For the first year, the pair shuttled back and forth between Britain and Australia. Then David moved to London. They’d sit around dinner tables and discuss their desire to have a family; and their gay friends would scoff at the notion of their having children.

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“Because it wasn’t common then, not in the UK,” says Richard. “And now so many of those same friends who pooh-poohed it have surrogate children. We’re probably one of the few remaining who don’t.”

They hesitate to sound as if they are criticising those who have made that choice or that they are virtue-signalling, but, as David puts it, “There are children who have fallen on hard times – children that already exist in the world that need to transition into a secure, loving environment. Why are we […] having more?”

At that point, it was not possible for gay couples to adopt in Britain but the law was about to change. The British government, concerned about the numbers of children in care, had ordered a review of adoption services.

This resulted in the Adoption and Children Act 2002, which came into force in England and Wales in December 2005, and allowed adoption by unmarried and same-sex couples. (The word “unmarried” was crucial: same-sex marriage would not become legal in England and Wales until nine years later, in 2014.)

Richard and David applied to adopt, as a couple, via the British social services. Then in 2007, they moved to Hong Kong, where they work in the creative industry. “We didn’t do our research,” David says ruefully. They assumed it would be possible to continue the process from a distance. It was not.

There are three accredited adoption organisations in Hong Kong – Mother’s Choice, the Po Leung Kuk, and International Social Service – overseen by the government’s Social Welfare Department (SWD). Friends introduced them to Mother’s Choice. “[They] were really amazing from day one,” says David.

“They said, ‘The legislation doesn’t support you but when it changes […] we’ll have a kid for you.’ What we didn’t understand, back in 2008, 2009, is that I could have started the process as a single male.”

In June 2011, they investigated the criteria for single adoption applications and in January 2012, David applied directly to the SWD as a single person. Apparently some gay Hongkongers, by keeping their sexuality secret – whether male or female – have managed to adopt via this route but, from the beginning, David and Richard were determined not to hide their relationship.

Technically, there is nothing in Hong Kong’s adoption ordinance to bar either of them; they fulfil the age, health, crime-free, financial and residency requirements. The only stated restriction is that single males aren’t allowed to adopt a female child.

A home study was ordered. Richard met a social worker. Endorsements from 30 people – local and expat, all solid, some well known – were submitted. Interviews with a few referees were conducted.

One was Claire Breen Melwani, who grew up in Hong Kong and has worked in business development for media and lifestyle companies. She was introduced to Richard and David by a close friend; for a while, David worked with her husband. The Melwanis have two boys, now aged 16 and 13, and, over the years, they have spent much time together, including at Christmas and New Year.

“You know how some friends are great when the children are younger or great when they’re older?” she says, on the phone, about David. “He’s brilliant, consistently engaged. They’re both lovely. My kids think the world of them and, as parents, I thought our views would be valid.”

In April 2013, Breen Melwani and her husband were asked to meet one of the SWD’s social workers at North Point Government Offices. The interview was scheduled to last 45 minutes but they talked about the friendship for almost two hours. “The social worker was really lovely – warm, interested, no prejudice. I remember feeling so happy that this was the one handling the case. I really felt she was committed to doing her job well.”

One of the questions was about female role models. “I think she wanted to find out if they hung out solely with a group of gay friends,” says Breen Melwani. “She wanted me to explore that with her so that she’d have the answer if it came up. I said, ‘If you make your home in Hong Kong, you make your extended family with your friends.’ And their friends are completely mixed. So, yes, it’s two men but this child is not going to be brought up behind a closed-door gay relationship.’”

Afterwards, as Breen Melwani left the building, she remembers thinking, “That was fantastic.” In June 2013, David received a letter of approval. Richard heard the news at Shanghai airport, where he cried. Then he rang his parents. They cried, too.

But a child has yet to appear.

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In 2017, Breen Melwani wrote an updated recommend­ation to a different case worker at the SWD. Last year, she sent a further recommendation on David’s behalf, which was noted with thanks. The reply email stated, “We will present his strong social network, including your unfailing support, in the matching panel as appropriate.” But seven years and three case workers later, there has been no match, no adoption.

“Whoever’s handling it now has never met us, we’ve not been asked to be reinterviewed,” says Breen Melwani. “They would have been brilliant, it’s a missed opportunity on both sides.” Another female referee, who became emotional talking about the lost years, was more forthright: “What’s happened to them is a disgrace.”

In a subsequent email, she wrote, “It is discrimination, quite possibly incompetence, and a tragedy for anyone to essentially lose a decade of their life putting their faith in a system which we now see to be clearly flawed.”

In the summer of 2020, a full 21 years after they met, the words “great”, “brilliant,” “amazing” pepper their conversation to describe pretty much everyone they have encountered along this adoption path, but there is a force blocking their way with which they cannot engage because, theoretically, it does not exist.

No one from the SWD has told them the adoption cannot happen. It is the gay community that has been frank about the near impossibility of success. (When I told a male gay friend, who is Hong Kong Chinese, about the situation, he immediately said, “Better to get a dog.”)

The couple had faced negativity before, in London, and the law had eventually changed. In Hong Kong, initially, they were told the delay was because of a shift in numbers. “A lot of kids weren’t being relinquished by their biological parents so they were going into orphanages,” explains David. The SWD has no right to permit an adoption unless the child is legally deemed parentless. “We thought, ‘OK, we’ll stick it out.’”

They were – which means David, as the official applicant, was – flexible about the prospective child’s profile (age, congenital issues, troubled parental history). Further home visits by new case workers took place. More glowing letters were written. When Richard murmurs, with a flicking gesture, “Tick, tick, tick”, he means every procedural box was checked. But what an outsider hears is also the sound of a clock as the years pass by, fruitlessly.

“From an ethical standpoint, as a social worker, what this is doing to them is abuse,” says Marty Forth. “If you’re going to say no – say no.”

Forth, a 46-year-old Canadian employed as a social worker in New York for 14 years, came to Hong Kong in 2015 with his American husband and their adopted child. The afternoon we meet, he is preparing to defend (successfully) his PhD thesis the following morning. It is titled “Becoming Fathers: Family Formation by Gay Men in Hong Kong and Taiwan”.

“It’s dedicated to my son as an apology for not giving him a sibling,” he says. “It was clear when we got here we were never going to adopt. It’s all wrong.”

Gay parents wish some in Hong Kong would be less judgmental

Engaging and direct, Forth was one of the people who advised Richard and David not to continue their attempts at family formation via the SWD. “I was very clear with them,” he says. “And they weren’t the first couple I had that conversation with.” He goes on to describe how “people get ‘accepted’” – full sarcastic air quotes – “and they do a child-preference form – age, ‘special needs’, that horrible catch-all used here. If you’re over three years old, you’re ‘special needs’.”

When I tell him Richard and David have specified they will take a child up to nine years old, Forth looks surprised at the bandwidth. “They’re very open by comparison – a lot of Hong Kong Chinese will only take infants.”

All this information, says Forth, is then fed into a computer. Possible matches emerge, and about every three weeks, the matching panel gathers; three adoption agencies plus the SWD, which chairs the meeting. Pros and cons are discussed. And this is when the fog machine begins to billow.

“No one sits in,” says Forth. “No notes are taken. There are no rules. There are no manuals. Social workers are not required to be educated in evidence-based practices. There’s no training – you just shadow someone.”

In Taiwan, officially contracted adoption agencies are allowed to do the matching; in Hong Kong, the application of the Adoption Ordinance is the responsibility of the Legislative Council and the SWD acts on its behalf.

“The place where gay men are being gate-kept is at the matching panel,” says Forth. “Gay adoption is a viable option here. Under the Adoption Ordinance and the law they can do this. But when people get involved … no one’s watching.”

Richard – more vocal and more visibly frustrated than David – recognises this. “It’s one or two people within that matching panel who see themselves as God,” he fumes. When David demurs (“I don’t know that that’s the case …”), Richard, speaking with slow deliberation, says, “They. Are. Choosing. Whether. This. Couple. Creates. A. Family. Or. Not. Who does that?”

The answer, as far as one can tell, is: people who are products of a conservative, bureaucratic and, crucially, Christian former colony. About 11 per cent of Hong Kong’s population is Christian but their influence, particularly in government, is disproportionately large. This can create curious political anomalies.

I know a gay male couple – one British, one Hong Kong Chinese – who wanted to get married in Hong Kong’s British consulate. Hong Kong doesn’t permit same-sex ceremonies. They could, however, do it in the British embassy in Beijing; same-sex marriage isn’t legal in China but the enactment of domestic law is allowed within its diplomatic missions.

Forth has gay friends who were married in a Shanghai consulate and, on applying for a spousal visa in the SAR, were taken aback to discover the marriage wasn’t officially recognised here.

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“A tiny little bone thrown to the religious right,” says Forth, who travelled to Taiwan half a dozen times for his PhD research. (One of those conservative groups is called, with no evident irony, the Coalition for the Happiness of Our Next Generation.)

Of his Hong Kong and Taiwan interviews, Forth says, “These men knew they were going to have children. They just didn’t know how.” The answer tends to involve either surrogacy – illegal if it is paid for, which it usually is, and therefore expensively fraught – or kinship care via a family member or close friend.

Inter-country adoptions have become more difficult in recent years. Same-sex couples are almost always barred but inter-country standards for any prospective parent can exceed those of everyday life. An agency in Taiwan, for instance, prefers applicants with a body mass index of less than 30, as does South Korea, which has a lengthy list of forbidden ailments, including back pain that requires regular analgesics.

So Richard and David have put their faith in Hong Kong. And it has been sorely tested. Hong Kong, like Britain, has no upper age limit for adoption but they are both now in their 50s. Over the years, they have acquired godchildren – Richard has nine, David three – but still no child of their own.

Richard has sent heart-warming video clips of gay families to the SWD as a prompt for the matching panel. Whether anyone has actually watched them is, like much else, unknown. “We believed in Hong Kong,” he says. David adds, quietly, “It’s not just Hong Kong. If we’d applied in 80 per cent of countries, they’d have said absolutely not.” Richard replies, “Which would have been better.”

This year, the couple went to Patricia Ho & Associates, a small firm in Wan Chai that specialises in public-interest law. Some time ago, they’d spoken to a lawyer who told them that, although they had a strong case, it would cost a lot of money – and probably another decade – to pursue it in court.

They simply wanted advice. They had no intention of taking legal action. But they allowed Evelyn Tsao Chiao-yin, a partner in the firm, to write to the director of Social Welfare for detailed clarification about the matching process.

“They were reluctant, it took some persuasion,” says Tsao, of Richard and David, when we meet for coffee. “But I personally have a passion for LGBT rights – I’m a lesbian – and I can’t accept the government pretending to allow a gay parent to adopt but, in substance, putting them on the back row. The government doesn’t want to make themselves susceptible to anti-gay judicial challenges.”

The system, as it stands, clearly favours discreet discrimination. “It’s on a case-by-case basis, and the best match is very personal,” she says. “They can explain it away – this kid is Chinese so these parents are better for him, this kid is a girl, this kid is better matched with this married couple. One thing I’m asking for is exact statistics.”

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Tsao, who studied at the University of Hong Kong and Harvard, then worked at Hong Kong’s Department of Justice for a decade, is in her mid-30s, energetic and arti­culate. She relishes a challenge. (She later tells me she is reading Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, though finding it quite difficult.) Would she like Richard and David to go to court?

“Yes. They are the most perfect candidates. If they hadn’t waited so many years, you couldn’t build a case – the alleged discrimination wouldn’t be so obvious. The other thing is, they have told the social worker they would be ready to adopt an older child. Older children are the last to be picked. The fact they’re willing, and yet they still don’t have one, shows something.”

She agrees the truly ideal test case would be a Hong Kong Chinese couple. “But a lot of my friends would do surrogacy. It’s allowed as long as it’s not commercial. Not a lot are like [Richard and David], who are adamant about adopting.”

Tsao’s letter of May 13 requested a response within 14 days. (When I contacted the SWD, I was told it does not comment on individual cases.) “I think the issue is obvious, I think the argument is obvious,” she says. “If I were the government, I’d want to settle. I’d match [David] with a child instead of going to court.”

On July 7, the SWD’s Adoption Unit responded. It stated that David’s same-sex relationship with Richard was known to the matching panel; that Richard’s role in parenting and child care had been considered; that “no single factor rele­vant to the best interests of the child would be abstracted and converted into a general precondition which overrides the others or causes any of them to be less fully considered”.

It also noted that, so far, there had been no suitable match, and it took the opportunity to extend thanks to David and Richard “for their passion to offer a child with [sic] love and care through adoption”.

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Tsao replied the following day. She asked for specific reasons why David had not been considered suitable; she expressed surprise that a public body responsible for the adoption of children keeps no proper statistics; and she wondered whether, in the past seven years, despite David’s availability, any child has gone unmatched.

Does Hong Kong really deserve to be host? “Yes,” states Forth, who’s on the 2022 organising committee. “Things always get better when there’s direct contact.”

He talks about how familiarity can cause positive societal shifts, about increasing acceptance among colleagues, about the change in demographics as the young replace the old. All true – tick, tick, tick. All taking time.

Richard and David have now been accepted, and trained, as volunteers in a programme run by Mother’s Choice (which declined to comment). Project Bridge involves temporary care – maybe a night, maybe a weekend, maybe a few months.

Richard is already nervous about becoming too attached in the short term. When he was a child, his mother fostered a baby boy for nine months, planning to adopt him. At the last minute, the parents changed their minds and, after a court case, the baby was given back. “That really destroyed my mother, she couldn’t talk about it for years,” he says. “I still have a memory of that kid.”

He turns to David and says, laughing a little ruefully, “You could cope more than I could. You’d see it as a bright light in that child’s life, even if it was just for six months.”