adoption

a friend loaned me a copy of this book when i mentioned that i am looking into adoption. i'm from seattle and am familiar with dan savage's weekly sex advice column and i was a bit curious about his decision to adopt a child. savage's account of choosing to raise a child in a gay home was funny, informative, and eye-opening.

opening your heart and home to an adopted child means divulging your financial and personal history to strangers who decide if you're worthy of raising a kid. savage wonders, as i do, about "bio-kids" who are born to people who have no business raising a child. In order to adopt a child you have go through mountains of paperwork and interviews to prove that you will make a good parent. savage and his boyfriend indeed proved, against odds, that they would be able to provide a good home for a child. they have to compete with straight couples for a child, and they have twisted ways of coping with the stress, but i was able to related to their situation in many ways.

in sum, this is a quick engaging read with funny and poignant scenes that will enlighten you about adoption, love, and what makes up a "real" family.

Like other reviewers, I found this book hilarious, brazenly honest (adopting a baby to fulfill a book contract?!), and engagingly written. The initial, pre-kid chapters describing the relationship with his boyfriend and their decision to become parents are, as expected, opinionated and funny. Although he is by no means reserved, Savage tones down his aggressive sex columnist style and maintains an even humor throughout.

The tale becomes more than merely fun with the introduction of the pregnant street kid who agrees to give them her baby. Savage puts away the soapbox and tells a rather affecting story about pregnancy and birth without becoming cloying, cynical, or overly self-involved. Incidental details about the open adoption process and gutter punk culture add a lot to the narrative.

In the end I was amused to see that the only people who seemed concerned about the adopting parents' sexuality were the happy fathers themselves and that, political rhetoric aside, Savage is quite a family-values man.

Leave it to uber-jerk Dan Savage to give the rest of us homosexuals a black eye once again. The emotionally-arrested biological terrorist (look into his hateful, patently illegal stunt to throw a monkey wrench into a fringe presidential candidate's campaign, all for an article on Salon.com) makes all sorts of simply bone-headed proclamations in this book. It reads as though it wasn't professionally edited, and is overlong by about 30%.

You'll find all sorts of dunderheaded pearls of wisdom in Dan's relentless tale about HIMSELF and HIS OWN wishes. For example, the man who often advocates infidelity in his sex-advice column informs us here that closed adoptions are ALWAYS wrong. That's right -- because he feels his experience was the right way to do things, anyone who wants to keep a kid from knowing about a horrendous situation they were adopted out of is an amoral cretin.

Dan Savage is a judgmental narcissist. I'm a gay guy who's been contemplating adoption with my partner, but I feel dirty for having read this thing. It's crass, self-absorbed and terribly, terribly self-righteous.

By the way, I don't believe for one second that some of those other 1-star reviews are from actual Christians. A la Moby, there are a lot of deluded people out there aping fundies' opinions to make them look bad in forums like this. Sad. But Dan's us-vs-them mentality only reinforces those weirdos' delusions that they're helping their own cause.