Trans New Yorkers Daniel and Grace Lavery and their partner, Lily Woodruff, welcomed a new baby boy into their Brooklyn brownstone on April 3. They named him Rochbert “Rocco” Ozymandias Wolverine.
“When I say we hope that the baby will be gay, I think maybe we’re all saying that we hope the baby will have an aesthetic life,” said Lily, who carried little and joined Daniel and Grace in their relationship after meeting Grace online in 2020.
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“I don’t know if you guys agree with that or not,” Lily told the others, curled up on the couch in their floor-through Brooklyn apartment with a writer for New York magazine, a few weeks before the blessed event.
“I’m just picturing a little Bob Newhart baby,” Danny replied.
“Oh!” Grace said, before adding, “I was thinking of Bob Ross.”
Danny, a well-known writer who co-founded The Toast website, met Grace, an academic, in 2015. The pair married in 2019 — Danny took Grace’s surname — and Danny broke contact with his family.
A year later, Grace met Lily, who was teaching art history at Michigan State. A baby with a New York-famous trans twosome was not in her plans.
“For a long time, I didn’t want to have a baby because I was worried about what the world’s going to look like,” Lily said.
Danny added, “If you had asked me whether I’d wanted to have children when I was about 8, I probably would have said something like, ‘Yes, but only if I can do it with a few of my friends and I don’t have to get pregnant.’”
“And if I had said that,” he added, “I would have been impressed today with my powers of manifestation.”
There was a period of adjustment when Lily arrived to join Danny and Grace’s gang, as Grace calls it. She and Lily were intimate first, so Danny and Lily found themselves negotiating another relationship to bring the throuple into balance. They had their first big row in December over recycling.
“There were ways in which I still felt like you and I would sometimes be on our ‘company manners’ around each other,” Danny told Lily.
“I think the outcome has been really positive,” Lily said.
“I’m really sorry we had to go through my being a d*ck.”
Danny described the behavior as “lesbian dominant”, with an asterisk.
“I don’t mean that in the sense of we’re dominant lesbians. I just mean we all have enough of a background in lesbianism and the processing of the lesbian school, which not all lesbians do, or have to do, or should do, but which does exist. I think we all like it.”
Then Danny predicted, “There will absolutely, I’m sure, come a day when our son is like, ‘I went over to someone else’s house and they don’t f**king do this all day. I didn’t know you could live with such beautiful quiet.’ Maybe that will be one of the ways in which heterosexuality will reintroduce itself back to our home.”
