The Gay Baby Boom

Hanson, 38, works in IT for a Manhattan law firm. He put some of his sperm in a syringe and gave it to Piper. The following night, Wilson, 37, a record-label executive, repeated the procedure. Afterward they all drove back to Piper's house in Massachusetts, where the two men alternated the process for another three nights. Hanson and Wilson, who were joined in a civil union in October 2007, know another couple who mixed sperm when making their babies. Those men created a genetic cocktail and waited to see which man won the lottery. But Wilson and Hanson decided to take turns. The big moment came each night at around eleven o'clock.

"We'd hand her the syringe," Hanson recalls. "Then we'd all go to sleep. It wasn't a social event and it wasn't hippie-dippy, with candles and fertility dances. We were kind of straightforward about it."

While Hanson and Wilson's embryo was being created, similar scenes were unfolding around the country. The stereotypical image of the American gay man—single, fabulous, social, and up for endless anonymous sex—is giving way to a new norm, one that has couples and even unattached gay men settling down to raise children. Statistics are hard to come by, but academics, doctors, lawyers, and gay advocacy groups say that there appears to be a boom in homosexual men having babies. And as with many trends, the increase in gay fathers has afforded its own terminology: the gayby boom.

"More and more gay men seem to be having babies," says Charlotte J. Patterson, a University of Virginia psychologist who studies gay families.

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