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AE: What's the reaction of friends, neighbors, and family as your family continues to grow?
AST: Actually, both sides of our families have been very supportive. Mark's parents, I don't think they ever realized they'd have so many grandchildren.

MST: When I came out to my mom eighteen years ago — well, longer than that actually. Make myself seem a little younger. [laughs] But that was the main thing she cried about. "I'm never gonna have grandchildren." I tease her about that now. I say, "Mom, you want some more grandkids?" And she says, "No, stop already! That's enough!" [laugh]

Really, though, Andy and I both work at the same school our kids go to. All our neighbors, the school, the principal of the school, for the most part the other parents, the staff, everybody around us [is supportive]. In this respect, I count us as being very lucky. We really haven't run into a whole lot of negativity. We get a lot more people that say, "I don't know how the hell you do that. I've got two kids and I think I'm going crazy, getting white hair every day. I don't know how you guys are running around there with six kids."

AE: Do you think you'll ever reach a point where you feel your family is big enough or will your arms and heart always be open?
MST: Well, the arms and heart are always open. Right now, when Nathaniel gets here, we'll have a one year old, a three year old, a four year old, a five year old, a six year old, Marcus is nine, and James is fifteen, so I think we'll probably, in the best interest of the smaller ones — and even James is going to start in high school and he's applied to a fashion design magnet program here in town — but I think in their best interest, we'll lay off the foster care for a little while so we can kind of concentrate our efforts on them. Maybe eventually in, oh, about eighteen to twenty years when our house is starting to get a little emptier, we'll pick it back up again and try to do some more helping out. In the meantime, though, we'll continue working in the public school system, helping out kids now and then as we try to do now at school.

AE: Is there anything we should be looking for as we watch the show?
AST: I think the one thing we really want people to see is that we're really no different than anybody else except we're two dads. We're like any other family. We love our children and we want to protect our children. We just want to keep them safe. If people can just see that we're not these pedophiles like everybody wants to think. "Gay dads are just pedophiles." That's just not the truth. You can see how our kids love us and we love our kids. That's what we really want people to see on the Oprah show.

MST: And there's also a really funny moment when Andy talks about diaper changing. He talks about being able to change three diapers at once with one hand.

AST: I was really proud of that! [laughs]

MST: There was one time quite a few years back where we had four under the age of two, all at the same time. He was changing a lot of diapers. Andy actually quit a $70,000 a year job to stay home and take care of Faith, who was born severely addicted to cocaine. Her mom used cocaine while she was pregnant. She [Faith] went through really, really severe withdrawal for about twelve weeks. He originally started with a leave of absence, and then she continued to have problems after that, so he quit working and stayed home for three years to make sure she got through all her difficulties before she started in school. To me, that's shows his dedication that he was willing to give up that kind of career to stay home and make sure she was getting what she needed.

AE: Thank you so much for sharing your story and being so willing to talk to us.
MST: Of course, and thank you for helping us put a face on it [gay parenting]. Andy and I were sitting around talking yesterday that it seems like everybody in the world has an opinion about gay families, but what I'm hoping is that this whole thing with Oprah will start the ball rolling to actually put a face on it.

For more information on Family Pride's OUTSpoken Families,
go to www.familypride.org/OUTSpoken.html

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