Language fails queer families. Or queer families outsmart language. I say 'gay' a lot. By which I mean gay and lesbian and bisexual and queer and, even, perhaps wrongly, trans. I also means the people and parents who don't identify as any of these words, who go without the category everyone else is trying real hard to put them in. Gay is shorthand. It's imperfect.
I say queer families, but that's our language. It's a word that doesn't really belong to our parents; many of them hear queer as something said before the stick is thrown or the spit leaves the bully's mouth. But still I use it, and so do many of the people in Gathering Voices, to describe their families.
And then some of us, though fewer, grew up so far outside of queerness that "gay language" feels altogether unfamiliar. I asked 2 young women in rural Pennsylvania,
"Are you part of the GSA?"
"Um...what is that?"
"The Gay-Straight Alliance."
[Laughter]. "Oh yeah no, we don't have that."
The people in Gathering Voices who say, "I don't really know the lingo" have their finger on the pulse of something insightful. For Heterosexual America, the lingo feels divisive, cumbersome, and exclusionary, like they're gonna mess it up and feel outside the in-house language. But the truth is, the in-house language is what queer people invented because what existed could not be used to explain our lives. We came up with words like bio-mom and sperm donor and transracial adoption and queerspawn and even the neutralizing parents because what existed did not hold us. But, even these words are imperfect. They are approximations and translations. What actually holds us is experience. I know the lingo isn't really good enough. But it helps.
I responded to this post on May 4, 2017: read it here.