Shit List Day 4: Family Values

Rather than go in to a critique of patriarchy, or the potential damage of bad families, I want to look at the idea of family as an exclusionary anti/social unit. Patriarchal families have been extremely bad for women and children, and that should always be named because it is infuriating and unacceptable. However right now I am primarily interested in having some conversations about how the family itself serves to obstruct a more supportive social system overall.

Families function to favor the set of people who are Blood Relations over the set of people who are Others. From the healthiest to the most oppressive, families all share a relationship to the question of who counts as family and who doesn’t. This way of dividing up the world has been completely exploited in the everyone-for-themselves capitalist system.  Economic oppression thrives in part on the idea that I don’t owe anything to anyone except my own flesh and blood. We can all do better. Queer people are here to do better. We are here to destroy family values.

When it comes to providing empathy and taking responsibility, our culture teaches us to prioritize family members over all the other humans to whom we are not related. Of course empathy and responsibility are not actually limited resources. But that is another conversation, because in our consumer culture we behave as though everything were a limited resource. So the idea of family enshrines care for a tiny set of people and diminishes responsibility for the rest. This fundamental aspect of family values is considered admirable because it is usually described as a form of loyalty.

The underside of family loyalty is a social order that lacks care for many, many, many, many people who need it. The system is set up to create a no-win situation where struggling families are simply not up to the multitude of challenges facing them, including emotional, economic, health challenges. Then the state and the community get to evade responsibility by pointing to some imagined moral failing of those same families.

In my birth family, two of the four of us were periodically hospitalized for mental illnesses and we certainly could have used some support from outside. But there we were, closed up in our suburban house, a family that offered little to its members and was unknown to others. We were not Family to anyone else. In other words, we were not in the set of cared-for people belonging to anyone capable of providing actual care.

So you say some families value empathy, healing, service, and caring for others? They are on their way to destroying family values and building new ones. Your family is a big household full of friends who chose to be together? Your family is tiny but made up of people who consider the babysitter a sister? You are building new family values. The old and the new live together side-by-side today, and sometimes you can feel the conflict happening. It doesn’t exactly help that we use the same word for both more open and more closed family systems. We all need a new normal. The default cannot remain the family that excludes. Right now many families straddle two worlds, waiting for the new to begin as the old passes away. We need to think carefully about what we wish to preserve from this contested territory.

On one hand, I want the new normal to question the ethics of valuing some people over others. The concept of family hinges on who is in and who is out. The conventional idea of family is based on the exclusion of the immoral, unwholesome other, in other words, the queer, the person who is with somebody the others do not approve of, the "illegitimate" child, etc. We have all had enough of that!

On the other hand, I want to note even the most loving family as currently constructed is still isolated and very often not up to all the work we expect from it. The family is inadequate to provide individuals with all the social, emotional and economic support that would make for healthier, flourishing human beings.

So the family is failing those it excludes, then under pressure it is failing those included as well. The family is failing, failing, failing. Can gay marriage be part of both the old and the new? It seems to me to hold too fast to the old. In the wrong hands, gay marriage serves to further de-legitimize our tribes and families of choice. NPR has provided some minimal coverage of conscientious objectors to gay marriage by inviting Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore on as a guest on at least 2 occasions. Recently there was coverage of the NY marriage decision, and the same interviewer who has spoken with Mattilda awkwardly brought up the fact that some gays think there is something “special” to preserve about gayness, separate and apart from marriage. A guy about to marry his long-time boyfriend responded, “Yes but we are tired of being second-class citizens.” Was he referring to the ability to marry, or is that what single people and unmarried lovers are? Or is that what people in relationships outside monogamy are? I found his response illuminating because it spoke on many levels regardless of whether the speaker would deny or confirm my reading. If anything, it is heterosupremacism that makes us second-class citizens, not the law in isolation and not the status of being unmarried. I wonder how single straight people felt hearing that interview.

The meaning of family may be contested but real families in the real world still kick out queer children and sometimes drive them to suicide. Real families still struggle and implode under pressures that are simply too great. We cannot rehabilitate that shit by simply demanding a place within it. Our presence alone will not do the trick. We need better values where care includes people who are neither your relatives nor connected to you by the rule of the state, and where a variety of relationships are respected. Before we jump to perpetuate a system that exists at our expense, we might consider whether we want to continue to even use the word “family.” But in the meantime, let’s preserve a practice well embedded in the queer community’s history and in our best present moments: caring for one another regardless of blood or law.

Shit List Day 3: Queers

I will be among the first to point out that the queer community has a million problems, flaws and failings. We fuck up regularly. We keep trying to love each other well, and sometimes we succeed in spectacular and very moving ways. Then sometimes we don’t try. Then some other times we exclude each other, accidentally or worse. Sometimes we behave like self-righteous douche bags, especially when we think we’re being “radical.” All too often we are as racist, classist, misogynist, transphobic and otherwise deluded as the larger culture we are trying to resist. Sometimes we replicate the very problems we try to address. Sometimes I need to manifest the presence of my finger up my butt just to deal with all the glittery elitism, cliquish condescension and premature enlightenment.

At the same time that I often feel alienated, I am also very proud of us. We have our love and we have our hope and best of all we have each other. I’m proud of our resilience and all we have survived. When I was a closeted kid, somebody told me that gays stick together because their families reject them. It gave me hope. And for gay marriage to divide my people into pairs when we have already created a more successful and more loving and more expansive social structure is positively frightening. Community doesn’t happen by accident but the mainstream default state of individual isolation requires very little effort. I fear the impact gay marriage will have on gay community. I fear that marriage might narrow the group of people we care for into a "family" at the expense of the expansive group of cared-for people we currently call our community.

My personal commitment to always actively build community has made my life more fulfilling than I ever dreamed it would be. I have experienced more love among queer people than I ever hoped to receive from a straight family structure, more than I ever saw around me in my straight upbringing, more than I imagined I would ever deserve or attain. I was brought up to believe as a dyke I would be doomed to unrequited love for straight women who could never possibly love me back. I was not going to marry so I would die alone. My life has already turned out much better than I had ever imagined, and certainly better than I had been raised to expect. The ongoing work of entering, understanding, sharing and repairing queer community has been and continues to be fundamental to sustaining my ability to exist in this world.

Gay marriage feels much too much like the compulsory heterosexuality I experienced growing up in the suburbs. At our best we have made markedly different, more just and more rewarding lives for ourselves. I want us to be able to stick with it and keep working on it. The fabric of the queer community is delicate and requires our care. If we throw it in the marriage washing machine and it disintegrates into couples, we’ll ruin something very precious, something that improves the world through its presence. Weakening the queer community would be a real loss for everyone who has ever wanted something more from their love relationships than what has been socially dictated. Hand wash only, please!

Shit List Day 2: Gays Aspiring to Marriage

The day after the NY marriage decision, the Michael Kors store had HRC logos all over their window. Behind the window was a display of wedding cakes topped with bride-bride and groom-groom decorations. At the dyke march I saw lots of great subversive signs, but right outside the Michael Kors store I saw somebody with “Cuomo-sexual” written on their back. The juxtaposition embodied much of what has been troubling me.

Could you be more of an unquestioning minion of the state? Could you more openly discredit the hard work our people did in favor of praising an opportunistic (and social service-cutting) governor? I could have grabbed this person by the neck, repeated “no” very firmly, and smacked them on the behind with a rolled up newspaper. Queer people! Please do not behave like lap dogs. We are not on this earth to form a market group or as a voting block for inadequately progressive politicians/corporate shills. Have some self-respect. We’re not here merely to vote or make campaign donations to Cuomo. I could have broken the window at Michael Kors and shit in their display.

Even as a child I wanted more relational options than the two I was taught: married or old maid. I realize that some of my more difficult feelings about gay marriage go all the way back to being indoctrinated to believe that if I didn’t get married then I would die alone. From my earliest memories, I rejected this dichotomy. I knew there had to be something better.

Some gay people want to get married, often for child custody, citizenship and/or healthcare, and sometimes for romantic reasons. Many of us do not want to get married. Of course our marriages should be recognized, but that still doesn’t make marriage something to aspire to. Nothing will convince me it is a good idea to force my most intimate relationships into more conventional frameworks; I am much too proud of how hard we work at breaking free from monogamy, jealousy, possession and patriarchy. I enjoy my queer relationships, writing, art, music, humor, fashion, films, house parties, political activism, made-up families, academic theory and counter culture. I love the queer culture boom happening right now. I hope a million new organizations, collectives and households form. Bottom line is that I like my friendships and love and culture as they are, totally queer. And I feel no less protective of this community than any other doberman would.

Shit List Day 1: Straight Homophobic Patriarchs

Four days after the NY Gay marriage decision, this guy on the train was yelling, “Civil rights are for people who are civilized. A woman letting another woman fuck her with a strap-on is not civilized. A man fucking another man up the ass is not civilized.” He was arguing loudly with a woman who was clearly offended and yelling right back. I went to another car.

But what I could have done was swipe the ugly little hat off his head. It was part of his ridiculous religious garb. I could have thrown it on the floor and crushed it with my boot. What I could have done was snap his head right off his shoulders and kick it down the length of the train to shut him up.

When I went back to my workplace after being laid off to turn in my final paperwork to Chuck in HR, he told me all about how he was leaving early to see his daughter’s recital. I minimally acknowledged what he was saying, as I had done the first time Chuck was introduced to a bunch of us and had attempted to build a rapport by talking about his family and football.

But what I could have done was smash all the framed pictures of his kids that he keeps on his desk. What I could have done was sit him down and talk about how the all straight-power high-fives make the workplace extremely fucking uncomfortable for people like me. So many good dads and committed moms there, trying to manage their work-life balance! Every check-in, every conference call, every meeting, people were constantly affirming their wholesome heterosexuality. It made me feel invisible and furious that the only way people could relate was through this hetero banter where I had never had anything to add. What the fuck do I have to say about your morning sickness or engagement or sleepless nights with the newborn? Holidays were the worst. The head of HR should know better, so I could force him to be educated clockwork orange style. Actually I am not even sure that would work. Even after all that I might have no choice but to beat him over the head with a giant dildo.

The law that now allows gays to marry in NY includes “exemptions” for religious organizations. Homophobic organizations are officially exempt from respecting the gay marriage law. In order for this to happen, a lot of people had to think it was reasonable to hate gays. It is considered a moral issue for churches and religious non-profits to discriminate against us. Their “right” to discriminate is written in to this law such that if it is ever taken away, the law is invalidated. The law that passed functionally legitimates the homophobia of the church. A lot of fuss was made by republicans about “protecting religious freedom,” conflating the desire to discriminate against queers with freedom of religion. (I am pretty sure freedom of religion was supposed to be freedom from state mandated religion.)

For this one, I could make some kind of breakthrough in astrophysics that would prove beyond any question that there is definitely no such thing as god. But that wouldn’t work because religious fucks are all about having faith despite evidence. Maybe I could call on the gods of Ancient Greece to smite them for their hubris. Or maybe there could be a god who appears on earth just to tell the fundamentalists of every religion that the only people doomed to hell are those dumb enough to take scripture literally. A fantasy that is really satisfying here would have to destroy both the church and the state, so maybe the fantasy is simply apocalypse. But you know some surviving asshole would immediately want to set up a church.