Stuff Gay People Like: Foreign adoptions

It is known that gay people are among the world’s most traveled, forgoing 3-car garages and SUVs to spend their money on plane tickets and expensive downtown lofts in cities far from where they grew up. In spite of that, only the tiniest of fraction of the Earth’s surface makes up the places gay men want to go; their destinations consist of the island of Manhattan, San Francisco, Tokyo, Berlin, West Hollywood, The Bahamas, Miami, and for those who like cutting themselves, Seattle.

Not only does the travel map exclude outer suburbs and rural areas – which are about as culturally different from the gay universe as Hare Krishnas – it completely skips the central states, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and the entire continent of Africa.

So the urban, white gay couple thinks it over: if we’ll never travel to a place like North Korea or Cuba, why don’t we obtain our very own piece of the third-world to keep right here at home? How about adopting a Columbian baby? They decide that not only does it save a child from having to grow up in some strange foreign culture, but it creates an alternative multi-racial family, the perfect epitome of progressivism and tolerance.

Suck on that, hippie neighbors! You may have gone to the Peace Corps after college, but we’re gay and our kid is from Columbia. We don’t know very much about Columbia, but it’s probably homophobic. So if she turns out to be a lesbian, we probably saved her from that! How many Columbian lesbians did you save from intolerance, hippies?

Straight people might have some concerns about adopting a child who “looks like” them. “But what if he’s discriminated against for being adopted?” they ask. “Other kids can be so cruel; what if he’s teased and can’t be popular?” Children are very perceptive, they say, and oh my gosh what if he’s the only one in the family with freckles? Even if no one says it out loud he’ll notice and be scarred, and grow up to be a serial killer. How would a different-looking child deal with being the only one in the family with freckles? For a lot of straight parents, that’s reason enough to forgo adoption altogether and try a few more years of expensive fertility treatments.

They’re also full of anxiety about the time they’ll have to give the adopted child that talk – the one when they dump upon his innocent mind the crushing reality that he is not actually their biological spawn. At least if he looks like everyone else, they figure, he’ll be ten or twelve before he has to deal with that conversation.

Gay people are unmoved by these conundrums. First, they’ve all already had a big, awkward conversation with family members in their lives, which at first resulted in an unpleasant trip to Bible Camp but eventually settled into uncomfortable acceptance. Second, regardless of what their kid looks like it’s going to be fairly obvious that she’s adopted from an early age when she mentions “her two dads.” And as far as teasing goes, most of them risked getting the shit beat out of them in high school when they showed up to the Homecoming dance with a date named Jason. They got over it, it gave them a reason to look forward to being an adult, and their daughter is definitely going to art school anyway.

With that in mind, young gay men dream about adopting all their kids from foreign countries, one from each continent for a whole collection of diverse children. That way they can all dress like the cast of Rent for family Christmas photos! Because a real family is based not on appearance, but love – and created like the build-your-avatars screen at the start of a video game.

Stuff Gay People Like (SGPL) is a satirical/cultural column. Visit the Facebook Page.