Egg Seeks Sperm. End of Story...? Articulating Gay Parenting in Small Ads for Reproductive Partners

Gay men and lesbians place small advertisements in the gay press to find reproductive partners. Analyses of over 200 such `mating ads' reveal that advertisers use a range of discursive methods to manage the potential gay parenting identities. We examine how gay male and lesbian advertisers adapt the formulaic format of the classified ad by exploiting the intertextual resonance of the job ad and the dating ad in order to construe reproductive identities and child-rearing roles. In addition, we discuss how the apparent contradiction of gay parenting is articulated through the use of dual discursive strategies which construe the advertiser and/or target both in identifying terms of lexical categorization (as for example, donor, dad or parent) and by delineation of a child-rearing role by degrees of involvement. Our analyses suggest that gay parenting roles need not correlate one-to-one with the discrete categories chosen to identify reproductive partner. The potential gay parent is personalized across both typological and topological models of meaning-making preventing him/her from becoming a contradiction in terms. We discuss the emergent identity of `co-parent'.