Gays with Kids

Some thoughts on “Sublet” and “The Surrogate”

Sublet. Illustration by Hansel Huang, 2020. All rights reserved.

I recently watched two new gay movies, coincidentally, both about surrogacy.

In “Sublet”, Michael (John Benjamin Hickey), a travel writer for the New York Times, visits Tel Aviv. In order to get a more authentic local experience, he has decided to stay at an apartment sublet by a young man, Tomer (Niv Nissim), whose sexual orientation is ambiguous for a hot second. This is a simple story about a guy who “travels”, and another guy who “hosts”, quite literally. The former, a middle aged New Yorker with a wedding ring on his finger, which obliges him to pick up regular FaceTime calls from his immensely caring and moderately naggy husband–“Is your landlord cute? Is he gay? Take your sleeping pills,” he says. Michael already has some lines you don’t want to see on a man’s face. Tomer, an irreverent film student, who gives off major “top who doesn’t text back” vibe, has all the lines you want to see on a man’s body. Of course, the two of them hang out.

Tomer learns that Michael wrote a book once upon a time about his first boyfriend who died of AIDS. Michael learns that Tomer does not take criticism well and is indeed a gay man who doesn’t text back. Michael witnesses Tomer’s sexual encounters, whether first or secondhand, and visibly mourns his youth as Tomer turns to his phone in the middle of conversations and bursts into random laughter. But this is not the reason that keeps him awake at night, or jet lag. Tomer invites Michael to his mother’s for dinner. And it is there that Michael finally confides with unhinged vulnerability that he has just lost a surrogate baby at birth. The two consummate this short encounter with a souvenir lay, and eventually Tomer, who has been confused and defensive with his emotions this whole time, erupts into tears at the airport. Michael goes back to New York.

We are so used to seeing John Benjamin Hickey play the nice guy that I can’t even bring myself to blame him for infidelity: he’s had a hard time. He deserves some fresh meat. After all, how threatening can a guy be when he brings a stack of blue shirts on his trip that all look the same? With this said, I struggle to empathize not because he’s going through something I couldn’t possibly fathom–a middle-aged gay man who lived through the AIDS epidemic grieving a child he barely saw. As a matter of fact, my mind kept wandering elsewhere: is it ethical for someone in his 50s to fuck someone who’s brain isn’t fully developed yet? (The prefrontal lobe of the human brain, the rational part, isn’t fully developed until around age 25.) Is the loss of the child a metaphor for the mournful nature of youth? Does the bond between Michael and Tomer reflect a generational gap native to the community, if there necessarily is one, of gay men in gay capitals like Tel Aviv and New York. The movie doesn’t give Hickey a chance to show us more. There he is, smiling all so bitterly over his own sufferings and just simply being a nice guy.

Another surrogacy goes wrong in “The Surrogate”. The movie centers on Jess (Jasmine Batchelor), a young, bright, liberal, upper middle class, Black Brooklynite. Jess has a beau to whom she has no intention to commit, and she makes it very clear in the very first scene. She’s at a point in her life where she’s “figuring it out”. And yet she agrees to be the surrogate for her best friend from college, Josh (Chris Perfetti), and his husband, Aaron (Sullivan Jones). Josh is white and Aaron is Black. All is shiny and bright in idealistic Brooklyn. However, Jeremy Hersh, the writer and director of this film, wastes no time to get to the juicy part. This happy affair soon barrels downhill as the fetus is diagnosed with Down syndrome. This is where it starts to get messy slash interesting.

The Surrogate. Illustration by Hansel Huang, 2020. All rights reserved.

For the longest possible time, nobody in this trio would even mention abortion as an option, though apparently conversations are happening behind closed doors between Josh and Aaron. Jess, meanwhile, reaches out to a community center for children with Down syndrome and their parents. She desperately befriends Bridget (Brooke Bloom), a mom from the community center, who dresses like a woman from the Manson family–as many rich Brooklyn white moms do–and constantly looks tired. As an effort to collect affirmative evidence to convince the couple to keep the baby, Jess tries to forge a bond between the gay couple and Bridget’s family, a reluctant role model. Josh has been an emotional wreck. Aaron, much more stoic, rejects the idea of taking another lawyer job, as Jess suggests, to bear the extra cost of keeping this baby. Jess, fueled with frustration and rage, declares she will keep the baby and raise it on her own.

What Jess decides in the end and how she has come to the decision is too good to spoil. But in one of the final discussions, which seems like a big buffet for identity politics study, we get to ask the uncomfortable question: exactly who really “gets it”? A Black gay man? A white gay man? A straight upper middle-class Black woman? Or potentially, a disabled Black girl?

The subject of gay men with kids isn’t groundbreaking in movies, though adoption is seen more often than surrogacy. There is “Ideal Home” from 2018, starring Paul Rudd and Steve Coogan. There is also “Baby Steps”, a 2015 film about a Taiwanese man grappling with the search for a surrogate and his mother’s comic homophobia, lost its promise to a fairly low budget. 2015 was the year when the United States Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in all 50 states .Two more movies came out that year: “The Dream Children” and “Paternity Leave”. Both took a fanciful approach to portray gay men trying to have kids. However, an Argentinian movie from last year, “End of the Century”, really caught my eye in this sub-genre of gay cinema. Film maker Lucio Castro’s masterful balance between content and form gives the subject a fresh sense of intimacy and humanity.

The pursuit of depth in gay cinema, has trapped it in a predicament where practically only two themes exist: nostalgic gay solidarity rising from the AIDS crisis in the 1980s-1990s or a “Before Sunrise” type of us-against-the-world walk-and-talk. “Sublet” falls into the latter bracket, while “The Surrogate” is more innovative in this sense. Nevertheless, this predicament itself reflects the ambivalence in an allegedly post-liberation gay identity: gay men fight for equality by demanding marriage equality. But many question the cost of this pursuit as they are being increasingly assimilated to the heteronormative. Having kids, or not, couldn’t be a more opportune prompt to open the dialogue.

In reality, having a child through surrogacy is still a luxury that most people, gay or straight, cannot afford. In fact, gestational surrogacy was illegal in New York state, alongside Michigan and Louisiana until a new law was passed on Apr. 2. Starting from Feb. 15, 2021, paid surrogacy can be carried out under contracts. (More details can be found here.) According to American Adoptions Agency, the average cost for surrogacy is $75,000, which covers fees and expenses for the prospective birth mother, with an additional $25,000 base compensation for the surrogate. The average cost for adoption is $40,000. Still, it ain’t cheap. And we have not even begun to talk about the moral ramifications that cannot be covered by financial compensations.

I used to follow an account on Instagram called @gays_with_kids. I checked it again the other day. The page still featured mostly white, two equally masculine men with their young family, their smiles so big you can see their uvulas. I wondered what kind of hell they had to go through to get to smile like that for a picture and whether they’d think it was all worth it.