Growing up Sammy, her moms, and her siblings always referred to her sperm donor dad as "The Mystery Gene." There was always an air of mystery about who he was and if she would ever get to know him.
Growing up Sammy, her moms, and her siblings always referred to her sperm donor dad as "The Mystery Gene." There was always an air of mystery about who he was and if she would ever get to know him.
This is the first chapter of a big story that takes up most of Rashomon Season 2. You will hear multiple families telling every side of multiple stories, all having to do with the early days of sperm banks and how it effected the lives of the families that used them. From this episode onward, it is important to listen to them in order to get the full story.
Rashomon is produced and hosted by Hillary Rea
Thank you to Sammy and Sharon Sass.
Music in this episode is by Paul Defiglia
Podcast artwork is by Thom Lessner
Theme music is by Ryan Culinane courtesy of the Free Music Archive
This episode of Rashomon is sponsored by Care/Of. For 30% off your first order of vitamins, protein powders and more visit https://takecareof.com and enter the promo code RASHOMON30
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Hillary [00:00:09] You are listening to Rashomon, a podcast where one family tells every side of the same story. I'm your host, Hillary Rea. Actually, you are listening to Rashomon, a podcast where more than one family tells every side of more than one story. Let me explain.
Hillary [00:00:35] So I'm in pre-production for season two and I'm reading a Brene Brown book, I can't remember which one specifically. But as I'm reading, I see that she mentions a social worker and researcher named Ann Hartman that totally shaped the way that Brene Brown does her own research. I dug around on the internet and found an Hartman's essay called The Many Ways of Knowing. I read through it and really loved the ideas, not only for how people do research, but how to understand the importance of story and different sides of a story. And what is truth and how conducting scientific research on human beings is more than just data. You need individual stories from individual perspectives. Ann Hartman writes, "We can enhance our understanding by listening to and reporting the narratives, the stories that make order and sense of human experiences and organize it into temporary, meaningful episodes." While I'm not doing scientific research or even investigative journalism, this style of storytelling takes into account many truths and brings them all together in this way that will help to make order and sense of human experiences. I wanted to take more time with this story because of how many people are a part of it. So far I've interviewed 14 people and there's a chance I might be interviewing more. I also struggled with how to share the story. Do you hear every voice in every episode or can the story slow down to give a sense of time plays a part of history and a more zoomed in look on the many ways of knowing family. You will want to listen to all of these episodes in order. I'm also changing up the titles. I'm taking a break from the so-and-so family and starting anew with first names. So with all of this being said, this is Sharon and Sammy.
Hillary [00:02:40] I met Sharon and Sammy Sass back in December. Sammy is Sharon's daughter. They came to meet me in my large IKEA art filled Airbnb on the border of Somerville and Cambridge in Massachusetts. When Sammy arrived at the Airbnb, she told me that she grew up just a few blocks from there and her whole immediate family still lives in the area. Sharon, who is in her mid 60s, has lived in New England ever since college.
Sharon [00:03:09] I grew up in Ohio and I probably knew from a very young age that I was gay, but I always had boyfriends. But I knew inside I was kind of living more of a double life, and I probably knew that in junior high and high school.
Hillary [00:03:23] Sharon knew that eventually there'd come a time where she'd have to open up about being gay.
Sharon [00:03:28] Oh, my God, nobody would have ever come out in those days.
Hillary [00:03:32] But she never expected it to happen the way that I did. It was her senior year of high school and Sharon went away to a private boarding school in Michigan called Interlochen Arts Academy.
Sharon [00:03:42] My parents didn't expect me to go. It was kind of a last minute thing because my best friend Terry was going and convinced me to go.
Hillary [00:03:48] And Sharon secretly applied to the school without telling her parents. But then she got in with a scholarship.
Sharon [00:03:54] And I went and it was great.
Hillary [00:03:56] Interlochen was an arts and music school. Sharon was a painter.
Sharon [00:04:00] But what happened when I was there was the girl down the hall and I her name was Mary. We fell in love with each other and she lived in my dorm.
Hillary [00:04:07] Sharon and Mary fell in love.
Sharon [00:04:09] You'd think it would be an easier place to be gay, but not in those times. So it was hidden, even though they were probably tons of gay people.
Hillary [00:04:16] Mary was a musician and a poet.
Sharon [00:04:20] She was writing beautiful poetry and stories and kept an extensive journal.
Hillary [00:04:26] Sharon said the journal was filled with stories to her and about her.
Sharon [00:04:31] And of course, as the story would have it, we were on spring break. I went to a Native American reservation in Arizona and she went to a meditation camp. But her parents found her journal and they found all these love letters to me and poems and blah, blah, blah.
Hillary [00:04:46] Mary's parents called the school, and Sharon says that they even sent her brother down there to spy on her.
Sharon [00:04:51] My coming out story was very harsh that way because her parents blamed it on me and I almost got kicked out of high school.
Hillary [00:04:59] There was no real reason to get kicked out. Sharon had straight A's. When it looked like that wouldn't matter, her art teacher stood up for her and made sure that she could stay in school and before the school could call her parents, Sharon made the call and was basically forced to come out to them before she was ready.
Sharon [00:05:16] It was very hard. My father was fabulous. He was such a loving person. My mother had a harder time with it, but my dad was right there, as he would be for anybody about anything. Thank God for that, because I can't imagine what it would be like, especially for kids during that time if... Well, even now, I mean, that exists. If then the parents aren't there. I mean, people want to belong. That's the most important thing. And if you're kicked out of your family or something, I mean, that's so painful.
Hillary [00:05:47] Sharon found out years later that Mary's parents had threatened to disown her and threatened to not send her to college.
Sharon [00:05:54] You know, I mean, she really had the screws put on her. And my parents would not have done anything like that. They weren't thrilled, but love would have surpassed anything. And I'm not saying her parents didn't love her, but they were like that.
Hillary [00:06:05] A couple months later, Sharon graduated from high school.
Sharon [00:06:08] Thank God I graduated and then, thank God, went on to Rhode Island School of Design, where everybody was nuts and out there and there was room to be whatever
Hillary [00:06:17] It was, the beginning of gay liberation and a second wave feminism was well underway then.
Sharon [00:06:22] It was wasn't even just neutral. It was fun. Like we had a great time and then it was great to be gay.
Hillary [00:06:32] While Sharon was in college at RISD, she started to think more about her future.
Sharon [00:06:36] I on the back of my mind was thinking, OK, I'm a lesbian, but I want to have children. How am I going to do this?
Hillary [00:06:43] Sharon knew at a very young age that she wanted to have children.
Sharon [00:06:47] And it was almost a spiritual thing for me. I just knew that was going to be part of my life. When I say spiritual to me, it came deeply from my soul that I was going to do that in similar ways that I knew I was a painter and would always be painting. And I just had to travel through the difficult times as a gay person to figure out how that was going to happen. But I knew I would figure it out. There was no question that I was going to make that happen.
Sammy [00:07:23] So I have two moms, Sharon and Laura. And I have a brother and a sister, Mateo and Ali.
Hillary [00:07:29] This is Sammy.
Sammy [00:07:31] My brother is ten months older than I am. And he was adopted. He came into our family when he was five months old.
Hillary [00:07:38] Sharon was pregnant with Sammy around the same time that the adoption came through for Mateo.
Sammy [00:07:43] And so my moms were like, OK, yeah, we're going to have these two little kids. And we were basically raised like twins. We had always matching outfits and like two cribs in the same nursery,
Sharon [00:07:55] It was like raising twins and it was fun.
Hillary [00:07:58] Sharon guesses she was one of the first openly gay women to figure out a way to have kids, and there weren't many options of how to go about it.
Sharon [00:08:08] The options at that time was either you could find a friend that was willing to do that and go through the process, you know, a male friend or just at the very beginning, there was a clinic in Cambridge that wasn't really a clinic. It was a doctor who was a gynecologist, obstetrician who was pretty lefty and pretty cool. And he had a few friends.
Hillary [00:08:32] Sharon got pregnant with Sammy through a sperm donor.
Sammy [00:08:36] The truth is, I don't know the full story of what sperm banks were like back in the day, because I only hear it from my moms and my moms are really good storytellers. And so they make it sound like there was just this like one guy that we just, like, knew through a friend. But my sense is that the truth is that there are very few sperm banks in the country.
Sharon [00:08:53] So it was not in the days where you had a whole list from California or even around here and you knew much about the people.
Hillary [00:09:00] Sharon thinks the doctor reached out to friends willing to donate sperm.
Sharon [00:09:04] So I think they were actually limited to five babies and then they were retired. They had certain rules about it, but not many. I remember asking for a Jewish donor because I'm Jewish. And they, he said, we're out of those. We don't have that. So I said, OK, all right, what are my other choices? But the truth is, you didn't really get much information. In those days you got the doctors friends, and you could kind of choose from three without much information at all. You know, at one point I thought the doctor was the father because Sammy looks a little bit like him.
Sammy [00:09:39] My moms have always had a theory that my sperm donor was actually the doctor at this clinic because I look like him. And so they were always like, it's just that guy, like we know it. You know, my whole life they'd been joking about that. And then we're out to lunch with my grandparents and like three tables over is the doctor from the clinic that my mom immediately recognizes. So she goes, oh, my God, Sammy, that's him. Look over at him. You look just like him, don't you think? Like, well, I mean, kinda like I don't really have such a good look. And then he gets up to leave with his family. So my mom and I like bolt out of the restaurant to get ahead of him and his family. And it's in a hotel. So we're like in this hotel lobby, just like pretending to be like hanging out behind the plants to be able to get a closer look at this guy's face. And I don't totally see it, but we're just like trying to see so we can confirm that this is him. I'm like, mom, this is like something out of like a cheesy sleuth movie that we're really hiding behind these pot. Everyone in the hotel lobby, probably, if they were paying attention, would just think, like, what are those ladies doing?
Hillary [00:10:46] When Sammy was really little, before she and her mom were hiding behind plants, trying to figure out who her biological father might be, there really wasn't much talk about him or how it all happened.
Sammy [00:10:59] For the most part, the focus on the sperm donor was so insignificant. It was mostly that I had these two dykey moms who would come and pick me up from school every day, you know, and a brother who I was in the same grade with at a very small school. And I'm white and he's a person of color. And so that those two things were so obvious about me that people didn't really ask about, like having a dad or the sperm donor part.
Hillary [00:11:26] Sammy and her siblings were the only ones with a family structure like theirs in their school. But Cambridge was a very liberal place.
Sammy [00:11:34] Of course, there are gay people all over the country, but there's like an in outness in Boston. So most parents had heard of gay people before and knew gay people.
Hillary [00:11:45] Sammy was that one person who people knew that happened to have gay parents. It wasn't a common occurrence.
Sammy [00:11:52] Everything was new about it. I don't mean to say like, oh, it was not a big deal. It was. But it also just was like I had gay moms. But I also, like, loved to swim, you know, like there was no moment when my mom sat us down and said, you know, you have a sperm donor and we're lesbians and your brother is a person of color. Like all of that was just so apparent that we never talked about it.
Hillary [00:12:17] It was normal that everyone in Sammy's family was so completely different from each other.
Sammy [00:12:21] Picture this. There's the five of us in my family sitting down to dinner. There's me who has a sperm donor, my sister who has another sperm donor, my brother whose biological family we don't know about. And then one of my moms who's not biologically related to anyone in the family and then one of my moms who's had two kids with two different sperm donors and no one shares the same name. Nobody looks like each other, really. So we all have these different parts of our lives and our biology and our lineage and our heritage that we just don't share with each other. And so there was something kind of mysterious and playful about all of that. Everyone everyone had something like that.
Hillary [00:13:00] As part of the lure of Sammy's lineage, her family always referred to her sperm donor as the mystery gene.
Sammy [00:13:06] So whenever I would do anything that felt out of step with the rest of my family, like, for example, I really love to fold my clothes and there really no one else in my family shares that love of neatness that I do. And so whenever I would do something like that, my mom would be like, oh, that's the mystery gene.
Hillary [00:13:23] And the mystery gene was always going to remain a mystery. When Sharon went to the clinic for sperm donation, she signed a contract agreeing that the man who donated was going to remain anonymous forever and that she would not try to find out who he was.
Sharon [00:13:38] But when Sammy was about eight or nine years old, I got a letter.
Hillary [00:13:44] Sharon says the letter explained the donor had changed his mind and that he would like to be known. And were they interested in finding out who he was?
Sharon [00:13:52] I said, of course I'm interested. And I talked to Sammy about it at the time in a nine year old kind of way. And she said, oh, yeah, that's great. And then we went back to whatever we were doing.
Sammy [00:14:02] I remember that my mom picked me up outside of the elementary school and she said, Sam, we got a letter saying that your sperm donor is willing to be known once you turn 18. And I'm seven years old at the time. OK.
Hillary [00:14:16] So in ten years or so, Sammy would need to get her driver's license and get a notarized letter and fill out all sorts of other paperwork.
Sammy [00:14:23] I just remember thinking, like, that is so cool. Like, I just can't wait for that to happen. And so from that day forward, I just knew that once I turned 18, this kind of magical thing was going to happen.
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Hillary [00:16:34] Sharon remembers having this sense of calm curiosity about who this mystery gene was.
Sharon [00:16:39] And as Sammy got older, it started to be that sometimes we saw people on the street that maybe looked like Sammy and we would think maybe that's your brother.
Sammy [00:16:48] I remember being like 15 maybe and driving down Mass Ave and seeing this man with, like, long flowing hair, like wearing a dress and like literally prancing down the street. And so I turned to my mom and totally as a joke, I was like, mom, maybe he's the mystery gene. And my mom, like, scrunched up her eyes and looked out the window and said, oh, my God, we tried to have a baby with him. And she knew exactly who he was.
Hillary [00:17:17] And then there was the whole thing with the doctor from the clinic and the restaurant and the possibility that maybe he really was the father. But the speculation game could finally come to an end. Sammy was turning 18 and she could send in all of the paperwork to meet her sperm donor.
Sammy [00:17:33] So on my 18th birthday, I was a camp counselor up in rural Maine and I went to the local bank to get my paperwork notarized. I was very motivated, like on my 18th birthday. I'm going to do this thing. So I go to the bank. I have this whole letter written out, you know, that says who I am and what I'm requesting this information for and that I was going to send to the sperm bank.
Hillary [00:17:56] Sammy hands the letter to the bank teller.
Sammy [00:17:58] And she goes, OK, I'll be right back. And she takes it into the back of the bank. And then all of the tellers at the bank take turns reading it and like, staring around the corner to look at me sitting at this little table, which makes me feel both totally on display and like, look at me doing this cool thing and I'm 18 and whatever.
Hillary [00:18:16] Sammy never said anything to the bank teller about her and her coworkers' odd behavior, nor did the bank teller say anything to Sammy.
Sammy [00:18:25] At that time, people were starting to hear about sperm donation more. It was kind of entering mainstream consciousness. And we the first generation really of kids raised by gay parents who had been born through sperm banks, we were like old enough now to get this information. And so people were, I think, starting to be intrigued about this thing that felt very foreign and interesting and kind of unheard of.
Hillary [00:18:49] Sammy submits all the paperwork and then she doesn't hear back from the clinic.
Sammy [00:18:56] I'm like remembering when I was seven years old sitting in the car. Can't wait to find out who this mystery gene is. All of a sudden, I submit my paperwork. I expect it to go smoothly. And I don't hear anything from months. So I start calling and I call them a lot and they say we can't get in contact with him and we have to get in contact with him before we can release this information. And we don't have enough information. We can't decipher the codes, et cetera, et cetera, which is all a lie and not part of the agreement that I thought that we had.
Hillary [00:19:29] Sammy had a feeling things weren't adding up. And at this point, she's away at college.
Sammy [00:19:33] I remember, like walking across the quad from different academic buildings and calling the sperm bank so that I could get them before their lunch break to try and, you know, make the case that I want to get this information.
Hillary [00:19:44] At the time, Sammy didn't have a full sense of why she wasn't getting the information that she needed, but she has a few theories about it now.
Sammy [00:19:51] I think when I sent in the fax to this like quote unquote, sperm bank, which was an actual sperm bank at the time, but then by the time I was eighteen, wasn't existing any more. By the time I sent that in, I'm pretty sure I was just like faxing this to the midwife, like at her home. I cannot confirm that, but that is my sense of the story.
Hillary [00:20:08] One important detail to this story: there are was a midwife who worked for the doctor at the clinic. She's going to come up in future episodes. With adult perspective and this theory about the midwife, he understands why things could have taken much longer than they were supposed to and who might have been behind the delay.
Sammy [00:20:26] I mean maybe the midwife, because she's the one that holds all the information, I can say she's in a hard spot, like she's holding a lot of information for a lot of men and for a lot of children and a lot of parents who then got pregnant and got to raise their families because of this sperm donation. And this is totally uncharted waters. I, I don't really envy her and the ethical decisions that she has to make without any real models for how to do it.
Hillary [00:20:59] But before that adult perspective, Sammy couldn't pinpoint what was going through her mind.
Sammy [00:21:04] I'm trying to remember if I ever thought that I didn't deserve the information. Like, did I ever think, OK, well, it's been 18 years and 11 years since the permission was given, maybe this person wants to take that back. Like, did it ever cross my mind that that might be a reasonable thing for him to do? I don't know.
Hillary [00:21:29] But she did know that all of the obstacles in her way were taking a toll.
Sammy [00:21:33] It was really frustrating. I felt like I'd had these 11 years of feeling like this was really going to happen. It's hard to retouch those emotions in that six months of waiting, but during those six months, it really seemed plausible that this actually had all been a ruse for whatever reason, and that it was going to be possible that I would never meet him and it was very frustrating and very sad. And going back to my moms as models for persistence and strength, they were just like whenever I would call and tell them, I was like, well, the midwife said this. And they don't have this information. Or they said, it's not possible. My moms would just be like, that's bullshit. You need to call them again. Just keep calling them. My mom's like, call them every day.
Hillary [00:22:18] So Sammy persisted. She finishes up her first semester of college and now she's back home for holiday break.
Sammy [00:22:26] So finally on Christmas Day, I check my cell phone and I have a message from the sperm bank that says we were able to get in contact with your donor. He's very eager to meet you, but he needs a few months to kind of get his affairs in order before he's ready to to meet you. And he'll write a letter and we'll send it to you.
Hillary [00:22:48] Sammy is thrilled. If that call hadn't come through on Christmas Day, would she have eventually stopped calling?
Sammy [00:22:58] I don't know. I wonder if I would have given up if my mom's hadn't supported me in the way that they did. But I think I also just really trusted that this person wanted to know who I was. You know. And so I just I went on that trust.
Hillary [00:23:16] This podcast was produced by me, Hillary Rea. Music in this episode was by Paul Defiglia. Theme music is by Ryan Culinane. Podcast artwork is by Thom Lessner. Please check out the show notes for links to all of their work, as well as the link to get 30 percent off Care of. We also have a Patreon page where you'll get a monthly newsletter and other fun bonus features. So we would love your member support. We're on Instagram and Twitter as much as we can be at Rashomonpod and we have a website, Rashomon podcast dot com. The best thing you could do right now is to rate and reviews on Apple podcasts and to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts or just share with a friend an episode that you liked from the past. OK, that's it. We'll be back in two weeks. Thanks for listening.