Navigating Florida's Adoption Ban

COMMENTARY: “Are you a homosexual?” she asked.

“Excuse me,” I responded.

“Are you a homosexual?” she asked again.

It was not her second question or the third, but the first question once I told her I was interested in adopting.

Her name was Sue. She was the on-phone representation of Our Kids, one of Miami’s premier adoption agencies. Given Florida’s law against adoption by gays, I didn’t blame her for her question, but I didn’t like it either. I knew if I were to tell the truth, that my partner and I are gay men who want kids, the call would be over. I knew if I lied, we might move forward and maybe even end up with a child, acquired under false pretenses with one of us as the parent and the other pretending, all the while building a web of lies to prove our acceptability to a system that has deemed us unworthy.

Unwilling to lie, I told her the truth, and the call quickly ended.

All we wanted were kids and a family, when there are so many kids inthe state of Florida who need families.

David Strah, in his book Gay Dads, talks about the growing phenomenon of gay fatherhood and how so many of us, upon coming out, thought we had to give up the dream of ever becoming a parent. Instead, Strah argues, the instinct to build families and raise kids is a part of who we are, straight or gay. It is a right of being human that we don’t have to abdicate because of our sexual orientation.

That said, I wish the state of Florida felt the same.

Not long after that call, my husband and I were invited to a welcome-home party for beautiful twin boys who had been adopted by a former colleague and his same-sex partner. The boys were born in Pennsylvania and were now, at 1 year old, finally coming home. Their story gave us hope, but it also raised a lot of questions. How did they locate these boys? How did they manage this out-of-state adoption? Was the adoption legal in Florida? And why’d it take a year to bring them home? Little did I know these questions and their answers would drive our lives for the next year.