My Ticking Biological Clock.

ONE GAY MAN LISTENS 10 THE SOUND OF HIS BODY YEARNING FOR A CHILD AND WONDERS ...

Lately I can hear the ticking of my biological clock getting louder and louder. Each insidious tick is telling me that time is wasting and that if I want to have a child, I'd better get a move on "Men don't have biological clocks," a friend snapped at me in response to my worries. "You can have kids until you're in your 70s." But that's not the point.

I'm not worried about my ability to procreate. I know that, given the right circumstances, I could spread my seed until I'm withered and gray. My concern is more that it's getting too late for me to find the right situation to have a child.

Think about it: I'm a gay man in his mid 30s who wants to be a father--not an easy goal, especially since I don't want to adopt and I want my baby's mother and me to somehow bong up our child together. "How's that going to work?" people ask, as if I were proposing something truly bizarre. "Are you going to live together? I bet your boyfriend will love that." I don't have any answers yet. I'm still trying to work it out in my head. Even trying to get it all down on paper for this article hasn't been easy. I'm just sort of hoping that the right situation comes along.

Something inside me aches when I see parents with their young children. It's an ache of longing, a yearning for the experience--the joys, the challenges, even the potential heartbreak and disappointment--of having a child. "Do you realize how hard it is to be a parent?" people ask, as if to dissuade me. Well, yes, I think, considering that I've been in therapy almost ten years trying to undo the damage of what was basically a pretty decent childhood. But my parents did the best they could, as they've told me often enough, and so will I.

Although I don't feel I owe anyone--except my child's mother--an explanation of why it is I want a child so badly, it is a question I've asked myself repeatedly. My desire to have a kid feels like an emotional and spiritual imperative for me. After ten years of painful, challenging self-examination--through therapy and through various dysfunctional situations and relationships--I feel more focused and self-confident than ever. I'm more able to connect with others--my boyfriend, my family and friends--in a deep, intimate way. But along with this increased emotional maturity and fulfillment has come the recognition of an untapped resource of love that feels fatherlike to me, a bounty of feeling that is just waiting to be lavished upon a child. What makes me think this love needs to be expressed in the context of a parent-child relationship? Because it feels like a nurturing, guiding, soul-shaping love that is meant for a son or daughter. It's a feeling so strong, sometimes it's as if he or she already exists.

My only fatherly experience thus far has come by way of my role as the owner of my beloved dog, Seamus, whom I treat, as most dog owners do, as if he were my child. I am the uncle of a 10-year-old niece and a 7-year-old nephew, who live 250 miles away in a suburb of Boston. I have strong feelings for them and enjoy the role of benevolent, gift-bearing uncle. And there are times when I'm with them that I have the urge to get more involved in their upbringing, whether by telling their father--my brother--that I don't agree with the way he reprimands them or by trying to get inside their heads more deeply so that I can help them avoid the kinds of dysfunction and disappointment I have experienced. But these are inappropriate impulses on my part. After all, no one is asking my opinion. And why should they? My brother and his wife are doing the best they can. What I can provide is my own unique brand of avuncular love and understanding, the giving of which only whets my appetite for fatherhood.

So as these fatherly yearnings have become stronger over the past few years, I've spent more and more time thinking--and worrying--about the various ways in which I could become a parent

"Why not adopt?" most people ask when the subject comes up, and then they well-meaningly remind me that there are a lot of unwanted kids out there who need loving fathers. How come people don't ask their straight friends why they don't adopt when the subject of having a baby comes up? I'm sure that over 99% of the hetero population want to have their own children rather than adopt, so why wouldn't I? Although I would someday consider adopting if all efforts to have my own child failed, for now I'm attached to the hope that someday there'll be a little boy or girl with half of my genes running around my apartment. I have this fantasy that I will be much more deeply connected to a child spawned from my own seed because we both will be descended from the same emotional lineage. (My fantasy is fueled by a fact I read in a New Yorker article that one's emotional makeup is 50% genetic.)

I suppose my hope for a deep connection is not unlike what one looks for with a romantic partner. Perhaps my fantasy is that my relationship with my child will make up for all the previous emotional connections that have fallen short of expectations, particularly my relationships with my parents. In this way, having a child--a "new version of me"--might be a way to make things right, to give my kid the love and attention and understanding I think I missed. Call me neurotic--and many people have--but I don't really see anything wrong with that.

But for now I have not given up my goal of finding the right situation in which I share the responsibilities of bringing up my natural son or daughter with the child's mother. In a way, looking for a prospective mother for your child is like looking for a mate. The woman I'm going to have a baby with is someone with whom I share a strong foundation of mutual love and understanding. Ideally, our value systems will be similar enough so that there will be no cataclysmic differences of opinion in the raising of our kid. And any legal concerns would be worked out before any plans were put into action.

On the other hand, finding a prospective mommy is actually much different than finding a mate because from the start you have to throw out a lot of the assumptions that come with being romantically involved. For instance, most couples eventually end up living together. I'm currently living with my boyfriend, and neither of us would want to share our home with a third party (besides Seamus), even if she is the mother of my child. And because I would have to set up a custody agreement with the mother of my child, far from starting off our parental life as if we were a romantic couple, we actually would be making arrangements as if we'd just gotten divorced.

The ideal scenario (if there is such a thing) would be for me to have a longtime lesbian friend who is in a loving, stable relationship and wants to have a baby. Why a lesbian? Because I worry about my single straight girlfriends' throwing in the towel by having a baby with a gay man, giving up any hope that they'll meet a nice straight guy, get married, and have their own kids. And say one of my straight girlfriends did have a baby with me and then ended up meeting Mr. Right. How would we all deal with our unconventional "family" arrangement? In Hollywood terms, such a dynamic might have the makings of a screwball comedy starring Rupert Everett but in reality things could get pretty tense.

The problem is that I don't have any longtime lesbian friends. (I wonder why--but that's another article.) The only women I've ever talked to about having a baby together have been heterosexual female friends who had more than platonic feelings for me and who idealized me as a father-to-be. But in my opinion--and sometimes theirs--these friends were not fully dealing with the fact that I am gay and am not going to eventually turn into the ideal husband as well We even talked about living together in the same apartment after the baby was born, in some kind of Object of My Affection arrangement. One of these women, Kate, insisted that if we were going to have a baby, we'd have to procreate the old-fashioned way--by fucking. I, on the other hand, wanted to use a turkey baster. Although I now know we were having as close to a romantic relationship as possible without the sex, I thought that having sex with her would be misleading. I was afraid if we had sex one time, she'd want and expect it again. And for me I worried that having sex with a woman would derail my ongoing evolution as a healthy, self-accepting gay man. I definitely have some heterosexual desires, but that, as I always say, will have to wait for another lifetime. Plus, truth be told, I was terrified to sleep with a woman. (But that's another article too.)

And say I do find the right situation to have a child. There are still obstacles within my relationship to contend with. My boyfriend, Ron, is supportive of my wanting to have a baby, although he says that he himself is "not quite there yet." So do I wait until he's "there," or do I try to work around his not being ready. Ron has also told me that when he is ready to be a father, he may want to have his own child.

When he first told me this, I thought it was some kind of "whose dick is bigger?" contest. After some discussion he expressed his fears that if the child were biologically mine and we broke up one day, I would take the kid away from him, and he'd have no legal right to see him or her--the same dynamic that currently holds with Seamus, who I brought into the relationship. This is something lesbian parents must deal with occasionally, but I had no easy answers for him short of reassuring him that I would never prevent our kid from seeing his other dad.

The upshot of all of this rumination and psychobabble is that there is no easy way for a gay man to become a father (and I haven't even touched upon the nightmares that could happen if I wanted to pay to have a surrogate mother to have my child, which is not an option for me). Ultimately, I'm just glad to have discovered this need to nurture. And while I figure things out, there are plenty of kids out there who need some fatherlike love, whether it's my niece and nephew or the children that my sister has yet to have or the kids with HIV and AIDS at places like New York's Incarnation Children's Center in Manhattan or the teens who attend the Harvey Milk School, also in Manhattan.

Who ever said there was anything easy about being a gay man, anyway? And just as I've worked hard to surmount a million obstacles--many inside my own head--to figure out how to have a healthy, intimate relationship with another man (and I continue to leap over hurdles daily), I'm just as determined to overcome all practical and emotional barriers to becoming a father. So I've got my biological clock beat no matter how loud it ticks.

Galvin is vice president of product development at Atlantic Records in New York City.