Some of you might remember Bill Pierce, the first president of the National Council for Adoption. Bill did not invent sealed records and other wild and weird adoption ideologies, but he facilitated and cemented them into the minds of politicians and the public starting in 1980 when he signed on to NCFA. (Although he was a former vice president of CWLA, he told me that until NCFA he didn’t know squat about adoption. He just needed a job.) This particular job was financed by the Gladney Center for Adoption with the help of a Texas Oil Depletion windfall. Its specific goals were to(1) keep OBC and records sealed and (2) promote adoption. He became such a hardcore beltway SOB that John McCain once personally physically booted him out of his Senate office. The naive believed that once Bill retired or died our problems would be over, which, of course, was not true. Sealed records had become the default rule of both adoption law and adoptee lived experience in the US and still is, despite our inroads.
When pariahs meet. Capital University Law School, November 2, 2002. Between us we annoyed liberal do-gooders and social workers in spandex and were banished from their island.
Some may also remember that I had what was considered by many as a bonkers relationship with Bill.
A few months before he retired from NCFA I began to receive emails from someone claiming to be a priest in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, who wanted to talk about adoption. It was Bill, of course. (In case you didn’t know, Bill, this is SO Bill!) Shortly after that, someone claiming to be an adoption professional or something in England joined alt adoption, “the meanest newsgroup on the web,” the site of Bastard Nation’s birth, and where all the bad adoptees hung out online. “She” lasted several weeks until during some batty discussion about clotted cream (seriously!) accidentally outed “herself” as Bill. With Bill out of the bag, the game was afoot. We welcomed him with suspicious but open arms. Maybe he was lonely. He loved being part of our show. He was fun. Actually fun! And he was a good debater, with a good vocabulary, unlike some of our “members” who liked to say dumb things like claiming that BN was a pagan cult that burned stick figures on the beach. He didn’t suffer fools, and often the fools that landed on alt adoption got it from both him and us.
One of my fondest memories of that time was about a certain pain-in-the-ass outlier “activist” who claimed to be on close speaking terms with a government high-up during the US negotiations for the Hague Treaty. He had told her blah blah blah– some seemingly ridiculous “inside story.” The fun started because the Hague guy and Bill were good personal and professional friends. Bill rang him up. The guy had no idea who she was or what she was talking about. Turned out, that her “close relationship” was predicated on being a member of a Hague mailing list with hundreds of others. No secret discussions there. After that episode and outing she never returned to pester us.
Bill and I began to correspond privately and he told me that he was “fascinated” by me and Bastard Nation. Why, I never learned. Even though Bill would regularly excoriate Bastard Nation for “stealing” the Ballot Measure 58 election in Oregon that restored unconditional OBC access there, or being a bunch of Birkenstock-wearing hippies, in private he was different. He’d tell me, “keep fighting me.” See, Bill liked a good fight and except for BN, he found then-current adoption reformers pretty milk-soppy. He was right. They bored him.
Bill was on the outs with NCFA by the time he retired, and some of the things he told me in private were surprising. One of the outs was his obsession with keeping records sealed and how it was breaking their budget.
I could tell lots of stories here but won’t. But there is one story that is just so out-of-our minds that I must share it during NAAM 2024.
I was one of the few people who knew that Bill was terminally ill. During our discussions on the secret life of NCFA, he’d repeatedly say “fuck em” and refer to certain people there as “motherfuckers.” This was hilarious, of course, since he was always chastising adoptee rights activists for our vulgarity. In public, the BN spermie logo drove his bats. He didn’t seem to mind it in private.
So, toward the end of his life, I told Bill several times that it would be nice if he rescinded his stand on OBCs and other records access and left a positive legacy. He responded, “fuck my legacy,” assuring me that he couldn’t care less what happened to NCFA (what an ingrate!) or his reputation when he was gone. Well…OK.
One day he told me that he was ready to die more or less, and couldn’t wait to get to heaven “so I can talk to God about adoption for eternity.”
I felt so very sorry for God. I developed an image of him eternally yapping in God’s ear as 10-foot-tall muscle-bound enforcer angels, in a nod to John McCain, kept pulling him off. No one got their prayers answered and the universe went to hell. I can’t imagine talking about adoption for 2 hours at a time, much less for eternity.
Actually, that sounds like hell…hmmm,
I learned later from one of his successors, that BIll told NCFA honchos to respect and pay attention to what Bastard Nation did. We were honest, didn’t lie (!) and we would do what we said we would do–unlike the rest of the adoption simps.
After Bill’s death in 2004, I attended a few NCFA conferences. At the first one I was publicly introduced at a breakfast session, and applauded. WTF???? Later a few individuals shook my hand, It was weird. Welcoming the freak to their show, I guess,or was an early volley in NCFA post-Bill re-imagining itself? Whatever, with BIll gone, the organization took off its cowboy costume and become a ghost of its former raucous self. Just just another corpo vanilla bore.
I am not convinced that Bill would be happy about the current state of AdoptionLand. He held contradictory views, and I’ve wondered if some of his personal opinions differed from his public opinions. When I see the ridiculous ideas and antics about adoption that go on in legislatures, public policy, and public discourse, especially social media, (on my side and the side of the adoptocracy) I can hear Bill, free of God’s angels fon their coffee break, pounding his shoe on heaven’s floor ordering them to shut up. They’re interrupting his talk with God.
I miss the days when adoptee activism was fun.
Cross-posted to Bastard Nation
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Adoption conversations in afterlife, yegads how boring!
I don’t remember the clotted cream incident. Possibly before my involvement. I do remember the Pierceforhimself username when I used alt.adoption (Poor Usenet, I miss it!)
I had gotten an e-mail from him back when there was some sealed records discussion on the nytimes site somewhere, but don’t think I have a copy anywhere, that was decades and many computers ago. All I remember was it was short and had a more reasonable attitude than he generally presented publicly.
Thanks for posting, Toff.
Bill was very performative. He minored in Theatre in college and met his wife when she was playing with him in Faust in the classic play. He played Faust naturally. He told me that as a young man he saw himself as Marlon Brando in the Wild Ones. They were both from the same town in Nebraska. So his failed stage career led to him turning AdoptionLand into his personal stage and adoptees were his actors.
Bill was really reasonable about a lot of adoption stuff in private, and it’s a real shame he held on to and is now remembered for the cranky stupid secret adoption/secret records thing. ( I think beyond NCFA it was about him being a New Deal Democrat and lifelong ACLU and was a privacy freak). He could have left a positive legacy (for the most part).
In his last year or so before he died he did a lot of research on adoption trafficking. One convicted and jailed agency trafficker who went to another state and opened up shop again threatened to sue him for writing about him Bill told him to sod off. He was adamantly opposed to re-birthing and other crackpot adoption therapy schemes. I am pretty sure he worked on making rebirthing illegal in Colorado after Candace Newmaker was killed. https://dailybastardette.com/the-therapeutic-murders-of-candace-newmaker-david-polreis-viktor-matthey-and-jessica-albina-bennett/
People like therapist Karen Purvis drove him bats. She believed that adoptees, for instance, should carry a little film canister with a cotton ball soaked in vanilla extract, on a cord around their necks so when they got upset they could sniff it. They should not be put in grocery carts either since it would cause abandonment issues. https://dailybastardette.com/returning-to-the-heart-of-darkness-ncfa-conference/
After Bill died she presented a couple of times at NCFA conferences. She talked that shit and people made faces and laughed out loud about it. Now their conferences look like 2-day therapy snoozes. What fun is that?
One of the biggest mistakes I made (besides incurring the wrath of BN by supporting and participating the Adoptee Rights Protest in NOLA years ago) was trying to talk to Bill about the advantages of open adoption in the early 90s, when I ran into him at an East Coast adoption conference.
I was a newly-minted adoption professional and was convinced that his insistence on hiding birthparents from adoptees (and vice versa) was because he didn’t understand the primal needs of either? I earnestly tried to “educate”him and he swiftly informed me that I knew nothing and tried to school me in the need for secrecy and respecting the privacy (nee: ownership) rights of adoptive parents, blah, blah, blah.
All we probably learned from each other that day was the importance of steering clear of each other during session breaks… the same thing Senator Donna Campbell and I have learned from similar encounters at the Texas State Capitol, when the battle for adoption rights and OBCs recurs.
No matter how valiantly the battle for open records access is made, she carries on his argument about secrecy/privacy every two years, and keeps the issue from ever coming to a vote on the Senate floor. I can’t help but suspect Bill enjoys watching the rancorous conflict, from wherever he ended up.