Do gay guys date men who are like their dads
For gay men, having a biological youth can be complicated
Most people hoping to become parents envision having children who are genetically akin to them. But for gay men, this process is complicated and costly. Seeing it through involves collaboration with a fertility healer, a lawyer, a gestational carrier (a.k.a. surrogate mother) and an egg donor. The process takes about two years and costs around $200,000 per kid - and prospective gay fathers don't meet eligibility criteria for most health insurance plans' fertility benefits, although this is beginning to change.
Brent Monseur, MD, recently helped steer a study to document details of how gay men use assisted reproductive technology to construct their families, including questions such as how many children they wish to have and how often their actions succeed. Monseur, who is completing his postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford Medicine in reproductive endocrinology and infertility, spoke with me about the research, which appeared Aug. 4 in Fertility & Sterility Reports.
How did this study come about?
A refrain that many LGBTQ people, including myself, heard after coming out, was, "You'll never be able to hold a
Gay dads: what kind of parents do you wish to be?
TV chef Yotam Ottolenghi wrote a courageous and heartfelt piece in the Guardian last Saturday about his long journey to parenthood as a gay man. Having considered co-parenting with a homosexual woman couple and then a single woman, he and his partner Karl finally settled on surrogacy, conceiving their son Max with the help of a US surrogate mother. Yotam describes the twists and turns of his journey and how they got there in the end.
It makes us reflect on how, for many same-sex attracted men we work with, finding the right route is not easy. Very often, co-parenting or recognizable sperm donation seems the obvious first choice. It is easy to comprehend why. It is streamlined – lesbian/single women and gay/single men can assist each other, the arrangement can be dealt with privately and informally, and in many cases conceiving is free.
But it is a mistake to ponder that co-parenting is the easy option for queer dads. Sharing your animation as a parent with someone you don’t reside with takes hard operate and a long designation commitment to flexibility and compromise. You have to be prepared to fit your family life around someone else. It can work well, but only if it is what yo
© Can Stock Photo | creatista
By Marshall Forstein, M.D.
Posted in: Parenting Concerns, You & Your Family
Topics: Diverse, Relationships
I was a precocious child, looking back. I read voraciously, and was curious about everything: such as what made people do what they carry out, and how mechanical things were put together and actually worked. And I loved my friends who came from very other backgrounds. I was a lucky child in so many ways, but I knew I was other from an early age.
Tommy and I were fantastic friends. We could communicate and walk, play stoopball against our houses steps, or just be silent reading books together. He was the type of kid who could hasten and somehow his shirt stayed tucked in his pants, and his hair never moved out of place. In June, at age nine, my family was moving out of Queens in NYC to a more suburban neighborhood, and Tommy and I spent what was to be our last second together. We lived a few blocks apart, and I walked with him from the playground to his house, both of us acutely aware that we were saying goodbye.
Although we said we would stay friends forever, I now believe we each knew in our heart that this was unlikely. We stood on his front steps
Thomas Gass, a dentist in California, has survived the curse—twice. The curse? Gass is a gay male whose only sexual attraction is to men significantly older than he is.
Gass lost his first spouse, 28 years his senior, through the slowly decaying effects of Lou Gehrig’s disease after they had been together for 13 years. After recovering from his grief, he launch love again with a man 18 years older but endured another tragic loss when his second partner died of pancreatic cancer after they had spent 17 years together. Still a relatively fresh man, Gass might wonder whether or not to take a chance on loving an older dude again. For him, however, the choice is between an older man or no man at all. Gass and his friends—all of whom had clueless older life partners—have labeled their abiding sexual attraction “the curse of entity attracted to older men.”
I began to study lgbtq+ relationships with age disparities while conducting research for my book, Finally Out: Letting Go of Living Straight. Gass and I started to correspond after he and his friends had read and discussed my essay, “Age as a Factor in Sexual Orientation and Attraction.” He wrote that in their discussion, some co
AsI think back on the past 24 years of providing couples counseling for gay male relationships, I sometimes acquire asked what the differences are that I see (in general) in same-sex attracted male relationships that are (again, in general), different from straight relationships.
I offer these thoughts to both free and coupled male lover men, based on my perspective of what I’ve seen through the years. My experiences and observations as a gay men’s specialist psychotherapist might differ from other queer men, and even other gay male therapists, and we always have to be mindful of not indulging in unfair assumptions, stereotypes, or even prejudices. But since making a relationship serve (which I explain, in part, as the relationship’s level of satisfaction for each partner and in its overall longevity and subjective “quality” for each partner) is at least in part based on a skills-building process, skills that I have faith are required for a gay male relationship to both endure (quantity) and thrive (quality). These are the issues that come up repeatedly in couples counseling sessions:
1. Money– Gay male couples can contain a lot of conflict around funds. Statistically, white men tend to be relatively