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Rough going overseas: gay men and lesbians who adopt abroad must hide their lives from suspicious antigay governments. But those who persevere give desperate children loving homes
Advocate, The, July 19, 2005 by Etelka Lehoczky
At 3 1/2 years old, Benjamin is already a Beatles fanatic. "He was Ringo for Halloween," says singer-songwriter Douglas Wood, one of Benjamin's two dads. "There's nothing more adorable than hearing him sing 'When I'm 64' or 'Eleanor Rigby.'"
Benjamin hasn't always been so Westernized. Born in Asia in 2001, he was an orphan until Wood and his partner, voice-over actor James Sie, took him into their lives. "We wanted to adopt an Asian child, and that's hard to do domestically," Sie says. "There are very few Asian women here who give their children up for adoption. It seemed like an international adoption was our best bet." The couple researched the process, found an agency that was right for them, and met with an adoption support group. They underwent a home-study evaluation and rounded up the necessary documents. Then they waited for a child to become available.
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Several months and $20,000 later, they were on their way to Benjamin's native country, where they were introduced to a rich cultare they have come to admire deeply.
"When you're filling out the forms explaining to the country's officials why you want to adopt from their country, you're supposed to say something like, 'We've always admired your culture and heritage.' After we visited, that was no longer an exaggeration," Wood says. "We really fell in love with the place."
The couple were also introduced to a homophobic government from which they needed to hide their relationship. While planning the first of their two trips to the country--the name of which they asked The Advocate to withhold, to help keep the door open for other gay couples--Wood and Sie discovered that their stateside adoption agency had not informed its overseas representatives that it was working for a gay couple. The adoption could be blocked if local officials found out that Sie was not in fact single.
So they decided to obscure their relationship, taking a female pal along as Sie's de facto beard. Wood remained in the background, pretending not to be involved as they met Benjamin for the first time. The first trip went smoothly enough that Wood and Sie traveled alone when they returned 40 days later the waiting period required by local law--to complete the adoption. They spent the next two weeks finalizing paperwork, with Benjamin now in their care. But they remained guarded about their relationship.
"Right after the official adoption, it was really hard," Wood says. 'Here was my son, and I wasn't allowed to show my feelings."
Of the handful of countries where nonnationals can adopt, not one allows gays and lesbians to do so openly. Information about the practice is circulated largely through word of mouth or anonymous e-mail lists. Couples avoid speaking openly about their process to online friends, wary of snooping governments monitoring the Internet.
"If the discussion is happening [openly] on the list, people believe it's being monitored by other countries," says Arlene Istar Lev, author of The Complete Lesbian and Gay Parenting Guide. "Think about it: If you were in the equivalent of the CIA in Guatemala, and you knew that children were being adopted by gay families and this was against your religion or whatever, it's very simple. You get on the Internet, you search for 'gay adoption,' and you sign on. And there's everybody's name, saying, 'Hi, my name is John Smith and we just got a child from Guatemala.'"
Because of this danger, most U.S. agencies that facilitate international adoptions for gay and lesbian families are secretive about it. One such agency, whose representative asked not to be named, warned The Advocate that any publicity could endanger countless couples' ability to adopt.
"Word of mouth gets around, so there's no problem with [gays and lesbians] finding out that an agency supports gay and lesbian families within the community," he says. "But particularly with the political climate, if the wrong people find out about it, they could begin taking action."
Even if the foreign government cooperates with a gay person's adoption, potential parents face other risks. Marlowe and Elijah B'sheart, a lesbian couple from the Detroit area, were working with an agency in 2002 to adopt two orphan babies living in foster care in a Latin American country. When they arrived for their final visit to finalize the adoption, they found one boy with pneumonia, a hole in his lung, and burns on his back, possibly from crude attempts to raise his body temperature. He had brain damage from an episode of cardiac arrest.
"We trusted people we shouldn't have," Marlowe B'sheart says. "But we didn't have as many choices in an agency because we were open about our relationship from the beginning." (To read the B'shearts' frill story, go to Advocate.com and click on LINKS.)
Some countries are friendlier than others, but any nation's policies can change suddenly. "It varies from week to week and month to month and year to year," says Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute and the author of Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution Is Transforming America.
