Bryan Leffew, Jay Foxworthy, Daniel and Selena Leffew
Bryan Leffew, 43, a homemaker, and Jay Foxworthy, 45, a San Francisco sheriff ’s deputy and Persian Gulf War veteran, met in college and bonded over “Star Wars” films and toys. They’ve been together 20 years, married since 2008. The Santa Rosa couple talked about fatherhood early in their relationship, but “there really were no signposts for gay couples that said how to do it,” Leffew recalls. Unable to afford surrogacy or find a local adoption agency willing to help, their path to fatherhood was foster care. They learned about a 5-year-old boy and his half-sister, a 16-month-old girl, who came from a family of seven children, all of whom had been removed from their home in Sacramento due to parental neglect and abuse. Social workers were looking for people willing to keep the children together, but were having trouble. One foster family had been willing to adopt Selena, but not Daniel, who has Goldenhar syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes asymmetry on one side of the body and required special medical attention and many surgeries. Leffew and Foxworthy took the plunge.
“I saw him with his bowl haircut holding his foster mom’s hand and it was love at first sight,” recalls Leffew, “and she was a bundle, adorable — there was no going back.”
Like many first-time parents, Leffew, who goes by “Dad,” and Foxworthy, who goes by “Daddy Jay,” didn’t realize how hard it would be to raise kids, or how little they knew. They took life one day at a time, adopting the kids as their own in 2006. Alarmed by Proposition 8 in 2008, a short-lived gay marriage ban repealed by the courts in 2010, they began sharing their home life with the outside world in videos they posted to their own Gay Family Values YouTube channel. The videos of holidays, school events, family dinners — chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese, anyone? — tallied thousands of views (one of them more than 300,000) and sought to show they weren’t that different, and possibly just as boring, as everyone else. (They were also the subject of a documentary film, Cassie Jaye and Christina Clack’s “The Right to Love: An American Family,” in 2012.)
On a recent weeknight, as Selena folded laundry with Leffew and Daniel dug into homework with Foxworthy next to him at the dining table, the atmosphere that prevailed was one of love and respect, with teenage humor pushing the boundaries of their parents’ patience. Maternal nurturing comes from grandmothers, aunts and family friends. Leffew has learned to braid his daughter’s hair from tutorials on the Internet. Daniel, once overweight, now works out with Foxworthy at the gym.
Of their neighbors and the school community, “The gay parent thing has not been a problem at all,” said Foxworthy.
Said Daniel, 16, “It’s not any different from any other family — you have one strict parent, one less-strict parent. You have rules. There’s no difference.”
Leffew, who recently watched a documentary about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, said it brought back his old fears that it would be hard to find a partner, he’d be alone, he’d never have kids. “My life has taken an unexpected turn. I’m married with two kids and feel like Alice in Wonderland,” he said. “I can’t believe I’m here. I have to be the luckiest guy in the world.”
“It’s truly rewarding,” said Foxworthy of fatherhood. “It’s the best thing you’ll ever do.”
“It’s not any different from any other family — you have one strict parent, one less- strict parent. You have rules. There’s no difference.” Daniel Leffew