Nicole Conn: Her Life, Her Family and Her Little Man

by Lydia Marcus, photos by Deborah Antoinese

The first time I met Nicole Conn was almost a decade ago to interview her about her first novel “Passion’s Shadow.” Back then she was going through her wild Turk single days and living in this little funky bachelor pad nestled in the hills off Beverly Glen that seemed more like a treehouse than a traditional home. She was enjoying newfound celebrity, even dating fans of “Claire of the Moon,” a film she wrote and directed that divisively cut through the lesbian community as a love it or loathe it flick. She was about to appear in “OUT Magazine” as one of the most eligible lesbians and hoping to find Ms. Right.

Well a lot has changed since those days – Conn found her “soul partner” in Gwendolyn Baba (an LGBT community activist formerly on the board of directors of the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center and currently a co-chair on the board of directors of HRC) and they started a family - daughter Gabrielle, 5 1/2, that Baba carried, and son Nicholas, 3 1/2, born via a surrogate.

After writing several more books, producing and directing the most successful lesbian documentary ever made (“Moments,” about the making of “Claire of the Moon”), Conn planned to make a documentary about surrogacy. But when a routine 20 week appointment to see how their unborn child was progressing uncovered major medical problems for both fetus and surrogate, the film turned into “little man,” a personal odyssey that would document son Nicholas’ premature birth at 25 weeks (born 100 days early, he was a one pound micropremie), his first 158 days spent hospitalized at Cedar Sinai’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), the highs and lows of daily life and almost death moments (including numerous subsequent emergency hospitalizations), and the stressful impact on the entire family. The film opens November 28 at the Laemmle Music Hall and will eventually air on Showtime.

“little man” has played numerous gay and straight film festivals around world and so far has picked up seven awards, including Best Documentary Feature Audience Award at Outfest). As I sat talking with Conn and Baba in the living room of their two story 1920’s Spanish style home in Los Feliz, an award from one festival had just arrived in the mail. Conn and Gabrielle took the award over to a living room cabinet where “little man’s” other awards are kept alongside the family’s Limoge collection and framed photos of Baba posed next to prominent political leaders like President Bill Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore, and Los Angeles Mayor Anthony Villariagosa.

The film is touching a nerve with mothers from all walks of life, even “the red states,” Conn shares, because “Premie moms don’t care if we’re lesbians, this film validates what they’ve been through, it validates their experience, it validates what their child had to do to be on this planet.”

During our nearly two hour interview, Conn and Baba recounted the hell of Nicholas’ arrival into this world, the medical problems their surrogate had that were discovered too late, and shared how Nicholas and the family are doing today.

L.M.: So catch me up to speed between 10 years ago when your first novel came out and now because obviously a hell of a lot’s gone on.
N.C.: Yeah. I was at a book signing for either “Angel Wings” or “Passion’ Shadow” in Palm Springs at the Dinah Shore Weekend in 1996...We met each other and it was literally like something truly like out of one of my books – the eye lock, the explosion and the violins in the background and neither one of us could barely function all weekend long cause we were falling more and more madly in love…Within three days we were madly in love and I basically checked into the Baba household at the time…And I moved in six months later – the lesbian thing. And she had told me from the very beginning that she wanted kids and I said “No you don’t.” And she said “Yeah I do.” And I was like “No trust me we are both the most two autonomous people I know, we do not rely on anything but our own selves and our own self swirl that’s always going on around us…She said, “Well that’s just non-negotiable for me.” So I spent the next year and a half trying to talk her out of it and I don’t know what bonked me over the head but I guess if you cant beat ‘em, join ‘em. I finally relented and we started the whole huge fertility dance that’s just so hard. And at first it was just Gwen doing all the cycles and we went through in vitro and then the doctor said, “Look you’re not getting pregnant,” it was about two years into that and then he said, “You know you’re both women, why don’t you both try it.” And I’m younger than Gwen by three years, so he said, “You know Nicole’s eggs are probably a little bit more ripe for the picking.” So we did a dual invitro cycle which is insane and you know fourteen embryos later…Gabrielle was born.
L.M.: Do you know who the actual mother is from the egg? Have you ever tried to find out?
N.C.: No, we’ve never done that, we call it our “little black box,” we have no idea genetically who’s she really is…In some ways it’s sort of like the best of all worlds because she’s an our child in every sense of the word…We don’t know if it’s going to open up a terrible situation later on, but I mean we’re both really and truly a thousand percent her Mom.
L.M.: But if she wanted it at some point, if she said “I want to find out.”
N.C.: Absolutely, after a certain age, that and the sperm donor, we got somebody who would actually communicate and meet their child at 18.
L.M.: Was it an option to use the same donor for Nicholas?
N.C.: Yes, I used the same sperm donor for the (my) embryos but she used a different sperm donor for her embryos because when we did this originally you pick sperm donors that look like the other person.
L.M.: So you went from not wanting any kids to wanting more right away?
N.C.: Yeah, we call me the uber mother, the uber goober mother. If I could just have a career being a Mom that’s what I would probably do. I am so in love with the kids…We always said we’re going to have two kids, the thing is we were old (laughs) and our embryos were really old.
L.M.: How old were you when Gwen got pregnant?
N.C.: I was 39 and she was 42, turning 43.
L.M.: And when you decided to have Nicholas?
N.C.: 40, it’s a really bad cut off date for women – just a warning for everybody I’m sorry to say, but you really should try to get it done before 40, not just because your embryos cant do it but because of the ramifications of all the genetic issues that happen with the kid.
L.M.: How old were you when Nicholas was born?
N.C.: I was 41 and she was 44.
L.M.: Why did you get a surrogate and why didn’t Gwen carry?
N.C.: I could not medically carry but I could produce embryos. Gwen had a really, severely bad pregnancy, once she lost the pregnancy (Gabrielle’s twin)…she was on bed rest for four months.
L.M.: Was adoption ever considered?
N.C.: Yes, we were going to use frozen embryos and if they didn’t work, we were going to adopt. We went through an agency and she was cleared medically and we didn’t realize all the problems she had until we were pregnant.
L.M.: What was wrong with her?
N.C.: She had a condition known as preclampsia. She also only had one kidney. We did know she only had one kidney.
L.M.: Is that an issue?
N.C.: Yes it is if you have preclamsia, but we didn’t know that she had preclampsia to the extent that she had it because she forgot to tell us.
L.M.: And how does that affect your health?
N.C.: Preclampsia is literally toxic to the child – it’s reverse blood flow so instead of getting rid of the toxins in your blood, you’re sending those toxins back to the baby. And when you send them back to the baby and cant get rid of them the natural way, the mother also gets sick. There’s only one cure for preclamsia, that’s delivery, so if you get preclampsia later in your pregnancy you can deliver and what had happened in her particular instance was she had forgotten to tell us that they had to induce labor at 36 weeks for her first pregnancy because she was highly preclampic at that time. The medical people that we’ve all spoken to have said anybody who’s has preclamsia, the chances of them having preclampsia again are just absolutely much, much higher. She just never should have been passed by any agency or any doctors.
L.M.: Is this a greed issue on the agency’s part?
N.C.: I think it’s one of those live and learn. I don’t think that they had experienced that. I’m sure they have nobody who has preclampsia at this point in their roster.
(Gwen sits down and joins the conversation)
Gwendolyn Baba: I think there was also a real eagerness for the agency to set up their one and only lesbian couple with their one and only lesbian surrogate. And so I think that eagerness kind of maybe overshadowed other prudent things that they might have worked out, or maybe not, I don’t know.
L.M.: At what point during the pregnancy did you learn there was something wrong.
N.C.: It was at 20 weeks…The doctor says, “We have found that the thighbone is two weeks behind and it really is good that you found this out,” I mean literally he said, “So you can terminate now.” And we said (raises voice), “What are you talking about? What do you mean terminate now because his leg is short!” You know I come from short statured men in my family. And that just led from one specialist doctors appointment to the next to the next to the next and everybody had differing opinions about what was wrong. A lot of people thought there was something wrong with the baby itself, possibly a genetic syndrome
L.M.: Can you put into words the feeling behind keeping the pregnancy going at all cost or is it just too emotional to describe?
N.C.: Well, part of it is so emotional that it is nonverbal. The surrogate came to visit us when she was six months pregnant. If somebody’s pregnant, I always try to touch her belly and try to feel the baby. I know this sounds weird but I can feel a sort of energy. I’ve been able to guess quite a few times the sex of the baby so when she came here I did that. What I wrote in my journal about his personality would describe him today. I felt him so strongly, his essence, his spirit energy. So when it came time to make any of these decisions and the pregnancy appeared to be going badly, we had conversations where I was saying, “You don’t understand this the last of my frozen embryos, I won’t have this chance again.” I don’t know if I projected out a certain relationship that I would have with this child or whatever it was, but I felt him so strongly that it was literally like saying, “Just let me just cut your heart right out of your guts.” I just couldn’t go there. He felt so real, so, so real, as real as Gabrielle did, that it was just you were asking me to put a gun to a kid’s head.
L.M.: Are you a spiritualist or how do you describe yourself?
N.C.: I’m very spiritual. I know it sounds icky pookie though.
L.M.: Personally to me it doesn’t.
N.C.: I know a lot of people (say), “Well what do you mean you felt him? What does that mean?”…I believe that Nicholas was meant to come in for a variety of reasons and they become more and more clear. You cannot untie this film to our whole life experience. The film actually became a strong sense of therapy for Gwen and I because we sat on such different sides of many issues and one of the things I felt like it did was it gave us both voice and helped heal us in some weird say…The message of Nicholas and our family whether it’s a message of gay and lesbian families fight every bit as hard to be family, whether its talking about the sheer to live that’s Nicholas, whether its talking about the love of Mom for a child or Dad for a child, those are huge messages that are really resonating with people and I feel like there’s some sense to me that he is a messenger on some level and that is one of the reasons he came here. And I don’t mean to sound grand or anything but I really feel like that’s part of why he is here. Everybody he touches and comes into contact with, he has a pretty intense impact on from his nurses to his occupational therapist to all of those people, he’s really an enchanted being from my standpoint and a lot of people agree with that. And I’m glad for that because it’s at a huge price that he is here. Gwen was right about all of those things and she was right all along and she saw a future view that I just couldn’t see, I was so stuck in every second that I was in.
L.M.: What were all the things medically wrong with Nicholas at birth?
N.C.: He had no lungs…they’re still liquid basically…he was on the oscillating vents…which ruined his eyesight and he’s got chronic lung disease because the oxygen is so overmuch that it blows the little capillaries and when they blow they basically break and they scar and start pushing the retina off the eye and so his left eye was already coming off. This surgeon was able to save his eyesight but now he’s basically legally blind, he has these unbelievably thick lenses.
L.M.: What can he see?
N.C.: He can see globs of shapes.
G.B.: He can see faces close up, he holds his books like that close (Gwen holds her hand up to her nose).
L.M.: How are his other senses?
N.C.: Really good.
G.B.: His sense of touch, smell, taste are amazing.
N.C.: He really is an adapto kid. The opthamologist said, “I know you think he’s blind and everything but he really has adapted unbelievably.”…He knows this house inside and out better than any of us…where all the crooks and crannies and every little edging of it is but you put him in a new environment and he is like (laughs) Mr. Magoo. He is Mr. Magoo. (both laugh).
L.M.: How does Nicholas compare to other 3 1/2 year olds?
N.C.: Basically he’s severely delayed and can’t speak yet but he communicates in his own weird gestural way – he speaks in what we call Nicholese – which is his own bibilybabbley stuff. And he also speaks in a lot of song, he (hums) the Barney song…The neurologists believe he has Apraxia which is the inability to say the words – he cant say them, he can understand them – because I can say “Pick up the apple not the banana,” and he’ll pick up the apple….He’s got a seven word vocabulary…He still cannot control his heartrate and his breathing and his body temperature. It’s this autonomia, he can’t control automatic functions from a neurologigal standpoint.
L.M.: And his walking skills?
N.C.: Yeah he walks, we call him the drunken sailor most of the times, he’s very tipsy. We have this little halter that we walk him with or we grab him by his shirt or whatever to keep him steady…He’s Mr. Explorer outside – he loves the outside more than anything. He loves to take these long walks around the neighborhood and he stops and looks at everything…His world’s really expanding now for him developmentally.
L.M.: What’s Gabrielle and Nicholas’ relationship?
N.C.: Right now they’re like puppies, they’re so adorable. We play wrestling somersaults every night - they get out that first steam of energy and then they lay next to each other and they almost cuddle like puppies, it’s so amazing, and they just love that their skin touch with each other. And unlike most siblings who cant stand to be that close, they’re very animal with each other. It’s wonderful to watch them…He just totally adores everything about her, he’s so connected to her.
L.M.: Hasn’t it been brutal watch the footage?
G.B.: It was a lot of times.
L.M.: What’s the hardest thing about watching it?
N.C.: For me I think it’s the pain, watching the pain that we’ve all gone through and Nicholas. You know you couldn’t go to enough therapy in the universe to deal with feeling guilty over a child’s pain and the pain you’ve caused your family. (Her eyes well up slightly and her voice cracks with emotion) For me that’s hands down the hardest – the pain that I put Gwen and Gabrielle through. And when I see Nicholas in some of those shots it kills me…It’s really hard to say to yourself, “Is this a cost that’s okay for them?”…That’s the question to the viewer, we can save these babies and should we be doing that.
G.B.: We have the technology to save them, we don’t have the technology to fix them…So they’re saving these babies that are more compromised and younger, the morbidity just keeps going up – they’re alive but at half – and what is the quality of life?
L.M.: You were really honest in the film about the aspect of not having a sexual life when Nicholas was going through the early medical traumas. How have you been navigating back towards each other?
G.B.: Well to be honest how many people straight or gay with kids relate to that. It’s very funny people come up to us and they go, “Well you know, I don’t have a special needs kid but that’s also a challenge.” It’s sort of like coming out of the door and looking both ways and going, “Is the coast clear, can we have a life now.” And like Nicole said we’re actually not as split taking care of the parts of the family that we take care of. Nicole is thank God not in production anymore, I mean I joke that Nicole came home with a four pound thirteen ounce baby and a hospital and a production company. I mean it’s cameras that we had to live with – the stress level in this house was remarkable.
N.C.: It was pretty intense.
G.B.: Finding intimate moments when you have 24 hour nursing and there’s somebody in the next room ten feet away or 20 feet away and you’re trying to have a relationship and you’ve got your two kids there, it is really tough. It’s not an easy thing so we try to get out when we can.
N.C.: Getaways.
G.B.: We don’t do a very good job of it, we have a long way to go, but the stress that’s so much of our lives has been kind of taking out so are we back to each other or having more time together, it’s a possibility now.
N.C.: We’re going to have our tenth year anniversary in March and its like if we could get through this, I think we can pretty much get through everything. And one of the pieces of feedback that I think is really, really incredibly positive about the film is a lot of people say, “The fact that you were honest let me voice some of my own feelings around just having children.”…(And) I’ve realized what an absolute incredible provider Gwen is and how well she’s kept this family together – it certainly hasn’t’ been me – I mean I take really good care of the kids emotional needs and stuff along those lines, but I have no clue about most everything else that’s going around this house.
G.B.: Thank you, thank you so much.
N.C.: Of course baby.
L.M.: So where do you go for the getaways?
G.B.: We go to Laguna Beach and we go to the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena.
N.C.: We went to the St. James once (Gwen corrects her “The Argyle”) because we can’t really go far you know because of Nicholas so we try to do these little…
L.M.: …like an overnighter basically?
G.B.: Sometimes it’s just an afternooner.
L.M.: The one funny scene in the movie was Gwen’s reaction to his getting glasses and what they looked like on him. It was just hysterical.
N.C.: We always get that.
L.M.: It adds levity. He looks so cute with them but he does look like a cartoon which is what Gwen says.
N.C.: I know, I know. That scene is always to me a sort of distillation of Gwen and I. I come home and I say, “He can’t see he’s myopic,” and she says, “You mean he’s blind?” And I’m like, “No he’s myopic, he can see, he’ll be able to see.” So I’m always looking at the Pollyanna version and she’s trying to figure out, “Well what will he see? Will he see this or will he see that?” Then we go upstairs and I’m like, “You can’t say anything negative about him,” and he clearly looks like a cartoon. It’s just so us, that scene always cracks me up. That’s the one scene I almost always cry at – I just love that scene with Gabrielle taking the glasses into him. I just love that, it’s so sweet.

Lydia Marcus is a Film Critic and Entertainment Journalist whose reviews, features, and photographs have appeared in many publications and websites including The Los Angeles Times, AOL, The Advocate, Girlfriends, Planetout.com, Frontiers, LN, GO NYC, IN LA, and indieWIRE.com. Her website is www.homepage.mac.com/lamchop27.