CHILD’S PLAY

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately with The Neighbour’s two-year-old son. I can imagine anyone who even vaguely knows me shuddering at that sentence because I’m not exactly noted as someone who is childproofed. Don’t read me wrong, I’m not unkind to kids when they (rarely) cross my path, but I view them in the same way I view a ringing mobile in a cinema: annoying, but a fact of life.

About a year ago, though, I started talking to our next-door neighbour. This in itself was unusual as I’ve always subscribed to the belief that one of the great joys of urban living – aside from the fact you’re never more than a few hundred yards away from a bar, like rats but more fun – is the anonymity it affords, meaning, bluntly, you don’t have to bother getting to know the people who live around you. I know that sounds unbearably antisocial, but I’ve never claimed to be anything other than an absolute committed curmudgeon.

So, anyway, there I was chatting away every now and then to The Neighbour with me pretty much ignoring her son, until I realised something. I started to notice he actually had a full-on personality of his own. That may not be surprising to you, but I’d always found toddlers to be about as interesting as a Cabbage Patch doll so it came as news to me. The Toddler, though, disproves my preconceptions utterly. He is loving, generous, eccentric, completely unbrattish and, most of all, funny. Who knew a child could make you laugh so much?

You don’t have to be Freud to work out the real reason I enjoy spending so much time with him. It’s because when I’m with him I forget all about HIV. I don’t think about test results or scans or meds or phone calls from doctors informing me of which vital organ – are there any non-vital ones? – is the latest to give up the ghost. My brain just empties and its weight ebbs away.

"I’m not unkind to kids when they (rarely) cross my path, but I view them in the same way I view a ringing mobile in a cinema: annoying, but a fact of life."

It’s obvious why it happens, really. It’s because kids know nothing of pain, or certainly shouldn’t anyway. They’re just all about the fun. Illness or fears for the future just don’t figure in their mindset. They just want to go as high as they can on the swings or run across fields as if they’re fleeing a burning building. Theirs is a simple world that revolves around sleep, food, silliness and wreaking havoc. The emotional clutter that inevitably creeps in with adulthood is nowhere in sight.

All of which has gotten me thinking about whether I would have made a good dad myself. Before I get rafts of emails ticking me off for considering adoption when I’m so far up the HIV creek a paddle wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference, let me be clear. I am not about to jet off to Malawi and buy my own Brangelina-style rainbow brood. I know I am now too ill to reasonably contemplate parenthood at all. That ship has sailed and sunk. What I’m talking about is life in a parallel universe.

Even in a parallel universe, though, I’m not sure I would have gone down the gay parenting route, primarily because you’re required to be in possession of such an unwavering backbone of steel to withstand the ongoing prejudice that swirls around the subject if you’re even going to have the faintest hope of making a decent fist of it. Essentially, like so many other aspects of queer life, we have to work twice as hard to be thought half as good.

Just look at last week’s Channel 4 documentary My Weird & Wonderful Family. This was a follow-up film about Barrie and Tony Drewitt-Barlow, the Essex couple who hit the media glare a decade ago when they shelled out a fortune to father twins using an egg donor and surrogate mother in California. They went on to have a further two children and another set of twins, which were born during the filming of this documentary.

What shocked me about the film wasn’t, of course, that two men could raise a family – I imagine gay parents are as randomly good or bad as their straight counterparts – but rather the negative reaction it provoked. The main crux of the criticism centred on the fact that the two men had effectively shopped for designer babies by choosing their egg donors largely on looks alone, the subtext being that if you’ve got the dosh you can buy anything your wallet desires, including a readymade family.

"Like so many other aspects of queer life, we have to work twice as hard to be thought half as good."

But it was ever thus. Are we seriously naïve enough to believe that money doesn’t gift a freedom to do what you want in a way us with lesser financial clout simply don’t have? And anyway isn’t the designer babies argument a bit of a reductive one to have in this day and age when unconventional families by dint of massive medical advancements over the years have become much more normalised and accepted?

The subliminal message seems to be: egg donation is fine; surrogacy is fine; IVF is fine; throwing queerness into the messy scientific and ethical mix is not fine. Even a friend of mine said she thought gay people were “selfish” for wanting kids because it would mean their lives would consequently be more difficult due to their parents being same-sex. That may be the case. Society probably hasn’t reached a point whereby queer parenting is necessarily welcomed with open arms, but does that mean we should just accept the status quo and not even challenge it?

Fundamentally, parenting, any parenting regardless of sexuality, comes down to love and anyone who saw My Weird & Wonderful Family would have to be an even bigger curmudgeon than me not to concede that the Drewitt-Barlow household is clearly full to the brim with love. No matter what you think of their lifestyle – a bit materialistic and superficial, to be honest – there have been plenty of other documentaries that have shown straight parents in a damnsight less glowingly favourable light.

For my part, I may never get to be a parent, but I get to be an indulgent neighbour who does a spot of child’s play pushing swings and running over fields. It might not sound like a lot to you, but when your life is so engulfed by darkness, trust me, it’s a much-needed, dazzling shaft of light. More importantly, it’s one I can give back to his mum and dad at the end of the day.

If you missed My Weird & Wonderful Family, you can still watch it on Channel 4 OD for the next three weeks at www.channel4.com/programmes/4od.

What do you think? Would you like to have children or is being a gay parent selfish to the well being of the children in question?


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