PRAIRIE VILLAGE, Kan. — David Titterington had a sense of what his childhood friend would ask him when she led him into a photo booth at a mutual friend's wedding roughly a decade ago. As the countdown for the second photo ticked, Jen Wilson popped the question: Will you be my sperm donor? "Of course I said yes," Titterington said.
"I mean, who would have guessed that, being a gay man, I would have this opportunity to have biological children and also be part of their lives?" One of Jen and Whitney Wilson's most beloved possessions is a trio of images captured in a photo booth a decade ago. The Oct. 5, 2013, photo strip, shown Friday in Prairie Village, Kansas, captures the moment they asked friend David Titterington to help them create a family by donating sperm.
Like other LGBTQ+ couples, they and their sperm donor have created their own traditions around Father's Day. On Sunday, Kansas residents Jen and Whitney Wilson will pack up their three children — ages 9, 7 and 3 — and head to picnic at Titterington's Missouri house to celebrate the man who helped make their family possible. "We just have decided to celebrate him," said Jen Wilson, who works as the executive director of the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Modern Family Alliance.
For LGBTQ+ people, single-parent households, other nontraditional families or those with strained familial relationships, Father's Day and Mother's Day can be painful and confusing. Events featuring those holidays at school can make some children.