Ale:
Do you want to start by telling me your name, your pronouns, your age, and where you’re from?
Keats:
I’m Keats Milles Wallace, my pronouns are they and them. I’m 32 years old, I’m from Seguin, Texas.
Ale:
So you’re a native Texan.
Keats:
Yeah. My mom’s family is half French and English, and the other half is Mex-Indigenous to this area. The border of Texas is where our people are from, so I wasn’t kidding when I said I’m home. We’re descendants of the Coahuiltecans who had been here for 10,000 years or more.
Ale:
Do you want to tell me what made you want to participate in the project?
Keats:
I’m in a local trans masc group chat, and someone posted a link to the project. We were just in the IVF process at that point [Keats and their partner], and not too many people do reciprocal IVF because it’s usually prohibitively expensive and invasive, so I thought our story could be helpful.
Ale:
How did you guys decide to go that way, and how were you able to afford it?
Keats:
My whole family, all the uterus-having folks in my world, have had major reproductive issues around 30, but Jessica [partner] doesn’t have that history, and we both wanted biological children. She doesn’t really care, at least at this point, but because it’s a short timeline, we said we gotta hurry up and do this. We decided to try my eggs first, that way I have a chance at biological children, and if they don’t work, we’ll figure something else out and use her eggs. We may still do that. Insurance covered most of it, but only after we had done four rounds of IUI. They cover regular IVF, but never reciprocal.
Ale:
Do you know why they don’t cover reciprocal IVF?
Keats:
I think because reciprocal IVF was something that could never happen naturally. We paid for the first round out of pocket, which was like $35k, but that occurred over two years, so we gave everything we had, all our savings towards it. For the next two rounds, I got mad about the insurance coverage, so we had Jessica’s boss write a letter to the company she works for because they’re really big about LGBTQ+ inclusion.
My articulation of it was that, sure, the insurance coverage for reproductive health that the company offers is based on equal treatment, but what they aren’t hitting is equity, which is that each partner has the ability to participate in the reproductive process. They have an opportunity where two same sex people can both participate, and they aren’t covering it, so they changed the coverage policy. We sent the letter and didn’t hear back, but then they put a section on the insurance that said they now cover reciprocal IVF. By the time we did round two or three in that same year, we hit the out-of-pocket max, so we didn’t pay for the next round.
Ale:
Around when did you and Jessica start the process?
Keats:
I think it was February 2021, almost four years ago now, and we finally both had jobs where we could make enough money to pay for it. We knew we were still gonna be strapped, but Jessica’s always wanted children, that is her life imperative, to be a mom, and mine was to be a pastor. She went along for all my school and getting me through, so I’m along for the ride with kids. I never really particularly wanted children, but didn’t not want them either and I think most of that came down to not wanting to carry children after thinking about it. We talked to our general practitioner and asked if she knew a good reproductive endocrinologist. We did lots of blood tests. They test for everything. I’ve never had so many vials of blood drawn at one time in my whole life.
Ale:
I might botch this, but in the simplest terms, reciprocal IVF is when they take someone’s eggs and put them inside another person – is that right?
Keats:
Yeah, usually you produce one egg at a time, sometimes more than one – they gave me two or three weeks worth of drugs to produce more eggs than normal so they can get many at one time. Regular people produce around twelve eggs.
“I don’t know why that was my worst fear my whole life – I imagine it’s probably due to being trans and forcing my body into a femininity in a really present way. The way people treat pregnant women, who identify and know themselves as women, is extraordinarily feminine. There isn’t a masculine version of being pregnant.”
Ale:
How many did you get?
Keats:
Thirty four.
Ale:
That’s good, right?
Keats:
It’s terrible, I learned. I didn’t know I have PCOS, Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, and I found out because of the procedure. They looked at the numbers and were like “oh shit, it’s PCOS” which means it drastically reduces your egg quality. They get tons of eggs, but only a couple were good, so we got thirty-two the first round and I think thirty-four the other rounds, and each time I got only two viable embryos. Our donor is a college friend who is a fabulous gay man and drag queen and ceramicist. He loves the idea of having children out in the world, but doesn’t want to raise them, but he told us he wanted to support us in any way he can. So we did all this genetic testing to find out whether they’re chromosomally normal, but we didn’t get enough genetic material to really find out, so we went with one that was undetermined. We tried the first one, got eight weeks in and then Jessica miscarried, and then April of last year we tried a second one and turns out the undetermined ones just wasn’t good. We found out that Jessica has silent endometriosis, which I didn’t know was a thing. You have endo but you don’t have symptoms.
Ale:
Given how famously horrible endo is, having it without symptoms sounds ideal, but ofcourse, it isn’t, right?
Keats:
Not having symptoms is delightful, but it still creates this protein in the lining of your uterus that makes it so you can’t carry children. Really! The egg can’t attach correctly to the lining, so you have like a 12% chance of getting pregnant without medical intervention. We found out that she had to be on hormones also for like, two months at a time.
Ale:
Do you know what kind of hormones, was it similar hormones as the ones you were taking for the egg retrieval?
Keats:
Different. She was on Lupron, which is designed to tamp down your hormone system as much as possible, so that you’re not producing estrogen almost at all. They had to do that so her lining wouldn’t grow as thick, and then do the implantation almost immediately after. It was a crazy process, but the third one worked.
Ale:
Third one was the charm! What hormones did they put you on this time around?
Keats:
They put me on a human growth hormone that time, which they say is like a Hail Mary thing. They don’t know why it works, and it works specifically in patients with PCOS. I’m a numbers nerd, so I was like “this one has to work, we can’t screw this up again”. I had a probability table of 11 different probabilities and I was looking at these studies about people who had used growth hormone. Almost every time people who used growth hormone got two embryos that were good, but my probability table said I might get one so I was not optimistic at all, but sure enough, we got two and we’re using one right now, and we have another one saved.
Ale:
It’s wild that people don’t know the science behind the growth hormones.
Keats:
Yeah, even the scientists don’t know the science. My reproductive endocrinologist is one of the top in her game, she is known throughout the country, she has a podcast and she says “honestly, this comes down to the art of medicine, not the science”. We don’t know why this works, we just know that it does.
Ale:
Interestingly, this happened to you, being that you’re a faith worker. I want to go back to something very key that you touched on earlier. You mentioned you never really thought about having children, but that was mostly because you didn’t want to give birth or be in a pregnant body. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that?
Keats:
I don’t know if there’s a whole heck of a lot more to say, I just never wanted to be pregnant. I don’t know why that was my worst fear my whole life – I imagine it’s probably due to being trans and forcing my body into a femininity in a really present way. The way people treat pregnant women, who identify and know themselves as women, is extraordinarily feminine. There isn’t a masculine version of being pregnant. That was my worst fear throughout all of high school.
Then I met Jess, and I guess I didn’t understand myself as trans at the time, but something changed and I thought “you! I could raise children with.” There was something about that where the pressure was off all of a sudden, I guess because I wouldn’t have to carry, and now there’s a little one growing and I cannot wait. I get to be dad and all of my dreams come true that I didn’t even know I had. Growing up in really naive areas of South Texas I didn’t know trans people existed until I was in college, and then I didn’t know who I was until I was in seminary. And you just don’t have the exposure, you don’t know, to even have the idea.
Ale:
I relate very much to the feeling of not wanting to be pregnant, and for me it has a lot to do with how pregnancy is synonymous with femininity. It’s the ultimate form of womanhood that I want to run far away from.
Keats:
It’s an ick, right? Which is ridiculous because we have examples in nature like Seahorses, where the masculine parent is who carries a pregnancy, but we don’t have examples of that in our own culture that are held up in esteem. People look at seahorse daddies and they’re still like “I don’t know.”
Ale:
Seahorse daddies are still such a spectacle, and add to that the men trying to get pregnant having to deal with so many conflicting feelings. Given the complications, what do you think would’ve happened if you had to be the one who was pregnant?
Keats:
I would have just have said no. I mean, it’s just not even an option for me because emotionally, it would be such a horrifying place that I can’t take myself there. In High School, as was probably the case for most of us, it was an awful, horrible emotional time, some of the most depressed I’ve ever been, a suicidal teenager sort of thing. And I promised myself I will never put myself in a position to be back there if I can help it.
Ale:
You know yourself enough to know it will be something that will put you back into that emotional state.
Keats:
It would take me back there, and I’m not doing it. That was my gift to myself after each egg retrieval. For the first one, my gift to myself was top surgery because I had to do something to fix this.
Ale:
Haha had to balance it out somehow.
Ketas:
Yes! I did something extraordinarily feminine, and then I had to dip into masculinity. And then I started testosterone for the second one because uuughhh I can’t do it.
Ale:
I want to talk about you being a trans pastor. How did you become a pastor, and how was that journey?
Keats:
It started in this room. Jessica is a lifelong Lutheran and I grew up Southern Baptist, which was not a great experience for me, as you might imagine.
Ale:
I grew up Catholic, so it’s a little more forgiving, but still. Tell me more.
Keats:
Ours wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t the hardcore Southern Baptist church, but it was a little bit there.
I remember growing up there was a woman of Asian descent who would attend church, and she would always sit in the front pew by herself. And I don’t know how I recognized the kinship with her at like five years old, but I did, and I always thought it was sad that she was by herself. And so we never got the “you’re going to hell” sort of preaching, but we did get that really open example of being ostracized, which is almost as bad as the you’re going to hell preaching.
I always kind of knew this is not going to be a place where I can stay and in High School, I ran away from organized religion, but did deep dives into religion as a whole. I got into school here at Texas Lutheran and we were required to take six hours of religion to complete our degree. I took intro to theology with Dr. Norm Beck, the dude’s like 92 and has been here forever, but he did this thing where he would take us on these trips, and we went to the Jewish synagogue, and we went to the Hindi temple and the Buddhist temple, and we worshiped with them. Through that experience, I felt like I was still worshiping Jesus of Nazareth in these places, but in a different way, so I was like oh maybe I am a Christian. Then I met Jessica my sophomore year, and she was going to Ash Wednesday.
Ale:
Fun! That’s one of my favorite ones!
Keats:
I’d never been to Ash Wednesday because Baptists don’t do Ash Wednesday. I was like, all right, I guess I’ll go. So I went, and it was gorgeous, how could you not love Ash Wednesday? So I was like being a pastor would be a pretty cool job because it’s here, it’s a university service, but it also serves the area community and anyone can come to the Ash Wednesday service. We’ve got several pastors that were on the faculty imposing ashes on people and I got to see this neat moment of my teachers being pastors.
And then the next year, Jess was like, I don’t want to go to Ash Wednesday, I’m tired, and I was like, I’m going and if you want to spend time with me, that’s where I’ll be. So I came here and there was a woman in the back of the church who I guess is a community member, and she came forward with four children, and Harry Foster [professor] – a gruff, tough, masculine man – is starting to weep as he proclaims your dust into dust shall return on the forehead of this new baby. I was like that is it, I need to live in that moment, in that tension of life and death and beauty and pain and all of this just all mixed up together.
So I looked at Jessica and I was like “hey actually, what if I was a pastor?” I was expecting her to be like, “no that’s silly, you’re in the middle of a marketing degree,” but she was like “I could see it, sounds like a good idea, you should talk to pastor Greg about it.” Then I went and talked to pastor Greg and I wasn’t baptized, I wasn’t a Lutheran, any of these things and I also expected pastor Greg to be like no here are all these barriers.
Ale:
I want to talk about the barriers, it seems like a lot of queer folks have a hard time accessing organized religion.
Keats:
Definitely true. In 2009 the church agreed to ordain LGBTQ clergy, and in the 70s, we agreed to ordain women, but there’s still issues, right? Those things are long term turnovers, they didn’t happen overnight. I was talking to Greg about this in 2013 so only four years after that decision to ordain LGBTQ folks, but I didn’t even know that happened and it didn’t occur to me that it would be an issue at the time. He told me “why don’t you and I meet weekly and let’s talk about your sense of faith and just see where you’re at.” We get to the end of six weeks, and he’s like “actually, based on what you’re saying, I think you’ve been Lutheran your whole life, so you’re gonna get baptized and confirmed on Sunday” it was a Wednesday.
Ale:
Only three days later!
Keats:
Then with the Lutherans you have to do this whole process, you do an entrance interview where a local pastor who’s been kind of pre-picked by the bishop will interview you and just see who you are and what your call to faith is and how you got here. Then you get to meet with a candidacy committee, and they determine whether you move forward or not. Through the whole process I expected barriers but no, the only thing they had a problem with was that I was kinda young. They told me to wait a year for seminary, but then I got a full tuition scholarship, and they told me to go because I might not get it again. I went out to the Bay Area and did three years of seminary and then a year internship in Ohio. That’s when I started to kind of realize the gender aspect of who I was.
“Which is the wildest thing about a lot of these bills that say God didn’t make mistakes, you are who you are born to be. I could use the same language and mean something very different. My thing is, I don’t understand why people believe that God stops working when we’re born, that’s ridiculous. God works throughout our lives entirely.”
Ale:
In Ohio or in California?
Keats:
In California. I was out as gay at the time, but I wasn’t out as trans. Then I was starting to figure it out in California and then I got to Ohio, and was really having a hell of a time. My internship was really hard because my supervisor claimed that he was accepting, but really didn’t know what that meant, and said a lot of really terrible things.
Ale:
Like what kind of things? A lot of microaggressions?
Keats:
And macro. He would say things like “doesn’t Jesus say to deny yourself? You shouldn’t be out,” but that’s not what that means. That’s when I started to kind of hit the walls and the barriers in the church and I was wildly depressed. I think I was figuring out that some of my discomfort around that was being treated in a way that was very feminine. So I told Jessica, “I’m not sure I’m cisgender,” and then I brought it up again a few years ago, and I was like, “no, but really, I think we may need to change some things like pronouns and my name.”
So we started doing that and she’s been cool with it. My Bishop was cool with it too because he has trans children. I’ve learned really quickly that being a trans person of faith, the more public you are, the better. There are so few of us that you get put into positions of relative power pretty quickly. I’m on two ELCA national task forces and I spoke at the ELCA youth gathering in front of 16,000 kids this last summer because when you’re willing to stand up and say who you are, people say “that’s awesome, you want to do it again?” and then your opinion typically gets valued pretty well, because again, the pool of us is very small. I think I get extra tokenized because I’m transmasculine, but also Mex-Indigenous. It gets irritating sometimes, but mostly I’m just glad to have the seat at the table because I’m not gonna sit there quietly.
Ale:
When you were coming to terms with your gender, was there anyone you could talk to? Even within the church—the seminary—did you have community?
Keats:
The ELCA has a group called Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries. Before they decided to ordain LGBTQ folks, they had a group who said “you know what, we’re borrowing our authority from the future, we’re gonna ordain queer people ahead of time.” Once the 2009 decision happened they brought those people onto the ELCA roster, but Extraordinary Lutheran Ministry still existed and we had a group of LGBTQ pastors and deacons that we called Proclaim.
So as I was figuring this out [transness], there were several people that had done this before and I had some really, really good discussions with people who were going through not just the gender side of what I was going through, but understood also the pastoral side and how complicated that can be. Then also in the fertility side, I know a trans pastor, a seahorse dad and when I was dealing with the egg retrieval side of it, not carrying, but still really having to deal with my anatomy, I called that friend and I was like “what do I do? Why am I freaking out?” and “I don’t know how to handle this.” And he really walked me through how he handled his own two pregnancies.
Ale:
So there’s a whole group of people in the intersection of the pastoral side and the trans side, both the worlds that you needed guidance with?
Keats:
Yeah, I have a group chat right now that’s trans masc pastors and we all bitch about stuff to each other. Two are in California, one northern California, one southern, one is in Ohio and then me. It’s a little group of four of us, all parents or soon to be parents. We’re getting really niche now but I’ve found people like me, even in my denomination.
Ale:
That’s cool – how often do you guys talk?
Keats:
We text back and forth almost every day. I mean, not lengthy conversations necessarily, but we’ll be like, guess what my kid did? Did you see this article? It’s just casual conversation, but we decided to do that because the state of the world sucks right now and we can’t safely talk on social media anymore, so we have a signal group. Then we were like, actually, to be even safer than digital communication, why don’t we start writing letters to each other, so we’re also pen pals.
Ale:
I love that. Would you say this group has gotten you through tough times?
Keats:
Yeah, absolutely and Proclaim has had its ups and downs, so has Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries. In my understanding, at this point in time it’s at a turning point of either it’s going to fall apart or it’s gonna have to become something new.
Ale:
Why is that, what is happening?
Keats:
I mean, it’s the same reality of queer communities where you have your cis gay men who occupy a certain space of privilege that don’t always seem to understand it, and then a little bit of a smattering of everybody else that are trying to help them understand. So we had that divide in the first place and then race became a big issue, which is also a big issue in the general queer community. I just kind of fizzled over that, so that the broader community hasn’t been as helpful. But the friends that I made there I’ve kept, and they’ve been really an anchor through whatever bullshit is going on.
Ale:
A lot of masc folks don’t feel like reaching out for support is accessible to them, which is really sad, but it sounds like it is accessible for you.
Keats:
We’re predisposed to community as clergy. I think it’s such a unique experience of life and professional world that we already are predisposed to talk to one another about what’s going on in our church or what’s going on in ministry, so it was really easy to make that leap.
Ale:
Queer folks are already so community-oriented, we have to find each other to survive, but for you, community is coming from both sides, the pastoral and the queer.
Keats:
Yeah – I got the jackpot of finding people.
Ale:
In that same note, how do you think your relationship with being trans and being a pastor are the most similar or different, or how are they sometimes conflicting?
Keats:
When people ask that sort of question, it’s the same as if they ask, “how did you know that you were trans?” You just make a decision every day over and over again, it’s almost the same as my sense of call to ministry. It feels like God is guiding me to myself, and it feels the same way with gender. God’s like remember to watch that one movie that’s gonna make you cry and think about things. It feels so much the same way. And so when I get into arguments with people, hopefully not too often, about how you get to gender and understanding what yours is, I tell them to just listen for God. God tells you who you are, will lead you to who you’re supposed to be.
Which is the wildest thing about a lot of these bills that say God didn’t make mistakes, you are who you are born to be. I could use the same language and mean something very different. My thing is, I don’t understand why people believe that God stops working when we’re born, that’s ridiculous. God works throughout our lives entirely. Everything that we do maybe isn’t necessarily like God moving the pieces, but I think God inspires us to different understandings and might put things in front of us that we otherwise wouldn’t have seen, or at least knows our truest selves better than we do, and it can help reveal that to us.
The other side of it is the social side of transitioning as a pastor and what that looks like. I thought it was going to be a bigger problem, and it hasn’t been. I now have half the male privilege of my male colleagues, which is great especially in the clergy world, where men dominate and that’s been really, really interesting.
Ale:
Let’s talk about that a little bit – since you transitioned and became one of the guys, has there been a shift in attitude from your colleagues?
Keats:
Yes and no. The way that the ELCA made the decision to ordain queer clergy is one that was really incredibly divisive. Half the churches left and what was still here, some of them were really supportive of that decision and some of them were like, I don’t support it, but I’m not leaving. So the pastors who are in the “I don’t support it, but I’m not leaving” camp, are still like “you can be over there, we don’t need to pull you into our ranks” and I’m like, “good I don’t really want to be there.”
But then of the supportive clergy in the area, it’s been interesting. Some of the guys have been like “you’re kind of one of us now” and have brought me into that loop – we go axe throwing! I think some of the more supportive women clergy also still see me very much as one of them, which is both upsetting and not. On the one hand, I’m not a woman, that’s not who I am anymore, but on the other hand, you still aren’t afraid of me and that’s a good thing. I’m happy to not receive the fear of you’re a man. So it’s been kind of an interesting in-between and I think that’s part of being trans masculine, but not a trans man, right? I’m in between, and people don’t know what to do about me, but not in a bad way.
Ale:
Do you think you could get to a place when you’re talking with the women and they recognize your masculinity, but is still trusting and still feel comfortable with you?
Keats:
We’re getting there. I think the longer I’m on testosterone the better. My voice has dropped pretty significantly in the last four months. I know one friend in particular has been like “you’re bringing in the low notes” and I’m like “yeah, I wonder why” hahaha.
Ale:
I want to go back to what we talk about yesterday and about your becoming a dad. Jess is pregnant and you live in Texas. Did you guys had a conversation about the implications of doing this in this time and place?
Keats:
We didn’t even think about it that clearly to begin with and now looking back, I’m like, why did we not talk about this? Because the abortion ban went into place once we were really getting moving with things, but it’s been a continuous part of the conversation as she’s been pregnant. Especially during the first pregnancy that we lost because she could have done a D&C [Dilation and Curettage] but there are a lot of complications, or we could have just let her miscarry on her own.
“it’s just been such a thought process of, okay if things go south, what the fuck are we gonna do? What state do we run to if there’s an anatomical issue?.”
But I was flying to Nashville three days later and we had to figure out another way so the easier way was to go get Mifepristone, which is a drug use when you need to induce a miscarriage. We were in the room when the doctor told us there was nothing viable, and that was awful and then they put us in a room where we could just kind of process things for a little while. Then the doctor came back and said here are your options for what to do and the drugs were the easiest option.
We went to go get the medicine almost immediately after, and I just remember being so angry preemptively, like if anyone messes with my sobbing wife, who just lost her pregnancy, I will lose my shit. So we walk up and there’s this guy standing in the pharmacy in casual clothes and a cowboy hat, and I kept thinking that if he is the one we have to talk to you, I can tell this is gonna go poorly and I will get in a fist fight with a man in an HEB. We ended up getting a female pharmacist who was so helpful.
Ale:
How did the female pharmacist react?
Keats:
The woman pharmacist who was giving us the consults on the drugs was just chipper, ready to give us the consult and she looked down and saw what it was, and I was prepared to be like “oh here we go, this is the moment where it all falls apart,” but she started crying. She could see that we were broken up, I’m sure, because we were red-eyed and teary and whatever, and she was so incredibly supportive. So we had this huge moment of grace through this whole horrible process, and in a state where even though it’s legal, the Governor and the Attorney General and the Lieutenant Governor like to make lists, so I’m probably on a list somewhere for having bought Mifepristone. It’s been really interesting.
Ale:
How do you feel about the new pregnancy now, after that experience?
Keats:
As she’s been pregnant this time, the constant worry is we can’t be too far from the hospital. We know this hospital will provide whatever care they need to and that it won’t be an issue. We know our OB is a really good, liberal OB who will do what needs done and we made sure that we got a good OB for that reason. But it’s just been such a thought process of, okay if things go south, what the fuck are we gonna do? What state do we run to if there’s an anatomical issue? What friend could house us for a week or two at a time? It’s been a really complex thought process through the whole thing.
Ale:
So many complicated feelings when you least need them.
Keats:
In the twenty-week ultrasound where you do your anatomy scan, we saw everything was good and we were like, “Oh God, we were so close to absolute fear,” especially because PCOS does degrade your egg quality. What if genetically we’re normal, but we don’t produce correctly? What could happen here? But everything’s good.
Ale:
Do you have anyone here in Texas to talk about these things—what if something was wrong?
Keats:
Not too much. It’s been mostly just between Jessica and I which I think is also kind of a matter of safety sort of thing, because our abortion law is written where it’s a bounty law. So if it’s a civil bounty law it’s not a criminal penalty. If you were to talk about abortion out loud, and someone heard that you did or thought that you might, they could take you into civil court and win $10,000.
Ale:
They’re applying the same bounty law to undocumented immigrants.
Keats:
And trans people. Here right now, there’s a bounty bill that is unlikely to pass, but it’s a bill that if you are supportive of a trans person, say you use someone’s name or pronouns, you would owe anywhere between $10 million, which is wild specially because it’s metered on whether it’s targeted at minors. So if you support a minor, and if that care or support that you provide leads to a surgery which would sterilize them, then it’s the $10 million award. Which it is insane and I think most legislators understand that it’s insane.
Ale:
They know these tactics are obviously not working, so now they’re going after companies that facilitate payments for abortions and gender-affirming health. They’re also going after organizations that help people leave the state seeking care.
Keats:
Most of the bills that I’m tracking right now are targeted more at identity documents and birth certificates, which is really interesting. They don’t want you to be able to change your birth certificate at any point in time, and then all these subsequent things that rely on your birth certificate. They’re really forcing people to out themselves as trans as much as possible and I think that’s what Oliverson’s gender identity fraud bill is getting at. You need to say who you are, but you know when we do that, we get killed, right? I’m talking with a lot of those legislators, most of them don’t want anybody to get hurt, is what I’m understanding, which is good, that’s a nice pro in this horrible legislation and many of them say they’re just trying to start a conversation, but there are other ways to start a conversation that don’t potentially impact people’s lives. So they’re definitely going after out-of-state for abortions and for surgeries, they’re trying to get lists of everybody for everything.
Ale:
To finish it off, how are your colleagues and everyone you know receiving the news that you’re going to be a dad?
Keats:
Really, really well. I think part of it is that no one’s been like “what’s your kid gonna call you?” I think they’re just kind of waiting to see, they don’t want to be rude in asking the question which I respect. I think most of them are just excited, most of them know what the fertility process is like for queer folks and folks who struggle in general, so I think they’re really happy that we’re finally finding our feet and getting somewhere. Also, my wife and I were talking about this the other day, our generation doesn’t really have kids very often, and to have a kid, people are excited. You don’t see babies anymore.
Ale:
I don’t think any of my queer friends are having kids.
Keats:
No, because we’re all broke and tired and figuring ourselves out first, which isn’t a bad thing, but I think it ends up being really, really exciting for people. We’ve had to do two baby showers because we couldn’t fit everybody at one, it’s been really neat. We’ve realized over the years that there are a lot of people who love you but never tell you, so we said anybody who wants to come to the baby shower can, even people I don’t particularly like, that’s fine.
We just kind of said, if you want an invitation, you need to give me your address, and we sent out all these invitations and folks that I wouldn’t have expected showed up and brought gifts and are excited. I think that’s one of the biggest learnings in my last few years – genuinely, there are people out there who love you that you just don’t know and if you don’t give them the opportunity to show that in a way that they know how, you never figure it out.
Ale:
Meet people where they are, right?
Keats:
Yeah. Sometimes you have to say, “all right, I don’t really want you to come, you wouldn’t be someone that I would go out of my way to invite, but if you want to be there, okay.”
