A Good Sperm Donor Is Hard to Find
Early last year, my partner and I decided it was finally time to start a family. We had already tempted those pesky fertility gods by daring to wait until we were almost (gasp!) 35—after which any pregnancy would be considered by our fine medical professionals to be a geriatric pregnancy—and we still needed to factor in additional time to find some sperm. They say certain things take longer when you’re queer. This is especially true when it comes to forming a family: our plumbing prevents a speedy and seamless experience. We couldn’t delay any longer.
One cold January afternoon, for the first time, we logged onto the database of one of a handful of cryobanks our doctor had recommended. We decided to use a cryobank because that’s what many of our queer friends had done, and because our doctor said it required a lot less legwork than using a known donor—fertility lingo for a friend who loans you a few of his swimmers. It seemed like the “normal” thing to do, and normal seemed like a nice start to our journey through the world of queer parenthood.
Over the next few months, we sifted through hundreds of profiles. New candidates would appear all the time, with no warning, while others would sell all their wares before we could even heart their profile. Donors’ profiles were chockful of first-date tidbits. The process was like a high-stakes mashup of the worst parts of online shopping—the doubt, the unpredictability—and online dating, with its anxieties and disappointments and unintentional hilarity.
There’s no guidebook on navigating sperm-donor databases, no best practices on how to find the perfect fit, whatever that means. My partner and I kept saying we wanted to find a buddy, someone we’d gladly grab beers with, but we weren’t even sure what that would look like in this scenario. Besides, I stopped thinking critically about men when I stopped dating them, fifteen years ago. When it comes to the opposite sex, I don’t have a type or even criteria for red flags. I’m a lesbian. The entire male species is a red flag to me. And yet, here my partner and I were, in close conversation with a part of the population that neither of us had intimately interacted with in years; and here we were, forming pointed opinions about men the fly. For example: Dudes who have cats? Good dudes. Guys who love video games? Not-as-good guys. Snowboarders? Could go either way, but we prefer the skiers. A man whose best friend is his sister? He’s a keeper.
I started seeing sperm donor profiles less as a means to create our family, and more like a portal into the male psyche. I knew this was a twisted thing to do, especially considering I don’t subscribe to gender essentialism, and yet I couldn’t help myself. I’d read a sentence like “One thing that makes me laugh is a good comedy” and immediately make a sweeping generalization, like, Men are so literal. Obviously, all men aren’t literal. All men aren’t anything. Each one is a snowflake. Still, my partner and I found some interesting overlap among the donors.
For instance, did you know that most men consider themselves to be “above average” at things our cis-hetero culture expects men to be good at? I’ found this suspect, because I’ve met my fair share of men who are neither athletic nor handy. (They’re actually my favorite guys to hang out with because I’m allergic to sports and DIY projects.) But not these sperm bank stallions, who tended to rate themselves as both “very athletic” and in possession of “excellent” mechanical skills. Evidently, they are the offspring of Michael Jordan and an HVAC repairman. When my partner and I encountered someone who described his mechanical skills as, “I can barely replace a lightbulb,” we almost chose him for what appeared to be a unique comfortability with his masculinity.
Another one of the standard questions cryobanks ask is: If you could have lunch with any person from the past or present, who would it be and why? The question sounds innocent, but we quickly learned that it reveals way more about his values than it does his lunch date preferences. Much to my dismay, none of the donors we encountered offered up Whoopi Goldberg. Even worse, a sizable amount of them responded “Elon Musk.” It happened so frequently that we started to look at the question first, thereby avoiding false hope. I longed for “has no particular feelings about Elon musk” to be added as a filter. I’ll never forget feeling hoodwinked after a donor who claimed his sister was his best friend revealed later in his profile that he was a Musk admirer. I wanted to lunge through my computer screen like the girl from The Ring and shake him by the shoulders. “You should know better!” I pictured myself screaming, my upper body dangling out of his monitor as I stretched my arms out to slap him. “You have a sister!” I am a married lesbian, but after getting hit with eight back-to-back Musk admirers, I wanted to kiss the man who answered Serena Williams. He wrote that her ambition inspires him. Same, my dude. Same.
Perhaps the least surprising thing that my partner and I learned is that male confidence is real. Holy shit, it is so real. Of course, there’s no better venue for boasting about yourself than a marketplace for your DNA, but I was nevertheless fascinated by how many men deployed superlatives to describe themselves. They were all, “one of the best,” “one of the only,” “the most …” followed by a cornucopia of adjectives: “disciplined,” “colorful,” “unique,” “creative,” “uncompromising,” and my personal favorite, “humble.” These guys weren’t getting paid based on how often their already-donated sperm was put into service, yet they all tried to make their sperm sound like the best sperm. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’d bend the truth about, say, my powerful nurturing instincts on an egg-donor application.
Many of the men also appeared to believe they somehow were unique. I lost count of how many personal statements included a variation of, “every other guy is all about X, but I’m different: I like Y.” I found myself transported back to high school, where I spent way too many free periods listening to some artsy guy or another claim that he’d seen Donnie Darko before anyone. Neato! I thought both then and now.
I was so inspired by the confident answers we read. I’m not kidding. Before I started cruising the banks, I never would’ve assumed I’m one of the most anything, except neurotic. But if a random 5’7 dude thinks he’s “the most disciplined person you’d ever meet,” then why can’t I? These donors taught me it’s okay to blindly believe in myself—seriously! —which, unsurprisingly, a large swath said was the most important lesson for any child to learn. “Self-pride,” “self-respect,” “self-confidence”: At least on paper, none of these donors appeared to suffer from self-loathing or even self-doubt, so I decided I wouldn’t anymore, too. Consider me schooled, Daddy.
I suppose the point of providing all these first-date details about the donors is to empower shoppers with some modicum of control over the experience. For us, it caused decision paralysis. The process was unpredictable and often disappointing, and in part because there was so much information to wade through, it consumed entire evenings and weekends. As our preferences developed, our search narrowed, but we were never able to completely settle into the experience. Sometimes we filtered the donors by certain characteristics, like height or hair color. If you’re wondering if this was an uncomfortable way to discover that you have a thing for gingers, well– Yeah, it was. On the plus side, it was also a hilarious way to discover how few men actually are tall. Set the height filter to 6 feet and above and, poof, there went 95 percent of the candidates. Now, if any man tells me he is 6 feet, I know that he is 5’ 10”. Thankfully neither of us were too picky about height. 5’9” was totally acceptable. We’d even consider 5’8” if his best friend was his sister.
Other characteristics were more difficult to ignore. I nixed one candidate because he claimed cantaloupe was his favorite food, and it freaked me out. He was either lying, because nobody likes cantaloupe; or he was being serious, which meant he was vegan, or a serial killer, or both. Another time, I couldn’t get over an otherwise qualified candidate saying the person he admired the most was Jimmy Carter. Taste in presidents isn’t genetic, but stupidity is.
The whole experience stressed me out so much that halfway through our quest, I began browsing for donors in the bath. A couple of nights a week, I would fill the tub with scalding water, place lit candles in its corners, throw in every bath bomb I could find, and scroll through still more profiles Every donor had the kind of cheeky username you’d find on Myspace circa 2004. Multilingual Math Maven? Sounded practical, but no thank you. Charismatic Athlete? Maybe—charm and coordination do get you far in life. Quiet Creative? Quiet I liked, but was “creative” a euphemism for unemployed?
My friends encouraged me to see past my own judgements, to remember that nurture counts as much as nature, to rightfully tell me I was being an asshole, and that the only thing that would matter was the baby’s health. I agreed with them on all those points, but my brain is a monster that is incapable of heeding sound advice. Instead, I called the customer service number for the bank we’d come to use the most and accosted a friendly-sounding rep with my predicament. “Is there any way you can show me less information?” I asked desperately. “Like, just the genetic testing? I don’t want to read their personal essays.”
“That’s funny,” he said. “Most people want more information, not less.” “Well good for them!” I thought. But I couldn’t be trusted. I needed him to spare me from myself. Instead, he suggested I “just not read the essays.” A perfectly reasonable suggestion to which I replied by hanging up.
Egg and sperm banks provide an invaluable service to couples and individuals who want to have a child but can’t conceive the old-fashioned way. Without them, the world would have a lot fewer queer families, and nobody (except a bunch of bigots) wants that. That we all get to make families, regardless of our parts, is a reality worth celebrating and perpetuating with more and more donor conceived children. As the adage goes, there’s more than one way to make a family. In fact, that’s precisely what made choosing an anonymous donor so difficult for us. We thought it was the “normal” thing for queer couples to do, but nothing about the process ever felt normal. And the longer we failed to find Mr. Right at the cryobanks, the more tempting it became to look for him elsewhere.
We’d gone into this process hoping to match with a buddy, but a buddy had turned out to be hard to find—not because there weren’t plenty of decent candidates, but because my partner and I were spoiled. We hadn’t really thought about it in these terms before, because why would we, but we actually knew lots of great guys. Hell, one of my buddies even came on my bachelorette trip. I doubt he’ll ever forgive me for it, but I am so happy he was there. More recently we’ve witnessed some of those lifelong friends transform into wonderful fathers. It was hard to put them, and the specific reasons we liked them, out of our minds as we cycled through carousels of profiles of anonymous men.
Less than six months after first visiting a sperm bank’s donor database, we logged off for good. We had decided that we wanted to know our donor. We wanted to know why we liked him, and we wanted to have personally experienced his good will. In other words, we wanted receipts. We were going to ask a friend, and we felt damn lucky to be able to do so—even if we didn’t know what to expect, let alone if anyone would say yes. We figured the extra leg work would be worth it if it meant being able to tell our child, should they ever ask, that we chose who he did because we knew for certain he was a very good man.
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