From pampers and potties to pimples and proms, anyone who’s raised another human will tell you there are a lot of “Ps” that come along with parenting. Among the most useful “P," many would agree, is a partner—someone to nudge at night for their turn to bottle feed, take on soccer practice duties or handle any of the other million tasks that come with raising a child to adulthood.

And yet for Black gay men, the dearth of marriage-worthy partners has put the dream of a nuclear family far out of reach.

That’s changing.

This spring, millions of men will celebrate Father’s Day as single dads, part of a trend that has exploded over the past few decades. Among them are an increasingly visible number of gay men and male figures, many of them casting aside traditional timelines and methods of creating their family and redefining when and how one should become a parent.

They’re men like Alexander Langford, an Atlanta-based author and baby boomer who, at age 40, felt the importance of raising a Black child in America mattered more than whether he had a mate along for the ride. More than two decades later, adopted son Xee Langford is a thriving musician.

There was a bedtime and morning ritual in the Malebranche household. A kiss from the family patriarch to his son David and daughter Michelle that was so routine—his decision to replace David’s kiss with deafening silence—reverberated loudly throughout their home in Galway, NY, in the summer of 1992.

Despite being an exceptional student with degrees from Princeton, Emory, and Columbia Universities, Malebranche, now 53, had become accustomed to achieving a level of success that appeared to impress everyone but the Haitian-born surgeon he called dad. Yet he was not accustomed to being viewed as a disappointment by the man he idolized.

“Donna, is our son trying to tell us something?” Malebranche recalls his father asking his mother almost daily, particularly after getting his ears pierced, and choosing to wear an earring in the right ear only on this particular day, which in the early 90s was a cultural indicator that a man was not heterosexual.

“He would ask her that question every morning. He would not let it go,” Malebranche said. “So after the third or fourth morning, she'd say, ‘What do you want me to do? I can’t cover for you.’”

“I'm 23. If he's not man enough to ask me directly, he’s not man enough to hear it from me, so you tell him,” he said. “And so she did. Those three days that I was home, he didn’t speak to me at all.”

In June, Alphonso Mills, 30, and his fiance Ja’Mel Ware, 33, will become fathers. They shared the news of their expanding family in a short video posted on their respective social media accounts on Feb 22, marking the 22nd week of their baby’s development. While Black queer couples are frequently raising children that are both biological and adoptive, especially in the South, Ware, who identifies as a queer transmasculine man and was assigned female at birth is carrying the couple’s first child. On testosterone for over a decade, Ware says he never imagined that he’d one day have to decide to stop receiving gender-reinforcing hormones in order to conceive, but that was before he met Mills.

Ware proposed in October 2020, during a trip to Walt Disney World after dating Mills for two years. It was a surprise affirmation of their commitment to each other that Mills later reciprocated with a proposal of his own.

“There was just something about our connection that made me realize as long as I could do this, I would do it,” Ware says.

I knew I was not alone. I had spoken to other Black gay men who were caregiving, but it was not something that was often discussed openly. Caregiving can be a very solitary role, where you end up isolated, and unable to find an outlet for all the emotions that you’re experiencing. Because, for some, you are caregiving 24 hours, and unable to leave your care recipient.

I was taught growing up that men were the providers, and as a Black man, I was supposed to leave the home to earn a living to take care of my family. The emotional and physical care wasn’t something I was taught would be my burden to carry. The truth is, there was never going to be any other way this would go. My parents have two sons. We were going to have to shoulder this burden or consider a home for our parents.

On television, the journey to fatherhood is blissfully straightforward: A few rough and tumble single years before finding ‘the one,’ welcoming a child or two, and settling down into cozy family life.

For Britt Chambliss, 33, the journey was similar up to a point. The Navy vet had restless years of self-discovery, found a wife, and even welcomed a daughter. Then he took a step toward an identity most fathers take for granted, shedding the female gender he was assigned at birth before stepping into his identity as a transgender man.

December 11, 2018 – Atlanta, GA – On December 4, 2018, 39-year-old comedian Kevin Hart was announced as the host for the 91st Annual Academy Awards. Over a 48-hour period, America watched as a series of homophobic jokes and comments from 2009 to 2015 resurfaced for a public divide of condemnation and defense, often with Hart’s young son as the subject, and usually at the expense of Black gay men.

In 1997 I began the very personal journey of fully accepting my sexuality. In my case, at that time, bisexuality was transitional. I knew it, but I couldn't say "gay" yet to anyone. We were in the car. I had finally gotten up the nerve to tell him. Holding a big revelation like that in was beginning to take a mental toll on me. I'm strong, but something had to give, and soon. In that car, at that moment I said it - "Dad, I'm bisexual." That was a lie.