Seriously Entertaining: Andrew Solomon on "Inside the Lie"

I make up in tailoring for what I may lack in content when my parents got married one of my mother's best friends from college gave them as a wedding present a basset hound she was a breeder of basset hounds the best friend of my mother and I think my mother had actually dropped a hint of her and the basset and arrived and her name was Magnolia and my mother said I cannot be dragged down the street on my heels along Lexington Avenue shouting magnolia magnolia so we decided or they decided rather because I wasn't born yet meant to rename the dog and because my father maintained that she bade like a Vogue nary and soprano she was called Brunhilde Hilda was apparently an easier thing to call out while being dragged down Lexington Avenue and my father had responsibility for walking the dog late at night and when he walked the dog late at night he would sometimes run into somebody else who also had a basset hound who also walked the dog late at night and they would sometimes chat and they would talk about their basset hounds and then my mother worked out that this owner of the other basset hound was actually the person who owned a little gift shop that was nearby that she occasionally stopped in and I was born and I was little and the gift shop was between our house and central park and so my mother would stop there and she would talk to Elmer Elmer grosse was his name and and to Willy and they became friends of my parents and it became clear over time that they were alone in some ways and so my parents invited them to be effectively part of our family and they came to Christmas and they came to Thanksgiving and they were round for all sorts of family occasions Elmer and Willy and it didn't occur to me at the time that there was anything on you we'll about the fact that my very middle-class New York parents had these gay friends who had come over who ran a gift shop and Elmer had been studying medicine he'd actually gone to an extremely prestigious school and then on to a very prestigious university and then started medical school at Yale and then he was drafted into the Army in the Second World War and the story I always heard was that he saw terrible things while he was there and when he came back he didn't have the stomach for medicine and I didn't know that I was inside a lie when I heard that story I didn't know until years later actually after elmer died and I was talking to Willie about it and I said it's never made any sense to me that he was in the middle of medical school and then he didn't finish it and Willie said nobody was going to go to a gay doctor he said and we had met each other and he decided that that was more important and I realized what he had had to give up to be true to his love and to who he was and it was the most terrible shock to me when I understood that and understood where he came from so if I grew up inside a lie I grew up inside the lie but gay people couldn't really have full lives most of them weren't going to find love most of them weren't going to find a way through they certainly weren't going to have a family they would have to give up what they really wanted to do and spend their lives painting amusing bar stools that was the way they were going to make it through the world and that was not a great message for me to grow up with lovely though it was that we actually had gay friends who came to the house who were sort of surrogate uncles and I as I realized that I was gay was determined that I wasn't going to live that way that I wasn't going to have to give up all of my dreams that I wasn't going to miss out on whatever the things were that I wanted or needed to be doing and so I went to great lengths in an ongoing attempt to be straight instead and at one point I've read in the back of New York magazine the aforementioned New York magazine an ad for something called sexual surrogacy therapy and I thought I would go for sexual surrogacy therapy and so I went off to an office on West 46th Street I believe it was where there were these women who worked there who were not exactly prostitutes but they were also not exactly anything else and so I went to visit these women and these people who I was encouraged to call doctors gave are encouraged to call exercises with these women I was encouraged to call surrogates and you let Eve switching around so you didn't get too attached to one of them but I was always hoping to get my favorite it was a kind of buxom blonde woman from the deep south who eventually admitted to me that she was actually a necrophiliac who had taken this job after she got in trouble down at the morgue so that was my that was my first attempt at trying to be straight and it sort of worked actually it worked enough so that I had a bunch of romantic relationships with women and indeed went through a whole period of my youth when a girlfriend and then I had a boyfriend and the night her girlfriend and then I had a boy for it was very confusing for all parties involved and bit by bit I began to wonder whether I had any integrity in this whole undertaking at all and by the time I was into my early 30s I had found a guy who I thought I might very well end up spending the rest of my life with I had met him in Budapest he was Hungarian he moved to the United States to live with me he found many things about the United States very confusing and we had a lot of conversations about America which were in many instances very very illuminating but he was a conservator of wooden sculpture and at some moment the wooden sculptures that he was working on which religious began giving him visions and I came home from being out someplace one day and found that he had left to join a religious community in Romania and that was the end of that and I thought to myself wow I thought I might not even make it to where Elmer and Willi did so I also thought that I was never going to to find any sort of love and then I wrote a book about depression and I was being interviewed about depression in a hotel in st. Paul Minnesota by a journalist from the Star Tribune an interview about depression may not sound like the beginning of a great love story but for us it was and I met John 14 years ago and I suddenly thought oh oh this this is love I thought this is actually possible for gay people but I was obsessed with the idea that I wanted to have children I had always wanted to have children I'd been incredibly close to my parents my relationship with them had been so central to my life I liked the idea of projecting it forward somehow I liked the idea of having a family but that was the one piece that had always seemed impossible and in those years of the boyfriends and the girlfriends it wasn't really that I was worried about the stigma of being gay it was that I felt I had to choose between being true to myself and having a family and I couldn't see how I could live with myself if I weren't true to myself and I couldn't see how I could live without having children except by being endlessly sad and while I was going back and forth and back and forth trying to make up my mind the world changed around me and it turned out that you actually could be gay and have children was just becoming clear to everyone about the time that John and I met so John then told me fairly shortly after we'd met that he had actually been a sperm donor for some lesbian friends and that he therefore had a son named Oliver and I said you have a son and he said well it's not my son it's their son but I was the donor and I said wow I said what does he call you and John said well his mom's Tammy and Laura said you've decided he should call me donor dad and I said Wow I said and is that what he calls you and he said well he never quite got it right and I said yes and he said so he calls me doe not dad I said don't up dad but I was completely fascinated John was gay and in some sense he had a child and he had these friends and they were gay and they had a child and we went to the Minnesota State Fair and saw the display cases full of butter princesses and all of the other actually it's cropped art there was a series that had been done at the Minnesota State Fair that year not apparently intended for a camp gay audience but this is what it was there was someone who had done a series of pictures in crop art which is where you take seeds from various kinds of crops and you paste them onto something and you make a kind of mosaic and it was sins of the first ladies and the opening one was Jackie Kennedy smoking in any event there we were at the Minnesota State Fair and we ran into Tammy and Laura and this little boy this little boy who looked a lot like the man I decided I was in love with and I thought wow his name was Oliver and I wondered what that was all going to be like and then about a year after we'd met John announced one day that Tammy and Laura decided they wanted another child and he'd agreed to be the donor and they then produced Lucy so now there were two of these children and John wasn't very close to Tammy and Laura but I was fascinated fascinated by them fascinated by this relationship and in the meanwhile I turned 40 and for my 40th birthday one of my closest friends from college rather surprised me by coming up from Fort Worth Texas where she lives surprised me because she doesn't much like travel and I was delighted it was a surprise party every thrilled to see her as I was so many other people and she and I went out for dinner the next night and I had said in passing some years before I was at a party she had been married to someone who appeared to be glamorous but turned out to be a jerk and I asked her whether she was sad that they weren't together anymore and she said no the only thing she was sad about was not having the chance to be a mother and I had said in an offhand way at this crowded table full of people well you'd be an amazing mother if you ever decide you want a kid I'll be the father and now suddenly there she was the night after my 40th birthday and she said do you remember you said that and I said oh yes I did say that didn't I and she said I think I'd like to do it and I thought I think I'll have another drink now and I felt very overwhelmed but I thought well John fathered these two children I could father a child like the world was opening up around us and John wasn't so crazy about this idea and he pointed out that he had been a sperm donor and that I was setting out to be the acknowledged father of this child and that she was going to have my last name and there were various other dramas involved it took us some years to work our way through it but we did bit by bit and finally we decided that it was all going to be okay and Blaine and I went ahead and we went through an IVF process and in the meanwhile John had said to me that he wanted to get married and I said well married what is married really mean for gay people anyway it doesn't have much meaning but at a dual national US and UK and Britain it passed civil partnership legislation and actually a British civil partnership did in fact have some meaning and so we decided that we would have one and we got married in England and very much enjoyed this kind of endearing which was that we realized the more traditional our wedding was the more radical it was because we were both men and since we both liked big parties and since we were both men we decided to have a really big English country wedding we went through the whole legal process with the British registrar John would then have residents right in the United Kingdom we had to be interviewed at some length to prove that we were real and that this wasn't a green card marriage I stumbled momentarily on the spelling of his mother's maiden name it all seemed to be in jeopardy we made it through and Blaine came to the wedding with her partner Richard whom she'd met in the meanwhile at three months pregnant with our daughter and John ventured that we'd had the first gay shotgun wedding and I said in my wedding toast the love that dared not speak its name is now broadcasting and I went down to Texas a few months later with John we went for the birth of our daughter who rather confusingly is also named Blaine and the Blaine's we call them for short I went down to Texas for the birth of our daughter and I remember standing there and thinking I'm going to be a father in a few hours I thought I'm gonna be a father and it seemed so strange to think of that as if I were still going to be myself and I were also going to be a shooting star or some other strange far-fetched thing and I thought all these years that I said but I want to have children but I want to have children but I want to have children and I didn't think I would or could and I didn't know how and I'd certainly never guessed that this was the way it would happen and then there we were in the delivery room and then I held this child in my arms for the first time but I thought it's really happened I really am a father and I wonder how I'm going to make sense of it and then we had to figure out by going down to visit Texas they're coming up to visit in New York well if the adjustment that was involved in this new role that I had and the dynamic among John and me and John and me and Blaine and Blaine and me and Blaine and Richard and Richard and me there was a lot of moving parts in this in this narrative and so along we went and I realized that day that hope is actually not a thing with feathers hope is a pink squalling thing newly born and I felt this surge of hope and I thought these things have worked out these things I thought would never happen and so I then said to John that I thought it would be really tremendous if we were to have a child of our own full-time who could live with us in New York and I said to John don't you think that would be a great idea and John wasn't so sure that he thought that would be a great idea and said he thought we had kind of a nice life as we were and I said well I got married I ended up enjoying it but I didn't want to at the beginning and it would be great if we could have this child too and we talked about it and we talked about it and I realized that while our love for each other was a prerequisite to our bringing a child into the world it wasn't a sufficient condition and finally my next birthday rolled around and John said your present is upstairs and I went upstairs and there was a beautiful 17th century German wooden cradle with the bow on it and John said if it's a boy can we call him George after my grandpa and so we then began the strange process of searching for an egg donor and figuring out what we wanted to do we asked a couple of friends who are young enough to do it but the people we knew who are young enough weren't emotionally ready and the people we knew who are emotionally ready weren't young enough so in the end we went with an agency and we went through that strange process where you scan through the website and you look at all of the characteristics of this parade of young women as if you were sitting or during a car online that you're gonna have to drive for the rest of your life and we finally found someone we liked and then she didn't pass the tests at the clinic we were using and we went on to somebody else and in the meanwhile we had to figure out who would be our surrogate who was going to carry this pregnancy and we started the process of looking and we were talking with various friends about it and one night we'd gone to Minneapolis and we went over to see Tammy and Laura and Oliver and Lucy and Laura said John we'll never be able to thank you enough for giving us our children the greatest thing in our lives but maybe we could show you how much we appreciate it I could be your surrogate if you'd like and we said that that would be really wonderful and so then there ensued the embryo transfer and all of the procedures involved and Laura carrying this child I was the genetic father there was the egg donor Laura was carrying the child and as we went along we spent much more time with Tammy and Laura and with Oliver and Lucy and we got closer and closer to them and came to feel more and more like family when the kids had first been born John had sort of taken a back seat in part because the mothers wanted to make sure that it was understood that they were the two parents but they understood it by then and so it wasn't dangerous for us all to be friends with one another and so that became the source of our son George getting married and having children are both very public events I remember the sense not only that we had these children who were new people for us to love but also that I had shrugged off the heavy coil of that unhappiness that had been with me for such a long time that unhappiness that in some way had started when I understood that Elmer and Willie came to us for Christmas because their own families didn't want to have them there I understood that we were past that I understood it the day that George was born and children children used to make me sad I used to see them and I used to feel sad in part because I was kind of a strain child and not very popular and they reminded me of that and sad because I thought they were one of life's blessings that would forever of that being far from me and now finally it wasn't far for me anymore and in contemplating having these two children we suddenly had four because Oliver and Lucy said that if Blaney called us daddy and Papa and if George was going to call a study in Papa that they'd like to call us daddy and Papa too so there we were the four of us now they set up a whole series of dynamics and I would be lying to you if I said that they have been completely smooth sailing the way of life of Fort Worth Texas the way of life of New York City and the way of life of Minneapolis are three different ways of life the way of life of the straight couple the lesbian couple and the gay male couple are all kind of different there is a great deal that has to be bridged through this whole process and also there's just a lot of explaining that has to be done when my daughter was doing the test to get into Fort Worth Country Day she was there and she did really well on almost everything they asked her and then they said and now for a picture of your family and she said no and they said no come on we'd like you to draw a picture of your family and she said aside she was four and she said it's just too complicated and I think there was always that sense of that complexity in fact my friend reg Barton who is married to this evenings Amanda Forman our splendid and much-loved host for the evening once came to dinner at our house and when he was leaving he said I'm sure there's a name for this kind of consanguinity he said but I I just wanted to say I very much enjoyed talking to the daughter of the partner of the mother of your daughter and I said Leslie is delightful isn't she so we then sent out our birth announcements about George and I had almost forgotten that it's not such a completely accepting world out there and John's cousin Beth sent back the birth announcement with a message across it that said your way of life is against my Christian values and I wish to have no further contact and I was struck by the fact that there seemed to be people who think that families like mine represent a threat somehow to families like theirs and I don't accept those subtractive models of love only additive ones and I believe that in the same way that species diversity is necessary to sustain the planet so this diversity of kinds of affection is necessary to sustain the ecosphere of kindness I recognize that in 20 states it is legal for someone like me to be fired for being gay or to be denied housing I recognize that there are laws coming up all over the world the anti sodomy propaganda law in Russia being the one that's had the most fresh but 27 African countries have recently passed laws against sodomy in Nigeria people are routinely stoned to death in Saudi Arabia two men who had been caught together were recently subjected to 7,000 lashes each leaving them permanently disabled the president of Zimbabwe has referred to gay people as filth and as I hear all of those stories I have to think how many people are still Willy and Elmer were not even Willy and Elmer who after all found each other and found rather a nice gift shop I remember being with Blaine and Blaine in the post office going I think to get her first passport and Blaine and I were swinging her we're each holding a hand and swinging her up in the air she was too okay we were swinging her she was too and she fell down and I remember the heartbreak of that moment and the realization that that was the love I had been waiting for thank you [Applause]

Channel: House of SpeakEasy

Views: 1,308

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: LGBTQ, Andrew Solomon, parenthood, family

Id: AzF1TgywCQM

Length: 24min 42sec (1482 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 30 2020