I have learnt to fill my life with friends, travel, theatre, adventure, partying and writing; all things that help fill the gap of not being able to easily become a dad.
One of the most painful things in my life was understanding very young that it'd be very hard — if not nearly impossible — for me to have kids.
It was like being told you're infertile aged 10 but with nobody to help unpack the weight of that realisation, or the consequences that I understood with increasing melancholy and grief as each year passed.
I wasn't infertile. I was growing up gay and closeted at a time when parenthood was simply not considered an option for LGBTQIA+ people.
The loneliness of not being able to be a parent
Becoming a dad was the path almost every adult man I knew — uncles, teachers, family friends — had taken in life, and a path either blocked or full of brambles for me.It felt odd to feel so upset over something I wasn't even nearly ready to do. It did two paradoxical things to me. As a kid, it made me precociously sad. Later, it delayed my maturity, freeze-framing me as a partying Peter Pan with few responsibilities.
Aged 10, it just made me feel crushingly lonely and pessimistic.
It'd be another seven years before the world knew I was gay and I could start processing that particular trauma.
It'd be 20 years before I saw straight peers taking advantage of that life-transforming opportunity I felt largely excluded from: becoming parents.
Our friendship trajectories diverged; I felt further from them.
It was like a new type of isolation in my adult years. They'd complain of sleepless nights and no free time to read books. I could read as much as I liked, but my life sometimes felt slightly emptier and less meaningful than theirs.
When I was younger, I'd listen to my dad reading me beloved Roald Dahl bedtime stories, then later driving me around proudly to university open days and I'd think: I'll likely never share this powerful sense of fatherly pride he's feeling now. I'll likely never pass down that gentle act of love of reading to my child.
A different way to parent
Two years ago, the chance — almost against all odds — arose. A close friend asked if I'd be a sperm donor so she could get pregnant, saying I was the first man she thought of.After much agonising deliberation I, somewhat reluctantly, declined. Our friendship is so valuable to me, so perfect in the shape and form it is, I couldn't bear to risk changing it.
I'd also learnt — as many gay men like me do — to fill my life to the brim with friends and travel and theatre and adventure and partying and writing. All things that for me help fill the gap of not being able to easily become a dad.
But there was another reason I declined my friend's offer, too. I already am a dad. I am also, not a dad. Allow me to explain.
I have five biological children
In 2020, I became a sperm donor. It felt like the perfect compromise for me: I never wanted to be an anonymous donor, but I didn't necessarily feel like my life was set up for co-parenting either.Since 2005, anonymous donation has been abolished in Australia, and so I'm a 'de-identified donor.' This means prospective parents know lots about me — from how much alcohol I drink weekly to how often I work out.
They also have a picture of me aged eight. It's, fittingly, the age just before my sadness about realising I was gay had crept in. My smile looks so pure and real.
Since then, I'm thrilled that three boys and two girls have been born from my donation, and two further babies are on the way. The clinic informs you of the sex of the child, and the month they're born.
It enriches me to know I've helped families who really wanted kids, given I've seen loved ones suffer the agony of infertility. But it also opens up a potential new future I'd never before envisaged for myself.
My door will always be open
Those five children can contact me on their own when they are 18 or older.When they see my file, they will receive a heartfelt handwritten letter saying I'd absolutely love to meet them — if it feels right for them.
My door will always be open for those kids — even before 18, if that's what they/their families decide.
If they allow me to play an ongoing role in their lives, maybe one day I'll even earn the right to call myself a grandad. That feels exciting.
If not, it honestly fills me with fresh contentment to know they're here. I played a small but meaningful part in their creation and made some families feel happy and complete. And now — finally — I feel that way, too.
But the most important thing is my hope for how they feel when they discover how they were conceived.
I hope they feel loved, that they know I'm often thinking about them, and that they never experience those feelings of exclusion or isolation I felt growing up.
If I could tell young Gary this is how his future might look, I know that eight-year-old's smile in the picture on my file wouldn't have become faded and fake as the years went by.
But that smile came back the day my first genetic boy was born, and has returned with the birth of each new child. This time, the smile is real. And I don't see it fading any time soon.
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