FAMILY WAY : Two Men and a Baby

The small meeting room is packed with 27 men and women ready to learn about financing their kids’ educations. It could be a gathering of any parents association anywhere in the country, but this one, Maybe Baby, is unique: Its members are all homosexuals, and they all want to be parents.

Maybe Baby meets on the third Sunday of every month at the Gay & Lesbian Community Center in Hollywood to swap stories, services and support about problems specific to gays and lesbians planning to start a family. “It’s not easy,” says Allen Dean, who shares custody of his 10-year-old daughter with his ex-wife and who wants to adopt a pair of siblings in the next few years. “Every county in California routinely rejects gay applications, and a lot of adoption agencies are connected to religious organizations. We’ve even had lesbians getting turned down by doctors for artificial insemination.”

There is no shortage of support groups for homosexuals who are already parents, but, says Steve Louis, who founded the group last spring, “The needs of parents-to-be who are gay were not being addressed.” (The names in this story have been changed at the request of the interviewees.) To remedy that, Maybe Baby programs have offered advice from such experts as a sperm bank director, a family practice attorney, a local social services official and a psychotherapist.

Chris Tucker is considering joint parenthood with a heterosexual female friend. Katie Adams and her lover are considering their options, including artificial insemination. Louis hopes to father a child with a lesbian, but says they’ll maintain separate lives. “That’s no different from friends of mine who now have two sets of parents through divorce,” he says.

Gays and lesbians, Louis says, can be even more committed to their parenting roles than heterosexuals: “They’re doing it against all odds.”