A Family Portrait: Brothers, Sisters, Strangers

It was never a secret in my house that I was conceived with the help of an anonymous sperm donor. For a majority of my childhood, I never really thought about him. But when I was around 11, I went through a period of having questions. My parents — I have two mothers — gave me a photo copy of a questionnaire that was sent to them from the sperm bank they used, California Cryobank. The donor filled it out in 1996, two years before I was born.

I remember carrying the form with me in my backpack, taking it to school and studying it occasionally when I remembered I had it. There was this sense of touch — this person had used his hand to answer these questions; I could see where he had crossed things out. It wasn’t that I was so desperate to imagine who he was; it was enough to have proof that he was real, entangled with who I am and yet, as that document showed, totally separate. The form made him concrete, if inscrutable. It also gave me the sense that there was this larger world, this process and this bureaucracy that my existence was built upon. It was a way to help me understand myself.

Eli Baden-Lasar. The photographer, sitting on his mother’s bed in the home where he grew up in Oakland.

I knew a lot of other children whose parents had used donors to conceive because every summer we went to a camp for same-sex families. Last summer, news traveled through the community that two kids from two families who attended the camp for years had independently gone on to a registry for family members trying to connect with donors or donor siblings. The two discovered that they shared a donor — that they were half siblings.

Until that moment, it had not really occurred to me — or my mothers, even though one is an ObGyn — that I might have half siblings out there. It makes no sense that we didn’t think about that, because my parents deliberately chose a donor whose sperm had successfully produced at least one live birth, whose sperm had, in a sense, “worked.” I think they were just so focused on thinking about the new family they were creating that they never stopped to think about the implications of the huge, inadvertent social experiment they were joining.

The news about the two kids at camp made me curious to find out if I had half siblings that I did not know about. So that same month, last August, when I was 19, I dug up the questionnaire, went to the sibling registry for California Cryobank, the largest sperm bank in the nation, and typed in the donor’s number. I landed on a message board for children of my particular donor and saw about a dozen cryptic user names of various mothers or children who were perhaps hesitant to reveal themselves completely. One jumped out at me — it said jplamb.

I grew up in Oakland, but I spent a semester in high school at a program in New York for kids interested in experiential learning, and one friend I made there, I knew, had two mothers who used a sperm donor to conceive him. His name was Gus Lamb. Right away, I texted him to ask if he had registered on the California Cryobank. He said he had. We exchanged donor numbers, and then we knew: We were half siblings.

It was a moment of glee but also of horror. I knew that as a story it was mind-blowing, but it was also disturbing — to have the script switched, to go from friends to brothers. In our experiential-learning program, we were constantly being asked to write personal essays to try to understand our lives. For four months, we were doing that and reading each other’s work and sleeping on the same floor of a dorm, all the while not knowing that we were half brothers — the perversity of that was not lost on either of us.

Sheepishly, we both wondered how that was possible: How could we not have somehow known? But at the same time, we both recognized that it didn’t seem so obvious. I had this suspicious feeling that scientists were conducting an experiment, had taken a lunch break and then forgotten to check back. But no one was watching through the two-way mirror, and instead we were stuck looking at each other, reflected and refracted, different people, but the same, mouths agape. If it was an experiment, the variables had not yielded some thrilling result. There had been no instant connection or unbreakable bond, and we easily lost touch when the program ended.

We got on the phone, me in California, Gus in Massachusetts. Gus told me that he had never been especially drawn to learning more about the donor siblings. His sister Izzy, however, who had the same donor, had done research for medical reasons after having her appendix out. “There’s tons of siblings,” Gus told me. That was another shock. Many of them, he said, had been in touch for years. Gus and Izzy even had video-chatted with a few.

When we hung up, I told my parents what I’d learned, and they were equally stunned. I felt both curious and anxious about these people and what they exactly meant to me. The sheer quantity of them gave me a feeling of having been mass-produced.

Even as I was trying to take this information in, I was realizing that one way I could maybe make sense of all of this was through photography, a medium I’ve been interested in from a young age. I could use the camera as an excuse to meet each sibling and maybe the process of making pictures would help me find some sort of stability, even as I also recognized that conflict, discomfort and maybe even a kind of love would be part of the experience.