5
“So whose sperm are you going to use? Yours or Drew’s?”
I knew coming out of the closet would mean sacrificing some privacy, but I never expected that a few years later, I’d be having this conversation with my mom.
This was an unforeseen downside of surrogacy—the spermification of my life. Once Drew and I decided to give surrogacy a shot, suddenly everyone I knew felt comfortable discussing the flagellating residents of my man junk—friends, neighbors, bosses.
“You given a sperm sample yet?”
“What’s your sperm count?”
“Better hope your boys are swimmers!”
No one dropped more S-bombs than our caseworker at Rainbow Extensions. She spoke a language that sounded much like English at first, until you realized that in her native tongue, every fifth word was the clinical name of the male reproductive cell.
“Who’s sperm we gonna use?” she asked. “We need to collect your sperm, test your sperm, sperm your sperm, and enspermanize your spermological spermograms.” This was what SpermEnglish sounded like.
Her name was S’mantha. S. Apostrophe. Mantha. In her picture on the Rainbow Extensions website we could see she had frizzy red hair and elongated brown-white teeth that looked like unwaxed snowboards. Her blouse appeared to have been made from the sofa cushions my parents had growing up, and if I told her that, she’d probably be flattered. “How nice! I recycle everything!”
On our very first phone call with her, S’mantha informed us that she’d already booked a visit for us to the Westside Fertility Center. “Nothing to worry about,” she assured us. “They just need a bit o’ sperm!”
It was then I discovered a topic even more awkward than sperm itself: what you have to do to produce the sperm. Sure, I knew the procedure pretty well, but it was never something I’d done in a doctor’s office.
Into a plastic cup.
While a nurse waited outside for me to finish.
As if all that pressure wasn’t enough, I’d have to make do without the standard accoutrements to which I’d become so accustomed—tender mood lighting, a can of diet A&W root beer, and a faded VHS of Dances with Wolves, cued up to the skinny-dipping river bath scene.
Or would I?
“You might want to bring your own materials,” S’mantha informed me.
“Materials?”
“You know? Materials. To assist in collecting your sperm.” Surprisingly, the word “porn” didn’t seem to exist in SpermEnglish.
S’mantha explained that Westside Fertility catered to a mostly straight clientele, so she couldn’t guarantee the availability of the particular genre of “materials” that would help Drew and me produce our sperm.
As much as I resented that our fertility clinic couldn’t accommodate us with the appropriate smut, I was kind of pleased to have a good excuse to buy porn. How often does that happen? All of my porn shopping memories were so bleak and demoralizing.
For one thing, buying a dirty magazine was the most blatant way of announcing my sexuality, before I was ready to do that. When I purchased my first stroke mag, it wasn’t just an awkward step toward becoming a skuzzy grown man. It was a giant leap out of the closet. You could argue that the first person I ever truly came out to was the cashier at Newspaper Nirvana on 75th and Broadway.
I was a senior at Columbia University, about two miles uptown, and I was doing what I always did at newsstands, reading Billboard. It was kind of an exciting week. Color Me Badd was proving they were no one-hit wonder with “I Adore Mi Amore” up nine spots to number six, and a hot new rap outfit from East Orange, New Jersey, was making its debut at number 85 with “O.P.P.” I predicted a bright future for Naughty by Nature.
That’s when I noticed something even more shocking than the staying power of “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)” by Bryan Adams—a shelf of glossy magazines with chest-bearing men on the cover.
It was porn, there among the general magazine population. Sure, like most newsstands, this one had its porn prison, secreted away behind the cash register. Each sleaze rag was sealed in plastic and partially obscured so that if you wanted to buy it, you had to ask for it. “Pardon me, my good man, but might you sell me a copy of the latest Big Black Asses?”
There was no way I could ever utter a sentence like that aloud, even to a complete stranger, so I had resigned myself to a pornless life. But for some reason, this store’s porn prison featured only straight smut. The gay stuff was filed under “Men’s Interest,” adjacent to the “Music” section, where I was standing. It seemed the nice older gentleman in the turban who owned this particular establishment was oblivious to what was displayed in the pages of Honcho, Torso, and Latin Inches, all of which shared shelf space with Details and GQ. I stole nervous glances from behind my Billboard, my eyes zeroing in on a particular periodical called Freshmen.
The cover featured a blond, blue-eyed frat boy in a wrestling singlet and mouth guard. To a straight, possibly Sikh, newsstand owner, it could have passed for a workout magazine, but my sperm knew that its objective wasn’t just to get your pecs hard.
Jerry, my sperm whispered. It’s porn!
“Shut up, sperm! It can’t be! You can’t just leave porn out like that! There are laws!”
But my sperm was persistent. I bet they never even opened a copy before they shelved it. Ha ha! The fools!
“Just let me look at Billboard in peace!”
Heyyyyyy . . . that wrestler on the cover looks a little like the guy from Color Me Badd, dontcha think? Without the goatee and earring? You ever wonder what a guy like that might look like . . . naked?
Well, yes. I couldn’t lie to my sperm. Yes, I had thought about what the guy from Color Me Badd might look like naked, clean-shaven, and unpierced—perhaps even in a wrestling singlet and mouth guard.
Buy it!
“It’s dirty!”
You’re a grown man!
“I’m a nice boy!”
Buy it! C’mon, let’s raise the stakes! We’re tired of freeze-framing Costner’s ass!
“I want to . . . but I can’t! Not now! I need to psyche myself up, get in the right frame of mind. Maybe in a couple of months . . .”
A couple of months? This isn’t like buying something else you’d be humiliated to ask for—like cigarettes or a Michael Bolton CD. This is easily accessible porn! How long do you think it’ll stick around?
My sperm had a good point. This was the lucky break of a lifetime. There were no other customers in the store, no one to fear but the cashier, who, let’s face it, was a professional man. He wasn’t going to say anything to me. Why would he care what type of naked pictures I liked to look at? My money wasn’t gay. And who was he to be high and mighty anyway? He’d already bought gay porn, too—from the distributor. Maybe he’d judge me quietly, but so what? I wasn’t getting into his Nirvana anyway. Then again, why would he judge me at all? He didn’t even know it was porn!
I was already holding the perfect porn shield. Billboard was twice the size of Freshmen. With the US News college rankings on the other side, my filth would be virtually incognito. Just to be safe, I also picked up Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Spin, TV Guide, People, and Nintendo Power. This way, I wouldn’t arouse any suspicion at all.
The cashier rang me up methodically. He didn’t even look at what I was buying. He just slid each magazine in my stack enough to see the price of the one below it, then moved on to the next one.
It’s working! We’re buying porn!
Then, when he got to Freshmen, he stopped cold.
He dug it out of the pile, held it up, examined it.
Oh shit, I thought. He knows. He’s going to ask for ID. He’s going to spit on me. He’s going to call me a fag and make me cry.
Hahahahaha! My sperm laughed maniacally. You’re so busted!
“Shut up, sperm! This is your fault!”
The cashier flipped Freshmen over and examined the back, which featured a Speedo-clad hunk in an ad for a phone sex line. There was no hiding anymore. It was possible the cover model existed in some kind of gray area between wholesomeness and gay fantasy. But 1-900-HOT-SPUNK did not.
As the cashier stood holding the magazine for what seemed like the entire fall semester, a woman entered with her eight-year-old daughter in tow. They scanned the candy racks for gum. Any second, they’d be right behind me in line. The little girl would giggle innocently, and the mom would inquire, “Daisy, what are you looking at?” Daisy would point up at the leering wrestler, and her mom would scream, “Police! Police!” I thought about making a break for it.
Then the cashier’s finger tapped the wrestler’s knee. He nodded knowingly and opened his mouth. Oh, shit. Here it comes. “Five ninety-five,” he said, gesturing toward the bar code. Then he rang up my porn and put it back in the pile. He stuffed my purchases into a clear plastic bag and slid it across the counter to me.
The see-through bag proved it. He had no idea this was adult material, or he would have hidden it in a brown paper bag inside another bag inside a third bag, then directed me to exit quietly out the back. That’s what I imagined happened when you bought porn, at least.
Instead, I found myself descending the steps to the 1/9 subway line, on my way back to my dorm room to peer beyond the singlet. I had gotten away with the scam of a lifetime, and it only cost me $50 in magazines I had no intention of reading. As the train came screaming into the station, my euphoria ebbed, and I realized where I now stood. I was forty blocks from campus, six subway stops from home. And the only thing protecting me from total exposure was a clear plastic bag, weighed down with enough magazines to fill the waiting room at the Mayo Clinic.
Buying porn was now the number two scariest thing I’d ever done. Getting it back to John Jay Hall Room 1117 was number one with a bullet.
I stood in the crowded subway car, with one hand on a railing and the bag squeezed tightly between my legs to keep it from falling over. I prayed I wouldn’t lose my balance, that the bag wouldn’t break open, and that no one would see inside and say, “Hey, can I check your Billboard for a second? I hear the Scorpions are making a comeback.” Any jostling could bring Freshmen to the fore and expose me to the world.
As I walked across campus, I clasped the bag tightly with both hands, like a bank robber shielding a satchel full of hundred-dollar bills as he searched for his getaway car. By some miracle, I didn’t see a single person I knew. Maybe it’s because I had my head down and refused to make eye contact with anyone. But soon I was in my dorm room, enjoying my prize.
My sperm had been right. Freshmen was porn—beautiful, glorious porn. It was relatively new, an offshoot of a magazine named Men, whose models were, presumably, not quite as fresh. It was kind of a classier gay version of Barely Legal. Each issue featured four models, ranging in age from their late teens to their late-late teens, old enough to vote but not to buy Zima. They were a diverse array of types, like the members of a boy band. There was one baby-faced innocent, one jock, one ethnic, and one guy with a single tattoo, the token rebel. If the pictures could speak, he’d probably be rapping, poorly.
Each dude was posed to suggest some activity that young people were known to engage in, only with an unexplained emphasis on his genitalia. You’d see a hot guy with his schlong draped over a soccer ball or splayed out on a professor’s desk while resting his balls atop an apple. It was sexy, it was exciting, it was totally fucking absurd. You really expect a teacher to eat that apple? Gross! There was no way to attach a narrative to these photo spreads. Most just fell under what I considered an “Oops! I Forgot My Pants!” scenario.
“Hey, just thought I’d come shoot some hoops . . . and Oops! I forgot my pants!”
“Yo, I swung by to study for our Econ final tomorrow . . . and Oops! I forgot my pants!”
“So I cleaned out the filters, checked the chlorine levels and . . . hey, what are you looking at? Oh, man, this is embarrassing.”
It was silly, but that was what I needed. I wasn’t ready to take sex seriously. I just wanted to imagine a world where regular dudes occasionally forgot to wear pants. Freshmen, you’d found your newest fan.
Sixteen years later, I stood in a sex shop on Melrose Avenue. I didn’t have to look hard to find the gay shelves here. There was bear porn, grandpa porn, weird fetishistic import porn. Glossy pro porn as polished and glam as the latest Vanity Fair and homemade porn zines that looked like they came off a dot-matrix printer in a cave somewhere in Idaho. All the oiled, throbbing dicks on display would have given twenty-one-year-old me a nervous breakdown.
The choices were virtually endless, but I decided to make my decision easy and picked up a Freshmen. I loved how easy it was to buy it this time. I just walked to the counter and paid. If the cashier had asked, I was prepared to shrug and say, “Yeah, I like cock. Do you validate parking?” But of course, that didn’t happen. And this dude knew just where to find the price: $8.99.
A few days after that, I brought my purchase with me to the Westside Fertility Center, safely stored in a brown paper bag inside another bag inside a third bag, just in case. The receptionist seemed confused when Drew and I told her our names. She scanned her desk for our file, but it wasn’t there.
So we dropped the secret password. Ahem. “We’re with Rainbow Extensions.”
She groaned audibly. Clearly, she was familiar.
“Did they give you some paperwork to bring us?”
“No, they never mentioned . . .”
“Of course not,” she sighed. “They never do. Well, you’re going to need to call and have them fax it. I’m sorry.”
I got S’mantha on the phone. “You’re at Westside right now?” she asked, puzzled. “But I have your appointment down for tomorrow. Is that right?”
“Well, no. That’s not right. We’re here.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure we’re here. I’m also pretty sure it’s today. That’s what you told us.”
“Hold on. Lemme check.” She dropped off the phone for a minute. “No, you’re right. It’s today. Is that what I said?”
“Yes. And I think they’re going to take us, so that’s not the problem. But they don’t have our paperwork.”
“Oh, that can’t be right. I’m eighty percent sure I sent it over. Have them look again.”
“Okay.” I put my hand over the receiver for ten seconds and pretended I was having them look again. “No luck. Can you refax it?”
“I guess so. Oh, gosh. Where is it? Gimme a few minutes.”
Drew and I sat in the waiting room, which was roughly the size of a middle school auditorium, with about thirty chairs arranged in rows. It was almost big enough to stage a touring production of Les Miz. But instead of head shots of whatever American Idol runner-up was playing Marius, the walls were covered with pictures of infants. Hundreds of them, smiling, sleeping, bathing. At the Westside Fertility Center, business—and babies—were booming.
There were single babies, twins, triplets, and quadruplets, but thank God, no Octomom. Some shots were in color, some black and white. There were probably at least a few taken by Annie Leibovitz as a family favor. Some had that slightly creepy smooshed-tush naked sitting shot. New parents and old ladies think this is cute. The rest of us wonder, Why would we want to see half your baby’s ass?
I wondered if our family photo might someday grace this baby museum. Suddenly, Drew poked me and gestured toward the entrance. Two gay men had sauntered in, peering excitedly around the room. They jogged over to a thirty-ish Latina woman with the first stages of a baby bump. They presented her with flowers and cheek kisses. We realized we were looking at our future.
She was their surrogate, pregnant with their child. And she was Latina! It was the first time I’d considered that our surrogate might be a different race than we are, and I couldn’t think of anything more awesome. I started picturing the day when our pasty white baby might emerge from a massively dilated African American vagina in a goopy testament to the miracles of modern science and the United Colors of Benetton.
At last, the receptionist called us over. “Okay, you can give your samples now.”
It was go time. A nurse set me up in a plain, windowless room with a TV, a DVD player, and a little half bed, half couch that was covered in a surgical sheet to guard against mess.
She handed me a plastic cup. “When you’re done,” she said, “mark down the time you finished and circle yes or no to indicate whether you spilled any.”
“Spilled any?”
“You know, your sperm.”
She closed the door, and I locked it behind her.
Ewwwwwwwww.
I dug into my fortress of bags and unsheathed Freshmen. It was kind of exciting, like being back in college. I opened it up and saw a flashy new layout but models that looked pretty much the same. The baby-faced innocent, the jock, the ethnic, and the rebel. The only difference was that now the rebel had three tattoos. Ooh, his parents must be so pissed!
But as I flipped through the pages, I didn’t get the same thrill as I did when I was in my early twenties. I wondered if it was all the college imagery, the messy desks, and the generic pennants on the walls that read, simply, “STATE.” Maybe I needed scenarios more geared toward my current life stage. “Okay, I brought over that mortgage paperwork for you to sign . . . and Oops! I forgot my pants!” “I can get you three-point-nine percent APR on that Camry . . . and Oops! I forgot my pants!”
But it wasn’t just the silly pretenses for the nudity. It was the eyes. Sweet, shy, pleading. The Freshmen seemed lost. Those adorable young faces reminded me of the boy I used to be, so innocent, so unsure. Even the rebel seemed like a nice kid, if he would just be a little more careful about what fell through the holes in his torn jeans. I didn’t relate to these guys anymore, and seeing them naked only made me feel creepy. That’s when I had an even spookier realization. This magazine was never intended for college kids just poking out of the closet. It was for dirty old men!
I wanted to talk to these boys, to encourage them to make better life choices, to protect them from the readers of this magazine. While I’d spent the last fifteen years growing up, they hadn’t changed at all. I had morphed from Freshman to Man, and they were still too dumb to put on some fucking pants.
As disturbing as it was, there was something reassuring about my epiphany. Seeing Freshmen as a thirty-six-year-old hadn’t been the turn-on I needed at that moment, but it did something even more important for me: It gave me a sneak preview of how it must feel to be a dad. If my kid ever posed for a magazine like that, I’d kill him.