Read The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant for Free Online

love to make life. Infertility did more than shatter their expectations; it undermined their sexual identities.
    Straight sex can be recreational or procreational—or both— but gay sex can only ever be recreational. Gay sex is never a means, only an end, and the end is pleasure. Homophobes use this to justify their hatred of gays and lesbians: straight sex, since it can make a baby, is “natural”; gay sex, since it can only make a mess, is not. Babies make straight sex more important than gay sex, so straights are therefore more important than gays. Babies underpin all hetero-supremacism, from “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” to “Gays don't have children, so they have to recruit yours.” Even when straights are using birth control, procreation still sanctifies straight sex. Even when straights are having sex that couldn't possibly make babies (oral, anal, phone, cyber), the fact that these two people could make babies under other circumstances or in other positions legitimizes straight sex.
    This is pounded into the heads of gay people and straight people alike. Gays grow up believing their desires, pleasures, and loves are illegitimate; and straights who fall for the hype believe they gotta work that magic, gotta make that baby, or . . . what? A straight person who can't make a baby isn't really a straight person at all. And if you're not straight, you must be . . . what? You're like my boyfriend and me. Suddenly your sex is all recreational, like gay sex, delegitimized and desanctified. Straight sex absent fertility has no larger significance. Oh, it's an expression of love— but so is gay sex, and that never made gay sex okay. No babies means no miracles, no magic. The sex you're having may still be pleasurable, but in a sex-hating (and consequently sex-obsessed) culture, pleasure is not a good enough reason, otherwise gay and lesbian sex would never have been stigmatized.
    I sympathized with the straight people sitting around the conference table. I understood what they must have been going through. I had been through it myself, a long time ago. When I hit puberty, I got the news that I was functionally infertile. But the straight couples at the seminar had only recently gotten that news, and they were still adjusting to it. How much we had in common with them was driven home by the rhetoric the counselors used during the seminar. It was the rhetoric of coming out. The straight couples were encouraged to accept what they could not change. In time, they'd see their “problem” as a blessing. It was important to tell family and friends the truth, even if they might not understand at first. They might in their ignorance ask hurtful questions, but be patient and try to answer. And while it is possible to live a lie, possible to adopt a child and pass it off as your biological child, no one can spend a lifetime in the closet.
    Now we all had some common ground.

    While the straight couples at the seminar were getting a little gay by coming out to themselves and each other about their infertility, my boyfriend and I were getting a little straight. Terry and I would be giving up certain things that, for better or worse, define what it means to be gay. Good things, things we enjoyed and that had value and meaning for us. Like promiscuity. Safely and respectfully done, whorin' around, like travel, is broadening. One night in Amsterdam, I met a guy in a leather bar, a twenty-eight-year-old German student. We had a beer, left the bar, and went back to his apartment. We messed around, nothing serious, and when we were done, talked all night about German reunifi-cation, what it was like growing up in the East, and what his grandparents had been up to during the Second World War.
    The next day, he showed me parts of Amsterdam I would never have found on my own; then he walked me back to my hotel, gave me a kiss, and said good-bye. I never saw him again, and I don't remember his name, but it was a beautiful experience.