Having a baby can be easy for some couples: A quick connection and boop, you’re a family. It’s not that easy for LGBTQ+ couples, as this week’s Portrait, Gabby Maunder, explains. Frustratingly, though we like to think of our city as a progressive haven, it doesn’t rate so high when it comes to queer parental rights. Maunder hopes to share her story and eventually help the city of brotherly love and sisterly affection become more a little more queer family friendly.
Where are you originally from? I understand that you are not from these shores.
That’s correct. I was born in Winchester in the United Kingdom and we moved to Moorestown, NJ when I was three. I currently live in Philadelphia.
Do you have any memories of the old country? Have you gone back?
Yeah, my entire family — outside of my immediate family — still lives over there so when I was young, we would go back two or three times a year to visit. [Laughing] I’m actually able to switch my accent back and forth from British to American just because of how much I’ve been around British people growing up. My parents also have really strong accents even now so I have that influence too. After my grandparents passed, the visits slowed down a bit but we still have relatives who come to visit us here. My parents actually just came back from there.
What’s the most Dickensinian thing you’ve done? Plum pudding at Christmas?
I think the most English thing we’ve done is just going to the pubs and having the right British food like bangers and mash or the proper fish and chips. I think with the Brits, we’re all about connecting. Sitting down outside the pub on a picnic bench with some good food and a pint and chatting. Those are the British moments that I miss.
I remember going there as a teen and drinking warm beer, but just being excited that I was being served at all.
Yeah, it’s always a good time going back there for sure.
What were you like as a kid?
I was a very independent child. I always wanted to forge my own path. Even at a young age, I had a lot of ambition. I was a very academic type, but I also played sports and loved being around friends. I also did a lot of theater and musicals growing up, and I was in an a capella group in high school. So soccer, singing and acting were strong interests, along with English studies and other academics. I was also interested in film but didn’t know what to do with that so I landed on communications as my major focus in college.
Where did you go?
I went to Wake Forest University in North Carolina. They had that red brick, green grass, one step from Ivy League education appeal and they had good sports teams too. [In high school] soccer was my game. I really didn’t play any other sports because they would have conflicted with my theater schedule.
What was your greatest theater moment?
I was in a lot of shows when I was a younger kid, mainly as part of the general cast. I just loved being part of the crew. But then I got cast as Annie in the musical which was my claim to fame at 10. And in high school, I played Jojo in “Seussical: The Musical,” which was funny because I was a 15-year-old girl playing a 10-year-old boy! It was my freshman year and I was around mostly seniors, which was fun. I met a whole new group of friends. The next year, I auditioned for a show and was cast in the chorus. I had played leads in the past and didn’t really want to go back so I joined the lighting crew. That way I still could be a part of it and have a role in making the show happen. I really loved it and did the lighting on the next two shows after that.
What did your parents do, were they in the arts?
My dad had been in finance and had been the CFO for a couple of companies and he still does that part time, but he quit to start his own business. He started a tour company in Philadelphia called WeVenture and they do Segway tours and walking tours and private car tours, scavenger hunts and all sorts of things around the city. My mom is an adjunct lecturer at UArts and she has also built her own company. My sister is blind and my mom started a company called Philly Touch Tours, where she works with different museums across the east coast and helps them formulate tours for the blind and sight impaired. She also does a program where she goes to schools that don’t have art programs and creates these wonderful quilts with the students.
So you come by your creativity honestly. What other traits do you think you got from them?
A lot of empathy and compassion for the world around us. My sister is blind and has Asperger’s Syndrome and I think that has opened us up in a big way. Also, the fact that they introduced us to travel and the desire to explore other places has contributed to who I am.
Tell me a little about your coming out experience.
Around 2011, I was 20 years old and in college. Wake Forest is a very straight school — lots of fraternities and sororities and I was in one of them — and though I think I had some tendencies and maybe an air of something about me, I’d never really thought about it or considered it, and then my brother passed away [in 2012]. He was also gay and a big part of our family, which really embodied the spirit of openness and acceptance and love but his passing really shook me. I really re-thought a lot of where I was and who I was after that. He passed away in March.
That summer, I came home and was working as a camp counselor and this girl told me that I walked like a lesbian. [Laughing] That really caught me off guard but we ended up connecting and then ultimately dating. Although she’ll always be a special person in my life, it didn’t work out. At first, I thought she was the only woman that would happen with, but then I realized that it wasn’t a one-time thing, that I was more interested in women than I was in men. Which probably explained why it never really clicked with them in the past.
Can I ask how your brother passed?
He was technically not my biological brother. He was my sister’s best friend in school and his family basically disowned him for being gay. He’d been adopted into a family that seemed to adopt kids to bring them into their religion. When he came out at 17, they told him he had to leave or pay rent and since he was just a teenager and had no money, he was asked to leave. He would already spend a lot of time at our house, hanging out with my sister so when that happened, my parents invited him to live with us. He lived with us until he passed at 28 from end-stage renal failure after two kidney transplants. I was eight years younger than him, so he was there for a good part of my childhood.
Wow, that’s a lot. So let’s fast forward to what you’re doing now.
Sure, I work in the marketing department at Comcast. Customer growth and upgrades is the formal description. It’s a lot of advertising and TV commercials targeted at our customers. I really love it. I loved film growing up and I love advertising and this is a blend of those two worlds. It’s about learning to understand how people work and how to speak to them in a way that moves the needle. I get a lot of input on the creative side and the briefs that we put out for different initiatives.
What was a favorite project?
I worked on a holiday campaign during COVID about keeping connected and I got to work with Steve Carell, who played our Santa Claus. That was really cool.
And now you have an even better job now as a mommy and an advocate.
My wife and I had a baby a year ago. He was born in 2022 and she carried him so we knew that I needed to adopt him right away but it was quite the process. We did not expect it to be as arduous as it was. We used a sperm bank, and I’m married to his biological mother, and I’m on the birth certificate as his other parent, it felt like they were treating us as if I was a stranger adopting through foster care and they put me through the ringer. It was disappointing to see how archaic the system is. There were tons of paperwork and an FBI background check, an interview with a childcare worker and all sorts of hoops.
And then my wife had to end up doing the same, even though she gave birth to him, which was beyond comprehension. There were a lot of things that came up that people just don’t know, and it’s very, very expensive. We were fortunate enough that my wife had a friend who is a family lawyer and was able to use his paralegal to do a lot of the work, which helped us save money. And Comcast covers $10,000 worth of adoption fees per child, which was a great thing to know so again, we were really lucky in many ways, as strenuous and challenging and frustrating as it was. Yes, there were lots of tears as we got phone calls saying, “They said, ‘no,’ not until you do this other step…” And it took a lot longer than expected but so many other people are much less fortunate because they don’t have the money and connections that we had available or even the time and willpower to weather everything that you’re put through.
That’s crazy.
Yeah, so we’re early in the process but we’re trying to map it out so that we can share the information we’ve collected and we’re working with our lawyer who is helping pro-bono to see if there’s something we can do to petition the court or take it to the court to find out why this system is the way that it is. It’s state-by-state so for instance, in New York, if you’re on the birth certificate, you’re automatically a legal parent there. That’s it. So it doesn’t make sense to us to have such a discrepancy. We’re trying to educate ourselves after our experience and then we’re planning to find a way to educate others.
When did you start the process? When your wife was pregnant?
There’s really nothing you can do until the child is born and you have a birth certificate. You can’t even start filling out paperwork. We did have the lawyer waiting and he knew the details of our plan and what we wanted to do. Because we went through a sperm bank, it made things a lot easier because with an FDA-approved facility, the donor’s parental rights have already been signed away. Once you buy the sperm you get the paperwork right away, so at least we didn’t have to deal with that. Someone using a friend or family member would have to go through an additional process.
And how long did the process take?
It took about six months after he was born to get it finalized.
So if, heaven forbid, something happened to your wife in those first six months, you wouldn’t have had any legal role in your son’s life. That must have been terrifying.
Exactly. Another thing that we advise people is that we did have a will set up to say that anything of hers would be mine and vice versa, though that doesn’t necessarily count for a child, which is another thing we all need to think about even without a child. If something happens to one of us, what are my legal rights? It’s all a bit daunting. But we’re hoping to help make things a little easier for people.
Lovely. Speaking of which, how did you meet your wife?
We met through a friend. I don’t think either of us felt connected to the queer community in Philadelphia. I was just recently coming out of a relationship and she was just coming out. We met through a friend at a bar and as the story goes, I was kissing somebody else and she said she saw me and knew I was the one. She tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You shouldn’t talk to her, you should talk to me.” I guess that boldness paid off because now we’re married!
Your wedding website was hilarious. I especially liked your “Bridesmen” entries.
Thank you. Yeah, we let everyone do their own thing. We didn’t care what people wore. We kind of had a color palette but everyone was free to express themselves however they wanted. One of the guys wore heels down the aisle, the whole thing was fun.
It looked like fun. OK, random question: What room in your house best reflects your personality?
My child’s bedroom. It’s got this Boho calming feel to it. I designed the whole house, but his room was the most fun. I have two framed photos in the room, one of Barack Obama and one of RBG, playing basketball.
Something that gets better with age.
Life. We’ve actually been talking about that lately: how you get to experience so many new things like building a relationship, finding community and having a kid. The older you get, the better life gets.
Most memorable birthday present?
One year, my best friend got me a guitar for my birthday. She’d taken the cover art from all of our favorite music and used it to cover the whole guitar in a collage. It was such a thoughtful gift. I still have it.
Something funny your son does?
He’s very cheeky. He loves music and he loves to sing (the same note over and over) and rock out with [his] head banging to the music.
Favorite quote?
This is one that I’ve had since I was really young. It’s from a song called, “Clark Gable” by The Postal Service: “I want life in every word, to the extent that it’s absurd.”