Thoughts on Queer Parenting

Almost 20 years after Eve Sedgwick's article "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay" appeared in Social Text, the title still evokes a frisson of danger--especially, I suppose, among queer parents like myself, who are often sensitive to claims that we are unduly and irresponsibly influencing our kids' gender or sexual identities by exposing them to a wider range of possibilities. Those who would make such claims, of course, assume that the heteronormativity that holds sway in most families--along with the subtle and not-so-subtle means by which gender norms are enforced--are completely natural and ideologically neutral. Sedgwick speaks to this very imbalance in my favorite part of her article:

"The presiding asymmetry of value assignment between hetero and homo goes unchallenged everywhere: advice on how to help your kids turn out gay, not to mention your students, your parishioners, your therapy clients, or your military subordinates, is less ubiquitous than you might think. On the other hand, the scope of institutions whose programmatic undertaking is to prevent the development of gay people is unimaginably large."

I think Sedgwick's words feel so fresh to me because the current discourse of lesbian and gay parenting is often timid and universalizing. Most of the family equality movement has staked its claims to equality on the premise that we are just like straight families, and any differences--especially differences that have to do with sex and gender--are swept under the rug for fear that the religious right will pounce on them as evidence that we are unfit parents.

And the religious right probably will pounce. But I, for one, do not want to live and parent with an internalized Dobson dictating my moves.

So I'm writing this blog to make a public place for queer family values. As a queer parent, I want to celebrate the ways in which our family is different and, what's more, I want to consider the utopian possibilities inherent in those differences. Following Sedgwick's lead, I want to write about parenting from the perspective that the world would actually be better if there were more queer people, more queer families, and more queer communities.

For me, queer parenting and queer kinship are practices that are open to, in Judith Halberstam's words, "strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices," as well as "subcultural practices, alternative methods of alliance, forms of transgender embodiment, and those forms of representation dedicated to capturing these willfully eccentric modes of being." Although In a Queer Time and Place is perhaps the book least likely to influence a parenting practice, I have found Halberstam's formulation of queerness as an alternative relationship to time and space to be very helpful in thinking about the values that I want to bequeath to my son. (I hear the irony of that last phrase, given Halberstam's insistence on queer time as opposed to the timetable of inheritance. And yet...I experience myself as the product of my queer mentors (some of whom are younger than me) and my son as their heir, too.)

To put it more simply, I am imagining the "gay" in "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay" as something more than sexual object choice and something more like a way of life. This blog is my space to write about attempting to parent without bowing to the dominant culture's values about sex, gender, and a host of other terms, including domesticity, wealth, aging, public space, community, and activism.