AARON LONG WITH BRYCE, ALICE AND JESS IN DAD GENESMeeting their makerDad Genes is a documentary film that follows Aaron Long, a former sperm donor who later connects with several of his biological children, eventually forming an unconventional family and becoming the subject or worldwide media attention.[/b]
Not everyone fared well in this story. One of the girls leaves her lesbian moms in Richmond, Virginia to meet Aaron, her biological father, in Seattle and settles there. This causes one of the ladies to remark that Aaron's role in the whole affair was really very, very tiny. Also ro say that his wearing a T shirt at his "meet the kids" party saying "I MAKE CUTE BABIES" was offensive, wholly egotistical.
But this little documentary is primarily about him and, from the viewer's point of view, for all we know, anyway, Aaron is wholly deserving of what results from modern, internet-driven tools not available in the nineties when his year of regular sperm donating took place -- the event of meeting Madi, Alice, Bryce, and one of the mom's, Jess out in Seattle, and their instantly bonding. This is because Aaron, as seen and heard from throughout
Dad Genes, is a very nice guy indeed.
Aaron is a quiet, easygoing man. He turns out to work at an agency that provides housing for the neediest people in Seattle. In his spare time, he takes care of his mother, who has Alzheimer's, joining her for lunch and dinner every day. He is artistic - this is what the women seeking his sperm liked. He plays multiple instruments and he writes. He is warm and loving to his mother. He's not as close as his father - they divorced whe he was five - but he was a professor of economics with whom he played chess. A long haired hippie type back in the day pointed toward unconventional lifestyle, Aaron has never married. His mother had presciently guessed that his sperm donorship, which he told her about after returning from a year of teaching English abroad, moving in with her, and driving a taxi, would be the only sense in which she'd ever be a grandmother. Now he sleeps in a very small room in the Seattle cooperative to which he belongs, and has few possessions. You might almost think he could be a monk, except he's too much of a hugger.
Bryce, his deep-voiced son, is the one who turns up as his son when Aaron does a gene test. After much hesitation, he contacts Bryce, who responds almost instantaneously and joyously. Bryce is the only male offspring who goes out to meet their sperm-donor father. Bryce, who comes out from Long Island and school in upstate New York, never had a dad to throw a ball around with (he had lesbian moms too), and turns out Aaron, though he was similarly deprived of a backyard athlete father, was on a softball team a decade ago, and so he and Bryce try a little baseball throwing one day.
Eventually somehow there is media attention; the story of the uniting of half-siblings with their biological father Aaron can be dated back to 2018, when Aaron himself published a story in the
New York Times, "First I Met My Children, Then My Girlfriend. They’re Related." The lede is "I didn’t meet my girlfriend, Jessica, until 12 years after our daughter, Alice, was born." (The dates and the relationships are a little hard for me to follow sometimes.)
Aaron was obviously open to building family. He was easy about how it might go. But the four half siblings who came to Seattle all felt an immediate connection with each other and with Aaron. Jess, the mother of Alice, felt drawn romantically to Aaron before he recognized the feeling in himself. The last part of the film documents their moving from the Seattle coop to a house on Vashon island, not far off. He has decided after the death of his mother to take time off from his housing work and decide what he wants to do with the rest of his life.
The story this film tells is surprising but basically simple. There's not much analysis here and it's almost more like an offbeat family album than a documentary film. A more searching film would have covered a longer period in more detail and depth, explored the some fifty possible offspring that may have resulted from Aaron's period of selling his sperm for $40 a pop as a young man, and provided more perspective on this practice.
Dad Genes, 65 mins., will have its world premiere at Dances With Films: New York (DWF:NY) on Jan. 16, 2026.
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