The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant - Softcover

Savage, Dan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452281768 ISBN 13: 9780452281769

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2000

Synopsis

Dan Savage's nationally syndicated sex advice column, "Savage Love," enrages and excites more than four million people each week. In The Kid, Savage tells a no-holds-barred, high-energy story of an ordinary American couple who wants to have a baby. Except that in this case the couple happens to be Dan and his boyfriend. That fact, in the face of a society enormously uneasy with gay adoption, makes for an edgy, entertaining, and illuminating read. When Dan and his boyfriend are finally presented with an infant badly in need of parenting, they find themselves caught up in a drama that extends well beyond the confines of their immediate world. A story about confronting homophobia, falling in love, getting older, and getting a little bit smarter, The Kid is a book about the very human desire to have a family.

About this title

Review:

Best known for his syndicated sexual advice column, "Savage Love," Dan Savage shares his own story in The Kid, a hilarious account of his efforts--along with his partner--to adopt a child. (Whoops, make that his boyfriend; Savage can't stand the "genderless" P-word: "Straight people and press organs that want to acknowledge gay relationships while at the same time pushing the two-penises stuff as far out of their minds as possible love 'partner.' I hated it.") Savage doesn't give an inch on the sexuality issue; it's hard to imagine that a homophobic reader would even pick up The Kid, but if it happened, Savage's unapologetic presentation of his life would quickly scare that reader off. Which isn't to say that he paints a rosy picture of homosexual cohabitation: the very first scene finds Dan's boyfriend, Terry, locking himself in the bathroom after a fight over the music on the car stereo. The misadventures continue through each step of the open-adoption process, in which Dan and Terry get to know their baby's birth mother, and the first few weeks of parenthood. The Kid is a wonderful, charming account of real "family values" that proves love knows no limits.

From the Back Cover:

From Dan Savage, the writer whose sex-advice column, "Savage Love", enrages and excites four million people every week, comes the story of his journey into parenthood.

For Dan and his boyfriend Terry, the odyssey begins at a seminar in Portland where (after rejecting the idea of making a "biokid" with a lesbian couple, a lesbian single, and their straight next-door neighbor), they decide on an "open adoption". The birth mother who selects them as the adoptive parents for her child is a street kid named Melissa, who drinks and uses drugs during pregnancy and who, despite doctor's orders, is still living on the streets. As Dan and Terry tag along on her prenatal visits and the due date rapidly approaches, the fears common to adoptive parents mount: What if the baby isn't healthy? What if we aren't parent material? What if the birth mother changes her mind and decides to keep the baby?

In The Kid, Dan Savage shares his views on what it means to be gay and raising a child in America today. In the process, he takes his usual scathingly funny potshots at everything from growing up gay to committing to a younger man, from the gay left to the religious right, homophobia...love...getting fat...getting married...getting older...and the very human desire to have a family.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0452281768
• ISBN 13: 9780452281769
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256