The Coming Entertainment “Gay-By” Boom! (What Does It Mean?)

It’s a “gay-by” boom!

Incredibly stupid pun aside, it’s true. Many surrogacy and adoption agencies report a surge in interest from gay and bisexual men and couples seeking to parent and adopt.

And these days it seems as if most of us are just as likely to have to endure stories about leaking diapers and budding young geniuses from our gay friends with children as we are from our straight ones.

But now the gay baby boom that’s been going on all over the country is moving out of the closet and onto television and movie screens and even theater stages. In the next few months, we’ll see:

• A new ABC sitcom, Modern Family, where two of the leads in an ensemble cast are gay couple that adopts a girl from Vietnam (see accompanying article).

• Scotty and Kevin contemplating childbirth with a surrogate on the ABC family drama Brothers & Sisters (see accompanying article).

• A new documentary to be released in October, Fatherhood Dreams, profiling a number of gay families.

• A musical stage adaptation of Dan Savage’s memoir The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant, part of New York’s New Group Theater 2009-2010 season.

It’s not that there haven’t ever been fictional gay dads before. We’ve seen them on TV shows such as The OC, Queer as Folk, The Tracey Ullman Show, Absolutely Fabulous, Hidden Palms, and Degrassi: The Next Generation.

In fact, one of TV’s first fictional treatments of homosexuality, the 1972 movie That Certain Summer, was about a teenager coming to terms with the fact that his dad is gay. More recently, It’s All Relative, a 2003 ABC sitcom, featured a gay couple with a daughter as part of an ensemble cast.

And the most affecting part of the otherwise humorous romp Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was the relationship between one of the gay characters and his long-unseen son.

Hell, even Jack on Will & Grace turned out to have fathered a child!

But most of TV’s previous gay dads were the parents of older children – usually children that were conceived in a previous heterosexual relationship.

Meanwhile, there have been only a few very fictional gay dads with actual babies, especially babies produced via adaption or surrogacy.

Sure, The Secret Life of the American Teenager featured a storyline last year about a gay couple seeking to adopt. And Will and Grace’s good friends Joe and Larry adopted a baby, on Will & Grace.

Joey and Chandler were repeatedly – and famously – mistaken for a couple of cute gay dads on Friends.

But these were all very minor characters – or, in the case of Friends, they weren’t really gay.