Today is International Lesbian Day.  Even if you are not a lesbian, join with me in rejoicing this day just by saying the word – lesbian.

It’s a great word, isn’t it?  I love saying it.

I’m visualizing in my head the first moment in time when a woman expressed her love for another woman, and had it returned.  The rejoicing at love shared, and the subsequent elation in realizing that although they lived in a male-dominated world, as far as the most important thing in their lives was concerned – men were redundant and unnecessary.

This certainly was the view of some in the lesbian separatist movement back in the day.

All women have intrinsically known that they’re superior to men, though, and it appears that evolution is on their side.

Human genetics professor Bryan Sykes predicted in his book Adam’s Curse that men could disappear within the next 5,000 generations, thanks to lowering sperm counts and the degradation of the Y-chromosome, which as the Telegraph review of his book helpfully explained is passed down only from father to son and “holds the instructions for making a man”.

But for now, us men are still needed, thanks to a substance we carry around in the most vulnerable part of our bodies.  If there were a God, it would be his greatest joke – that to continue the human race, men would only be required for a fluid that, but for its colour, resembles another fluid that one’s body desperately tries to expel through the nose whenever you’re afflicted with a horrible cold.

And in that department, lesbians in New Zealand don’t have a great deal to rejoice about on this day.  Richard Fisher from Fertility Associates has alerted us to a sperm shortage, not because there aren’t enough functioning penises, but due to discrimination.

According to GayNZ.com, “it’s harder to find donors who are willing to allow their sperm to be used by lesbian couples, and [Fisher’s] team would be delighted if there was a rush on gay men willing to help out with the situation.”

How society can change in a few short years.

I interviewed Richard Fisher when reporting for GayNZ.com in 2006, when there was still a ban in place for gay men donating sperm.  The same rules which still prohibit gay men from donating blood were then also in place for sperm donation.

The issue came to light in January of that year when Fertility Associates went public with news of a sperm shortage – a real one.

A gay man in Wellington rocked up to his local clinic and was turned away for not being heterosexual, and the headlines erupted.  A very quick reversal ensued, and by the time I got to speak to Dr Fisher, the policy was already on its way out.

“We’re somewhat embarrassed about the whole kerfuffle, given that our desire was always that we might potentially have gay donors,” he told me.  “We had been acting under the verbal advice of the previous chairman that we shouldn’t use gay men, because he was associated with a clinic that some years ago had some pregnancies affected with HIV.”

Despite the clinic screening all its donors for HIV, a process which involves quarantining sperm samples and testing donors twice for HIV at a six-month interval, gay men were being excluded at the first hurdle without even taking the test.

This policy was overturned, and gay men were welcomed with open arms – by Fertility Associates at least.

Once it became public knowledge that gay men were now eligible to become sperm donors, the wonderfully-named Christchurch geneticist Frank Sin stepped forward in the media to insist that potential parents be warned if their donor is gay, lest their children turn out the same (donors under the new rules were under no obligation to state their sexual orientation).

By this stage, Fertility Associates were starting to get more than a little miffed.  You can understand why: previous pleas for sperm donors had not resulted in a noticeable increase in willing men, yet the publicity over gay men being excluded from donating proved to be an effective campaign in itself.

Gay men who previously had not considered the possibility of fathering children in this way were now coming forward, and I imagine, looking back, that Dr Fisher didn’t want to piss off a new chain of spunk supply during a shortage.

When I called Dr Fisher to weigh in on Sin’s comments, he said he was “heartily sick” of the fuss being made over gay donors. “This is about an agreement between a donor and recipient at arm’s length.  I don’t think it matters whether they’re gay, heterosexual, or Catholic. It’s a matter between those two parties, with us acting as an intermediary.”

If concerned potential parents questioned the clinic over whether a gay donor would produce gay children, they’d be told “we think it’ll be extraordinarily unlikely.”

The genetic history of donors is documented, but technology could only be used to flag obvious health-related flaws which are known to be inheritable. And even then, “because they [the donor] don’t have a family history of carcinoma of the bowel doesn’t mean the child won’t get it. If the issue is genetics, we can’t answer any question with any accuracy.”

The determination of sexual orientation in humans is far more complex. “For us to get into a discussion about the likelihood of there being a ‘gay gene’ is crazy because there might be a thousand genes which we’re aware or unaware of,” he said. “It’s not a discussion that I think we’re ever likely to get into. People make their own decisions about those things, and we don’t offer them advice about it either.”

Reporting on this issue started turning some cogs in my own mind.  I’d never harboured any desire to have children, but this had got me thinking.  Particularly when Dr Fisher explained to me the self-imposed restrictions that are often put in place by donors.

“The donor is giving a gift, and may be as discriminatory as he wishes. There is nothing in the Human Rights Act that says if you donate, it can go to anybody.”

As well as some men not wanting their sperm to be donated to single women or lesbians, “some of our Maori donors will choose to restrict it to a particular iwi. And from that point of view, they’re giving away their genetic material and they can be as discriminatory as they wish. Some put restrictions of age on as well.”

By the same token, recipients can be equally as discriminatory about their donors, however at the time I wrote my article, I noted that nobody was spoilt for choice. “They have less choice than they would want, and what we would want as well,” Dr Fisher told me.  “Recipient couples end up being offered a profile of the donors, and they say yes that’s suitable for me, or no that’s not.”

While donors have no legal or financial responsibility for their offspring, the law requires that your name go onto a special register, which can be accessed by the child once he or she turns 18. “It has been true in our clinic for ten years that you had to be potentially identifiable as a donor,” Dr Fisher told me. “We didn’t want someone being a donor who one day would refuse access to a child who wanted to know more about them.”

It is this aspect of becoming a sperm donor that frightens many people away, and an Australian clinic at the time had even resorted to bribing potential donors with free trips overseas.  Fisher thought such gimmicks were distasteful.

“That’s a primitive approach to recruiting donors, really.  It’s a commercial rather than a social model.  We think people should donate sperm because they want to, not because they get paid for it.  We want to have donors who are committed, who recognise the child might one day want to know who they are and a bit more about them.”

The more I thought about it, the more that idea appealed to me.  I may not be involved in the day-to-day parenting, but just the thought of being phoned up twenty years down the track by a human being who was brought into existence because of me… well, it appealed.  And, I admit, I felt a bloody-minded desire to reverse discriminate: my donation would be reserved for a lesbian couple, who, I reasoned, would be more likely to bring up their child to be tolerant of diversity in the world.

So I went in, filled out the forms, got the requisite blood tests, and…went to make my first deposit.  I remember the room was quite nice, a bit like a three-star motel, with plants, a bed, a bathroom – nothing to get the pulse racing, but hardly the sterile environment I expected either.

What I’ll never forget was the reading material.  As my visit was only a few weeks after their gay ban was lifted, they’d yet to understand that some of us seeking visual encouragement to rub one out probably wouldn’t be turned on by Penthouse and Playboy et al.

As if hastily realising this, buried underneath the well-thumbed hetero porn was a copy of the latest Express, our national gay newspaper.

This is the gay equivalent of jerking off to the Dominion Post.

Anyway, I got it over and done with, dutifully handed over my sample in a brown paper bag and tried to hide the last vestiges of Catholic embarrassment as I looked the female lab attendant in the eye.

The quarantine period passed, and I was called to be given the all-clear, but by this time I’d gotten the jitters about the whole thing.  Maybe my desire to father a child was born out of narcissism, maybe I thought I wasn’t worthy of replication – who knows?  I decided to withdraw.

Subsequent to that, I was diagnosed bipolar, which now excludes me from donating anyway, and I regret my hesitation.

As an adopted child, I know how long my parents had to wait to get me – seven years.  If you want to become a parent, and are unable to conceive in the regular manner, it takes commitment to go through with it.  Infertile and same-sex couples don’t become parents by accident.

And for the gay men out there, I can’t think of any better way of celebrating International Lesbian Day than phoning up Fertility Associates and having a chat with them about the process.

Because, none of us would be here without women.