cover image Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?: 
Confessions of a Gay Dad

Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?: Confessions of a Gay Dad

Dan Bucatinsky. Touchstone, $14.95 trade paper (243p) ISBN 978-1-4516-6073-9

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. (June 5)