Julius Ybañez Towers was taking a walk around the Harlem Meer in Central Park with his twin 10-month-old sons and two dogs. A woman stopped to compliment him for giving his wife a break. Towers, 40, is still rare, but he is part of a growing movement. Surrogacy agencies across the country report a surge of interest from single gay men in the last few years. Shelly Marsh, a spokeswoman for , a nonprofit that helps gay men navigate the surrogacy process, said that the increase in interest from single men is part of a broader surge in gay families. The surrogate is not genetically related to the child. She also has no maternal rights, so intended parents are legally protected from her keeping the baby. New York, along with Michigan and Louisiana, are the only states where it remains illegal to pay a woman to be a surrogate mother. None of this is covered by insurance. Towers, having biological children was a long-held dream that he was willing to work toward. He grew up in what he called a humble home in Palm Bay, Fla. He put himself through law school at University of Pennsylvania. Gradually, after the death of his mother, a failed relationship and two dog adoptions, he realized that he was ready to take on fatherhood, even by himself. He viewed being single as a positive because he alone would control the decisions about surrogacy and parenting. Yet control was still an illusion. Because it is illegal to pay a surrogate in New York, Mr. Through an agency in Portland, Ore. The embryo itself was made with the eggs of an anonymous donor from an agency based in California. These eggs which, according to the agency, came from an astrophysicist were fertilized at Oregon Reproductive Medicine, a clinic in Portland. After a failed transfer of a single embryo, Mr. Towers and his surrogate decided to transfer two embryos in hopes that at least one would take. They knew it could mean twins. Asher had a short stay in the intensive care unit, so Mr. Towers stayed in Oregon for three more weeks, until the twins were ready for the long flight home to New York. As unpredictable as the medical prospect of surrogacy may be, some gay men prefer that to the possibility of facing discrimination in adoption. Dennis Williams had his son, Elan, via surrogacy four years ago. Williams, who is 46 and black, said he chose surrogacy because the prospect of persuading a woman to allow him to adopt was daunting. Williams and his former partner had a failed egg donation from a woman they met through a friend. After he and his partner broke up, Mr. Williams still wanted to be a father. Once he became a father, Mr. Williams said, he felt as if he finally fit in with his big family in Kansas, where he grew up. Towers, the race of his twin sons was more difficult to control. Both his parents are mixed race: his mother half-Filipina, and his father part Native American. He hoped to find a multiracial egg donor, but most of the donors, he found, were white. Towers enrolled in a twins class, did a daddy boot camp and took a baby-dog home-integration class. Even though he has a nanny seven days a week, he is on his own nights and mornings. After the walk around the Harlem Meer, Mr. Towers, with the help of the nanny, returned home and put the boys in their cribs. He leaned in to kiss each of his sons on the forehead. As the boys drifted to sleep, he exhaled and stood watching them. He mentioned that he just renewed another year of storage for his remaining frozen embryos. Through a genetic screening test, he knows one embryo is female.
