The following is the 2nd installment of a hilarious ongoing series by author and squirrel hunter seriously Amy Bronwen Zemser called " How to Thaw Your Unborn Child ," about sperm donation and artificial insemination when you've got an acute case of lesbianism.
Catch up on Part 1 here , then continue below:. When I lived in San Francisco in the nineties, my friend Michelle told me about a lesbian couple who were looking for frozen sperm together. At that time I was married to a man, and I thought Michelle was talking about some people who wanted to breed cocker spaniels. I'd heard about sperm banks and babies, of course, but I'd never really given them much thought except to wonder at the logistics behind the donation process.
I was thirty-one when my marriage cracked open and the mess oozed out. Figuring out that I was gay was a pittance in comparison to my fears around not being able to have a family. After all, it is one thing to figure out that you are a homosexual HOMOsexual when you are a teenager struggling with all the concomitant insecurities that go along with discerning your identity.
It's quite another to come out at thirty-one after you have already come of age, published a book, snorted lines of cocaine in your living room with friends, and driven all the way to Crater Lake in a sedan with a carful of topless lesbians right after having sex with your husband. It was still harrowing to figure it all out so late in life. But not because I was necessarily nervous about telling my friends and family although I was. The worst part about figuring it out later in life was feeling like I had no "community" around me.
I certainly didn't know any lesbians that had children. All the gay women I knew were single. I wanted a baby. Wasn't that the whole point of getting married to a man? I went to the library and the bookstores and tore through an immense amount of reading material in a short period of time. I remember one book vividly: it was called From Wedded Life to Lesbian Life , and each chapter unveiled a different woman's experience after leaving her husband.
