You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
WHEN I WAS FIRST INVITED TO SPEAK ABOUT GAY PARENTING, I felt flattered and slightly flummoxed. What could I talk about? As the coordinator and moderator of a panel last year at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, at which Susan Vaughan presented her paper Scrambled Eggs: Trends in Lesbian and Gay Fertility and Family (2005), I have certainly pondered extensively the many psychoanalytic questions that the advents of reproductive technology and gay parenting pose. I could describe and consider my own efforts to develop my new family's narrative—my husband and I are fathers to a 22-month-old daughter through gestational surrogacy, and we are expecting twins through the same process next month. Furthermore, I have several gay friends and acquaintances who have their own stories to tell of how and why they became parents. But psychoanalytic papers, I thought, are supposed to focus on clinical material, in which we draw our inferences, our often flawed conclusions, and our own interpretations of the analytic process that ensues. By these criteria, what data did I have? As a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with a particular interest in gender and sexuality issues, I have an active practice of gay and straight adult patients in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, yet I can only count two patients who are gay parents. Then I wondered, am I stuck in traditional models? Must I follow the path to analytic paper writing that is tried and true but not necessarily that fits this subject and me? If children can be created without sex, and two men can raise
them, why can't I be a father of analytic invention and conceive the paper I want by nontraditional means? I began to gestate a plan in my mind.
My first step was to realize that the demographic makeup of my clinical practice is itself data. Most of my gay patients are men, and gay male parenting by design, by which I mean when a child is not a product of a previous heterosexual marriage, is a much newer