Adopting a New Family Vision

“The Velveteen Father,” Jesse Green’s brave, big-hearted chronicle of an alternative path to parenthood, is a book about where America is now--a most enlightened, evolved, compassionate America, at any rate, which is a place where the conventional family, famously breaking down, is also at the same time, in pockets, being carefully built up again.

Green tells the story of how he and his partner, Andy, came to understand that they wanted to bring meaning to their lives by rearing children. When Green first met Andy, a high school guidance counselor in his early 40s, Andy had already adopted Erez, then 14 months, “not so much to fill a hole as to tend to something untended in himself.” With Erez, Andy had faced several obstacles. There was his mother’s initial reaction (“God forbid; wait until I die”). There were bitter inequities, such as the teenage girls Andy counseled, who treated pregnancy with alarming casualness. There was the fact that “as a source of passion--the kind of passion mothers are admired for possessing and vilified for lacking--fatherhood, even biological fatherhood, was suspicious.” And there was a distinct hierarchy in the adoption world, where infants went first to married couples, then to single women and last to single men, gay or otherwise.

But Andy persevered. Willing to become a father to a non-white child, he signed on with a domestic agency that specialized in infants of Hispanic origin. Neither the agency nor the social worker asked about his sexuality. They told him that he would have a baby within nine months; he received a call after three weeks.

Green’s paternal feelings came more slowly. A successful journalist, he found himself facing a dilemma in his late 30s: “I had perfected everything possible in my world,” he remarks, “except me.” It was with children, his niece in particular, that he felt most real and most alive. Without a child of his own, he would always remain a child to his parents; however, he was not yet at the point that he wanted one himself.

But then he met Andy--and Erez, whom he found to be “a faith healer.” He was gradually beguiled. Before long he became a loving second father to Erez and his brother Luke, whom Andy adopted, with Green’s support and encouragement, two years later.

Not everything in the men’s experience (or the memoir) is idyllic. In society generally, Green points out, “[a]s hearts trump clubs, fatherhood trumps gayness,” but this doesn’t mean that their unorthodox fatherhood fails to attract insensitive comments and odd looks. Green sometimes resolves issues a little too facilely, such as the virtues of the closed adoptions the men favored. Green passes too quickly over the boys’ potential need to know their origins. Similarly, he is a bit peremptory about how much the boys should be educated about their Hispanic backgrounds. And finally there is Green’s own lingering hesitation: While he moves to Brooklyn, he still maintains an apartment of his own.

“Is the traditional family so successful that it cannot stand experimentation?” Green asks, specifically with regard to his separate living (more accurately, working) quarters. The question, though, applies more generally to the family Andy and Green have built, and the answer, in our fractured contemporary world, is a resonant no.