"Too many men have to choose between authenticity and fatherhood.
Andy Miller wants to change that.
The 43-year-old Texan just launched The Handsome Father (thehandsomefather.org), a national nonprofit organization devoted to guiding gay men toward and through fatherhood, with everything from mentoring programs to adoption and surrogacy resources to gay-friendly vacation planning.
First, about the name. "Handsome," notes the website, "means pleasing, dignified, generous, appropriate, fitting, ample, graceful, bountiful and, yes, attractive. We believe fatherhood is handsome in every respect of the word."
Next, the inspiration.
"When a man comes out, in his internal monologue he often considers what he'll have to sacrifice," Miller told me. "Maybe it's that he'll no longer have a close relationship with his parents, or he won't be able to run for public office. For a lot of men, it means giving up the dream of having children.
"Our goal is to let men know: You can be your authentic self and you can still be a father."
Miller and his partner, Brian Stephens, 42, decided to found the organization together after adopting their son, Clark, in 2006.
"It was a case of stumbling blindly through the process and hoping everything worked out," Miller said. (It did.) "Once you become a parent you become aware of so many different paths, and we wished we had had a more robust collection of resources to look at."
Fatherhood added a layer of richness and meaning to their lives like nothing before or since. They wanted other men who deferred their dream of becoming dads to hear their story and stories like theirs. They tracked down gay dads to contribute blogs at thehandsomefather.org and commissioned profiles of households headed by gay dads".
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