My Two Dads
Two loving parents, one child in need of a home—sounds like the perfect match. For Jon and Michael Galluccio, it was only the beginning.
By Leslie Garisto Pfaff
I park my car in front of the Galluccios' house in Maywood—an elegant, white-shingled colonial on a tree-lined street of expansive, well-kept homes—and before my feet hit the pavement, Adam Galluccio is out the front door and down the steps, a five-year-old perpetual-energy machine fueled by pure exuberance. He stops in his tracks and for a half-second regards me warily, his sandy hair casting the slightest shadow over his brown eyes. And then—though this is the first time we've met—he runs up and asks if I've come to play. I tell him I hope so, and he slips his hand easily into mine, leading me up the stairs and into the house. It's clear that I'm in for the Kids' Tour—first stop, the fish tank; next, out the back door to a driveway strewn with the plastic detritus of a middle-class childhood. "I have a backyard," Adam tells me. "I have a truck. I have a backhoe." Crouching in the doorway of his Little Tykes log cabin, happily cataloging his possessions, he seems the most normal of children, entirely unaware that his very existence here represents nothing short of a social revolution.
 Clockwise from top: Jon, Michael, Adam, Maryanna, Rosa, and Madison surround Mercury the cat in the Galluccios' Maywood home. Photograph by Scott Jones |
It easily could have been otherwise. In September 1995, Adam was born premature and HIV-positive to a drug-addicted mother who hadn't the wherewithal, emotional or otherwise, to raise him. He might have spent years, even his entire childhood, in the foster care system—if he managed to survive at all. Instead he ended up in the home of two loving parents who were determined to adopt him and make him well. That they were gay men couldn't have meant much to Adam at the time. But it would have extraordinary significance for the future of adoption in New Jersey and for the fight nationwide to legitimize gay parenthood. On a more personal level, parenthood would prove entirely transformative for Adam's parents, Jon and Michael Galluccio, who less than a decade ago couldn't have imagined themselves raising a family, no less standing at the center of a social and political maelstrom.
In 1981 Jon Holden met fellow student Michael Galluccio at Glassboro State College (now Rowan University). After becoming a couple the following year, the two moved to Los Angeles and later relocated to Manhattan. In these major metropolitan areas, living openly as gay men in America was easier than it had ever been—which is to say that although homosexuality still carried a huge stigma, it was possible, depending on where you worked or went to school, to admit to being gay without fear of losing your job or your standing as a student. If you had the courage to acknowledge your sexual preference and face the world dead-on—and if you exercised a little geographical discretion—you could live a pretty good life. What you couldn't do, of course, was raise a family. So early in Galluccio's and Holden's relationship, the question of kids simply never came up.
It wouldn't come up for another twelve years. Like so many young gay men and women, the two had learned to live with the anxiety of coming out and being out by covering it up with, as Michael says now, "externals—having parties and going to parties—a lot of parties—and buying things and moving a lot." They acknowledge that their first serious conversation didn't take place until 1994, when Michael confronted Jon about his drinking. It was a conversation that would set in motion Jon's eventual recovery and lead them both into couples' therapy. And suddenly they were talking all the time about the stuff that mattered.
It was during one of those soul-searching talks—what Michael calls a Where-Are-We-in-Our-Life? conversation—that the question of family arose. Taking stock of their life together, Michael recalls, "we realized, all right—we're in great shape, we've done everything, been everywhere, feel great, our relationship is solid." And then, after a minute or two, Michael said, "Jon, I have something to tell you."
What he had to say was that his most ardent dream was to be a parent, his greatest regret the fact that he'd never be one. Jon was shocked—not at the notion of Michael as a father, but because he, too, had long harbored dreams of raising a family. "I knew in high school that I was gay,"Jon says. "I went through a real depression, and one of the big depressing factors was that I was going to have to give up all that I wanted, including being a parent." Now, suddenly, parenthood was conceivable again. That night Jon and Michael talked long and hard about the possibility, but finally rejected it.
Their reluctance had everything to do with shame. "You're raised to think that there's something wrong with you for being gay," says Michael. "And as much as you think you've dismissed that, you very much internalize it." Now, envisioning themselves as fathers, Jon and Michael were hit with the full force of all their accumulated guilt. Struggling with a way to explain their feelings, Michael says, "Why would you want to raise kids in this hideous lifestyle? Yes, you've come to accept it for yourself, but of course it's not good enough for children." As a postscript, he adds, "It's a horrible way to feel."
Then one day a gay friend who was in the process of fostering a child asked them, "Why not?"
"Why not?" they asked themselves again, and this time the answer—"only because somebody else says it's wrong"—was a revelation. "Once we got that out," Michael says, "all those years of assuming that we weren't as good as everyone else in every area just started to melt away."
They were living in Manhattan at the time, but decided it would better serve them from both a legal and practical standpoint to move back to New Jersey. First, they were determined to adopt as a couple, and at least one precedent for co-adoption already had been set in the state: Joan Garry, a lesbian, says a decision in a New Jersey family court allowed her to adopt her partner's biological child. And then, of course, New Jersey was home, the place where they both had been born and raised and where several sets of potential grandparents still resided. The two men may not have known a whole lot about either adoption or parenting at the time, but they were savvy enough to understand the value of grandparents.
So in March 1995 Jon and Michael left the Upper West Side for the relative wilds of Maywood, Jon's hometown in Bergen County. Their plan, once they got themselves settled, was to adopt a healthy white child through the state system. They enrolled with the Division of Youth and Family Services (DYFS) and began the requisite adoption training. And then they got the letter laying out the likely waiting periods. According to Jon, it could take up to ten years for a healthy white child and from several months to several years for a healthy nonwhite child. If they were willing to take a "medically fragile" child, though, there might be little or no wait.
Jon and Michael knew that medically fragile often meant HIV-positive. But they'd become friendly with another gay couple who had adopted a so-called AIDS baby who was now seronegative (with no identifiable traces of HIV antibodies) and robustly healthy. Okay, so it probably wouldn't be easy to take on a sick child, but they were pretty sure they could do it. "We had a spiritual sense," says Jon, "that God wouldn't give us anything we couldn't handle."
"Just for the record," Michael adds, with an insight born of hard experience, "God really pushes the envelope."
It was two days before Christmas 1995 when the phone call came. Michael was in his home office and heard Jon pick up in the kitchen. Curious, he walked downstairs and saw Jon, receiver to his ear, writing furiously on a piece of paper. He read over Jon's shoulder as he wrote: "Baby boy. Preemie. Blond hair. Blue eyes." Then: "HIV-positive, tuberculosis, hepatitis C, drug-addicted."
As the paper filled up, Adam's short history of illness and abuse unfurled itself. At his birth, doctors had found heroin, cocaine, marijuana, methadone, alcohol, and nicotine in his system. He also had an infection of the lower respiratory tract that could damage the lungs of susceptible infants. In the first three months of his life, he'd come perilously close to death not once but twice. He was still in intensive care. This was the sort of news to freeze the heart of any parent. But, says Michael, "I can't remember ever being happier in my life." He had a baby. He and Jon were going to be fathers. Together.
Anyone who's negotiated the foster care system with an eye to adopt knows what a jarring experience it can be—a white-knuckle flight through bureaucratic airspace, fraught with byzantine regulations and migraine-inducing snafus. And then there's the ordeal of laying yourself and your most fervent hopes on the line. So Jon and Michael were more than a little surprised that things were going so smoothly. They'd made it clear from the start that they planned to co-adopt, and their caseworker had assured them this wouldn't be a problem. Of course, life with a medically fragile infant wasn't exactly a Leave It to Beaver scenario.
When Jon and Michael first brought Adam home, he was frighteningly small and so pale he looked gray. Dark circles ringed his blue eyes, and he'd shake violently as his body went through withdrawal from the drugs to which he'd been born addicted. For six months he received a dose of phenobarbital every four hours to wean him off his habit. "So you watch your baby, and he's in your arms like this," says Michael, still wincing at the memory, cradling an invisible infant to his chest, "and you're administering these drugs that you can see your baby getting high on. It was really sad." Because Adam required round-the-clock care, Jon, an actor, quit his job to stay home full-time.
Yet miraculously, Adam was managing to surmount crisis after medical crisis, including an enlarged liver, a hole in his heart, and enzyme and triglyceride levels that were badly out of whack. He was beginning to thrive in spite of the HIV; in fact, in less than a year he would test seronegative, evincing no trace of the virus in his system. And as evidence of their renewed sense of hope, Jon and Michael decided to foster a second "medically fragile" child, Andrew. They weren't just a family now. They were a growing family.
In August 1996, buoyed by optimism, they filed to petition the state for consent to adopt, which would make Adam officially their son. And then in September they got a call from their lawyer's office informing them that all the paperwork was back with the exception of the consent letter, the key document. Jon called DYFS and, after several abortive conversations, finally reached the office manager, who told him there was "a problem." A division policy prohibited unmarried couples from adopting jointly. Considering that Jon had no job and therefore no income, the office manager said, they could only consent to Michael as an adoptive parent.
"But you said this would be okay," Jon remembers sputtering. "And I don't have a job because I stay home with the baby." He reminded her that DYFS had made a previous exception to the policy in the case of their gay friends who had adopted the baby with HIV. "She told me, ‘That was a mistake, and we're not going to make the same mistake again.' " If they wanted to keep Adam as their son, Michael would have to adopt singly and then Jon could petition for adoption at some point in the future.
In the end, Jon and Michael decided to press for co-adoption—for two reasons. One was emotional. After years of living with the shame of being gay, they'd finally managed to cast it off; taking the state's route, they reasoned, would be like assuming that mantle of shame all over again. And for the sake of their children, that was something they simply couldn't do. On a more practical note, if something were to happen to Michael before Jon could adopt, Adam would in effect be an orphan and anyone in Michael's family could take him—anyone except Jon. In the end, says Michael, they decided "it was too risky, emotionally and legally," to do anything but press for co-adoption.
They approached several organizations that handled gay rights cases and eventually though somewhat reluctantly settled on the American Civil Liberties Union. Michael in particular wanted to shield his family from publicity, and he had a sense that the ACLU was overly fond of media circuses. During his initial meeting with Lenora Lapidus, then legal director of the ACLU of New Jersey, he told her point-blank, "You will not put my family in the media." Lapidus gently informed both Michael and Jon that if they decided to fight for co-adoption, media exposure might be inevitable. That was the potential bad news. The good news, she said, was that they might not need to file a lawsuit at all.
"We really thought we could negotiate an agreement before we filed," says Lapidus, now director of the Women's Rights Project at the national ACLU. In fact, she and her legal partner, Michael Adams, were baffled at the state's refusal of co-adoption. "Jon and Michael had been caring for Adam as foster parents for two years then, and the law in New Jersey was clear that gay couples were allowed to adopt," she says. "It made no sense to require one of them to go through an adoption and then months later require the second to go through a whole other legal proceeding." The only reasonable explanation for the state's stance against co-adoption, Lapidus believes, was politics. "The DYFS social workers on the ground level all thought that the adoption should go forward," she says. "At some level there must have been a political decision that this wouldn't look good for someone."
After the ACLU's efforts to negotiate resulted in the same response the Galluccios had received—essentially, adopt separately or give up Adam—they filed two lawsuits, a petition for adoption in family court and a class-action suit against DYFS on behalf of Jon and Michael and Lambda Families, a New Jersey gay and lesbian organization. As she laid out the logistics of the suits, Lapidus told Jon and Michael that a press conference was pretty much a necessity but probably wouldn't attract much attention—"maybe a local paper, a local radio station," says Jon. When they arrived at the ACLU offices in Newark, though, they were greeted, according to Jon, by virtually "every newspaper, every radio station, every TV station."
They were terrified. After Lapidus first informed them about the press conference, they'd arranged to have a home alarm system installed. That afternoon, Jon says, they went home and punched it on, images of crosses being burned and rocks being thrown vivid in their collective imagination. Though DYFS had decided to return Andrew to his maternal grandparents, the Galluccios' were now fostering an infant girl, Madison. What would America think of two gay men raising not just a little boy but a little girl as well? After all, the suburbs of North Jersey weren't the Upper West Side. A good part of the state was steadfastly conservative. At home in Maywood, they hunkered down and waited for the onslaught.
The first indicator of the public's response came at eight o'clock the next evening in the form of a phone call from a reporter for the Record of Hackensack. The paper, she told them, had run an editorial that day strongly urging DYFS to allow Jon and Michael to adopt as co-parents. As of that evening, the piece had received more reader response than any editorial in the Record's history, all of it positive. The news, Jon says, was "life-altering."
"We were led to believe that as gay men, we couldn't live an open, public life," he says. "And here we were, not only out, but having people respond in our favor."
In late October, the adoption petition was heard by Judge Sybil Moses in state Superior Court in Hackensack. "The adoption proceeding went very smoothly and easily," says Lapidus, with the court's deciding that it was in Adam's best interest for both parents to adopt jointly—thanks, in part, to a glowing endorsement from Adam's caseworker, Loretta McCormick. "Basically," says Lapidus, summing up McCormick's testimony, "she said that Jon and Michael were two loving parents who'd taken a very sickly child from the hospital with all kinds of physical problems and loved and nurtured him until he reverted to a healthy, vibrant, and happy little pre-toddler." When the court ruled positively in the first case, DYFS agreed to settle the class-action suit. In December 1996 the state of New Jersey joined California, Connecticut, and New Hampshire in recognizing the right of unmarried couples to adopt jointly.
For more of "My Two Dads", pick up this month's newsstand issue.
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