Ben Fergusson

In 2018, after the introduction of marriage equality in Germany, Ben Fergusson and his German husband Tom became one of the first same-sex married couples to adopt in the country. In Tales from the Fatherland Fergusson reflects on his long journey to fatherhood and the social changes that enabled it. He uses his outsider status as both a gay father and a parent adopting in a foreign country to explore the history and sociology of fatherhood and motherhood around the world, queer parenting and adoption and, ultimately, the meaning of family and love.

Tales from the Fatherland makes an impassioned case for the value of diversity in family life, arguing that diverse families are good for all families and that misogyny lies at the heart of many of the struggles of straight and queer families alike.

Two Dads, One Adoption and the Meaning of Parenthood

Tales from the Fatherland

Emma Hak-Kovacs

A number of studies have suggested that the children of same-sex parents have slightly better educational and psy- chological outcomes than kids brought up by straight parents, with an Italian study showing the children of gay fathers coming out best. The researchers suggest that the advantage has nothing to do with gay fathers being innately better parents than lesbian mothers or straight parents, it is simply that the harder it is to get a child, the more wanted the child is likely to be. And isn’t there in fact something very beautiful in this? The depth of one's desire to have a child makes one a better parent.

But what I often imagine is some archaeologist of the distant future cracking open our books, dusting off our hard drives, and discovering that we created a society in which the people who couldn't have children biologically looked after the children of those who weren't able to care for their biological children. Wouldn’t that archaeologist think she was reading about a utopia? If someone told you about the discovery of an uncontacted society, deep in the jungle, in which no child was neglected, where a child being loved and having a secure home was more important to the community than the sex of who was raising that child - wouldn't you think that was paradise?

Quite apart from the fact that the notion of coming out ignores the fluidity inherent in all of our sexualities and how sexuality can subtly shift over time, it is also premised on the idea that it happens in a single moment, like a stamp in your passport. Clonk. Queer. But of course revealing your sexuality isn't something that happens in a single moment. Instead, queer people, like all invisible minorities, take part in a life-long negotiation with concealment and disclosure.

Countering men who think that their wife or girlfriend should be the primary caregiver when their wife or girlfriend wants to share childcare is relatively unproblematic. The men are obviously wrong.

People who hold up the straight nuclear family as an icon would have you believe that same-sex families are a danger to traditional families. But isn't there in fact something beautiful in the desire of people who can't biologicaly have children to have children anyway? Doesn't their desire not in fact undermine but rather reinforce the mysterious underpinnings of humans' desire for family?

Tales from the Fatherland quotes

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