Reminders from an Undated Work Journal

1. It's not about me.
2. Respect people's time.
3. Everything relates to goals and values. Details reflect priorities.
4. Don't act when you are triggered.
5. Get over how you think things should be and work with how things are.
6. People are mobilized by feelings and relationships.

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!