The Velveteen Father
By Jesse Green
An excerpt, published with author's permission
Unconditional love. Immortality. Were they good reasons for wanting a child? They sounded a lot like the reasons given by teenaged mothers. But Andy no longer cared about reasons. What he finally realized was that having children was in all cases ill-founded. Motives were never unimpeachable, and so he did not need to have an unimpeachable motive. Had he not been a gay man, no one would ever have asked him to explain. Since he was a gay man, he had been forced to do much more thinking than most people do -- certainly more than his own parents had -- if to no better conclusion. Like everyone else with their mixtures of terrible thinking and fantasy and hope, and something perhaps theological, if you will (or biological, if you won't), he had what reasons he had. He was human; it was enough to say he wanted not so much to fill a hole as to tend to something untended in himself. He was rich but fallow. He wanted a child because he wanted a chance, at last, to love well: not to receive unconditional love, but give it.