Ruth Institute Blog

by Elizabeth Marquardt

A scruffy man, tanned and good-looking, dressed in an old leather jacket and snug jeans, is on a motorcycle zipping through a neighborhood near you. He’s a restaurateur into “local” everything, a man whose produce vendor is one among many sexy women who want to hook up with him. He was also, years ago, a sperm donor who, unbeknownst to him, achieved reproductive success.

Meet Paul, who is about to encounter the California lesbian couple who each became pregnant with his sperm. In a moving, at times ambivalent and, despite its attempts at realism, largely fantastical exploration, the new hit movie The Kids are All Right probes the emotional fall out after eighteen-year-old Joni makes a phone call that results in a first-ever meeting between the two teenagers, their biological father (played by Mark Ruffalo), and the mothers (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) who raised them.

The movie is rich on particulars and complexity; there are no stock characters here. The lesbian mothers are sympathetic, funny, and attractive, but have their faults. The daughter is a classic overachiever who wants to protect her mothers. The fifteen-year-old son is a jock with feelings, at ease in a world of women but not one of them. If you came looking for a heavy-handed defense of gay marriage or a commercial for gay families, all happy-go-lucky behind their white picket fences, you won’t find it here.

What you will find is a sometimes searing exploration of the raw emotions at stake when women who never intended for their children to have a father suddenly find a father in their lives. “The plan was to limit the involvement,” says one, desperately. “He’s their biological father and all that crap,” says the other. “And it’s really sh—. Like we’re not enough or something.”

The film also exposes the task that confronts children when they meet their sperm donor father, for the first time, once their childhood is largely over. On their way to meet Paul, protective Joni warns Laser, her brother, “I just don’t want you to have big expectations.” Later, Laser asks Paul, “How much did you get paid?” Paul admits, “I got paid 60 dollars a pop.” Laser flinches, and so do we, at a child’s bald confrontation with the cold facts of his commercial conception.

Despite the attempts at realism, the movie is a fantasy. To begin with in real life, these kids would not have found it so easy to find their sperm donor father. And it’s equally unlikely that he would resemble the easy-going, available Paul.

The movie implies that the children have an identity release donor, a concept pioneered by the lesbian-friendly Sperm Bank of California in the 1980s. The policy allows children to learn the identity of their sperm donor when they turn eighteen. Once Joni makes the phone call, in the blink of an eye Joni, Laser, and Paul are sitting at an outdoor table, bathed in sunlight, playing get-to-know-you.

For most donor conceived persons, this is the stuff that dreams are made of. Throughout its long history (the first recorded case of donor insemination in America took place in Philadelphia, in 1884), sperm donation has nearly always been an anonymous transaction. Male infertility was a source of shame, and going outside the bonds of marriage to reproduce with the aid of modern medicine was thought best kept a secret for the sake of everyone involved.

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