A column published by The Federalist takes aim at a New York Magazine sex diary written by a 42-year-old gay father outside Boston, arguing that the first-person account exposes what the author sees as a fundamental problem with same-sex parenting: that adult sexual appetite is placed ahead of an infant’s developmental needs.
The Federalist piece, which carries a warning about disturbing content involving adults and children, focuses on the diary’s roughly 2,300 words, most of which recount sexual encounters, fantasies, or efforts to arrange them. The writer, according to the column, lives with his husband, Gavin, and their infant daughter, Sophie, who was described as having been born through paid surrogacy.
A week measured in encounters
According to The Federalist’s reading of the diary, the week begins with the author opening Sniffies, a location-based app used mainly by men seeking anonymous sex. From there, he propositions a married man who initially declines to show his face, and goes on to have sex with that stranger on his daughter’s leaf-shaped play mat. The column notes a stuffed giraffe knocking against the man’s head during the encounter. Later in the week, he sends Gavin a photo of himself in a jockstrap in hopes his husband will leave work early, and ends the diary having sex with a police officer at a party against a washing machine.
The Federalist frames those details as more than titillating filler. Its central claim is that the diary’s structure — hundreds of sentences, the overwhelming majority devoted to sex — reveals a hierarchy of priorities in which the child appears only as an administrative obstacle or a scheduling concern. When Sophie does surface in the entries, the column argues, she is quickly folded back into her father’s sexual monologue. While Gavin prepares a bottle, the author is thinking about oral sex; as formula drips down Sophie’s chin, he jokes that she must be Gavin’s because she “eats like a troll.” At a pediatrician’s appointment, he notices the doctor’s body and characterizes the exam itself in sexual terms, including the moment the doctor tests Sophie’s sucking reflex.
An argument about biology
From there, The Federalist shifts from the diary’s content to a broader argument about what it calls the biology of new parenthood. The column notes that women who have just given birth typically undergo physical and hormonal changes, and that doctors generally advise waiting until a six-week postpartum exam before resuming intercourse. That interruption, in the column’s telling, is not an obstacle to maternal care but a mechanism that directs a mother’s attention toward her newborn and away from sexual adventuring. Pain, exhaustion, hormonal shifts, and an infant’s physical dependence on its mother all pull her focus toward the child.
Men, the column acknowledges, do not undergo that same physical transformation and can love an infant deeply without having been forced by their bodies to slow down. But it points to research suggesting men’s bodies change too — provided they are connected to the child’s mother. It cites a 2011 study by Lee Gettler and colleagues that followed 624 men and found testosterone dropped substantially among those who became partnered fathers. Men tested within a month of their child’s birth showed the steepest declines, before extensive caregiving could account for the change, which the column says suggests a man’s biological transition toward fatherhood may begin during his partner’s pregnancy and intensify around the birth. Lower testosterone, the piece adds, is associated not only with gentler behavior toward a child but with a temporary dampening of sexual appetite, and postpartum research on opposite-sex couples describes sexuality being reorganized around the baby.
The column’s inference is that a gay man who acquires a baby at birth, without nine months alongside a pregnant partner, cannot be presumed to undergo the same hormonal shift — and that in this particular case, even daily caregiving did not subordinate the author’s sexual appetites to his daughter’s needs.
A contrast, and a concession
To sharpen the point, The Federalist sets the diary against one written by Alena Falkengren at roughly the same stage of her daughter’s life — two months postpartum. Falkengren, according to the column, wrote about her baby’s first smiles, the difficulties of breastfeeding, and how motherhood expanded her heart’s capacity day by day. She described the intimacy of learning her baby’s rhythms and the exhaustion of being constantly needed. In her account, the column says, the daughter was not an interruption to the diary — she was the diary.
The column is careful to note the difference is not that every mother is selfless or every father distracted. It cites the Lindsay Clancy case as evidence that not every mother is automatically nurturing, stable, or safe, and describes such cases as deviations from the norm — which, it argues, is precisely why they provoke shock and horror.
By contrast, the piece asserts that routine sexual exploits are not a deviation among gay men but the norm. It says surveys of male same-sex couples have repeatedly found very low rates of sexual exclusivity, and that sexual recklessness and serial hookups are not unusual in gay male pairings, nor are negotiated arrangements like the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy referenced in the diary. Open arrangements may be consensual between adults, the column concedes, but it argues they do not become child-centered simply because both men agreed to them. Whether Gavin authorized the encounters, the piece says, does not change what Sophie experiences: a household organized around sexual opportunity rather than the demands of a two-month-old.
The policy argument underneath
The column closes by tying the diary to a broader claim about family structure. It asserts that children have a right to their mother and father, that they do best when raised by that man and that woman in a permanent, low-conflict relationship, and that outcomes decline in any arrangement where a mother or father is missing or an unrelated adult is present. It acknowledges that some such households arise from tragedy and that adults in them do their best to mend a child’s loss, but argues that other arrangements are opposed to centering the child from the start — and that the diary offers an undeniable picture of one.
The Federalist concludes that it was an error to legally and culturally equate same-sex couples with married mothers and fathers, writing that love does not make men mothers and that fertility contracts and payments cannot replace the woman a child has lost. The father, the column says, has told readers exactly what the modern family prioritizes — adult appetite over child need — and should be believed. The remedy it proposes is to retake marriage on behalf of children’s rights so that no child grows up deliberately deprived of her mother and the attention the column says she deserves.
Source: thefederalist.com — https://thefederalist.com/2026/09/16/gay-dads-disturbing-diary-illuminates-dysfunctions-of-buying-babies/