WEST CHESTER, Penna. – Ignoring the historically poor performance records of sperm banks, indie film actor Vincent Gallo is offering to sell his sperm for $1 million. According to Gallo’s official website, that price covers “all costs related to attempt at an in vitro fertilization.”
The price does not include naming rights, however. Any child produced from Gallo sperm may not be surnamed Gallo. The website does not say if there is a similar proscription against using Gallo as a first, middle, or confirmation name—or in a hyphenated last name construction.
Mr. Gallo, who is best known for his 1998 art-house hit Buffalo ’66, promises to “sell no sperm before it’s time.” He also vouchsafes that the sperm is “100 percent guaranteed” to have sprung from his forty-three-year-old loins and, furthermore, that he is “drug, alcohol, and disease free.”
Apparently Mr. Gallo is also Wall Street Journal free. Two months ago the Journal cataloged a rash of failures in the sperm bank sector, where prices were, on average, a quarter of what Mr. Gallo is asking. The most recent closing is the Babies by Bubba sperm bank at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas. This highly touted project, which had been in beta testing for two years, was aborted when mothers raising babies fathered by the former president complained that the tykes “tried to nurse from other women the minute our backs were turned.”
The Clinton failure was the latest setback to the faltering boutique sperm bank market. Last winter, as U2’s newest album was climbing the charts, lead singer Bono tearfully announced that he was closing Bono’s Little Legions, a sperm bank he had launched in 2000. Although the diminutive singer alluded to “colossal demands on my time” as the reason for the closing, an official close to the project said that patrons had been returning their babies in droves “because the little bastards wouldn’t stop talking about themselves.” The official also noted that the babies were extremely sensitive to light and required expensive sunglass almost as soon as they opened their eyes.
Once the latest go-go trend among venture capitalists, boutique sperm banks now appear to be just another dot.com bust. Larry King Live babies proved to be anything but. In addition to requiring suspenders to hold their diapers up, most of them were born with tragic addictions to Garlique, Ginko Biloba, and numerous other supplements. Meanwhile, Diddy ‘s Dandies, formerly known as P. Diddy’s Dandies, exhibited an almost pathological inability to remember their names and had trouble sleeping if the singer-mogul’s music wasn’t piped into their fur-lined nurseries.
The Wall Street Journal article concluded with a warning from Merrill Lynch market analyst Kaiser Soze: “The only boutique sperm bank not swimming against the tide is Kevin Costner’s Kids. Like Costner, the babies have no distinguishing characteristics and are, therefore, unlikely to require special care or feeding. They can be difficult to pick out in a crowd, however.”
Soze advised sperm bank investors “to pull out before it’s too late.” That same warning ought to be heeded by anyone with $1 million of disposal income and an inclination to bear Mr. Gallo’s child, for even though Mr. Gallo claims to be drug, alcohol, and disease free, several of the comments he posted on his website are troubling.
To wit: he warns that he maintains the right to “refuse the sale of his sperm to those of extremely dark complexions.” He also offers a $50,000 discount to any female who can prove she is naturally fair-haired and blue-eyed, and/or related to “any of the German soldiers of the mid-century.”
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