“Ovulation Night”’s baby daddy is a novel I never wrote.
Back in the 1990s, I gave birth to an idea called Extended Family, a book about a gay couple and a lesbian couple raising a baby together under one roof. Also under that roof: the lesbian couple’s 13-year-old daughter and her father, a homophobic, down-on-his-luck sportswriter.
What could possibly go wrong?
This was the last century. For the most part, LGBTQIA+ were still MIA in the media. The world needed stories about the families we create.
Then I saw a call for submissions for an anthology of gay humor and thought: I’ve got something for that.
Instead of the entire book, I composed one particularly chaotic scene from it: “Ovulation Night”.
This was my chance to indulge in my love of screwball comedy: Love, American Style, Noises Off, Three’s Company.
The premise is simple enough.
Bradley and his lover Duke want to become fathers. Quasar and her lover Lily agree to help. To conceive the child, Bradley and Quasar agree to one perfectly timed sexual encounter. But when the big night arrives, nerves, jealousy, hijinks, and political correctness get in the way.
Eventually, Extended Family faded from my to-do list. I’m not even sure the gay humor anthology that prompted me to write the short story was ever published.
But “Ovulation Night” found another home, in 1998’s Ma-Ka: Diasporic Juks: Contemporary Writing by Queers of African Descent.
Years later, one of my favorite television shows would make an enormously successful comedy out of some of those same ideas. Modern Family was very different from Extended Family, but every week it made people fall in love with a collection of characters connected by marriage, divorce, children, adoption, sexuality, and love.
The families we’re born into. And the families we create.
Maybe that’s one reason I’ve always had a soft spot for “Ovulation Night”. It’s a surviving piece of a book that never existed, written at a moment when the family at its center still seemed unusual enough to require explanation.
And now the digital age has given the story yet another life. “Ovulation Night” has been revised and is available as an ebook and audiobook. It also has a new cover that finally captures the slightly naughty, retro, screwball comedy I intended it to be.
Let the fun begin.