![]() After a horrific sexual assault, Lee said, Angel had become pregnant, and was now determined to give up the baby. In April, 2017, Lee sent an e-mail about Angel, whose due date was July 8th. Lee began sending them profiles of potential birth mothers, or “first mothers,” as they’re sometimes called. One image showed Kyle cradling a newborn another showed Adam in his art studio, where he makes custom figurines of people’s pets. They prepared a twenty-two-page book about their family, filled with descriptions and photos of their home and of their parents, siblings, nieces, and nephews. He and Kyle signed the paperwork that day and gave Lee a deposit of twenty-five hundred dollars. “It felt like a comfortable fit,” Adam recalled. Many adoption agencies are affiliated with churches that disapprove of gay couples Lee said that she had never worked with a same-sex couple, but that she had no objection to it. During their meeting, Adam noticed an expensive-looking watch on Lee’s wrist that seemed at odds with her image. She didn’t look or speak like the staff members from other agencies she cursed and had tattoos running down both arms, which gave her a folksy air that she said made it easier to bond with young pregnant women, who were often dealing with addiction, poverty, and other challenges. She explained that she was a licensed social worker with a boutique adoption agency called Always Hope. She was small, with shiny black hair, dark eyes, and a nose ring her voice was high, like a child’s. Lee, who was thirty-five, was waiting for them at a table with a manila file folder of paperwork. In January, 2017, he and Adam drove to a nearby Tim Hortons to meet her. Then a friend of Kyle’s mentioned that a former middle-school classmate of theirs named Tara Lee was running her own adoption business. They started researching adoption agencies. “We were both getting older, and, being a gay couple, we figured it would take a while to be matched with a baby,” Kyle said. He wanted to adopt a child in the next year. Kyle was thirty-five and working as an I.T. In 2016, they got married and moved with their three dogs into a four-bedroom house on more than two acres in a rural area outside Detroit. “He was nice, and he cared, and he was interested in what I did,” Adam told me recently. ![]() A week or so later, they went out for dinner and drinks. Adam finally told him, “Come and find me, I’ll be outside mowing my lawn,” giving him only an approximate location. In 2014, on a dating app, he met Adam, an artist with a day job as a private-client banker, and spent the next year trying to get him to go on a date. When Kyle was twenty, he moved into his own apartment and came out to his family to his relief, they were accepting. His mother, who comes from a large Italian family, sent him to an all-boys Catholic high school, where he felt out of place and was teased regularly. He grew up as the youngest of three in New Baltimore, a suburb of Detroit on the shore of Lake St. “Kyle is a strong, determined, caring man who would do anything to protect and support his family,” he once wrote of himself. To Kyle Belz-Thomas, an ideal life included a noisy house full of children.
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