Hendrik Schäfer | Double Income, Kids / 2019

gay guys normalized

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hendrik Schäfer (director) Double Income, Kids / 2019 [documentary]

 

German director Hendrik Schäfer grew up in the Berlin world where, he comments, “There…seems to be a general consensus that our overpopulated world doesn’t need any more people. So, growing up as a gay man in Berlin, the natural assumption was the belief you would be childless your entire life.” But upon moving to Tel Aviv, he found a radically different expectation, in which for cultural, social, and religious reasons that a great many gay Israeli men were very much seeking to have children.

     

“In Tel Aviv I was confronted by a very different assumption. Over and over again, I heard gay men clearly expressing their desire to become fathers at some point in their lives. It seemed being gay was not to the exclusion of beginning a family unit, to the contrary.”

     Schäfer’s 2019 documentary Double Income, Kids, accordingly, follows the experiences of one gay couple living in Tel Aviv as they plan for and reorder their lives awaiting the birth of two children, implanted with each of their sperm, in a surrogate mother in named Krista, living in Portland, Oregon.

     The earliest portions of the film are devoted to simply explaining how artificial insemination from two different sperm samples takes place, what are the chances of the sperm fertilizing the egg, and what are the dangers from the surrogate mother. In daily touch with the doctors, it first appears that one egg seems to be surviving while the other’s survival is in question. Since each doner, Motty and Alon have chosen a different sex, the survival process becomes unintentionally a kind of statement about the sperm providers. Fortunately, both eventually survive, and after a scan of the fetus it reveals that both eggs in good shape; the men can now share the news finally with their families. Alon’s mother is ecstatic while his less-accepting father remains basically silent.

     Eventually, the film introduces us to both families, Motty’s family evidently having spent time in the USA before immigrating to Jerusalem, seeming to have far more open and relaxed attitudes than Alon’s parents, uncles, and aunts. But Motty’s family also seem to lack the intense closeness to their relative than Alon’s family.  

     What the film doesn’t thoroughly reveal is that the reasons for Motty Garcia and Alon Gvili’s choice of using an international surrogacy agency and an American woman is that in Israel the issue of same-sex surrogacy became a hot political concern a year before this documentary when in 2018 Israel’s parliament, as Bob Bahr from the Atlanta Jewish Journal writes, “with the determined support of ultra-Orthodox political parties, denied access to surrogacy to same-sex couples and single men, while at the same time supporting it for single women and heterosexual couples”—this despite the fact that “the country gives broad legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation, and gays are allowed to serve in the military.”

      At one point they mention that the cost of the US surrogate birth was about 600,000 Israel shekels (about $185,000), the average yearly household income in Israel being about $36,000. So  the choice to have children for these men is a substantial investment. We never learn, however, how these two men are employed.

      Bahr reports that after this film was released, the Israel Supreme Court decided unanimously that the ban on same-sex surrogacy was discriminatory, and in February 2020 ruled that gays, lesbians, and single men should have the same access to surrogacy services as the government provided to heterosexuals. On July 11th, however, the high court again banned surrogacy for same sex couples and single men.

      The impending birth of their children, which in the film is presented almost as a count-down, causes the couple to undergo some major changes, the first of which is perhaps one of the most devastating, as they plan to move from their beloved Tel Aviv to a more child-friendly town nearer also to Alon’s not entirely gay-embracing parents. As they begin the packing, it becomes apparent that Motty, in particularly, almost wishes they could start all over again.

      Much of the film concerns their moving into their new home and redecorating it for the two future inhabitants; but we also witness them practicing for the rituals of diapering, nursing, and simply caring for their newborns along with reading books on child rearing. The closest they come to an on-film argument concerns how close to the presumed birthdate they should arrange for their Portland house rental, since they both hope to be there in the hospital room to share the actual births of their children. One is clearly in favor of renting early, while the others calculates the amount of time it will mean being away and the cost.

     We never discover precisely how that argument is settled, but they actually do miss the birth since, suddenly they get the call that Krista’s water has already broken early, the children on their way.

     The two men rush to the airport, and we can almost share their anticipation as they are made to wait boarding and then, await their luggage upon arrival. When they finally catch a taxi to rush to hospital they watch pictures of the two newborns on their cellphones, kissing one another in the joy of suddenly having become fathers. In the ugliest moment of the film, the cab driver demands them to stop kissing or he will demand they leave the auto. It is a greeting of the two to the US that speaks, all over again, to the notion of the “ugly American,” and in this day and age seems to be utterly homophobic.

     But the negativity of that scene is quickly forgotten as the two men, reaching the hospital, are greeted with total friendliness and given their children to hold. But even here, particularly as the film progresses, we sense an odd arrangement, as each of the men seem to care for and hold only their “own” child. One wonders, if fact, if this will truly be a fully integrated family or to gay men living together, each to raise their own child. There is something strangely patriarchal and almost territorial in that behavior.

      The issues becomes even a little more uncomfortable when we follow Alon to a local Portland synagogue where his male child undergoes the circumcision. I have always been against circumcision, my feelings made more complex by personal events.* But to actually have to observe a full cutting of a baby’s genitals, where one puts his finger covered with a lick of wine in the child’s mouth, while holding the baby’s arms tight so that child will not move while the mohel cuts, is something most unpleasant, and despite the fact that the rabbi attempts to describe it in terms of the Jewish tradition and an entry into community, it appears increasingly to be a brutal tribal custom.

     Along with the ritual immersion in water of the two babes, a Jewish tradition which neither I nor my Jewish husband had ever heard about, the two also share time Krista and her family, making certain that she also is able to hold the children; photographs are taken so that later they might explain to their kids who their birth mother was.

     Returning to Israel, the babies are, of course, celebrated by the families. And in a rather surprising ending, the two gay men decide to finally marry—an event we might have presumed had already occurred. There is something touching, however, in the wedding celebration being witnessed by their two newborns, and the fact that the celebration is part of a larger embracement of not only the couple but the family they have begun. Speaking at the ceremony, Motty’s mother explains that when she found out her son was gay, she immediately accepted him for who he was. But her main worry, that he would not be able to live a “normal” life, remained with her. She now expresses her joy at the fact that she is now speaking at her son's wedding, in the presence of his two beautiful babies, marriage and child-rearing obviously being her definition of normality.

     Once again, we are reminded that these gay men are embraced back into their families with even greater willingness now that they have grandchildren of their own blood, and their sons have embraced the idea of the large community into which they were born.

 

*At age 13 or 14 my parents were convinced by their local doctor that I should be circumcised for cleanliness’s sake. My 1947 year of birth probably represented one of the last years in which men weren’t standardly circumcised in most US hospitals at birth. My parents, terrified of speaking about anything even slightly sexual, did not tell me of that operation. I went into the hospital to have my tonsils removed. My tonsils were removed, but not only my throat hurt upon waking up, but when I looked at my penis, I was startled to discover large stains of mercurochrome, and a slight pain between my legs. At the same time, my anesthesiologist had clearly given me a slight overdose of ether, the drug applied in those days, and for at least a couple of weeks after I had ether dreams, which I associated with my unannounced circumcision. I’ve forgiven my parents a great deal over the years, but this was something I could never quite get over, that they had decided for me about cutting away the skin surrounding my then developing penis without even explaining the fact seems, even today, unforgiveable, despite their sexual shyness and medical ignorance.  

 

Los Angeles, October 3,2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).