Gay Dads Get Creative — On-screen and Off

Forget adoption. Now all the gay couples on television are looking for surrogates.

We’ve written before about the recent “gay-by” boom – the trend of fictional gay characters becoming parents. 

What’s interesting lately are the increasingly varied ways these characters are becoming dads – and the ways in which they’re actually reflecting real life.

"When my husband and I started talking about having kids, even seven years ago, people said we were crazy," says Thomas Marino, who writes about his experience having children via surrogacy with his husband, sister, and donated eggs in his book Tomorrow May Be Too Late.

Being gay used to be "all about culture, the lights, the party," he says. "But surrogacy and adoption are much more embraced by our community now."

Sure enough, for a long time, the idea of a gay male couple with kids was virtually unheard of, onscreen or off. If a gay man did have children, it was as a result of a previous heterosexual relationship – and the children most definitely lived with the mother.

In the 1970 movie The Boys in the Band, Hank has left his wife and two children to live with Larry.

And in television’s first gay-sympathetic-ish television movie, ABC’s That Certain Summer, a 14-year-old boy who goes to spend the summer with his closeted gay father (Hal Holbrook), now divorced and living with a male partner (Martin Sheen). The partner has moved out of the house while the son visits, and the drama of the movie involves around the son discovering the truth about his father and, uh, running away in disgust.

So much for gay dads in 1972. No doubt there have always been some small number of gay male couples happily raising even small children. But The Boys in the Band and That Certain Summer did reflect the mores of the era: being gay and raising kids was usually very much an either-or kind of thing.

And it wasn’t just straight people arguing that. Last year, actor Rupert Everett was criticized for saying, “This whole thing of forcing the idea of parenthood on us gay men is so bogus. Marriage? Babies? Please. I want to be illegal. I want to live outside the mainstream.”

But the fact is, Everett was just expressing a sentiment that was common among gay people in the 1970s and 80s. 

Robin Williams (right) as a gay dad in The Birdcage

One of the first media portrayals to portray a gay couple as actual, child-raising parents was the 1978 French movie La Cage aux Folles, for a time the U.S.’s top-grossing foreign film. But the movie, which trades in extreme stereotypes, was an outright farce, and remained as such in the 1983 stage musical version as well as the 1996 American remake The Birdcage.

The 1994 Australian movie Priscilla Queen of the Desert includes a sub-plot about a gay father reuniting with his long-unseen 8-year-old son – and the movie concludes with the man taking his son for an extended stay so they can get to know each other better, giving the mother a break.

Next Page! Josh Brolin as a gay dad?