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

This is not some cloying docudrama about two sanitized gay men and their quest to make the world a better place by adopting a child no one else wants. Dan and Terry are a couple of urban gay guys. Like most everyone else, they want a healthy baby. Savage writes in candid, if-you-can't-deal-with-it, take-a-hike fashion about things like sex, beer, drag, and monogamy. He also makes short work of Christian fundamentalists, chilly relatives, and gay political orthodoxy. His cutting, self-deprecating gay wit makes this book fast, giggly, and compulsively readable. At times I felt like I was engrossed in a piece of beach-blanket paperback fiction. You have to be fairly uptight not to find yourself smiling through this book.

But this is also a human story. Dan and Terry are two intelligent, financially stable guys with a messy condo, a sense of humor, and the human urge to deepen the meaning of their own lives by pouring themselves into nurturing and shaping a new one. They wisecrack through tough situations, fight over dumb things, worry when necessary, and take their work and family obligations seriously. They have a large, loving circle of parents, step-parents, siblings, and friends. Why shouldn't they adopt?

This book isn't intended as a detailed legal, political, and moral argument on behalf of gay adoption, though Savage disposes with the most specious and disingenuous complaints of right-wing windbags. The most telling point is that no one demands perfection from straights -- coupled or single -- who often bring kids into far more adverse and dysfunctional environments than the home that's being made by these two gay dads. (As Savage puts it with typical matter-of-fact dispatch, "Straight people all over the world have kids for ... much worse reasons every day. They fall down drunk and get up pregnant.")

Dan and Terry are really no more, no less than a competent, comfortable, committed, funny couple who have their own good reasons for wanting to share their lives with a child. That, in the end, is the central message of this book.