meaning he's a man with a purpose, a use.

Children, the book reminds us, are a wonderfully normalizing force. When a baby's diaper leaks all over your new minivan, dad's sexuality doesn't matter -- it's gotta be handled. If a baby barfs on a gay man, does he not still reek?

Reading list

More promising: Michael Paterniti's fine story on baseball great Thurman Munson, who died 20 years ago but lives on in the memories of his teammates; a story on a vicious guard "who did some very bad things in the deadliest prison in America"; and a list of the best '90s CDs you've never heard. Freedy Johnston, anyone?

And when New Yorker editors say adventure, they mean it. Why, they sent a writer to camp out in Central Park! Now that's thrill-seeking on an almost unheard-of level -- a sane man needs to camp in Central Park like a fish needs a mountain bike, one of those really expensive titanium ones. "... That, needless to say, was the appeal," Bill Buford writes.

Elsewhere, we have a marathon ocean swimmer, the low-down on "adventure as executive therapy" and a hike across the Sahara. This last is a good opportunity for Americans to get acquainted with Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski.

An uncommonly literate journalist, he's covered more Third World revolutions than perhaps any reporter who still has his skin intact (chronicled in such books as "The Soccer War" and "The Shah"). He's been in situations that would make a fish on a bicycle seem normal. Yet for all the gonzo nature of his travels, his writing is admirably free of glibness and forced craziness. It's scrubbed clean of needless sag, like bones in the desert.

Footnote

Charlene Smith will sign copies of "The Tuskegee Airman: A Biography of Charles E. McGee," at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the Barnes & Noble at 2191 N. Rainbow Blvd. Call 631-1775.