I met Michael in the fall of 2024 when I was in Cleveland for the Inkubator conference for writers. Michael had joined me and a few others in the courtyard of the public library between sessions and it didn’t take long to discover both of us were writing about being step adoptees who never knew our birth fathers. His story of trying to pin down his identity in the face of this absence includes an ethnicity struggle that has waxed and waned over the years. I was so enthralled by the few glimpses he gave me of his experience, it took all the restraint I could muster not to block his way going into the next session and insist he give me all the gory details right there and then! But I bided my time, I knew I’d get the story out of him one day. Because, well, I’m tenacious and we step adoptees make space for each other.

There are many intriguing aspects of Michael’s story, particularly his experience of how he has navigated and continues to navigate an identity comprising many layers of otherness. As someone who has spent a lot of time trying to uncover details about a father I never knew, I found it especially fascinating that Michael has never had any interest in meeting his bio dad or that side of his family. Rather, Michael’s interest is in his cultural and racial roots. You’ll see what I mean when you read our conversation below.

This month I’m not presenting the full audio of our my interview with Michael. He and I had a fun, intense, all-over-the-place type of conversation that lasted more than an hour. It would be an absolute nightmare to edit down the audio to a reasonable length, so this time I’ll only give you a small excerpt. Michael’s voice reflects his personality: earnest, funny, and curious with a compassionate forbearance for life’s surprises.

Michael’s response to my question, do you regret your mother telling you the truth?

And now, may I present to you Michael Ben Shirreffs:

Michèle Dawson Haber: Michael ever since meeting you last fall and learning a bit about your background I wanted to know more about your story. So that time has come, thank you for being here! Let's start off learning a little bit more about you, your regular old life, and how you discovered the truth about your bio dad.

Michael Ben Shirreffs: I was born in Wyoming in 1963, but I was raised in Southern California. Washington, DC is my home, where my husband works full time. I am currently living in Ohio, where I am out of the job market and provide full-time care for my mother. When I was in fourth grade my mom asked if she could have a conversation with me. I can remember her being apprehensive and sad. She sat us down and told me the man that I called my dad was not my biological father. But it was a very quick conversation, and she transitioned into telling me about how she found love in the man I call my adopted dad, and how much he loved me as well. I got the sense at the time that she was trying to reassure me. The thing I remember most about that moment was that she was doing this alone—the man I called my dad was not there. I remember putting on a pretty brave face saying, I get it, no problem.

A few days later, she wanted to have a second conversation with me, and this time she brought a photo album. It was one of those old photo albums with the crinkly pages. There were a series of pictures of her life in college, and she came to a picture of a man. She tapped on his photo and said, this is your biological father. I can remember he was dark, and I can remember thinking, does he look like me? Do I look like him? And my mom told me, as if she was revealing something very profound, that he was Mexican American and that people back in that day in Wyoming didn't approve of that fact. Then she went on to tell me about all his virtues, that he taught himself to play the piano, that he loved theater, that he wanted to be an actor, these kinds of things. Later on, for Halloween we had a dress up thing at school, and she dressed me up in a very stereotypical Mexican outfit, like the little cartoon mouse Speedy Gonzalez, dressed in all white, a big Sombrero, and a colorful serape. Around the same time, she had Taco Night at the house with my uncles and some other people. We had never, ever had Taco Night before. It was implied that these two things were supposed to represent my identity, and she wanted to give me something that was Mexican American.

MDH: What about your adoptive stepdad—did he legally adopt you? Are there papers showing that he's your father?

MBS: Yes, there are. He legally adopted me. And this is a frustration that I have had as an adult with it, because the birth certificate that I have on record from the State of Wyoming is completely falsified. They were married two or three years after I was born. My mother's maiden name was Blake, but she had a true shotgun wedding to the man who fathered me. When my mom told him she was pregnant, my biological father said, “Yeah, so what?” And my grandfather took his shotgun, found him wherever he was in Wyoming, and said, “You'll marry my daughter, or else.” They went across state lines, to South Dakota, got married, and then they never saw each other again. Later he sent his sister to meet me as an infant to make sure that I looked like him. My mom said that I looked like him very much from a young age, and the sister was satisfied that I was really his.

I found out later that my middle name, Ben, was my father’s name.

So, my mom's maiden name was Blake, but her married name through the shotgun wedding was Santistevan. When they created the adoptive birth certificate, they showed my mom's maiden name as Santistevan, not Blake. It's a messed-up birth certificate, and it's bothered me because that was not her maiden name. While I may have had that name for a short time, I don't have any attachment or affiliation to it, other than genetically. Maybe that's why it bothers me, it’s like a whisper or a ghost of something that is not true. That birth certificate implies that my mom was Latina, and she isn't. It's like a missing limb, or a remnant of a missing limb that sort of sticks out, and I don't like it.

MDH: There's probably more that's false about your birth certificate. It shows your adoptive stepdad as being your biological father, Correct?

MBS: Correct. I was expecting adoption papers, not a fake birth certificate. So one of the things that is really important to me is that my biological father was Mexican American. While it didn't mean anything to me very much growing up when I was 26 or 27, my cousin Billy, who was my adopted dad's brother's son, came to me and said, I need to ask you something, and it's really personal. Now, at that age, I was in a relationship with another man, but I was 100% closeted. There were no people in my life that knew anything about it, except for me and the other man. And when cousin Billy said, I want to talk to you about something, I panicked. I started to get very nervous. I was sure he was going to say, “Are you gay?” And I had no idea how I was going to react. I was terrified, and yet I was really hopeful, in a way, that I could be honest with somebody. Finally he said, “What are you?” He blurted it out. When somebody’s going to ask you if you're gay, that's not how I expected it to come out. He saw that I was confused, and he said he was in his first serious relationship with a woman who was Filipina, and wanted to marry her, but was afraid of what it was going to mean for his children. What are they going to be? He wanted to know about my experience. He never said the words, but it dawned on me: Billy doesn't think I'm white. I told him not to worry, that he was handsome and his girlfriend gorgeous, and that his kids were going to be beautiful. But then I went to my mom and said, Billy doesn't think I'm white. My mom said, “Oh, yeah, your grandmother called you the spic baby.” And all of a sudden, in that conversation with Billy and then with my mom telling me this, my whole world, my whole identity changed. I remembered when I was young my uncle coming and telling me it was okay that my mom had fallen in love with someone on the other side of the tracks. I can remember the absolute distance that my mom's dad put between us. His whole side of the family shunned me, and while I just saw this as weird silence, it now made sense. They didn't accept me. My grandmother—the one who called me the spic baby—after the second time she said it, my mom said, “If you ever call him that again, you will never see me or him.” She got over that and we became unbelievably close by the end of her life. But those two experiences changed how I saw myself and in a very profound way.

There was a time I was fascinated with family trees, and I wanted to do family trees for my dad's Scottish side of the family, and I can remember all his relatives being kind of dismissive. After the conversation with cousin Billy, that made sense—I wasn't part of that family.

MDH: And your mother, what was her ethnicity?

MBS: My mother's family is German Jewish. We weren't strongly Jewish, either culturally and certainly not religiously, but that's how I identified. In the 1960s and 70s, when people asked, “what are you?” that question had a very different meaning than it does now. It was before big changes in immigration had taken place, and being ethnic didn't mean Korean or Thai or Filipino, it meant, are you Italian or Greek? You know, these were the whites with an asterisk. We grew up in a community with large Arab Christian, Greek and Italian communities. And I was always asked, are you Italian, are you Greek, or are you Lebanese? I was racially ambiguous for them, but it was impolite to ask, “Are you Mexican?” Even though we had a large Jewish population, it was also impolite to ask if you were Jewish.

After these two things happened when I was 27, I decided I was going to start telling people that I was half Mexican. I decided I was going to own it. I didn’t know my biological father’s connection to being Mexican American, particularly in Wyoming, where there were so few of them, but I decided that he was Chicano. It had a political bent to it. It had a very generational connotation to it. So, I would tell people that I was half Chicano, half Jewish.

MDH: So you just took on a new persona and said, this is how I'm going forward in life. Cool.

MBS: Yes, except then when I moved to Washington, DC at 28 there was a woman working with one of the advocacy groups hosting a group of indigenous Mexicans. She invited me to meet them. I was uncomfortable. I was a double negative because I was Chicano mestizo, so I wasn't fully indigenous. And not only that, I was not fluent in Chicano culture. I was a white-ish, Jewish kid passing myself off.

MDH: Sounds like you felt inauthentic.

MBS: I felt completely inauthentic. And so after that I stopped telling people that I was Mexican American.

So California had its racism, but it was relatively liberal. Then I moved to Washington, DC, which is an extremely liberal bubble. But when I moved to the solidly red state of Ohio about eight years ago, the constant homophobia and the constant racism, really started to weigh on me. We moved into the town where Jeff grew up, and all his high school friends became my extended group when I was there. I was the first Jew they had ever met, and they were polite about that. But their rabid hate of Latino immigrants would come through, and I would be terrified to come out and say, “Hey, I'm Mexican American.” In DC, I was always gay, I was always Jewish. And you can say that. But in Ohio, you can't. They are homophobic, and they are prone to violence against others, and I am still terrified there to say out loud: “I'm gay and I'm Jewish” or, in the face of the racism they’ve hurled at others, “I’m Mexican.” Do you know how ashamed I am of that?

MDH: Not everyone can find the strength to put themselves in the line of fire.

MBS: It's exactly that. You know, I'll take a bullet for being Jewish. I'll take a bullet for being gay, because I truly, really deeply am those things—

MDH: You don't feel as strongly the Mexican part of your identity?

MBS: I can’t identify with it because I never grew up in the culture. I can’t own it. So it becomes a fantasy.

MDH: So you feel like you don't have any legitimate right to it? There I think you're wrong. Your history is still yours. Have you ever felt the need to search out your father or your father's family?

MBS: In the 90s after I had already moved here, my mom contacted me and said my dad wanted to meet me. He had reached out to a friend of hers to ask through my mom if I would be willing to meet him. The answer was “no,” and I meant it. I had zero interest in meeting the man.

MDH: Was it because you were you angry?

MBS: No, it was not a matter of anger, it was a complete and total lack of interest in him as a person. A little less than a year after he tried to contact me, he died. I'm assuming that he got bad diagnosis of something and wanted to tie up loose ends. Had I known that I might have done something differently. But I still have no sympathy or empathy for him. However, I immediately started to do as much research on his family as I could. I felt like I had been given permission to research those roots. And so I became obsessed with cultural questions. Did all the women in my family come together in a tamalada, the traditional gathering around Christmas of all the mothers and the aunts and the grandmothers in a big assembly line of tamale making, or were they too assimilated to carry on that tradition? I looked up surnames to see if there was any connections to the Hispanos in New Mexico—some of those Hispanos had discovered Jewish roots, they’d been crypto Jews hiding within the larger Latino population in New Mexico. I became obsessed with trying to link my dad's family to those people so I could claim my Jewishness on that side as well.

MDH: Did you meet your father's family ever?

MBS: Nope. I know there are some Santistevans still in Wyoming. My father remarried a good girlfriend of my mom’s right after their forced marriage and subsequent divorce. I know that they moved to California, and had two daughters, so I have two half-sisters on that side of the family. They got divorced and that's all I know. My interest is not in the people, but their culture, what my culture could have been. What if my mom and he had stayed together? Would I be more Chicano? Would I have been more ostracized for being Mexican American? Would all of society have seen me as the spic or would my mom's Jewishness have mitigated that? Am I privileged, or have I missed out on something very profound?

MDH: Have you answered that question for yourself yet?

MBS: I have, I think that it's both. Being adopted Mexican American, then being gay on top of that, and then being Jewish on top of that—it’s complicated.

MDH: Lots of otherness, layers of otherness.

MBS: Layers of otherness, and it depends on where you are in the world, what becomes dominant, what becomes a safety net? What lets you pass? There's a halal store close to where I live to in Ohio, and I have a tattoo that identifies me as a Jew on my leg, which I'm very careful to cover up when I go in there. I just don't want to be a Jew in there. But right across from them is a Proud Boy haircut barbershop. And so even though I'm afraid to walk in as a Jew to the halal shop, I know that if somebody wanted to come up and shoot a bunch of Middle Easterners, they would see me as one of them. And so I'm constantly juggling what am I in the world.

MDH: Do you regret your mother telling you the truth, given how you feel about your father?

MBS: I absolutely do not regret that my mother told me the truth. I asked her later why she did, and she told me there was concern that I would start to pick up on and recognize the difference with how my adoptive dad's family would treat my younger brother and me. I looked different than everybody else in the family, and they were thinking that I might start to notice things, or that my grandmother or somebody on my mom's father's side, who doesn't like the fact that I was Mexican American, might slip up and say something directly to me. So, it was defensive in a way. Had he not been Mexican American, they might have waited longer. But there's absolutely no resentment whatsoever. I'm really glad to know it. I am deeply proud of my mestizo heritage. I want more of it. I think I want to claim it more strongly, if that makes sense. And so, it's not something that I regret her telling me at all.

MDH: What have you learned from your experience and what advice would you give to others who encounter paternity or genetic surprises?

MBS: For some, there's a gut instinct to ask, “Why? Why did this happen? Why was I not kept?” For me, that is not the point of the story. It's been enriching for me to learn about the family and what I could have been, but trying to figure out the motives of my biological father and why he abandoned me is almost secondary to the story of what I am. And I think that goes against what a lot of adoptees feel. I did change, but that was not about the man who walked away from me. That was about the culture and the race that he came from.

Also, how people perceive you changes in time and place, and this also shapes and reshapes my sense of identity—even when I don’t want to confront it. This is a thrill and also a challenge given the racist, xenophobic world we live in.

I’ve negotiated my biological father’s absence all my life. Not his absence as an individual, but rather as a racial and cultural absence, which that has always left me feeling less than whole. I haven’t learned anything. I am learning. I’m learning that identity is more than a single person—it includes generations of men and women, generations of history.

MDH: Michael, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your story and your perspective.

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Did you find it as fascinating as I did to hear Michael describe how he’s steered himself in, out, and between all facets of his identity? Hypothetically (or not), if you discovered a parent you never knew had an ethnic, racial, or cultural background that was unfamiliar to you, would you want to find out more? Would you feel authentic adopting that background in whole or in part? Real or imagined answers welcome below—tell me what you think in the comment section below!

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Thank you for the time you spent with Michael and me today. Sending you oodles of appreciation!