FATHERHOOD:
Third-generation LGBT Chris Veldhoven is uniquely suited to challenge and support the diverse dads and dads-to-be taking The 519’s queer parenting programs
The high-pitched activities going on in the rainbow-festooned Family Resources Centre of the 519 Church Street Community Centre include toy-car driving, jumping around, colouring, jumping around, filling up on apple slices and cheese cubes, jumping around, being dangled by one’s ankles and more jumping around. Sometimes a musical cue is like a parachute ripcord.
“How do we feel about a music circle? How are parents feeling?” calls out Chris Veldhoven, program coordinator of Queer Parenting Programs at The 519. “There’s been a request for ‘Sleeping Bunnies!’” The adults in the room, about a dozen of them, knowingly plop mats on the floor. The lights are dimmed. The lyrics “Let’s sit down, let’s sit down” gives you a clue what “Sleeping Bunnies” is all about. As much as the kids are enjoying their Saturday afternoon romp, the monthly Queer Family Mixer is also about parents, who need a moment or two to catch up and catch their breath.
When a two-year-old refers to Veldhoven as “Sparkle Chris,” it’s perfect kid logic. Although Veldhoven’s grey hair, goatee and conservative fashion choices give him the look of a lawyer or real estate agent, youngsters are more likely to notice his giggly child-like quality. The kind of gay man who might accidentally show up to a meeting with glitter on his face, Veldhoven’s exuberance does indeed make him all sparkly. But Sparkle Chris also has a slightly deeper and more subversive meaning. Used by the two-year-old’s family to replace words like aunt and uncle — words that draw strict gender lines — sparkle is meant to separate kinship from the burden of consanguinity. Uncle privileges blood ties; sparkle emphasizes a closeness fueled by affection.
As social and legal changes have made it easier for gay men to become fathers, you can argue that it’s also made it easier for them to lead more conventional lives. The period of partying and self-discovery that often follows coming out can pull gay men in a different direction from their relatives and straight friends. Neither side of the equation quite understands how the other spends its time. Introduce a baby to the gay picture, however, and suddenly the relatives and straight friends have a point of reference — and someone over which to ooh and aah. Social developments that seem radical — “You did what with the sperm?” “She doesn’t know her mommy?” “He has how many daddies?” — can emerge from our most old-fashioned impulses.
“We need to really look at the way life as gay men has limited us.”
Since he took his first contract at The 519 in 2003, Veldhoven has tried to upend all of this. On one hand, with his Daddies and Papas 2B course for gay, bisexual and trans men curious about parenting, he’s tried to make participants comfortable with the aspects of parenting that seem most novel and anxiety-making: How to decide on co-parenting or adoption or surrogacy; how to pursue each of these options; how to sort out the social and legal implications of each approach; how to navigate external homophobia.
On the other hand, in the 18 cycles of the course he’s taught so far, Veldhoven tries equally hard to make participants a little uncomfortable about the things they think they already know. Can men be as nurturing as women? Are gay men too sexually driven to raise kids? Are certain family roles feminine and, if so, are they equal to masculine roles? Can sissies be good daddies? Can men who were born with a uterus rather than a penis be fathers? By the time gay men reach adulthood, they’ve often grown sensitive to how society can thwart them, even as they overlook how they might sabotage their own desires to make a family.
“We need to really look at the way life as gay men has limited us,” says Veldhoven, 45. “Some gay men don’t understand how we’ve learned to internalize some really sexist and misogynistic beliefs.” For example, bad habits, like calling people “the B-word,” can crop up among gay men who don’t have many women in their lives. “It’s about not passing on the many forms of shame to our children.”
Listening to all this thoughtfulness on what it is to be a good parent, it’s hard to overlook the fact that Veldhoven himself is childless. And single, for that matter. If you want to understand how he has become a queer parenting guru, you’re going to have to go all the way back to his upbringing in rural Nova Scotia. That’s where he discovered the importance of turning the things that many families would see as worth hiding into things worth celebrating.
Son & grandson of LGBT
Veldhoven’s father, Gerard, grew up in the Netherlands and came to Canada in the 1950s with his parents and three brothers. They established themselves in Halifax. In 1961, Gerard came down with pneumonia and met a nurse he felt he could love. They married and in 1966 had a son, Chris, followed by another son four years later. When Chris was seven, his father came out as a gay man to his mother. They were separated and divorced within a year, with Chris and his brother in their mother’s custody.
“I didn’t know why dad was moving out at first, but within two years, he told me, one night when he was driving me home from Cub Scouts,” says Veldhoven. “He said he was homosexual. I had some idea about what that was from the playground. I remembered that it had something to do with anal sex and my father said, ‘Not necessarily.’”
Veldhoven had already developed romantic crushes on male TV characters like Hawaii Five-O’s Steve McGarrett (Jack Lord) and the Partridge Family’s David Cassidy. Somewhat effeminate, he found the playground to be “a difficult place.” After the divorce, fearing Veldhoven was “at risk,” his mother sent him to a counsellor who suggested putting him in a hockey league. “At least I learned how to skate.”
His father, meanwhile, found a partner in Norman Carter. The two men met while Gerard was a teacher at the Amherst School for the Deaf and would stay together for 35 years, for a time running an upholstery and drapery business in Amherst and in 2004 getting married in Nova Scotia’s first public same-sex wedding. Carter died in 2010. He too had attempted to end-run his homosexuality in a straight marriage and, after his own divorce, had custody of two daughters.
Veldhoven remembers spending time with his father and Carter and their array of colourful friends who Veldhoven, in retrospect, can describe as LGBTQ. Veldhoven absorbed them all with wonder. All the while, his mother was dealing with her hurt feelings over the marriage, even as she encouraged her two boys to accept their father for who he was.
“The lesson I learned was the damage that can be done by cultural homophobia. I saw the damage that it did to my mother,” says Veldhoven. Telling this chapter of his life reveals Veldhoven’s knack for storytelling. There are no villains other than the system. The positive elements — his father’s finding himself as a gay man, his father’s rich relationship, his own closeness to his mother, his own delighted emerging awareness as a gay man — are foregrounded. The difficult elements are not ignored, but framed as lessons, things to be worked through with a smile, and disarmed.
“The class helped me feel less isolated, so I don’t feel like such an odd duck.”
In the 1990s, after Veldhoven’s paternal grandmother passed away, his grandfather, who had lived through the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, came out as trans, telling Gerard that he always felt more at home in women’s clothing. He had always kept a suitcase full of them tucked away somewhere. There is no discomfort, hesitation or shame in Veldhoven’s recollection of the story, which ends with a lighthearted joke about he and his father wondering if the trans patriarch should be buried in men’s clothes or women’s (he was buried in his legionnaire’s uniform — yet another kind of drag). His wedding ring was passed down to Veldhoven. Rather than marriage, Veldhoven and his father have decided the ring now represents community-mindedness and cross-dressing, and will someday go to a person in the next generation who exhibits those traits. Veldhoven has, quite remarkably, found a way to turn what are usually tense, contested life moments into something warm and playful.
The dads, each one different
Few people born before, say, the 1980s would have listed a job in the LGBT not-for-profit sector among their youthful career aspirations, especially since the sector has only really existed for a couple of decades. But considering Veldhoven’s upbringing and his LGBT activism at Queen’s University, where he got a degree in psychology, it was no fluke he ended up on Church Street. Having also studied theatre (“I didn’t have the temperament to sell myself”) he started in the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre box office. Through his many activist and social contacts, social-development-y contracts started to come his way. He worked at the Lesbian Gay Bi Youth Line, taught LGBT sensitivity at cop school and joined more committees than you could name. When The 519 and the LGBTQ Parenting Network (now administered by the Sherbourne Health Centre) were looking for someone to design and teach a program for lesbian, bi and trans men curious about parenting, his résumé made him the ideal candidate.
But there was something about his personality and his power to adapt that also made it work. Bear Bergman (a friend, papa to the two-year-old at the beginning of this story and partner to trans activist and educator j wallace) recounts one story time when the book Veldhoven was reading from was describing hetero-normative families. “On the fly, Chris changed them all around to reflect all the families in the room, so people could recognize themselves in the story as it was being told,” says Bergman.
Mixer regular Tim Wilson was already in the process of adopting when Veldhoven was launching Daddies and Papas 2B. When Wilson came out in his 20s, one of the things he felt bad about was the “fact” that he’d never have kids. To a certain extent, he had bought into the idea that gay men and children don’t mix. But as Wilson grew older and enjoyed his brother’s and sister’s kids, he realized he still wanted his own and wondered what it would take to make it happen. He went through the process mostly on his own. From his first call to the Children’s Aid Society to the time he got “the call,” it was 14 months. It was another 14 months before his son Alex, now in grade two, was in his care.
Logistically, it was a smooth ride. “I was surprised how few roadblocks there were,” says Wilson, now 52. The social navigation, though, was more of a challenge, which is what drew him to The 519’s programming. Being gay, it turned out, was much less an issue than being single and being male.
“The world is mom-centric,” he says. “After dealing with schools and doctors and everything, it is a place to vent to people who understand.”
Brian Reusch went through Daddies and Papas 2B last year. “I started paying attention to people who knew me well and who thought I’d make a good parent…. I’m a fabulous gay uncle.” A US import studying his master’s in education, he came equipped with lots of theory, but also with some uncertainty about his own skills and journey forward.
“When I showed up for class, I was so nervous about having to give an account of why I was there,” says Reusch, 34. But the non-judgmental approach soon put an end to that.
“The class helped me feel less isolated, so I don’t feel like such an odd duck.”
John Paul Ricco, an associate professor at University of Toronto’s Department of Visual Studies, went into the course with more confidence. Though he’s single and doesn’t want to parent without a partner, the process helped him see the bigger picture. The discussion around surrogacy and its costs made him rethink that option. “It starts to feel like you’re buying a baby.”
Anecdotally, about 30 percent of past 2B participants now have kids. With 18 courses and about 18 participants per group, that’s about 97 new queer families. Veldhoven has seen men start in the 2B program, then show up a few months or a few years later at mixers and other programming for queer families. Individual friendships that are made in one stage can turn into mentorships and family friendships.
“This isn’t a one-person show, it’s about me being a catalyst,” says Veldhoven. “It’s about people learning what’s right for them. Some people leave the course, saying, ‘I think a dog is what I can handle.’”
Although Veldhoven would never put it in such vulgar terms, a lot of what he does involves looking past the BS and seeing what’s at the core of family — love and caring — rather than warped stereotypes. That means helping people find their own stories.
Stories are the heart of everything,” says Veldhoven. “A lot of my work is helping people recognize the gaps in the story and helping them rewrite their own story so that it celebrates them.”
Veldhoven is open to children in the context of a relationship, but it’s not a priority. He’s an enthusiastic uncle to his two nieces and is currently in the process of helping a friend have a child. “I’ll be a ‘spunkle,’ a sperm uncle.”
While that may be a bigger commitment than being a sparkle, Veldhoven is loath to rank roles.
“A lot of my nurturing energy has gone into building community,” he says. He was born at the right time to do so. Veldhoven’s own story connects three generations (that we know of) of familial queerness to a much larger family tree defined by love, understanding and support. He might not be related by blood with the two generations he’s helping to produce so far, but that doesn’t make the work any less rewarding. It doesn’t make him any less a patriarch — or matriarch, for that matter — in his own right.
