Ad Age is marking Pride Month 2023 with our Honoring Creative Excellence package, in which LGBTQ+ creators revisit some of their favorite projects. (Read the introduction here.) This week, our guest editor Jonathan Mildenhall turns the spotlight to Emmy-winning actor, writer and producer Dan Bucatinsky. Here, Bucatinsky shares his thoughts on the creative leap that led to “Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight? Confessions of a Gay Dad.”

I’ve always heard “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Well. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always lived my life avoiding things that might kill me. I’m the opposite of an adrenaline junkie. You’d never see me on a season of “Survivor,” for example—too many bugs. I stay away from scary things. And as a result, I’m very much still alive. I just may not be very strong, as a result.

I mean, sure, I’ve taken some risks over the years. I’ve spent most of my adult life in the entertainment business, which may not require eating bugs but, at times, one could argue is even worse. I’ve certainly grown resilient, having been pummeled by my share of rejection over the past 30 years.But back in 2010, I wound up jumping off a creative cliff I’d never contemplated before. I wrote a book. It wasn’t part of a plan or strategy—wasn’t even a dream of mine. I’ve devoted so much of my adult life as an actor and writer for TV and film, living in the space of fictional storytelling. I think it’s always been an escape from the day-to-day reality of life: the challenges, the obstacles and the pitfalls of being me. It was an escape from feelings of inadequacy, fear, self-doubt.

Growing up gay in the ’80s didn’t help. It was a time when the word gay was associated with AIDS, which managed to whip up a global homophobia that took no prisoners. There were few, if any, role models. I found ways to stay in the closet, so I was never truly connected to the deepest parts of myself: my authentic drives, fears, desires and pain—my truth. How ironic, really, considering that an artist’s most impactful and meaningful palate is the one made up of our truest selves.

Then it all changed.

In 2005, my husband and I became dads. We made an adoption plan with a birth mom and embarked on the journey of parenthood that changed me in a way I could never have predicted. All the colors of my emotional palate—every drive and passion and fear—were heightened. There was no more running from the truth.

Around that time, I was asked to write an honest, comedic piece about parenthood to perform with other parent writers and comedians. Something raw and funny and real that you wouldn’t read in a parenting magazine. I was terrified. But I summoned my courage and put my experience into words. It unleashed in me a cathartic feeling of connection, not just with my truest sense of self, but with those with whom I’d be sharing my story. 

I performed a different piece at nights like these over the next two years. By then, I had amassed a series of about ten essays chronicling my parental panics, mishaps, worries, victories and challenges. I learned to drive in the direction of the scariest places, exposing the experiences of being a dad that evoked both riotous humor and paralyzing fear. Writing about it and sharing it with an audience connected all of us.

It certainly didn’t kill me. And it absolutely made me stronger. It wasn’t long before I realized how the sharing of my specific gay parenting experiences became a thread connecting me to so many others: gay, straight, married, single moms and dads. It was about exposing, well, our humanity.

I wrote more essays and tied them together into my book “Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?” (which I’ve learned it did not—and that’s fine by me!). The book was released in June 2012—for Pride and Father’s Day. And the pride I feel about having allowed myself to be vulnerable, honest, funny and real in those pages is a pride I carry with me well beyond the month of June!