Famous gay men adopting boys, a compendium

The correlation is remarkable. What does it mean?

Famous gay men who become fathers are very overwhelmingly likely to adopt boys.

The connection between famous gay fathers and adopting male children is so close that, in my research, I have not yet found a single example of a famous gay man who became a father through surrogacy or adoption but does NOT have a son.

The connection is nearly axiomatic: a famous gay man who is a father, has a son.

This connection is striking and worth, I think, pointing out. As a political scientist, I am interested in family formation and human relationships. I am especially interested in the questions surrounding surrogacy and artificial reproductive technologies. As it stands today, these technologies are virtually unregulated, creating a market in which adults can effectively “purchase” designer children. Modern surrogacy allows the parent to select the gender and avoid genetic defects.

To say that these technologies have the capacity to be “socially disruptive” is an understatement. Parenthood, like marriage, is increasingly unmoored from the traditional “biological” model. What this means for the future of the family and for our political order I leave for another time.

Instead, I will present my data. It is not exhaustive. My research is limited to famous gay men who I could identify as fathers from publicly available data on the internet. In order to find a suitable sample size of famous gay men, I searched for online available lists of gay male celebrities and then cross checked those lists with gossip magazines, instagram, etc. to see if they had children. I also searched for names of famous gay men in sports, music, Hollywood, and government.

I have found 16 examples of famous gay men who have children. Every single one has a son; only a handful also have daughters. I present this data set only as a question: why do famous gay men overwhelmingly prefer to adopt boys?

I don’t claim to have an answer, but I will note that I am not the first researcher to note this connection. Science Daily reported on a study, in 2009, by one Dr. Abbie Goldberg who found that gender preference among adopting couples followed a noticeable pattern:

Among those who expressed a preference, gay men were the most likely to have a preference and heterosexual men were the least likely.

The unstated preference here is easy to guess from the rest of the article: homosexual men, when they had a stated preference, chose to adopt boys.

My research bears that observation out.

My interest in this topic was spurred by this post from a Twitter user named “Cimmerian Pervert” that went viral yesterday in which Mr. Pervert identified a number of gay male celebrities who adopted boys. I decided to check and see if this pattern held true. It does.

Here is my list of gay male celebrities who have children. All have sons:

1. Anderson Cooper, CNN Host

2. Andy Cohen, T.V. host

3. Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Secretary of Transportation

Pete with his husband, Chasten

The twins that Buttigieg adopted.

4. Clay Aiken, American Idol contestant and singer

   

   

   Aiken with his son in his lap.

5. Dan Savage, sex advice columnist

   

   I believe this is a photo of Savage with his son, but cannot confirm. Savage mentions his son on instagram, however.

   dansavage

   

   A post shared by @dansavage

6. Dave Rubin, conservative influencer at BlazeTV.

   

   From Google:

   

7. Elton John, singer

   

8. Glenn Greenwald, commentator and former editor of The Intercept

   

9. Lance Bass, musician and actor

   

10. Matt Bomer, Golden Globe winning actor

    

    Bomer with his oldest son.

    

    He and his partner have three boys total.

11. Neil Patrick Harris, lead actor on How I Met Your Mother

    

12. Perez Hilton, Gossip Columnist

    

13. Ricky Martin, musician

    

14. Shane Dawson, Youtube celebrity

    

15. Tom Daley, olympic diver

    

I am interested in further expanding this data set. Are there any famous gay men who have adopted or fathered through surrogate who don’t have a son? I have a found a few examples of gay men who adopted only girls but these men are not prominent. More research is needed on a wider dataset to establish overall population trends.