Gay man reflects on struggle to become a father

By Nick Grabbe
Staff Writer

Published on May 11, 2007

The youngest of David Jean's four children is 16 now, and as Jean nears the milestone of one last high school graduation, he recalls the painfully public struggle he went through to become a father.

Jean, 54, is a teacher of culinary arts, and he is co-chairman of the pastor search committee at an Amherst church. He moved to this area in 1996 because of the quality of the schools and because his elderly parents live in Chicopee, where he grew up.

For two weeks in 1985, Jean and his partner, Don Babets, were at the center of a Boston media frenzy. They became pioneers in the struggle for equal adoption rights for gay and lesbian couples, long before same-sex marriage became a public issue.

Their ultimate vindication was not only a change in state adoption regulations but the freedom to adopt four children.

Gay parenthood was less accepted in 1985 than it is now. When Jean and Babets started caring for two foster children, their private lives became front-page news.

"It was very disturbing for me, to be thrust out there for the whole world to see," Jean said. "I was scared, alternating between, 'What have I done, this was really a bad thing to do' and 'I only went into it to do good.' Sometimes I felt like a criminal."

A politician running for City Council stirred up the controversy, and the Boston Globe and Boston Herald ran stories. Ellen Goodman wrote a column about them, and there were TV news reports. Jean and Babets called a press conference to clarify their position.

"I wasn't trying to prove anything," Jean said. "It was just something I wanted to do. I thought I was just a regular guy who wanted children."

The tensions escalated quickly. A state official decreed that foster children were best served when placed in "traditional family settings" and foster parent applicants started getting asked about their sexual orientation. Gov. Michael Dukakis, who was running for re-election, made the decision to remove the boys from the house Jean and Babets shared after they'd spent just two weeks there.

Gay rights activists picketed Dukakis, sat in at his office and dogged him about the case during his 1988 presidential campaign.

Fred Small, who is now a minister and environmental activist, wrote a poignant ballad about Jean and Babets and the two boys (listen to it on Gazettenet.com). Jean remembers hearing the song, which mentions him by name, on a Boston radio station.

Jean and Babets sued state officials over the foster care regulations. They were supported by Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, the group that would become famous later while making the case for equal marriage rights.

In 1989, the Legislature added "sexual orientation" to the state law banning discrimination. In 1990, the Dukakis administration made the "best interest of the child" the standard for foster parents.

Jean said he was not seeking to make their family a test case, and he doesn't consider himself a gay rights activist. "But anyone who is gay is an activist by default," he said.

"They were in the vanguard when this wasn't an easy issue," said Gary Buseck, legal director of Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders and a board member in 1985.

GLAD was a tiny organization then, and the Jean-Babets case presented a major challenge, he said. Almost no Boston law firms were willing to help, in sharp contrast to 2002, when the same-sex marriage issue came before the Supreme Judicial Court, he said.

"They were courageous and put themselves on the line," Buseck said.

The struggle Jean and Babets went through was "a symbolic and important event in the whole historical sequence of developments on laws on gays and lesbians," said Savanna Ouellette, of Shutesbury.

She and her spouse, Katie Tolles, adopted two sisters 16 years ago.

"In the old days, if you were a gay couple and took a foster child, it was hush-hush, and now it's very well known," Ouellette said. "It's not considered uncommon. People don't pay attention anymore."

The siblings Jean and Babets adopted were 7, 4, 3 and 3 months old when they arrived one Friday evening in 1992.

"There's a lot to do, being a parent," Jean said. "Those duties took over and that's what I concentrated on."

He said he found the experience of being a father very rewarding.

"I went into it thinking I was well prepared and found I wasn't," he said. "Whatever I thought I knew, there was 10 times as much that I didn't know. I learned more from my kids than they learned from me."

Jean said he appreciates living in a place "where we could be a gay family and not be harassed for it." He periodically revisits those two weeks in 1985, he said, and thinks he was naive not to have anticipated the problems he encountered.

"But I learned that I had more courage than I thought and could stand up for something I believed in," he said.