A Canadian commercial of a cereal company made the last few days the rounds all over the internet before it will hit the TV channels this week. https://www.youtube.com/...). You see two good-looking white thirty-something gay men talking. An edible toddler, a black girl, climbs from one guy into the other: they are her dads. The men speak English with an endearing French accent and they tell about their life together and the adoption of their daughter. Web magazine Jezebel calls it a ‘touching adoption story’, Slate says it is ‘adorable’ and other less prominent websites use words like ‘heartwarming’. The commercial is the first of a series for the Cheerios brand of General Mills Canada. Jason Doolan, director of marketing of that company told Canadian magazine Marketing: 'We were in meeting with [the advertising] agency talking about issue of disconnection in society, this epidemic of loneliness,, […]. We talked about the history of Cheerios and the role it could play in bringing people together. Somebody stood up and said, ‘You know, when you put two Cheerios in a bowl, they float together.’ It didn’t take more than 30 seconds on Google for someone to say, ‘It’s a real thing.’ We think it’s a perfect metaphor for human beings’ desire to connect.' (http://www.marketingmag.ca/...
I am a white gay dad of two African American kids as well and I can surely relate to the feelings of these men in an intimate way. But honestly, I am taken aback by the commercial, not only because André and Jonathan sell an intimate story of a life changing event to a company to promote a certain kind of breakfast. More problematic is the complete lack of what defines adoption in a more profound way. The nature of adoption is rooted in dark social situations and debilitating personal occurrences: poverty, racism, mental and physical illness, restricting social mores and so forth, are making the child available for adoption. There is a reason why the men’s child is black: her blackness reflects one way or another how our society deals with issues in communities of color, here and abroad. The commercial – and therefore it is a commercial and not a mini-documentary – hints just one short moment to some awareness of the other party in adoption, the first family, when one of the men speaks about the ‘risk she [the child] can go back in her biological family’. The ‘risk’ refers to the days or weeks after the adoption in which the mother is legally allowed to change her mind. The risky line is immediately followed by the expression of relief that that didn’t happen, in the inarticulate words: ‘Now she is really cool, she has love, she has confidence.’ The reference to the first family is in fact not about that family, but about the fears of the adoptive parents.
I wished that this commercial would be an isoloatedt incident, but many representations of infant adoptions in gay - and mainstream - media are just as one-sided. There is a happy website ‘Gays with kids’ (https://gayswithkids.com) which shows mainly good adoptive parent news stories. The LGBT advocacy organization Family Equality Council has the slogan ‘Love. Justice. Family. Equality’, but justice and equality relate only to adoptive families and not to first families. The larger LGBT club Human Rights Campaign has on its site the article ‘8 Questions to Ask Before Starting the Adoption Process’ without any consideration where these adoptable kids actually come from (http://www.hrc.org/...).
As a gay father it is hard to understand that a highly successful social movement – rooted in social activism and focused on real change – where it concerns adoption is just as conservative as the rest of our mainly straight society. It seems that like straight couples and single parents, gay men don’t want to see the bigger picture of adoption, a picture in which the first parents are seriously represented, the plight and perspectives of them acknowledged and regarded as prompts for social activism. Adopting a black child like André and Jonathan have done comes with an obligation to the family and the community of which she was and still is part. How to fulfill that obligation is a personal choice, but to lay back and to enjoy ‘normal’ family life is – in my view - not an option. I never regarded being gay as ‘normal’ and I don’t regard my ‘gay fatherhood’ as ‘normal’ either. The little cheerio that floats in a bowl of milk to two already together cheerios is a false image of adoption - or for that matter human relationships – since no cheerio is ever by itself, but is connected to a multitude of cheerios who are in fact visible outside the constructed milky world of a touching, brilliantly made, however disturbing commercial.