I Was A Teenage Sperm Donor

[randy_byers]

Recently I wrote about the movie The Kids Are All Right and tried to argue that it was a new kind of story because it presented a new kind of character in the sperm donor. (The lesbian spouses/mothers are also arguably a new character type leading to new story types.) I was talking about the movie with my neighbors on Saturday, and E told me she knows a woman who has a child by a donor whose sperm has produced 150 children. This mother belongs to an internet community of women who have children by the donor. This modern world! And all this finally made me remember that I donated sperm in my mid-twenties. (Not as a teenager, but hey, I was a late bloomer.)



This all came about through a lesbian that Denys and I knew back then. She was the mother of a boy that Denys was a father figure for. She approached me a couple of times about lesbian friends of hers who were trying to get pregnant. Would I be willing to donate my sperm to the cause? I was told I would be one amongst other donors, so we wouldn't know who the actual father was. I agreed to it both times. The method was that L would call me and let me know she was on her way, and I would jerk off into a jar. This led to some surreal scenes when she would arrive before I had finished my work, and I would hear her upstairs chatting with Denys while I was trying to get off. Good times! Timing was of the essence, because the sperm would only stay alive for a short period in the jar. L would rush off with the jar as soon as I handed it over. I'm not sure if an actual turkey baster was involved at the other end of the process. Eventually the requests for sperm would stop, so presumably a pregnancy had been achieved.

There was a form I filled out beforehand both times, but I can't remember what all it asked. I remember for one of them I gave my name as Boreas, the Greek name for the north wind, because I had been reading Herodotus, who told a tale of people who believed that pregnancy was caused by the north wind. One of the forms asked how I would feel if I were to be contacted by my child in the future, and I wrote, "Scared." Several years later I told the story to a friend who had been adopted, and he was furious about it. He thought it was very unfair for children not to know who their biological fathers were, especially regarding possible congenital illnesses. That had never even occurred to me.

Honestly, I don't know what I was thinking, if I was thinking. That I was helping a friend in need, I guess. I've wondered periodically if I am in fact a biological father to someone (maybe two), but the idea doesn't seem very real to me. Is that strange? Can paternity really be that free of consequence? Apparently so. It's possible that I could still be contacted by somebody some day, although I'm not sure how I would be found at this point, because L died of cancer many years ago. I don't think I put my real name on those forms. It was all very homespun and ramshackle, our process. It was a process that wanted to excise the father from the picture, unlike the scenario my neighbor told me about, where the brilliant sire was a commodity mothers purchased.

Comments

[terryminer.livejournal.com]

had a friend who was a professional sperm donor, said his sperm was very popular. he looked good on paper- tall, dark-haired, intelligent-however, he was nuts! a pathological story-teller so good at his deception it took his closest friends years to discover that he lied All the time!
i wonder how his kids turned out.....

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

One thing I don't understand in the trope of The Long Lost Child (or, Long Lost Father) is how there's an INSTANT BOND between inseminator and spawn.

That's the way it is in movies and books. The LLC seeks out the LLF, they meet up, INSTANT BOND. Whereas our probably-mutual adopted friend sought out his birth family, and in all cases it was a painful experience, filled with pretty bitter rejection and negation. And according to him, that was the experience of just about everyone who sought out their birth parents in spite of closed record adoptions.

Having said all that! I think records should be open, and adoptions should be open, not just because of the congenital illness, but because it makes a stronger family bond all around.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

One of the criticisms Dan Savage made of The Kids Are All Right is that it doesn't show the sperm donor being integrated into the family, and he talked about how he and his husband have integrated the mother of their child into their family. I think it's a dumb criticism of the movie, but it does point out variations on the story that could be told. It also seems that a woman who brings a child to term and then adopts it out has made a whole different level of commitment and relationship with the child than a guy who makes a one-time donation of sperm to somebody he doesn't know and never sees. On the other hand, I'm not sure I understand the argument for how open adoptions make for stronger family bonds all around.

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't have enough direct experience to say "better family all around." However, Dan's written pretty glowingly about his birth mother being involved in the family. And it feels more normal to the children, rather than filled with shame or that there's a big secret.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

In the only open adoptions with which I'm personally acquainted, the fact that there's no big secret and everybody knows everybody else and what all their peculiar relationships to each other are helps a great big whopping amount to make it easier for everybody to treat each other relatively normally.

"Relatively normally" in this case means "in just as neurotic a way as if everyone lived in two-parent heterosexual families and the two parents were the birth parents as well as the parenting parents, but with more entertaining origin stories. No, not as entertaining as Spiderman. Okay, maybe they're not all that entertaining."

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

One thing that this is making me think about is how extensive adoption is on Yap, but in a form that I don't really understand. It's very common for people to adopt, say, a sister's kid. It's not because of infertility or because the sister can't afford the baby, and I'm not actually sure why they do it. My sense is that they don't tell the adopted children who their real parents are, but it's more or less an open secret and everybody is living in the same village. I'm positive that there are nuances to the practice that I don't even perceive.

[grytpype-thynne.livejournal.com]

Daddy!

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

No, I won't wear the paternity suit.