Factually! with Adam Conover - Queer Parenthood, Grief, and Salmon with Joe Osmundson

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

Choosing whether or not to become a parent can be a profoundly difficult decision, but it only becomes more difficult when you’re queer. Joe Osmundson is a professor of biology at NYU, and the author of Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood. This week, Joe talks with Adam about the life-defining grief that followed his experience of losing a chance to become a father, and what it taught him about society, biology, and salmon. Yes, salmon. Find Joe’s book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. I'm thrilled to have you with me on the show again. You know, I'm at the age where a lot of my friends are starting to have kids. A lot of my close family members have had kids as well. We have new members of my family, which is something that is so exciting to me. But, you know, it raises the question for me, naturally, do I want to have kids? And that's something I've always been ambivalent about. Both, you know, for the usual reason of, oh, it's a time of rising fascism and climate change. is it right to bring a new life into the world?

Blah, blah, blah. You guys know that one. But also the deeper question of, you know, is that an experience that I want to have and what does it mean to me? You know, obviously it's a rewarding thing to bring a new life into the world and to raise a smaller version of yourself

or a smaller version of a brand new person to get to share the passage through life with them. That seems rewarding. Maybe something I don't want to miss out on. But, of course, there's so many things that I get to do now in my life that would be closed off to me, where I'd have kids and to be responsible

for the care of another human being. And sometimes when I'm thinking through this, the question that comes to mind is, like, is this something that I want to do? Or is the desire to have a kid something that's been put on me by society or biology or by expectation or something outside of myself? The decision of whether to have kids

is one of those times where it's hard to figure out what I really want versus what I've been told that I should want. And is my feeling of missing out a genuine fear or is it guilt over not living up to something that's expected of me? Now, that's hard enough for me to figure out. But I have a great appreciation that it's even harder to figure out for queer folks in this country. Because first of all, queer folks are already, you know, breaking so many societal

expectations through simply living openly as themselves. That's a disruptive and brave and wonderful thing to do. But then the idea of having kids at all is only something that has recently become socially acceptable in America. And we can't ignore, has become less socially acceptable in recent years. There has been a swing back against queer rights in this country over the last few years. So for queer people who really want to have children, I think it is a very very, very difficult time. And my guest today on the show expresses that really beautifully. His name is

Joe Osmondson. He's one of my favorite guests we've ever had on Factually. He's a professor of biology at NYU. But he's also a really wonderful personal writer who delves deeply into his own experience and some of these deep questions and looks at them through the lens of not just personal history, but biology as well. And as you'll hear in this interview, some of these questions that I've been wrestling with that maybe you've been wrestling with really hit Joe in a very personal and powerful and acute way. And we're lucky enough that he has written a new book about it. The book is called Spawning Season, an experiment in queer parenthood.

And the book is beautiful. This conversation is beautiful. I know you're going to love it. I found it very moving. I think you will too. Before we get into it, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show and all the conversations we bring you, head to patreon.com. Adam countover and five bucks a month gets you every single episode of the show.

Add free. We'd love to have you. And now, let's get to this week's interview with the wonderful Joe Osmondson. Jesus. Salmon, queerness, sperm, okay.

Joe, thanks for being here. I'm looking at my questions. Great. And I got salmon. I got queerness. Yeah, sure. I got sperm.

I got grieving. Yep. That is. This is what your book's about. It's just a beach read. Your par for the course memoir, as it were. No, I love your writing because you combine so many disparate top, you combine science and queerness and personal memoir.

And your books are funny, I think. Yeah, it have to be. Yeah. And that's my favorite type of writing. It's liberal arts in the best way, I would say. And that not liberal, conservative liberal, like we're going to have every sphere of human knowledge is, is weaving together and getting messy playing around in the mud pies, right?

Yeah, I mean, that's where I live at, right? I did an undergrad degree in French literature and biology, had the foresight and good mentorship that French literature was not going to be a thriving field for me moving forward. And so I carried on in biology, which is thriving only compared to French literature in academia. But I always combine those things are in us. We were sort of chatting about AI earlier. talking to my good friend last night, who's a pornographer and writer and one of the smartest

people I've ever met in my entire life. And we were just talking and getting so much joy from thinking together. Yeah. And like life is so miserable. So much in life is miserable. One of the only nice things about living is thinking, having a new thought, reading something that excites you, that's unexpected, sort of having that experience of like, wow, I'm feeling my mind be changed. Yeah. And sort of offloading that to anything but time with your friends and time with books. Man, it is, it is rough. I don't understand that at all. Yeah. So like the lipper arts of it, it's like where those connections are being made where people might not have had a thought before. Yeah. That's the fun place to be at. What is a, uh, what a great place to start an

interview. And you're reminding me of what like, when I hear teachers, uh, you teach, right? I do. When I hear teachers talk about AI, it's, because you could say, look, what about people who don't want to think? What about people who don't want to draw? What about people who don't want to make music? And now I could do it for them and they could do something they didn't want to do before. But like, when I hear teachers talk about that, they talk about it with such pain because the sort of struggle of a teacher is just trying to convince kids for 30 seconds. Hey, actually thinking might be nice if you did it. I know all of society is telling you that this doesn't matter, that it's a hoop to jump through.

But it's actually not a hoop to jump through. It's actually nice to read and think and talk. And what if you did for a moment and the existence of AI pulling people, giving them an easier option, just makes it all the less likely that they will. Yeah. You know, my other good friend who's also a college professor is telling her students, she teaches in Jamaica, actually, and she's telling them, your mind is the only thing you have. I mean, this is the thing that is going to be with you now at 18, 19, 20, when you're 60, you know, and that curiosity, that capacity for generative thinking. And the fact that usually exciting writing or music or visual art comes through the struggle of trying to make it and comes through like the deep interrogation of the craft that's come before you and what you might want to do differently. And so, you know, I actually work in a field.

I'm a biologist by training. And we've been using machine learning way before the AI creates. Yeah. Right. But it's never to generate new information. It doesn't do that. All it can do is take big data sets and sort of make sense of them, but it cannot ask new questions. That's never what we used it for, actually, in our field.

We use it for interrogating datasets that are too large for one mind to wrap their head around. And it's great at that. It's not going to tell you what questions to ask or how to cure cancer. It's going to take a bunch of cancer data and be able to. to analyze it in different ways. So yeah, you know, that spark, that putting together, you know, in my book, the grief of almost having a kid, and then that sent me down the spiral where the only thing I could do is look up salmon facts. A computer can't do that. It would want to. A computer doesn't feel grief. It's not going to have to go to some weird

stage of trying to rationalize something that's irrational. And out of that, you know, I had a loss and then out of that can come a book. A computer can't do that, you know? So I really, you know, I really, it's hard to try to convince an 18-year-old to be like, actually sitting in the grief, letting it wash over you and being curious about what might come out of it. That's the only thing about being alive. That's the only thing about being a person.

I don't know, dude. While you're sitting there sitting in your grief, I've got 10 clawed agents sitting in grief 24 hours a day. They're grief maxing. They're vibe coding. They're vibe coding it. They're pumping it out. They're pumping out books that connect grief to salmon and cod and trout.

And so you, so we're mass producing this shit. I saw the hottest guy on Grindr when I was here. And he looked familiar to me and I know. And it's like, oh, he's like an engineer and I like a nerd. Sexy nerd. That's where I live at. And then I click over to his Instagram and he works for an AI company that does like Gen AI music.

Oh, yeah. I was just like, oh, man, this is the biggest boner stomp I've ever experienced in my life. That sucks. You might have met the same guy I did. I went to, for New Year's, I would have a very cursed place. I went to a field New Year's party. And it was an open, and by the way. Sorry, the soul just left my body.

I'm not here anymore. I like that app. I got about 10, 12 minutes of stand-up comedy about that app. But this was an open invite field party. You can imagine the groups of people who were there. Me and a friend who I met on field a couple months ago. You know, we keep touch. we went to the party.

And we got it. We were involved in three horrible conversations before we had to leave. And the one that made me leave was a guy going, oh yeah, yeah,

I work for the Suno, the AI music company. This is that person. And I was like, oh, yeah, it might have been the same guy. And I was like, oh, okay, well,

you're, well, you're a piece of shit. And he's like, oh, yeah, I know a lot of people say, I was like, no, really, no, really, you fucking suck. Your company sucks

and what you're doing is bad. And I was letting you know you're doing bad things for the world. And he was like, We'll see you later. But it was very satisfying just to be able to say that clear.

Not with malice. Just, oh, yeah, well, go fuck yourself. You know, nice to meet you. I was a plus. I would have said it if I weren't a plus one. I was a plus one to the Webby's this year with my good friend, Gauphin, who won the fucking, fucking award for producing an amazing podcast about Felucuti. And so I'm just plus one and we're there.

And it's this huge tension in the room because, like, 80% of the Webbies are for creative professionals who know that AI is taking away their work. And then 20% of the Webbyes are manufactured. by the sponsors to go to AI stuff. And every time one of those, everyone was just like, and so there's this guy who won a Webby for using Adobe AI to, like, do the labor of a bunch of creative professionals and post it online.

And I saw him at the after party, and I was just like, my friend had to hold me back from being like, you are everything that's wrong in the world. You are ruining the creative arts. Everyone in this room hates you. I hope you go home. You have sullied the sanctity of the Webbies. the most prestigious.

We all know. No, the Webby's given to humans. No, those weren't just made up by companies in order to give themselves a shelf of shitty metal awards.

No, no, no. The Webbies are real except for these other Webbyes. The spiral thing is so sex toy adjacent to me that I kind of...

That's true. Hey, somebody's fucked a Webby. Tell me about your book. I mean, I love your last book. I love talking to you on the show last time. And so this book is about your quest to become a parent.

Yeah, so I wanted to be parents since I was a very young person growing up. And like my mom was in training to be a nurse and to make money doing that. She taught Lamas classes. And I was like her class assistant and would go and like hold the pregnant people's hands and like breathe with them and rub their backs. So parents can't make you gay. Is that what you're saying? I think it certainly was a pathway now in front of me. Yeah. This is like very much out of a like a 50s dad being like, you can't do this to my son. I literally, God bless my parents. I had.

to choose between quitting the Boy Scouts and quitting Lamas class assistantship. And by the way, my parents made me think this was a real thing. It was just because my parents were so poor, they couldn't afford a babysitter. So I, like, had to come along and they invented this class assistant role for me. And I quit the Boy Scouts to continue being a Lamas class assistant instructor. God, I would have loved the chance to have quit the Boy Scouts for that. I would have jumped at that. It was a great decision.

Anything to not be a, not be a Boy Scout. That's sweet. That's a very sweet thing. It is unfortunate now because when homosexuals ask me to tie them up with rope, I don't know the knots. I don't know the knots. So the Boy Scouts does actually give, you know, life skills that are transferable to the homosexual lifestyle. Yeah, you know, and now that they've got gay scout leaders in there, they're teaching them Shibari. They're teaching them.

You know. So, you know, this is something that I've wanted my whole life is to be a parent. And in my family, Irish Catholic folk, it was just sort of like the air you breathe that my parents had us and we would have grandkids. We'd all be one big happy family. But, you know, then I'm a grad student in New York and I'm broke and I'm, I'm by, but I'm, you know, mostly dating men, although not exclusively. And so there's just, you know, I'm making $27,000 a year. Things aren't going great for me to parent until sort of a good friend of mine. We're getting in our late 30s.

she comes to me and she's like, so how about we pull the trigger? How about we try to do IVF together with her and her partner and then all co-parent together? And it was sort of this utopian vision where, you know, I would have time off to still be a gay adult human to go to the club, to work on my writing, to read. I could wake up on some Saturday mornings and have still in quiet, which I value. And they would have the same, you know, for them it was more like, they could take two weeks off to travel and I could. Because you'd co-parent. Exactly.

So, you know, everyone would have a little bit of a release valve from what I've seen very up close now. What is truly the hell of parenting in late capitalism, it is really, really tough. Tougher, I know it's tougher now than we even had an idea then because none of us were parents. And what about it is so tough now that you see, that you see? You know, there is just no support. It's very isolating.

Yeah. Above and beyond the cost, which people make work in whatever fucking way that they can. And that's having kids being expensive. My parents dealt with that and you make it work. But, you know, one of the things I got asked about in a book event was sort of the limits of community. And we had this very utopic vision of how we're going to raise kids together. And like one thing that came up was like, I don't, I can't get pregnant. So like, it's harder for me to have a kid than my best friend and her partner, who both could.

So that's a limit of my biology. Like I just can't do it. And no amount of community can give me a womb. And similarly, my friends who are parents have just felt like no amount of community is going to come breastfeed at two in the morning. And then again, at 4.45 in the morning. And, you know, we all live far from each other. And, you know, my other best friend who had a kid, her Dula told her, you just don't know. You might think you know who on the other side of childbirth is going to actually be there for you.

Yeah. You actually don't know. And a lot of people who you think are going to be there for you aren't going to be able to show up for whatever reason that they have. And you just have to be ready for that. And I think everyone I know who's had a kid has gone through that grief. That is a grief too, that you think some of your friends or, you know, queer family or whatever are going to be there for you and they just can't show up in the way that you need them to.

There's like a narrowing to a certain extent. It also strikes me that when you say there's no amount of community. that can breastfeed for you. Well, in some human communities, that's points in history, not America now, but in the past, that is a thing.

Communities did literally breastfeed for each other, right? I think it is much healthier to raise a child outside of the nuclear family. And that's a relatively recent invention. Yeah. By capital,

it's really good for having labor forces that are mobile and can move anywhere for a job. Oh, I never thought of it that way. It's like a model. modularity like, oh, like Mr. Johnson and his three people will lift them up and here's, here's some money and you'll go to Phoenix. Yep.

And that worked, you know, that worked for some people and not for others, especially when, uh, you know, the household labor was all done unrenumerated by the woman, right? And so that makes it incredibly modular. Yeah. You have a built in child care that is not paid for, um, you know, so there's a feminist movement that's really all about wages for housework, right? and about that labor not being so atomized and movable. But yeah, you know.

You give me so many thoughts already because I also think about there's this sort of like woke right wing critique of feminism, which is that, you know, oh, women allow being able to enter the workforce, that's just, oh, we're just letting women work for a living and participating capitalism. How great is that? But what you're making me realize is ignoring the fact. No, that was, it was, you were still working for capitalism in the 50s. Correct. It was just unpaid. That's right. But it would enable capitalism to the same degree.

It was the same amount of like, uh, tenuousness and, and being forced to work. And it was still alienation from one's community. And like what kind of some people think that's a trad life, but what kind of trad life is that to return to, honestly? It's also the economic violence that can be done to women when your choice to leave, you know, you have, you have no outside income of your own. Oh, all that as well. All of that, you know. it's just one thing that I've been thinking about a lot is sort of when the seemingly radical or progressive or cool new thing, you start doing that and you realize, oh, no, there's stuff with this as well, right? Like, just calling it queer family doesn't make tensions go away.

And that's just because we're all people. We're all still people. You know, in my situation where I almost had a kid and then ended up not having a kid, it was because. sort of my best friend is a woman of color and her partner was white and we had all agreed that she didn't want to raise a white child she felt like she would be isolated you know with a white partner and a white co-parent and a white child and we had all agreed on that a long time before and sort of the dynamics of our situation where i was going to be the sperm donor and co-parent and she was going to give the egg and her partner was going to carry so we would all have this

sort of very cool and queer biological input into child making, you know, and then her part, and as I had sort of given up on being a biodad, just my life was not headed in that way. And I kind of only realized how badly I wanted that when it actually became possible. And then similarly, my best friend's partner, as she got closer and closer to implanting a baby that wasn't going to be her bio baby into her body, she was realizing she thought, thought she wanted that, but didn't. So I couldn't even mad at that. Because I sort of was experiencing that same thing, you know.

And so it was this queer utopic, new, like a three-way baby and we're all going to parent and it's going to be amazing. And then the tensions of our needs, our human needs that are messy. Yeah. You know, that her desire to be the biomom. And she kind of hated that about herself, but needed that. that and who am I to tell her that the baby she's going to carry in her for nine months that it's wrong for her to think that's her I didn't even feel that way yeah you know so I am a

huge believer in utopic thinking and ways of being outside of capitalism but we are all still formed within capitalism yeah and our desires are inextricable from what we got fed as a kid did you feel that those desires on her part or your part were connected to you? from to capitalism? And maybe we don't have to psychologize her, but your desire to be a bio dad. Toxic. Yeah.

So you feel that is born from where, like the environment you grew up and how so? You know, my dad's dad shot himself in the head. Wow. Yeah. He had terminal cancer at the time. He was not a good dude. He was deep.

I met him twice in life. And he wrote a suicide note. And in that suicide note, he didn't mention my dad. He didn't mention any of the other grandchildren. Wow. I lived very far from him. I'd met him twice in his life.

He had grandkids who had been close to him as he was sick. He did not mention them. Wow. Why did he mention me? Because I had to carry on the family name. I was the only male, Osmondson. Wow. That is sick.

Yeah. That's a sickness. Yeah. And so unkind. Yeah. But you that was in you? That was the water that I was. swimming in as a kid was that it was inevitable that I would have kids. And I think a lot of people

who swim in water that is that sort of uniform and hegemonic might reject that. And I rejected a lot about where I grew up. I was so badly bullied by the little boys that were then, you know, experiencing physical violence at the hands of their father and then enacted that on me in school. and I rejected that version of masculinity. And I knew in my gut from a kid that I did not want to be like that. But on the other hand, this notion of sort of compulsory parenthood, I didn't reject it all. But what I did is that I, as I write about a lot in the book, I knew that I was going to be a mother. So I write a lot about motherhood in the book because the only image I had of being a dead.

was, you know, my dad at the time, we've gotten a lot closer now, was a very emotionally distanced man, not a lot of closeness. And that, I think, for him, he got the shit beat out of him by his dad. So he was like, I'm not doing that. I'm being a great father. And in his way he was, the other kids I grew up around were definitely being physically abused by their dads. So that was what fatherhood meant. And my friend's moms would ask me what my favorite subject was. school and if I wanted a snack, you know, and there was this care. And so I was just like, well, that's going to be my orientation to my kid. I'm going to be soft and curious and tender and nurturing, you know, but I never, never doubted that I would have a kid. You know, there's a,

I found a note that I wrote to myself at 18 in 10 years, you know, it's like high school senior project that you do. And it said, you're going to, you're probably not a dad yet, but you're going to be a dead soon and I bet you can't wait. It was just and so that is patriarchy. That is heteronormitivity. That is the pathway that capitalism lays down for us to be productive workers and, you know, productive citizens, which means having kids and raising them in a particular way to grow up to be workers themselves.

So yeah, man, I was in that. And as critical and as fucking radical Marxist as I can be, there's something that I could not swim away from in that desire to nurture a kid of my own. Hey, how much of your personal data do you think is online? You know, it's scary to hear, but it's probably a lot more than you think. Our whole world is online, even if you think you're not. And that means all kinds of your data, including email addresses, phone numbers, names of relatives.

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We come up with a better structure and saying, hey, this is the fault of capitalism. This is the fault of patriarchy. You make you want to construct a different structure, right? But a really deep belief that I have, I've said it on the show many times, is, you know, everything that happens good or bad on earth is because of people doing what people do.

Right? You live people alone, and they'll do wonderful things and they'll be assholes to each other. And in every movement, in my various pieces of movement work, like union or like left wing movement work, it's like, hey, look, you can't just expect. Just because we're all members of the same union. There's not going to be any assholes here, right?

There are, in fact, definitely going to be assholes. And you need to figure out how do you deal with the assholes, right? What do you do about it? And so in, you know, queer community, queer family, you're going to have that as well. And when you look at the structures that we've built for ourselves, well, what is that? But assholes and the messiness of humanity writ large upon each other. So, I mean, how much is it the structure and how much is it, you know, you looking at and going, well, hey, yeah, I mean, people want what they want. and they're a little fucked up,

but we're all just striving for a little bit of happiness, blah, blah, blah. And it's like the nature, nurture question, I'm going to do something. You can just cut out the next two minutes.

I'm not cutting anything. Jose S. Bognos wrote this great, I mean, everyone knows him for queer utopia, but he wrote this great book called Disidentifications, which is about the notion

that capitalist structures are very violent, but then being reactionary to capitalist structures is also just as informed by them as the structures themselves. So you're kind of stuck with this thing that like the thing is bad

and then being reactionary to the thing is also bad. So where do we find our humanity in that? And, you know, I think that book talks about, my favorite example is Pedro on the real world, who came out as HIV. That's an amazing chapter in the book. Who comes out as HIV positive. It actually goes on the real world

as part of his activism around what it means to be HIV positive at the time and says that, well, this real world show will give me a huge platform to let people watch me, live in love as an HIV positive man in the early 90s, and that is in and of self-activism. So it's using the infrastructure of capitalist MTV, but to do kind of cool, weird movement work that wasn't happening at that time. And, you know, so we all just have to weave our little ways, weave our little ways through

the, through the world, dealing with our grief, you know, our utopic vision of having a kid together, this three-way kid that we're going to three-way parent, left us all kind of broken in different ways when it fell apart. We are all still in each other's lives. It was one of the hardest things in writing this book was they had to be okay with it, man. They had to read it and be like, you can say all this stuff. And that was very generous of them actually to give to me. And when their kid was born, all at first I could see her as was not my kid.

I couldn't see her as a child. I just saw her as not my child. And so I couldn't show up for them for the first three to six months of her life. Yeah. And that was really painful. Yeah. Because we were very close and had spent years making plans about how we were going to support each other in the first year of co-parenthood.

And I just could not fucking do it, man. Of course. And I kept telling myself, man, just like text, get up, go over there. It's going to be fine. And my body would just not go. I couldn't do it because of the grief. So, you know, I failed in that way. That's a really harsh way to label yourself about that.

That sounds like the most understandable thing in the world. It is. And yet, you know, they were very isolated. They were dealing with all that first year parenthood stuff that is impossible. Yeah. I think what I'm trying to say is that even if, you know, I'm not saying like I was the asshole in that moment, but I did fail. And, you know, I'm in therapy so I can tell myself that I could not have done better.

It is not my fault that it was completely. completely understandable to not be able to show up, but you still have to, you know, that hurt them. And there still needs to be some conversation about that. Yeah. And, and, you know, I can sort of act differently in the future when I'm not in that grief. So I can show them that I do take the hurt that they felt seriously, even if I couldn't have done any different. So I'm super curious about those moments when we ourselves are maybe, if not the asshole,

not able to be the revolutionary radical thing that we imagine ourselves capable of, you know? And I think it's very, it's like I had a boundary. I've been working for a very long time on having a boundary because as a young queer kid, oftentimes, you know, and it's actually the same best friend that sort of introduced this idea to me, we feel that deficit to other people.

We feel unworthy of love because we're queer. And therefore we have to give, give, give. Because if I don't give you the answers on your home, or my sandwich for lunch, then you will leave me. And a lot of queer kids have that orientation to other people. So as adults, we have to learn to respect ourselves enough to give to ourselves. You know, put the mask on yourself before you put it on someone else. And that can be really challenging.

Yeah. I'm in my fucking 40s, man. Yeah. And that is still something that I have to work on. But grief made me do it. Yeah, me too. That's something that I struggle with myself. there's this

a kid's book I read when I was a kid that was a book about Grover and this is like one of those things that like viscerally like upset me when I was a kid which is Grover goes to school and he wants first day of school

preschool he wants all the other kids to like him of course so and they're like oh you know you can all go play outside when you know if you clean up first or Grover's like I'll clean up for everybody yeah and then everyone else runs off and plays he cleans up and then he gets out to play and like recess is almost over and then he's like you know playing with his favorite truck and some other kids like I want to

play with the train he's like oh you can play with my truck he has to play with something worse and and there's no cookies and milk left for him it's like that and and like the book has a happy ending where the where the other kids do notice and they're like oh grover you can you know like da-da-da-da but like all this stuck with me was that was that feeling of trying to give give give but they're not being anything left for you you know um and and and because you You didn't like take care of yourself. And it's still a lesson than I'm, I still think about that,

that book constantly. Yeah. It's, it's one of those things, you know, I'm, I'm a person who likes to nourish other people. And there are healthy ways,

I think, to nourish other people. Yeah. Um, that can be selfless, not derogatory. And then there are ways to be selfless that are actually an erasure of,

of your own inner humanity. Yeah. Uh, and, you know, there's a breakup that happens in the book. And one of my best friends at the time told me, Joe, you give so much to other people, you cook for other people, you show up for other people.

You have to actually, and this is so cliche, but it hurt. It was so true that it hurt me at the time. You have to pretend that you're the other person and you have to like nourish that version of yourself. Because I was like in the breakup grief where I couldn't eat a sandwich. And I had to be like, okay, if you don't eat a sandwich, you're going to have a panic attack. So it is time to make a sandwich and then eat that sandwich. And like, I didn't let myself leave the room until I ate the sandwich because I didn't want to have the panic attack.

Uh-huh. But, you know, that practice of turning that impulse to nourish, not erasing it from nourishing other people. I love and I still nourish other people. I've been in LA two nights and I cook two dinners for the friends that I'm staying with. You know, that's in their kitchens? In their case. That's a lot to cook in someone else's kitchen. I normally travel with my knife kit, my pasta maker, two meat thermometers.

Like this is, you travel with a knife kit and a, an apostat maker? I sure do, yeah. You're checking a bag. I check the bag. Okay. Yeah, I carry on only. I'm not bringing a knife kit. All right.

I mean, and the pasta machine, I feel like it could be a weapon in and of itself. Yeah. You know, and my deal is my friends, you know, it's LA. A lot of them have a spare room, which is just something in New York that is not our sex and sexuality. But they do out here. And so I get their spare room for free and they get nice meals, made and you know it's sort of this lovely he's kind of a nice little you i got a spare room next time

you're in their town you come over we'll have dinner uh tell me about the uh biology piece of it because we talked about you wanted to be a biological father and the social impulse but um something to me that i've i don't have that drive socially that wasn't instilled in me but um and i have no particular plans about having kids or not you know um and i have the luxury of not need to make a decision anytime soon. But sometimes, you know, I think about adoption or parenting a child that isn't mine in some other way or that isn't mine biologically in some other way versus the idea of having a kid biologically. And I don't know how I feel about it. And what the biological part of it specifically means to me. Actually, I do have one thought that's a thing that I read

years ago about the biological piece of, but first I want you to answer. Yeah, I didn't have you know, when we first started talking about co-parenting, we were talking about adoption, we were sort of talking about everything on the table sperm. And it's still true that I would be a parent without being the biodad. That was just sort of this extra thing that became sort of, it made me feel I was not going to be the primary, you know, that they were the couple having the kid. And what being the biodad made me feel was that I couldn't be taken out of it. And I think I was afraid of that.

And then, of course, the great irony is that I was thinking. Bio-Dads get out of it all the time. That's true. I did not want out of it. I don't think you never know what's going to happen when the kid was there. But I really, I think that's right. That's the attention. You always have a claim.

You could always be like, knock, knock, here I am. But don't we all know that, like, a lot of people have kids and then don't nurture those fucking kids, man. So I think that's one of these scripts. A lot of people cut out biological fathers. And, you know, so I think that's one of the scripts that's given to us that if you have a baby that is your biological baby, you won't be able to leave each other. And I think, you know, I have abandonment issues. And that was what made it feel nice, was this feeling that this is one, one person on the planet that would be mine who couldn't abandon me. But of course, number one, I lost that connection. And then number two is a false narrative to begin. I mean, imagine even. That's too much to put on a kid, right? Like even if that kid grows up, right?

And you're like, you're the one who can't leave me. Jesus Christ, dad. It's like, like, have a little bit of self possession, you know? Nothing makes you consider your parents like almost having a kid. And, you know, my mother, my relationship to my mother is a little, I think my mom wants me to forever be 12 so that she's needed in that way that a mother of a child is needed. I think that made her very happy and feel very fulfilled. But I'm fucking 43, man. And so she has a hard time relating to me.

And I frankly have a hard time relating to her for that reason. But I have a lot more empathy toward her now, given what I was feeling about the child that I was going to have and how much motherfucking healing I imagine. That it would give you some kind of purpose or importance or self-worth. And so that's how she felt about me, that it validates my existence, the child. Exactly. Oh, but that's a powerful thing to realize about yourself. It was, you know, and I, just because I have a lot more empathy for my mom doesn't necessarily change my orientation to her, but it does, I think, help me understand. And then, you know, in terms of like all the options, the plethora of options that we have for having a kid, anything that is not just like knocking up your partner without any medical help is fucking expensive.

Yeah. Adoption is fucking expensive. Surrogacy is fucking expensive. And then nothing is ethically easy. Surrogacy has all of these fraught issues of exploitation. And then, you know, I've really thought, oh, adoption. It's like, I've gotten these emails since I published the book, don't forget about all the little kids that need a home. And, you know, I have a couple writer friends who are like adoptees and who work really closely with adoptee groups.

And it's basically like this country manufactures white poverty in order to have white kids. who can't be careful by their parents, who have to be taken away and given to other families. Yeah. So it's this whole system that, you know, creates violence, perpetuates violence, and then creates this adoptie experience that can be itself very fraught.

Oh, yeah. Well, I have, you know, two friends who are adoptive parents, and they, the story of how they adopted their kid is so beautiful. And, you know, they, I don't want to tell the kid's whole story, but, you know, they were told, hey, if you, if you hadn't adopted this infant from a very difficult situation, this infant would have, like, gone to the foster system in a state where you don't want that to have happened. And they've stayed in touch with the family and, you know, they're doing everything really, really well. And I'm like, this is beautiful. I think this is about the, about as selflessly, quote, unquote, as you could possibly do it.

And they really put the work in. And then I have other friends who are adoptees, they're adult adoptees and feel that. that their adoption story is like the, like a horrible thing that was done to that, you know, or a, or a trauma or a, a true injustice, like a systemic injustice. Right. That they're going to be grappling with for the rest of their lives.

And I've only recently begun to understand the depth of that. So that, like, both of those things are true. And, yeah, you're opening at the very least a can of worms there, right? I think that's, that's what we were all feeling. Yeah. Um, you know, I've gotten a lot of questions about like my desire to be a parent is still present. And I've gotten a lot of questions. Well, why don't you, why don't you do it? It's just the, the can of worms is there, you know. And I wrote this book in part because what I was left with when

this whole year's long process kind of blew up. I was, I was left with kind of nothing, right? Like I had a void. I had a kid that I almost had, but then didn't. Uh, and I needed to fill that with art. you know, I needed to make something. Yeah. And that I wrote hundreds of thousands of words. And I was obsessed with cooking and with fish facts. And I would, you know, I would wake up on Saturday morning and think about what it would be like to be a parent. And I would have quiet in the house.

But I couldn't do anything productive. I wasn't yet working on the book in a meaningful way. I just would, you know, Google salmon ecology papers because we had called our kid that we were going to have a baby fish. We had called her a baby salmon fish. That was sort of our pet name for her. Um, you know, so it, it, it, there was just that void that I have to fill. And, uh, rationality, sort of science and art helped, helped me fill that. But the tension that I really, I was going to use the word resolved, but that's the wrong

word, the tension that I have to live with is I am a person who has had a lifelong desire to be a parent and I'm probably not going to be. That's life is long, man. I mean, can I, can I just ask a couple, uh, a couple, uh, do you, Do you have a, like, a romantic partner of any kind of your life? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do, you know, he's a cis guy and is ambivalent about parenthood. I think if he were really gungho, gung ho about being a dad, we'd be having different conversations. Sure. I have gotten really into, you know, sort of one of the things that helped pull me out of the grief was my other

very dear best friend from college called me up about three months after this all blue. up and my other friend had had their kid saying she was pregnant. And so that was like a life, a young life, a little girl that I could feel completely uncomplicated about and that I had no problem showing up for. And I spent months when she was, when my dear friend was pregnant, making bone broths that they could freeze. It would be ready in her freezer for the, you know, breastfeeding months after, after birth. And that, you know, she received. recently moved to another country and I've been traveling three, four times a year to just spend time. She's three. You should just be there. Just to be one of those adults in her life.

Yeah. You know, the data shows that like just having your parents know that you love them unconditionally, you need three people in life. And it could be a grandparent, could be an uncle, could be aunt, it could be anyone. Could be someone not biological. And I want to be one of those people for her. Yeah. That she knows every few, that she sees all the time and that she just knows, man. That's, that's Uncle Joe. You know, he's he's got me. Yeah. So there are other, you know, one of the realizations of the book is there's not only one way to have a child. Yeah, I'm a teacher.

I am a non-bio uncle. And a lot of those needs for nourishment that I was like so desperate to have in parenthood, I am finding in these other ways. Yeah. That has led to an acceptance of if I'm not a bio dad, that's okay. Yeah. I'm curious about the very strictly biological piece of it. Like, you know, if you're to do the exact, we're talking about all the different ways you can have a parent,

you can parent a child or be involved in a child's life socially, but not biologically. How do you feel about the flip? Purely, you know, sperm donation. Hey, there's a kid out there somewhere. Maybe I'll be involved at some point. Who knows? But it's literally just a biological connection.

Because that's a completely different dimension, The sharing of literally genetics. Yeah, you know, that's not my orientation to what I, what I long for in parenthood. Like, again, you know, I went all the way through the IVF process on my end. So there's like whatever five ccs of osminson sperm that, you know, it's a very homophobic process. So you have to like quarantine after donation before you use the sperm. My shit's ready to go midtown east, you know, if someone is really needing some fresh hot, fresh cold sperm, they are there and available. and, you know, I'm paying to keep them because if a good friend came to me and even didn't

want to co-parent, but was like, you know, we would want to use your sperm. They are fucking sitting there. Yeah. I'm not a podcast. You're just going around a party. Hey, guys, but if anybody needs some sperm, I got some. They're like, yeah, we can all get sperm. I mean, but this is like, but this has been.

This is really good. They've done the swim test. You know, they do the swim test before freezing. And then they freeze and then thaw and then do another swim test. It's like IVF quality. It is. It is. It is Michelin star sperm.

Got it. Yeah, I, I, you know, I'm not opposed to that type of sperm donation or something. That's not what I long for. Yeah. You know, it almost reminds me of like my grandfather's desire that our name gets passed down. I have no necessarily, like, I do not have a desire to have genetic offspring floating out there in the world. I want to cook for someone. I want to wrestle on a Sunday afternoon.

So you feel that the desire that you had to be a biological father was just totally socially imprinted. You don't think there's any biological drive. I mean, you know, something that always stuck with me is, and I don't think that this is like literally true, but I always loved this argument. I read, you know, Richard Dawkins, the selfish gene when I was in. I know, but this, I really love this book when I was in. college, right? It's a way of thinking about life that I think is really powerful. And he makes a lot of,

I think, wonderful arguments in that book. And it's, you know, it's a lot of his intellectual exercise rather than being like strictly biologically true. The book is like 50 years old at this point. But, you know, he sort of makes this argument for altruism generally that like, you know, if the, if the purpose of a gene is to perpetuate itself, then an organism that shares 50% of his genes with something else, right? With another organism, you, well, preserving your own life is as good as saving two organisms that have 50% right or of your drug material or taking a 50% risk of your own life to save one. And so it sort of becomes this like silly math experiment.

It's a spreadsheet. Yeah. Of like, okay, well, if I can save like eight cousins or if I'm only taking a one in eight risk of dying to save one cousin, it's like worth it genetically. And then there's some cool offshoots of this where it's like, oh, if you look at like ants and like why are some ants sterile, well, ants are actually more closely related. to each other than like most organisms are because of like a quirk of how their chromosomes work.

And so like I, you know, my reaction to that shit was always like, oh, cool. Cool. But then the back of my head, well, if I adopted a kid, would I like, you know, be less likely to jump into a river because of some deep down biological,

probably no. But, you know, there is, I don't really, you know, evolutionary behavior and psychology and stuff. Usually bullshit. But like, hey, genetic offspring. is like that is one of the main impulses of an organism. So is there not

anything in your view? I have, you know, we're playing in my kiddie pool now and sort of as a molecular biologist. Yes. That stuff works it works oftentimes on the level of genetic material. You know, I think your point is that your point earlier was that, you know,

humans actually evolved in a much less biologic. You know, you weren't just raising your own bio kids necessarily. And you can imagine selection evolutionary selection occurring on a population, which is not generally how scientists think about it. You know, I think about viruses a lot in terms of the selfish gene that viruses act a lot this way. You know, just in terms, there's an argument that's always been made that I think will sort of offer why I fell out of love with this sort of selfish gene type thinking.

Sure. And the argument was always that faggots exist because we care for our kin. Yeah, that's the argument literally in that book is like, hey, if you have a certain number of people who do not want themselves to have offspring, it's like beneficial in a sort of band-sized society to have a couple people who are like, oh, we'll take care of other people's kids. And then we'll, you know, have gay sex. That's right. And this is actually, it started to bum me out. Because I don't feel like my queerness is a deficit. And this mindset is trying to explain why queerness exists as though it were a deficit.

Right. And so it started to bum me out. And then it's the evolutionary quirk that, oh, actually it has a utility like that framing. Exactly. And so I'm like, you know, I don't view my sexuality that way. And I also know, you know, I am the fagittiest faggot on the faggot that ever faggotted. And I have sex with people who can have kids all the time. Right.

So it's like, you know, like many acts, it doesn't, you know, I write the book about doing IVF donation, which is like, you go into the sterile room and jerk off into a cup. And it is the worst orgasm of your life because it is a very unsexy. You know, it's like Juggs magazine from 1982 is on the wall. And you're just thinking about, I bet I've had worse orgasms. It was on my list. On my list. Okay. Pretty low.

But it doesn't take a good nut to make a kid. Right. Right. You know, and it doesn't take a lot of sex with someone to me. make a kid, you can knock someone up after one, you know, this, like how many fucking rom-coms, right? You know, we would put the rom-com industrial complex out of business, as though if it weren't already going out of business, if this type of situation didn't happen.

So it just feels so reductive to the complete. I think if anything, our biological selves is imprinted in our brain, which is all about sociality. Right. And all about, you know, if you do have a kid that is not biological, it is, not going to imprint on your brain and all of those sort of drives and desires to nurture. I don't think it's going to be less because that's itself genetic and biological. This need to nurture and care for the thing that is your one and only job to keep alive.

What a great answer that like, I mean, yeah, let's talk about biology. Humans are on a biological level, social animals that respond to each other socially. Physical changes happen in us because of social things that happen in the social world. and therefore, when you're talking about what is our biological drive or biological connection, it's obviously not going to be just genetics. That's sort of my, you know,

as a molecular biologist, as a person, the reason I study bacteria and viruses is because those are organisms where in most of the time, still not all of the time, but you can say a particular mutation and a particular gene has a particular outcome. And human, you know, all these,

it was all gay men looking for the gay gene in the 90s, you know, and it was these alleles. that would be like, it increases your likelihood of being gay by like 5%. And that's like, to me, that is like, it's all hand-wavy nonsense. You know, I actually sequenced my gay gene myself in the molecular biology lab and found out that I am in fact a straight man. Wow, you don't have the gay gene. Breaking news, I do not have the-

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No, no, no, no. I'm Kyle Mooney. Sorry about that. Exactly. No, all good. All good. Thanks, buddy. Yeah, and we host a show, what's our podcast here on Headgum? This podcast is brought to you by SquareSpans.

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of a website or domain. Hell, sounds easy. Anybody could do it. That's really interesting that it was gay men looking for the gay gene. Because my impression was kind of was it was the other way around. It was like, we've got to figure out these gays. No, it was. But again, I think it came from an era of gay men who really felt that they were broken.

You know, I went on a date with someone. They'd justify themselves. That's right. I went on a date with someone in the odds. A long time ago, and he was maybe 10 years older than me. And he, you know, I'm, I'm by. And he's like, oh, you're by. And I was like, yeah, he's like, well, why don't you just choose to be with women?

And I'm like, well, because I kind of like having all this plethora of possibility. And he said, man, if I could just be with women, if that, if I had that straight path, my life would be so much easier and so much better. And that was just so sad to me. Yeah. You know, and it was just not my orientation to it. And it was, it was, I, I just felt like you and I are not going to vibe because like, yeah, you know, self-hating can lead to great sex. But that's not, that wasn't, that's the best thing I've ever heard anyone say about self-hating.

Yeah. Oh, man. You got some shit to work out. You can, you can really talk, go back to the rope bonding, you know? Yeah, sure. It's like, you can play some fun roles with that one. Yeah. Exercise and demons.

Exercise on demons. Exercise on demons on that dick. Hell yeah. Let's talk about, you know, I love that you were, when wrestling this, you were thinking about salmon. You were waking up every day thinking about salmon. And that is sort of one of my favorite things to hear from a writer. I don't know what it is. As I was thinking about this, I was consumed with this question.

What is it about salmon and how to salmon come into the book? Well, you know, so my best friend came to visit. visit my hometown ages ago when we first met. And I'm from the Pacific Northwest and she like goes out fishing with my dad, you know, she's not from the States and she's not white. And my dad's sort of like explaining to her like, oh, yeah, it's just trout this time of year. And she's just like, exotic, you know, like there's white people stuff. Like, you eat salad and you go fishing. It's just like, this is wild to her. And so that image is kind of stuck with her of where I come from and it was a symbol of our our relationship I think and so when we were planning on having a

kid it was just like we called that's what we call it my dad was like oh yeah you know they salmon swim a thousand miles upstream like up fucking mountains they climb up ladders and dams and so and that was another part of it for me as I was thinking about what I had lost is that sort of innate biological desire that like salmon get born go out to sea swim thousands of miles out at sea to eat. And the, you know, the lady salmon are making eggs the whole time, thousands to tens of thousands. They swim 700,000 miles upstream to lay their eggs, die.

The last thing they do is make babies. Yeah. Their whole, you know, all of us, if you think reductively biologically, like our whole purpose is to make offspring that then will make offspring that will make offspring. And with salmon, it's just laid so bare. their desire, you know, is sort of like so enacted in their muscles. There's no salmon going like, I'm going to wait a little bit. I have a scene of that in the book, right?

Like the gay uncle salmon, they're like, nah, let me have an apparel spritz. It's like Alaska's kind of nice this time of year. You know, it's like 24 hours of sun. So I'm going to chill out actually in the ocean and eat some squid. You know, I have a really good squid restaurant around the way. It gave me a lot of opportunity to play, I think, with stories and images like that. You know, the kid that I didn't have started coming to me in my dream as a fish. And we would have conversations.

And she sort of then started appearing to me in real life as a fish. And that gave my grief someplace to go. So, you know, grief is so logical. And I don't know if I could tell you why. why this is the way that my daughter that I didn't have came to me was in the guise of a half girl half fish. You know, some Freudian shit in there. But that's that's where it went.

And I think another part of it was I had been through this really bad breakup. So I had known that grief. And it was really somatic. I was like running a fever and not sleeping and having these panic attacks. So this second big grief of my life of kind of losing this kid that I thought, I was going to have became almost metaphorical. My body wouldn't feel it. I think part of it was my body wouldn't feel it.

So it had to sublimate and go into some metaphor. And the metaphor that was later, all of our Google Docs were all of our planning was like, salmon spawn, fish fry. It was like that was what we called her. So that's sort of how that grief came out of my pores. Wow. I was wondering like, again,

I'm like, hey, we're about the same age. Life is long, you know, sperm are viable for a long time, right? Who knows where life will take you? And so I was wondering where that grief was coming from because, you know, well, hey, I didn't go to the party this Friday, but there'll be, you know, there'll be birthday parties in the future, right? Yeah. But the amount of planning that you put in and the amount of, the amount of like sort of commitment

you had made, I guess. And I went through my biological process, right? I went through all the screening, the genetic screening, the coordination. I stopped drinking for that whole thing. time period just almost symbolically I was like my friend's going to stop drinking for nine months and doing all whatever you know wow so I was like I just felt like I wanted to do that as like a symbol of how seriously I was taking it um I took that I felt that whole process I was going through

a lot of of feelings um and and you know like we talked about IVF and we talked about adoption and everything is so complicated and like ethically I felt like my best friend coming to me, wanting to co-parent with me after I was the sperm donor, that was like the one thing where I unequivocally could say, I want to be parent that way. It's not the only way, but that is like, I feel ethically awesome about this. I feel like we're doing something really cool together. And I had that and then it fell apart. Yeah. And I might have that again. But that's a rare. But it's a, it was a rare special thing. And again, like one of the only things that got me through my breakup with my ex that was so somatic.

Like, this best friend of mine was in, she was the one in the neighborhood when he came in and was like, I'm leaving. Yeah. And he didn't want to have a kid this way. He was actually sort of blocking me from having a kid with my best friend and co-parent. And so as she's like rubbing my back and I'm like sobbing uncontrollably, I said to her, well, at least we can have a kid together now. Yeah.

And so it was one of the things that like kept me alive through that grief was like, well, I've lost this partner who I thought I was getting married to. and have that version of forever. Yeah. And I lost that, but I have this version of forever, which is being a dad. Yeah. And so, you know, that, so that's another reason why the grief was cyclical, because then when I lost that situation, the grief of the breakup came back up,

that I had sort of lost that vision of the future that had kept me alive for the breakup. So it's just, yeah, grief, man, it accumulates and modifies and mutates. And then you learned to accept, you know, my grief was blocking me from loving my best friend's kid and showing up. Yeah. And that's totally reasonable and understandable. But as I worked on my grief, I've been able to show up more. And there's joy in that. I'm finding joy on the, you know, on the other side of that loss.

Do you think there's a difference between grieving something that you had, that you lost? and grieving something that you thought that you would have, grieving the idea of forever, because that's sort of, you just described it as being two flavors of that type of grief, but I'm sure you're also grieving the actual relationship that you're present in. I have also been grieving the end of that type of relationship. And there's, you know, there's the grief for the future and the grief for the past. And sometimes the grief for the future you feel sort of silly about because you're like, well, whose idea was that?

And where did that come from? And is that, am I grieving a thing I was supposed to want rather than a thing I did want? I don't know. It was very complex. Yeah, I don't know the answer to that question. You know, when I lived with my partner for many years. And so when he suddenly moved out and he had a dog coming into the relationship and he took the dog weaving. So it was just like, my body was so used to snuggling with him in bed every night.

And so there was a somatic thing that had changed that made me. me lose my fucking shit. And I did not experience that losing the idea of having this kid. The grief was very, very different. And, you know, I don't know if that's because I didn't lose a fleshy thing that I had in my life. And so somatically, it just felt very different. Or if I was sort of repressing my grief because my body wouldn't go back there. My, you know, that, the level of grief I had, not to be triggered or anything, but the level of grief I had when I lost my partnership taught me how bad grief can actually feel. And I feel like that changed my DNA. Like I do not want to go back to that place. That was the most pain, physical or emotional I have ever been in. And I survived

it, but it taught me depths of suffering that I did not know to be possible. And so when I had then my next grief after that, my body did not go back there. But other things came up that were surprising. Other things came up that were surprising. And I just wonder if it's because my subconscious was just like putting it. I dissociated a lot in that second grief. And so I don't know if it was that there was no body that was missing and it was a theoretical future grief or if it was because the previous grief just stopped it and wouldn't let me experience it in that way. So I had to experience it in a different way. Is there something about the story of the salmon that helped you come to terms with

the, I mean, obviously diving into the art. I've also experienced that for dealing with grief, but about the salmon specifically. Yeah, I mean, I think it gave me a place to be curious again. You know, I think we were talking about the joys of thinking and all of it was quite difficult and dissociative and I wasn't feeling a lot, but I could feel, I never thought about this before, but I could feel joy in the thinking. I could feel joy in the curiosity. I'm not an ecologist, and I'm not an organismal biologist.

But my training gives me the ability to dig into the primary literature and gain that expertise. And I do think there was a fucking joy in that. And I think it allowed me to feel a very intellectual pleasure that was a sort of safe replacement for the very embodied pleasure of parenthood. that I felt that I had lost. So I do think even in the depths of the winter that I found out, I wasn't going to be a dad and was just obsessed with salmon facts. Thank God for NYU's library, like global access to scientific journals, because I was in it.

I was just printing stuff out and reading and underlining. Amazing. And that's fun. That was fun for me in a way. Yeah. There is something that is so deeply captivating about the, life cycles of other species. Like you're talking about salmon and I'm thinking about about eels, about American eels,

which I'm sure you know this, but for for those who don't, and maybe you can fill in the blanks, it's like there's an eternal mystery about how the fuck eels breed. Because like eels, I believe they start in freshwater. And then they go into the Atlantic Ocean and they dive deep down and then nobody knows what happens down there, but then like baby eels just come back out of the ocean. And it's probably that they're fucking and they're dying. at the bottom of the ocean. But we've like never seen an eel fuck, basically.

I think on either side of the Atlantic, right? That's, that's right. And, you know, so my friend Sabrina Imbler, who's also a queer mo and a science writer, wrote the book, how far the light reaches. And I did an interview with them about why it's like my friend Lou Miller, Lars Horn and Sabrina, we all wrote these books about gay fish. I'm sort of like, what the fuck are we doing? Like it was independent.

Like my book started a long time before those were published, but yet we were all drawn to this. One of Sabrina's answers was that when they had a hard time being kind to themselves, they could have an easier time being kind to an animal that they could imagine and tell their story through. Yeah. So it's sort of, you know, a deeply, animals have these life cycles that are deeply biological, that are, we can imprint our metaphors onto them, and we can express kindness toward them or curiosity toward them that we might not be able to give to ourselves. Yeah.

And that allows us, I think, to move through our own. stories with a little bit more humanity pointed back at ourselves. Oddly enough, through the animal, we give ourselves the gift of a humanity. This was reminding me of a short story. I want to go back and reread that I read like over 10 years ago. I think it was in the science fiction magazine, Clark's World, which is online magazine. But it was about, it was told from the perspective of a male anglerfish. You know about these? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, female angler. You picture anglerfish, that's the female, right? And they're huge.

Male anglerfish are basically just like tiny little swimming sperm. And they, they're like, never eat, right? Yeah, they, I think they don't have mouths. They're like, they're like alive for a second. They're regular, res the angler fish, the female anglerfish are like alive for a normal amount of fish years. But the, but the male angler fish, they're like born. And then they're like, they swim onto the female angler fish and they just like suction on.

That's right. And they turn into their gonads just sort of like become absorbed. Well, she can use them, I think, at any. any time is how it works. They just become a swimming sack. They like lose their individuation. And so the story is told from the point of view of a male anglerfish, which is swimming alongside the female anglerfish and trying to resist the urge to die by subsuming himself

in her. And then they're having a dialogue. And I should go back and re-read. Because obviously this is the writer somehow working through something. At the time, I was just like, whoa, cool story. Cool story, bro. It has nothing to do with me, my codependency. Yeah, clearly that's what that's about.

I should go back and reread this. I mean, I'm pretty sure people can find that on the internet if they search for it. It was a cool little short story, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think these questions of codependency and our need for other people. Like I said earlier, I think there are ways to need other people that are so healthy that, you know, allow collective movements. Yeah. Allow raising of children, allow friendships. You know, there is no us without.

me and like there's no me without us and all these things are fucking beautiful and that's what we strive for. And there are ways to be codependent that can be self-destructive. And so wait, that line between respecting yourself and allowing yourself to be part of a larger movement is something that I'm constantly thinking about. Yeah. As an Irish Catholic person, I was definitely Ray, you know, an Irish Catholic person who was drawn to motherhood from a young age like the fucking martyr man, that is. There's nothing sexier than a martyr, you know, because you can, you sort of have this get out of jail free card that I live for everybody else, you know? And so, yeah.

But that is not a healthy identity to, to aspire to. Yeah. You know. And so, yeah, that the messiness of that line between the individual and the collective and the ways in which sometimes, and again, this happens in movement work too, where people are so giving to everybody, everybody, everybody, but it's actually a way to be quite selfish or to like become essential to them. I think become essential to the movement, right?

if you're so essential, that's actually a danger to the movement because then if you go, the movement falls apart. Yep. You know? So actually, we should all be trying to make ourselves redundant to the movement. But that requires a selflessness as well. Yep. You know, so even in our organizing spaces, this sort of need to be essential can be quite

dangerous, but it's alluring. They need to be a leader can be really beautiful or can be really toxic. Yeah. So how we negotiate those desires within ourselves. and then within our collectivity is something that I think we're all going to be struggling with for the rest of our lives. There are no easy answers. Yeah, well, because every problem is a human problem. You know, you're talking about French literature.

A couple of years ago I read Germanel by Emil Zola. Yeah. But an incredible book. Only I've ever since read one of their Zola novel, but I'm not a French literature guy. But incredible book about a minor strike and every single character in the book. And this is people like represent some force in capitalism or some. This person's this kind of proletariat. One of the main characters is like the leader, this kid who gets, you know, sort of radicalized and like leads the strike, leads the union movement.

But then the Zolot has such a good job of describing his own desire for martyrdom and the way he like started imagining his own heroism. Yeah. And he is the hero of the book. But like there's just a couple pages about like him imagining his heroism and and leading myself as a leader. I was like, oh, man, there's no. it was a really wonderful depiction about how, you know, even even the great people who do the great thing have some like, you know, messy humanity to them that is at risk of ruining the whole enterprise or causing the pain that they themselves are trying to solve, right? A hundred percent. Yeah. It's just, you know, and then I think the only way to deal with that is like long trusted relationships, you know, like one of the best things about everyone who's in this book that I just publish is I've known almost all. of them for like fucking 15 years man.

If I were on some bullshit, I would get a phone call from each of them. Girl, let's let's let's rate it in here. You're, you're embarrassing me and like your family to me and I can't. I cannot have you acting this way. You know, so I there's real value I think into that. And you know, both of these characters in this book, I read, you know, I'm a white faggot from a very working class small town in Washington State. I read marks for the first time because of this girl I met in college that I was dating at the time.

And that gave me, I would not be myself without my experience of reading marks. And I read Marx because of her. I read Judith Butler because of this best friend that I almost had a kid with. And I would not be myself and have my understanding that I do of my gender and its relation to other people if I hadn't read that. So there's such value in these messy human relationships. And we're all doing different types of movement work in different movements. And I think there's real trust that everyone is negotiating very complex. They're both parents now.

And that has taken them away from movement work in ways that are really painful for them, actually. So, you know, but I can step up and help them parent. I can step into movement work that they can't because they're parenting. So, you know, thinking about the messy relationships, the long relationships, the trusting relationships as a feature, not a bug, as a good thing. Yeah. That to the robustness of our movements and to our ability to survive what is a very

difficult political, very hopeless at times political moment. Yeah. When you're thinking about the questions of, you know, what do you want versus what's been instilled in you or the social piece of it, I wrestle with that all the time. You know, me and my ex both had deep ambivalence about having kids. tell her story. She has a book coming out about it later this year. So if you're curious, she's thought about it very deeply and I think I can safely say her and her abivalence is very deep. So it was mine. And as then we wrestle with her through a whole relationship and like,

even now we're like, get together like, how the fuck do we feel about this now? We're getting older and like what are the? And so sometimes like, you know, like, well, I'm missing out if I don't have the kid. But if I did have the kid, I'd, well, then I'd be raising some fucking five year old and I'd be like, well, now I'm, I'm still unhappy. So this wasn't, maybe I should I've done the other thing. And like, what is the, you know, I can't piece for myself. You know, my, I have family members who are having children now. I'm like, am I the weird one or am I the one taking the more interesting path currently?

And how do you sort through this? So, I mean, is there a part of you, I haven't gone through the grieving process where you think, oh, well, maybe I got out of something. Maybe the thing that was instilled in me I'm released from. And how do you tell if it's that, or is that cope? or is that, you know? It has just showed me, I think, how fucking ridiculous the human experiences.

Because basically, as a person, we have two choices, which is you either have kids or you don't. And if you don't have kids, you are missing out on something. Yeah. You just, it is a relationship unlike any other.

And if you do have kids, a lot of the times, it fucking sucks. Yeah. And you miss out on a lot of other things. And you miss out on a lot of other things. Yeah. So that is just it, man.

That is the ambivalence. If you had that kid, you wouldn't have written a book about salmon, you would have been changing diapers. I would be, and I wouldn't even have learned all the salmon facts if that came from the grief, right? Yeah. So that and that is the paradox of being a fucking person

that both options limit your possibility for experience. Yeah. And that, I just, I have to accept that. And if I do have a kid in the future, that will come at the cost of, you know, my best friend who moved to Jamaica is the smartest writer I've ever met

and wrote an incredible doctoral dissertation in sociology about the inheritance of knowledge from grandmothers to mothers to daughters and how they operate in a particular geography. So how they move through space and how that's inherited matrilinearily. It's going to fucking rock. And that book

doesn't exist yet because she has a fucking kid. You know? So it just, I think what I'm sitting with is just acknowledging that that is the human reality is so much of American intellectual pursuits is avoiding that reality. Just consume entertainment and go and do your thing.

Instead of just sitting with the fact that our realities, you have kids and you have this experience, you give up on a lot, or you don't have kids, you never have this experience and you also give up on a lot. And acknowledging that, there's pain in that, and there's also joy in being an uncle where I get to have close proximity

and a relationship with a young person throughout hopefully their whole fucking life. And I get that experience and I also get some of the amazing things about not having a kid. Yeah. Which is my own time, my own, you know, I have my ability to do my writing in a way that I just wouldn't if I were a parent. Yeah. It's not a binary though that you have kids or not. I mean, like you've had the experience of almost having a kid and then grieving.

Some people have a child and the child passes away. Some people, you know, do have a co-parenting experience. Like had you had the co-parenting experience that you plan to, That is a, that's almost a third way, is it not? I'm a binarian on this. I'm a binary and non-binary. No, it's you're, I'm living the, I'm, I'm living the close unclehood. I'm not like an uncle where I'm not, you know, I'm spending a lot of money and giving a lot of time, do this very joyful thing of showing up for my, my best friend's kid.

And so that is kind of a third way, but I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I'm getting experience of being a parent either. I'm not. I'm not there every morning at 6 a.m. Yeah. I'm not making lunch. You know, I'm not, when she has something in the yard, she steps on a bug or whatever, I'm not the one she runs to. Yeah. You know, she's a pretty reserved kid.

And she's very used to me being around, but she's not super affectionate, you know, in the way that she is with her parents. Yeah. And I actually like, the lot of emotional work that I get to do, get to do, I really do think it's an opportunity to be like, this kid is pretty reserved. and she loves me being around but she's not like hugging me and telling me she loves me all the time and that is her fucking prerogative man

and if I want to love her right I just gotta go with it you know I got it's like from being around kids you really learn a lot about again like what you inherited and where you want to give that love forward and where you want to interrupt fucking patterns

yeah you know and needing to be loved in a particular type of way with a particular type of performative thing this or that I want to interrupt that man, I want to be loved on the terms of the little girl that I'm growing up to get to know. I want her to get to decide. Yeah. And that's taken a lot of growth.

Yeah. Well, that's really beautiful. And I think the way that you think about is very beautiful. And a lot of people do have kids and don't think of it. Don't do it with a fraction of the thought and intention and, you know, care that you are giving the experience of maybe and then not. and then, you know, maybe. So I don't know. It is hard to get away from this,

this idea of what you're supposed to do and then how that interacts with your wants, but like how you deal with what is and either the choices that you make or the choices that are put upon you or the outcomes that are put upon you is kind of the most important thing, huh? Yeah, I mean, I'm going to try to get knocked up later

this afternoon, but I don't think it's going to take. Yeah, you know, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not sitting here trying to print it. You don't have choices in life. You do. Some people get pregnant by accident and then end up having kids and that, you know, we all both have agency and then we have a material reality. And that's messy.

And I just am about that. I'm in my 40s, man. I'm about that mess. I love that mess. I want to live in that mess. I want us to all acknowledge and make very non-AI driven songs, visual art, and writing. This is the thing about being in your 40s is you're just like,

It's a fucking mess. It's a fucking mess, man. Everyone's messy. You go get laid or don't have kids or don't, you know, and hopefully your friends and everyone in your life can like step up and support your mess. I think if you don't have kids in your 40s, you're able to appreciate the mess a lot more. Because people who are in their 40s and they have kids, because it's around the time,

you know, I have a lot of friends who are having kids. Everything needs to be just right. You know what I mean? Like they got a, we need a fucking Toyota Rav4. And we have to drop the kid off. And everything is like on a schedule. Are you in the like the friends where it's like nap didn't happen? And now everything is melting down.

And every plan that was ever going to happen for the next two weeks, the plans are out the window because there was no nap today at 245 to 315. Yes. It's over. Yes. Call 911. Oh, my God. It's wild.

It is wild. They're like, I'm never going to sleep again. And you think that's crazy. And then you take one look at the kid and you're like, oh, fuck. It's so fucking true. No, it's so fucking true. No, it is, it is fucking not getting that afternoon nap. And then the transition from like the nap years to the not nap years.

And then it's like, oh, fuck, the kid took a nap. It's going to be up to 1 a.m. It's horrible. It is hard. Yeah. It is a fucking tough experience, man. Yeah. You know, I'll say, uh, a thought that I have sometimes is, you know, again, I haven't

had kids and my sister has, right? And I'm like, oh, she's got a wonderful little family and, you know, my parents love visiting. I love visiting my niece. and then I'm like oh maybe I'm missing out on something and then I get to spend so much more time with my parents like I like my dad is getting older and my have such a better stronger deeper more most importantly relationship with him than I had before and like you know something goes wrong for them I can fly up and I can just you know I can devote a lot of time there that you know my sister's not able to right and and and so that's it's not consolation prize it's a different path right right that's like, oh, that's something that's available to me. It's also familial care. Right. Elder care is also familial care.

Right. And, you know, it's just as essential. And it's something that, again, in late capitalism, particularly in America, we tend to offload, not think about. We'll just pay. We'll put them in a home. Blah, blah, blah, you know. And I just did an event in San Francisco with my writer friend, Celeste Chan, who was talking

about caring for a community elder and caring for her dad as they both sort of had dementia. And oftentimes that care is also done by queers, you know, because we might not have kids. And so, yeah, I think you're talking a lot, and I haven't thought about this, but that the opportunity of not having kids to provide cares in ways where the need is just as great. Yeah, this is a very stupid story. But my favorite type. I, you know, I had some friends who were like describing, like, describing. like playing like video games with their kids right i'm like oh that oh you know what that that would be nice you have a kid you think oh here's here's a game that i grew up with and having sharing that with a child

right um but then a couple years ago um you know i got my dad a PlayStation and i got him a copy of my one of my favorite games was just Tetris effect which is a if you played Tetris effect yeah it's incredible gorgeous game i think this is truly the best game ever made it's so beautiful it's spiritual it's moving and i've send it and i yeah and i visited him once and he was like for the first time he was like, uh, he was like, Adam,

you want to have an edible? And I was like, yes, you're dead. Let's have it up. He, he, he, this dude's doing like 20 milligrams.

Like he's, like 72 year old guy in Oregon. Like he's fucking, it's going to, I didn't know it was that much until we took it. We got so stoned. And he's playing Tetris. And he's,

and he's just like, Adam, this game is incredible. And then I'm literally like teaching him how to play Tetris, you know, because I, I play Tetris so fast. he's like, you're so good.

And then he's, he's playing. And I'm like, okay, so just like move it to the left, move it to the right. And I like actually watched him like get his first Tetris. And he went like, yay. Like he made this little yay. And my heart was so warmed. And I'm only now realizing like, oh, that was like he was my kid. Right.

It was such a similar experience of sharing something that actually was deep, like deeply important to me. It's so beautiful. And one of the great gifts of queerness to my mind is that I grew up in such a small town in the 80s and 90s. I didn't know what a scientist was. I didn't know what a writer was. Life was very foreclosed. People did one of a very small number of things. And if you were educated, you were a doctor or a lawyer kind of end of list.

There was no creative work at all that one imagined we could do. And so one of the great gifts of queerness and going to grad school was just life opening up to possibilities you didn't even know. existed. And I think that way too about care, this nurturing and caregiving that you might not have ever thought that you would have this opportunity to get stone to play Tetris with your dad. Yeah. But what a surprising delight. And then it's a double delight because it's something that you could have never even imagined being possible. And I just really, man, life is just so fucking hard these days. Yeah. And so when I'm with my kid, my friend, my kid see, when I'm with my

friend's kid and we're on the beach and we're in the water and she just loves the water man and she's just laughing just endlessly and had a floaty on her arm you know in her um swim diaper on and she's swimming back and forth between my friend and i and i think i don't have kids but i i didn't know that this is a delight that i could feel yeah this delight this one right here that i'm experiencing and i'm feeling the wind and i have salt water in my hair uh and i just want to i just want to i just want I want to accumulate that pleasure, that joy, that experience, and not let anything get in between me and that and really accept that joy for the great, great gift that it is. That is so beautiful, Joe. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

I have to read your book. And what's it called? Spawning season. Spawning season. An experiment in queer parenthood. Amazing. And it is out now. It is out now.

You can get a copy, of course, at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. Where else can people find you? I mean, I am on Al Gore's internet. So you can have a website there, you know, buy the book from anywhere. But the evil enterprise, that is the evil enterprise. Your local bookstore is a great place to do it. And yeah, I just, you know, publishing is like trying to get a book out now is kind of like fiddling on the roof deck at the Titanic as she goes down. But if you read it and you dig it and makes you feel something, slip me a DM.

because that's like the only good thing that's happening right now. Slide into Joe's DMs. It's just these one, these interactions with readers who are moved is just like, you know, the only thing. Well, I'm moved talking to you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. It's always a delight. Thank you again to Joe for coming on the show.

Again, if you want to pick up a copy of his book, head to our special bookshop, factuallypod.com. Every book you buy there supports not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. If you want to support the show directly, head to patreon.com. slash Adam Con, over five bucks a month gives you every episode of the show, ad-free. For 15 bucks a month, I'll read your damn name and the damn credits. This week, I want to thank Anthony and Janet Barclay,

Griffin-Meyers, Alex Womack, Grant King, Aaron Matthew, Andrew Harding, Lexical Unit, Amy Thorntron, Aaron Explosion, Game Grumps, thank you to Game Grumps, Rick J. Nash, Howard and Kevin, Faith Murkan, Darren Kay, and a whole lot more. You know what, let's add one more. Let's also thank Ed. Thank you so much, Ed, for supporting the show.

If you want me to read your name or silly username at the end of the show, once again, patreon.com. slash Adam Conover. I want to thank my producers, Sam Rodman and Tony Wilson, my engineer Sam Rogic. Everybody here at Headgun for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening. I'm going to see you next time on Factually. That was a HeadGum podcast. Hi, I am Mandy Moore.

Sterling K. Brown. And I'm Chris Sullivan. And we host the podcast. That was us now on HeadGum. Each episode, we're going to go into a deep dive. from our show, This Is Us. That's right. We're going to go episode by episode.

We're also going to pepper in episodes with different guest stars and writers and casting directors. Are we going to cry? Yes. A little bit. Are we going to laugh? A lot. A whole lot. That's what I'm hoping, man.

Listen to that was us on your favorite podcast app or watch full video episodes on YouTube or Spotify. New episodes every Tuesday.