Richie Jackson - Gay Like Me: A Father Writes to His Son

For Jackson, because of Jordan.

We were gay. Now were human.

Harvey Fierstein, Safe Sex

My Son,

The single dream and drive of my life has always been to be a father. I didnt have career goals, never fantasized about money or glory or fame. All I wanted was to catch a ball in the backyard with my son. I didnt desire power; I desired paternity. In 1984, when I was eighteen, I told my mother that I was gay and that I was going to be a father.

I have always felt lucky to be gay. Ive known since the third grade that I was gay, and even then it made me feel special, unique, chosen. I still feel that way. It is the blessing of my life. Everything good that has happened to me is because I am gay. Everything I think, believe, crave, create, conquer, comes from being gay. Ive marched, stood silent vigil, protested, picketed, boycotted. I have spoken up, spoken out. I have buried friends. I have had relationships, created a family, had that family fractured, then recovered and rebuilt a new one. I am used to the highs, the lows, and the loves. I am familiar with progress and bitter setbacks. I can rejoice in celebrations and navigate danger. But none of this came easy, and the journey to this point was a long and difficult one.

I was seventeen years old when I moved to New York City in 1983 to attend New York University, right in the heart of Greenwich Village, right at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic. The early 1980s were a harrowing time to be gay. The entire world seemed to be lined up against us. A plague was ravaging us, a new group called the Moral Majority was demonizing us, politicians used us as punching bags, and cardinals stigmatized us. There were very few laws to protect gay people. There were no out elected officials. There were no out movie stars; there was no visibility, no representation on TV. It was as if Id joined a secret society, bound together by oppression, and we reveled in our clandestinity even as we fought to assimilate.

When Nurse Jackie, the television series I produced, ended in 2015, I had an idea for another television show that I wanted not only to produce but to create. It would be about the differences between being gay when I was seventeen and what its like to be gay now. Growing older in the gay community has never been easy, but now there are many of us who find it hard to recognize the community we were born into. So I wrote plotlines to develop the story of how we reconcile our younger and older selves. I created the two primary characters: An older gay man named Guy, newly single at sixty-two, who is a fish out of water in his own community. In my story he finds himself roommates with a young twentysomething gay man named Zack, who is new to New York City. Zack pushes Guy to date and go on Grindr; Guy gets Zack to lift his face out of his phone and teaches him how to street cruise.

Just when I was putting this pitch together, you told Daddy Jordan and me you were gay. Suddenly everything I was trying to make up was real and happening right at the dinner table. You and I stood looking at each other across that complicated divide. And now you are eighteen and going off to college, and suddenly it doesnt feel like just a comedy anymore. Its a drama with high stakes. Now I write to you as a fellow member of the grand LGBTQ community in which we are both a part, as gay man to gay man.

Daddy Jordan wasnt in our lives when you were born. It was ten years into my relationship with BD when he and I had the life-changing conversation about having a baby. Sitting on the deck of a house on Fire Island, having just returned from a family reunion with our parents and our nieces and nephews, we felt the strong pull to start our journey to making our own family.

When we were pregnant with you and your identical twin, I was in a state of elation and agitation. I was thrilled but petrified that something would go wrong. Identical twinsI can still remember all the joyful faces of the people when we told them we were about to be fathers. The world had spun to a magical new place and it was good, if frightening. Surrogacy and in vitro fertilization were so new, and I was so scared.

On May 28, 2000, the phone rang at 11:30 p.m. I had been asleep for two hours. BD was visiting our surrogate, Shauna, in California. I picked up, and he said he was rushing Shauna to the hospital as a precaution, because she was having contractions. Your due date wasnt for another three months. He said he would call me back and hung up. I waited hours. Finally, BD called: Our babies were born, they were boys, premature and fragile, and our firstborn son had died. We had to quickly name you both, deciding which of the family names we had chosen would be relegated to a grieving memory. Then he said hed call when he had more news about you and he hung up. I got on the phone with United Airlines to try to get the first flight out in the morning to Modesto.

Your twin brother, our Boaz, died after two short hours of life, and you, at a frail two pounds and thirteen ounces, were battling mightily to hold on to your own life. Your tiny body could fit into the palm of my hand. The first morning I saw you, the doctor told me that you would likely not make it, that you would probably die. I was sick with worry for you and I mourned. I mourned your brother, mourned all that you had already lost, and I mourned my shattered expectations. I understand now that the reason its called expecting when you are pregnant isnt only because you are expecting a baby; its that the minute you hear the news, your expectations of what your child will be and of what your life will be instantaneously coalesce. And over the next nine months (or in our case six) you obsess and fantasize and plan for each part of the life you have envisioned.

We had to airlift you to University of California San Francisco Medical Center because it had a neonatal intensive care unit better able to care for you. Your first three months of life were spent in an incubator in the NICU, hooked up to a machine that helped you breathe.

You were prodded and poked. Your tiny veins were so worn from intravenous needles that at one point they had to put an IV line into your head. Every day was an emotional roller coaster with the mounting medical newshes going to be blind, hes going to be klutzy, he is going to need an operation.

You were so sick and your life so precarious. At one critical point you needed a blood transfusion. Because BD and I are gay, we were prohibited by US Food and Drug Administration regulations to be your blood donors. We had been parents for just two months; you were lying in an incubator, unable to breathe on your own, hooked up to a dozen wires; and because we were gay we couldnt take care of you the way you needed to be taken care of, the way we had pledged to care for you. As I seethed, a strangers blood coursed through your veins. Being prevented from giving you our blood wasnt a medical precautionthe doctors and staff knew that we were HIV negative: we had to be tested to do the surrogacyit was a smackdown. A smackdown when we were already downone son dead, one son in critical condition who may not survive. We were helpless, and were made to feel even more helpless. We were being locked out as the IV in your tiny arm released that strangers blood into your system. Just a few months old and you were already confronted with gay prejudice.

Now the FDA requirement is that gay men are not allowed to donate blood unless they have been celibate for twelve months. We are not assessed individually but as a group, and as a group we are labeled a risk. The lifetime ban has ended, but the prejudice that gay men are diseased, unclean, still stands. During catastrophic crises, when the Red Cross sends out those calls for emergency blood donations, our patriotism and volunteerism call us to act, but we are denied.