photo Carissa Gallo
I wrote an entry for the Huffington Post's Gay Voices blog that was published last week - you may have seen me tweet about it? Called The Future Perfect: Planning for Parental Bliss (the title is a link! click click!), it details my pre-parenthood planning obsession. Wait, what? A sample, for the lazy:
"I like to imagine how I'll raise my family and I, like anyone who looks forward to having children, like to imagine how much better behaved my kids will be than all the rest, whose parents have obviously not taken to the Kosher organic sugarless gluten-free family miracle diet I saw on Pinterest."
The piece is written tongue firmly in cheek, but I hope the emotion behind the words isn't taken for granted. One of my biggest concerns as "gay parenthood" becomes an increasingly common term thrown about in mainstream American sociopolitical discourse is that popular attitudes towards it will be shaped by the oftentimes flippant mainstream media representations of same-sex parenting. Take, for instance, new Fox sitcom The New Normal. In the first ten minutes of the pilot episode the gay male couple around which the show revolves meets with a designer baby consultant who recommends, "VIP egg files"; one future father then asks for, "a skinny, blonde child who doesn't cry. Is this extra?" I'm not sure how the show has progressed, because I was honestly too overcome with the urge to take a crap all over the guy's face to keep watching. How many representations of gay male fathers are out there right now in primetime? On Fox? Not enough to let this exploitative b*s waddle into the popular imagination, that's how many. But, I digress...I want to make this a positive post!
Click through for happy things!
