As my partner Annie and I raise our child Cecelia, who is now a little over a year old, I find myself torn between the urge to spare our daughter the pain and struggles of the homophobic world in whatever way I can and the urge to teach her to embrace all of the things that make our family queer: huge meals with chosen and blood family, our intentional ignoring of the distinctions of "mommy" things and "daddy" things. I want her to be able to fly her freak flag high, if she wants to. Mostly, though, I want to support Cece to discover exactly who she is meant to be in the world.
About 3 million LGBTQ folks in the United States are parents. And though the image of LGBTQ parents in recent media are predominantly upper-class and white, like Modern Family's goofy Dads Mitch and Cam, or the financially comfortable white lesbian moms in The Kids are Alright, an LGBTQ parent might just as likely be a person of color. In contrast to most of these shows, ABC Family's The Fosters, which features a white and African-American lesbian couple and their multiracial, blended family looks promising, and considers many ways one can be a queer spawn, with a biological son, adopted twins and a foster daughter. Since on average, LGBTQ parents have at least two kids, it's likely that at least 6 million Americans have an LGBTQ parent.
In Anna Boluda's award-winning 2005 documentary Queer Spawn, the children of queer families talk about coming out to their friends about their parents and then being sudden objects of cool. They also talk about friends being not allowed to spend the night at their houses. They talk about the pressure to be straight—to disprove the myth that LGBTQ parents teach their kids to be gay, and they talk about the fear of disappointing their parents when they decide that they're straight. In any case, many express the desire to be seen as members of the LGBTQ community, whatever their own sexual and gender identification.
The struggles of kids of LGBTQ parents reflect the struggles that all of us have to face as we deal with the pressure to fit norms of gender and sex as we come of age. I remember being embarrassed at my straight parents when I was a 'tween—at my father, who would tear up at schlocky films like Jonathan Livingston Seagull or an especially good drum solo. And at my mother, who would buy the most outrageously funky Christmas presents for me, when all I wanted was the Sperry Topsiders that I read about in The Preppy Handbook. But the stakes of those struggles are heightened in situations of isolation, or the fear for physical and emotional safety produced by homophobia.
Writer Anne Chagnot describes her experience of the heightened awareness of her own queer family as she came of age. As she wrote in The New York Times, "When I was 4, my father decided he wanted to become a woman." She describes the difficulty of sharing this part of herself with conservative friends and boyfriends. "What was I supposed to say when my friends asked who was picking me up? Often I went with 'my aunt,' too worried to say 'my dad' and then have them see a woman sitting in the driver's seat." But she also writes of the ways that witnessing her transition helped her see her transgender parent as human, and to appreciate her struggle to live genuinely: "Perhaps it's the bold move she made, the fact that she truly chose her life, that has allowed her to live so deliberately, with such assurance and curiosity in the world," Chagnot writes.
Youth-led groups for children of LGBTQ parents like Queerspawn and COLAGE (Children of Lesbian and Gays Everywhere) help to create community connections and also to redefine the terms in the public eye. Megan McKnight, one of the COLAGE Chicago chapter facilitators, and senior at DePaul University, writes of the importance of raising consciousness about "queer spawn," and to help members of the larger community "to consider the unique positionality, border-walking, struggles and joys of children with one or more LBGTQ parents." COLAGE has had its own art shows, conferences, rallies and social media presence.
For our daughter Cece, being a "queer spawn" has meant having a family with ever-expanding borders, where her mothers, blood family and chosen aunties and uncles, like her Uncle Rae and Aunt Brian, help shape her confidence and faith in the world; who help her learn how to maneuver a slide for the first time, or to appreciate hummus and manaeish; whose downstairs laughter sometimes wakes her from her nap; who might teach her how to kick a soccer ball properly, or teach her new songs to entertain herself before her mothers wake up in the morning. Who might teach her how to wear stripes with polka dots, or shave her head and help her to fly her own flag.
Francesca Royster is a Professor of English at DePaul University, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare, Popular Culture, gender, race, sexuality and performance. Her books include Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Michigan Press, 2013) and Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon (Palgrave, 2003).
