Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?

April 9, 2012
A regular Huffington Post contributor, actor Bucatinsky (who has appeared in Grey’s Anatomy and Curb Your Enthusiasm) writes a monthly Advocate.Com column about being a gay dad, and he expands on that in this darkly humorous look at the vicissitudes of parenthood and potty training. Recalling his early relationship with his partner, sharp-witted screenwriter Don Roos (Marley & Me), he opens with a twisted tale about terminal cancer patient Patti, who scammed caregivers Dan and Don over a year before they caught on to her fraudulent cancer claims. Deciding to adopt, they found inspiration in Dan Savage’s book, The Kid, and met with an adoption lawyer. Traveling to a seedy section of Vegas, they rejected their first birth mother candidate, deceptive drug user Samantha, but their luck changed with the affable, Slurpee-drinking Monica, “a beautiful, wide-eyed, tough-talking, pack-a-day teen.” In 2005, they adopted Eliza Rose. Initially, Dan was petrified by whether he’d be able to bond with an adopted baby “until the day of the birth. The second Eliza was lifted into the air, like Kunta Kinte in Roots, I fell in love.” Jonah, also from Monica, arrived a few years later. Throughout, Dan details happy and stressful days with Eliza and Jonah, as he reflects on gayness, the gay life, and being asked, “Where is their mother?” Writing with an inventive, fluid flair, he delivers dramatic surprises replete with clever verbal sparring, finding risible humor in life’s little banalities as well as its emotional peaks.

April 1, 2012
Actor, writer and producer Bucatinsky muses on being a gay parent of two adopted children. Bucatinsky, a co-creator of the Showtime TV series Web Therapy, and his husband, the director and screenwriter Don Roos, adopted a girl, Eliza, in 2005, and a boy, Jonah, in 2007--both from the same mother. The author chronicles the adoption process and the highs and lows of his experiences raising two young children. In the early sections, which focus on the adoptions, the author touches on similar territory as Dan Savage's 1999 book The Kid (which Bucatinsky mentions approvingly), but where Savage's book was moving and witty, Bucatinsky's is mostly shallow and trite. Among his banal observations: that both gay and straight parents argue about how best to raise kids; that married couples have sex less often after kids come along; and that What to Expect When You're Expecting doesn't anticipate every parenting question. Bucatinsky obviously thinks that bodily functions are a rich source of comedy, but readers will tire after the fourth or fifth story about urine and/or feces. He also devotes multiple pages to his opinions regarding female genitalia and details a failed attempt to shave his own testicles. Throughout, the author employs a style that suggests an overeager blogger desperate for approval. An amateurish memoir.

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March 1, 2014

Bucatinsky, actor and author of a column for The Advocate that chronicles his life as a cofather of two, expands on his columns in this darkly hilarious account of the adoption of his children. Highlights of the memoir include his reflections on being gay and on being asked where the kids' mother is. (LJ 7/12)

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