[Editor’s note: The names of foster children have been changed to protect their privacy.]

Actor and activist Ed Asner has said that raising children is “part joy and part guerilla warfare.”

With five vivacious children and a teenager inhabiting their own familial war zone, Carl Davis and Joey Ruiz can wholly relate. For the past two years, the couple has gradually increased their laundry load and responsibilities, becoming foster parents through Walden Family Services, a San Diego-based nonprofit foster care agency.

During a recent visit to their El Cajon home, 4-year-old Iris eagerly introduced the members of her family, each captured for posterity in a family portrait prominently displayed on the living room wall. Coming inside the house from dribbling a basketball in the front courtyard, her brother, 8-year-old Raymond, offered a tour of the home.

Asked what he likes about living with Davis and Ruiz, Raymond answered plainly: “I get to see my dads all the time. I love them very much. They’re the best.”

In many states across the country, the very question of whether or not GLBT people should be permitted to adopt children or to serve as foster parents has become a joyless battleground. While Davis and Ruiz are anxiously on track to adopt their five young children, a legal double standard in Florida prohibits gay and lesbian foster parents from ever finalizing their parental commitment through adoption. Despite legal challenges over the past few years, the 1977 Florida ban on gay adoptions has remained intact. Nationwide, efforts to outlaw gay adoptions have emerged in 16 states this year.

Fortunately, the scenario is a bit more pleasant at home. Signed into law in 2003, AB 458, the Foster Care Non-Discrimination Act, prohibits bias in the foster care system based on sexual orientation, gender identity, HIV status and other factors. California is also among the most laissez-faire states in terms of adoption law.

In San Diego, Walden Family Services has ramped up its ongoing outreach to the GLBT community. In its effort to locate quality homes for children with special needs, the agency unveiled an advertising campaign this month targeting the GLBT community. The ads (as seen in this issue of the Gay & Lesbian Times) were funded by a $15,000 grant from San Diego LGBT Pride in concert with the Human Dignity Foundation.

“We’ve made a concerted effort to be a member of the community, to let people know that this opportunity is available to them,” said Bruce Wexler, Walden Family Services program manager. “It started [in 2001] in terms of our interest in supporting gay and lesbian kids and reaching out to the gay and lesbian community, which to this day aren’t necessarily aware that they can be foster parents and adopt kids.

“Our push, as is the county’s, is to get kids out of these institutional group home settings and into family settings,” Wexler said. “The overriding philosophy is that kids do better in families.”

That same core belief in the family as a cradle of personal growth and emotional stability helped Davis and Ruiz cement their decision to pursue adoption of their five young children – all siblings separated when their biological parents lost custody of them.

“We wanted them all placed in our home quickly so we could stabilize [the family] once, instead of re-stabilizing every time [someone arrived],” Davis said.

Among those in the foster care system are often gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or questioning youth who have been rejected by their parents or guardians. Davis and Ruiz’s 17-year-old, Damon, came out at the age of 15 and entered the foster care system a year later.

In reaching out to the gay and lesbian community, Walden Family Services also hopes to find loving homes for children with trust issues or developmental disabilities.

“For many of these kids, living with a family is very threatening,” Wexler said. “Some of them have been through multiple rejections and abandonment.”

Davis and Ruiz both hold down full-time jobs. After finishing work, feeding the children and taking some time to play with them in the background, it was off to an event at the local elementary school and then to attend Damon’s graduation from a program at Walden Family Services that helps older teens prepare for their eventual introduction into society. Such free, ongoing support services are one advantage to utilizing Walden’s services, Wexler said.

“With the county you have a lot less support,” he said. “With us, [there are] higher expectations and responsibilities, but there are extensive support and services. We have under our roof all the multidisciplinary services that a child typically needs – social workers, trainers that work with the child to build the adaptive skills that they need to be successful in the community, therapists [and] psychiatrists.”

Davis said their biggest challenge as foster parents has been learning to deal with behaviors that spring from their children’s initial removal from their biological parents’ home. A child is typically removed due to abuse or neglect.

Raymond had been living in a group home with his brother Kevin, now 5, when he came to live with Davis and Ruiz.

“They were really close and they hadn’t seen each other for almost a year when we started doing visits,” Davis said of the brothers. “I said I could never separate them again.”

At Davis’ feet, the boys’ 2-year-old sister, Tammy, vies for his attention with cries of “daddy, here.” Though Tammy was too young to remember her siblings after they were separated, her older sisters, Allison, 3, and Iris, 4, told the woman they had been placed with that they wanted to live with their brothers.

“Another foster mom had wanted to adopt the girls,” Ruiz said. “That helped her transition of letting them go.”

Damon had been living in Las Vegas when he entered the foster care system, where he was turned down several times because of his sexual orientation. He had no idea he was being placed with a gay family near San Diego until he met Davis and Ruiz.

“Walking in the door to meet us at Walden is when the county social worker told him, ‘Oh by the way, these are your dads,’” Ruiz said. “We knew he was gay. That’s the reason he was getting pulled from his aunt’s [home], because she didn’t approve.”

Wexler said the scenario is not uncommon. A recent survey of homeless youth in San Diego showed that a disproportionate amount of foster teens are gay or lesbian, he said.

“Based on their experiences in the system, they’re running; they’re hitting the streets.”

Damon said the placement with Davis and Ruiz has opened a lot of doors for him.

“It has actually made me happier,” said Damon, who was able to keep up his involvement in a dance company he started with in Las Vegas, which also has a branch in San Diego.

“Starting here just randomly, it was surprising,” Damon said. “It is a good thing that I did come here, but in the beginning it was kind of hard to deal with – the fact that I left where I was living for, like, 14 years with family.”

Ruiz said he sees glimmers of himself in Damon.

“This is the hardest time for him,” Ruiz said. “He’s going through a lot of the experiences that I had already been through.”

The couple realizes that, as their young children grow older, inevitable comparisons with other family structures will arise. They say they’ll cross that bridge when it comes along. In the meantime, they view documentaries with the children, such as Daddy and Papa, a portrait of gay men and their adopted families, and HBO’s All Aboard!, about Rosie O’Donnell’s cruise for gay and lesbian families. They also attend events hosted by Family Matters, San Diego’s GLBT parenting organization, so that their children can interact with other families with same-sex parents.

Though Davis and Ruiz receive money from Walden Family Services for the children’s expenses, family entertainment often exceeds their household budget.

“It’s a small fortune, so we just look for coupons,” Davis said. “Our challenge and our goal is to expose them to a variety of things – whether it’s going to the zoo, going to Legoland or going camping. The reason that we wanted to do this was to be able to provide the kids with a different experience than they would have had – to open up their world.”

North Park resident Merritt Smith is the foster parent of a 14-year-old boy with slight developmental disabilities. Walden Family Services was looking for a long-term placement for the teen when Smith agreed to take him in for the weekend. The agency found a match in Smith, who has experience working with special needs children at a local nonprofit school.

“You really have to be positive with these kids,” Smith said. “You have to kind of underplay their mistakes and really be their cheerleader. When they do something good you have to make a big deal of it. That was my training that I brought into it.”

As a single gay man with a limited income, adoption was not an option for Smith. Given his work schedule, fostering an older child was ideal. His son, Thom, gets out of school just about the time he gets off work.

“I’ve always loved children and I know I’ve affected a lot of children’s lives, but it’s like, now I’m a permanent part of his life,” Smith said. “It’s the whole immortality thing, having someone live on after me that I’ve spent so much time with and affected his life so much.”

People interested in serving as foster parents must undergo a preliminary assessment by Walden staff, followed by a supervised meeting between the child and the potential parents.

“Everything is gone over in detail,” Wexler said. “‘What are your likes and dislikes?’ ‘What are your expectations of family life?’ … We consider it a mutual assessment process. We’re assessing whether they’re fit for doing this particular type of foster care, and they’re able to assess whether it’s a fit for them.”

If a placement would appear auspicious, the next step is to have the child live with the family for an introductory period, in which they are monitored by a county social worker to see how the child adjusts to living with the family. Parents must then undergo a series of background checks and take part in a 27-hour pre-certification training series. The courses cover everything from behavior management techniques to grief and loss. An additional 16 hours of training is required per year for foster parents.

Should a family decide they would like to adopt a child sometime down the line, and that child is eligible for adoption, Walden Family Services can help facilitate the process.

“More and more we are definitely meeting the needs of these parents,” Wexler said.

Ryland Madison and husband Mark Fisher are the parents of a 9-month old son, Max, whom they adopted at birth.

Though they knew they were ready to become parents years before, they weren’t yet certain which route to take. They started attending parenting support groups and other events with Family Matters to help them make their decision. Today, Madison is the president of Family Matters, which serves as a social and informational network for GLBT parents.

“We’re more planners, so we got started early,” Madison said. “It certainly helped us create our family and be prepared to be successful.”

In the end, the couple opted for an open adoption, in which they remain in close contact with their son’s birth mother.

“We knew the biological parent prior to the birth,” Madison said. “She was an acquaintance of ours and she already had a daughter. She really wasn’t planning on having another child. She knew that we were looking to have a child, so she actually approached us and [asked] if we would like to adopt.

“Ours was an extremely unique situation,” Madison continued. “We got to follow Max’s progress and we were there for ultrasound[s]. Usually, you don’t know about the biological parents until the fifth or sixth month of the pregnancy…. We were there for the birth and the delivery and we took Max home the very next day.”

Madison said their son has enriched their lives in innumerable ways.

“It’s just the joy of watching them grow up, being part of their lives and watching them learn from you,” he said. “You also get to look at the world through new eyes again. You get to be a kid again.”

Remaining in contact with the birth mother has had its advantages, Madison said, such as knowing he and his partner have access to the mother’s medical history, should that information be required at some point for their son’s care.

“Some people get along really great and they talk several times a week or month,” Madison said of the open adoption process. “It’s just like with any relationship. Sometimes you have the other extreme where maybe you only write once and you exchange photos at Christmastime.”

One fortuitous aspect of adoption in California, Madison said, is that, once the adoption is finalized, the birth certificate can be reissued with only the adoptive parents’ names on it – a convenient document to have when same-sex parents are traveling out of state with their children.

“If something medically happens and you have to take [the child] to the hospital, that’s the last thing you want is to be arguing and contesting your parental rights,” Madison said.

Madison said they are still waiting to receive Max’s reissued birth certificate with their names on it, which typically takes about eight months. The original document, with the birth mother’s name on it, will be sealed from the public record.

“Unfortunately, there’s only one worker in the state of California that does all the adoption certificates,” Madison said. “We don’t have much longer [to go].”

Randy and Michael Clark said it took them some time before they were ready to raise a family. It was Randy who first broached the subject.

“It just sort of started creeping into conversations,” Randy said. “You’d go to Pride and you’d see the Family Matters booth or the Children’s Garden. I started digging into the different ways that people become parents.”

Michael needed some persuading.

“I had actually reached most of my personal relationship [and] familial goals, which was that I had found the man that I wanted to spend … my life with,” he said. “We owned a home together. We were both secure in our careers. It wasn’t something that I was brought up thinking was a possibility. Randy slowly, gracefully opened my eyes.”

After looking at all the options available to them, the Clarks chose surrogacy, resulting in the birth of their son, Evan, and daughter, Annika. The twins are now 1 year old.

Though in the case of lesbian couples surrogacy typically requires a $500 MasterCard charge at the local sperm bank or some cajoling of a trusted male friend with admirable genetics, for gay men surrogacy can be a more “priceless” endeavor.

For starters, it is nearly impossible to find an insurance carrier that will cover birth costs for the surrogate mother – about a $10,000 out-of-pocket expense. Add to that the mother’s prenatal expenses during pregnancy and another $5,000-$10,000 for eggs from a donor. The surrogacy could wind up costing the potential fathers anywhere from $70,000 to $120,000.

“It wasn’t like we immediately decided to go the surrogacy route,” Randy said. “It was more like, there are lots of different routes to go, let’s see what the plusses and minuses are for each. That was when we started reaching out. We went to a couple different Family Matters functions. We talked to other people who had gotten their kids in different ways.”

Randy and Michael eventually spoke with a couple who had done a traditional surrogacy, where the woman who carries the child is the same person who provides the egg.

“What we did in the end is something called gestational surrogacy,” Randy said, “[a more expensive process] where the person who provides the egg is a completely different person than the person who carries the children to term….

“You’d be surprised,” he continued. “Surrogacy sounds expensive, but private agency adoptions and foreign adoptions can also be very expensive. We very seriously considered doing foreign adoptions, and while we were getting our paperwork lined up, one of the two countries we were looking at, the Ukraine, closed its doors. China has done the same thing and Russia was hit or miss. We hadn’t looked closely at the surrogacy option again because of the expense, but at the end of the day we started looking at things and saying, ‘… OK, if the goal really is to make sure you have a child that’s really yours, where you’re not going to end up in some kind of hideous battle with the biological mother or have her change her mind two months down the road, surrogacy is an attractive option.”

Though more expensive, with gestational surrogacy the Clarks were able to have both their names on their children’s birth certificates.

“It’s all done through some amazing legal mechanics that were actually fought for by straight couples who did surrogacy births,” Randy said.

Both Michael and Randy contributed to the insemination process, producing dizygotic, or fraternal, twins, in which two eggs are fertilized by two separate sperm.

“They pick out the eggs and then you have to give your sperm donation,” Randy explained. “They combine the sperm and the egg and they see how well they multiply. Then, after three days, you come back with the surrogate and they do the implantation of the embryos. So we had a bunch of fertilized embryos, half fertilized by Michael, half were fertilized by me, and they classified them as to how well they had developed over those three days and took the top three and they implanted those. It just so happened that out of the top three, Michael and I were both represented.

Randy said the couple is not exactly sure which child is genetically linked to whom.

“They could both be genetically linked to one of us or they might be genetically linked to one of each [of us],” Randy said. “You can look at the kids, you can look at us and people can guess all sorts of things…. We will probably eventually get some kind of a genetic test run, but it’s not really important for us.”

Michael said the prospect of being involved throughout the entire pregnancy also made surrogacy appealing.

“I would say that I was more involved with our pregnancy than the majority of heterosexual fathers,” Michael said. “[The birth mother] was seen at least once a month, sometimes twice a month, and I didn’t miss a single minute. I even went with her to visit the endocrinologist and the dietician when she started developing gestational diabetes. I was extremely involved.”

“It really helps you adjust gradually to this idea that you are about ready to become a parent,” Randy added. “When we started the whole surrogacy process, I thought, ‘Well, I could be ready for a baby tomorrow,’ but looking back at it, I’m really glad that we had that nine months.”

Randy and Michael both said they wouldn’t trade fatherhood for the personal freedoms or life they left behind.

“Ten years ago if you asked me if I’d ever be driving into Hillcrest and parking a minivan I would have choked on my tongue,” Randy said. “That’s how we go to Hillcrest now. I’m sure a lot people probably look at us and go, ‘Ah, straight guys are here with their kids.’”

Since their children were born, Michael has worked remotely from the couple’s Point Loma home. He said the quality of their lives has improved considerably since their children were born.

“It’s something I did not expect,” Michael said. “Randy is home every day by a quarter to seven at the latest and we have wonderful dinners together every night of the week, whereas before we would just kind of meet somewhere and maybe eat something at a fast food restaurant. Now we definitely have a lot of quality time together.”

John Rocha and Joseph Brusatto adopted their 2-year-old son, Lucas, from an orphanage in Guatemala, picking up their son on their second visit to the country. The entire process took about nine months.

“Guatemala is an extremely poor country and the infancy death rate is very high,” Rocha said.

“When they give up their babies for adoption, a lot of these women are really giving them a second chance at life. In the case of Lucas, he was born premature and considerably ill. The mother was 43 years old when she gave birth to him. We know she had never taken anything for prenatal care. Without him going to an orphanage, he probably wouldn’t have made it.”

Though their son had a respiratory infection, a double hernia and suffered from malnutrition when they first brought him home, he rebounded quickly and is today a healthy eater, with a taste for Thai food.

Rocha said the couple chose foreign adoption to avoid the lengthy process of waiting for a child through the county or a private agency, and because he wanted a child that shared his Latin heritage. The couple is already making plans to adopt a daughter, this time probably through a private, domestic adoption agency.

“If it takes two or three years before we get a referral, then so be it, but my partner and I have been together for almost 10 years and, that first time, we were ready to have a child,” Rocha said. “I think we had reached a time in our relationship where we felt that we could give a better life to our child than our parents did to us. We felt that we had dealt with our own issues and that we had that stability.”

Both Rocha and his partner are self-employed and work out of their Alpine home, affording them flexibility so that one person can tend to their son’s needs at all times.

“We didn’t want to have a child that we took to daycare,” Rocha said. “We wanted to be part of his growing up.”

Rocha said he and his partner haven’t once regretted their decision to bring Lucas into their home.

“He’s completely changed us,” Rocha said. “We used to smoke. We used to be overweight. Now we don’t smoke. I’ve lost 40 pounds and Joe has lost close to 30 pounds. We care about being alive a little bit longer than before because of him. My focus now is nurturing our relationship and making sure that Lucas has a great childhood. We’re actually looking forward to being grandparents. It’s kind of weird, but we just look forward to tomorrow.”