Jordan Casteel
Twins, 2017
Oil on canvas, 72" x 56" / 182.9 x 142.2cm.
Image courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York
GAYBY LOVE
LINDA VILLAROSA
Beginning in the early ‘90s, my mother started jonesing for grandchildren. As soon as the feeling hit, right away she bore down on my heterosexual sister. She began gently, “Thinking about kids?” Then, a bit more heavy-handed. “Our family is wonderful; isn’t it about time to extend the gene pool?” Next, guilt: “I’m getting old. I want a grandchild before I die.” Then bullying: “Am I ever going to get a %@#! grandbaby?”
Finally, after several months of this, my non-kid-loving sister had had enough. “Mom, wrong tree,” she said. “If you want a grandchild, talk to your lesbian daughter.” My mom—God love her—is a transactional woman. She flipped the script, fast, and started in on me. She was basically, “If your sister isn’t going to do this for me, then it’s on you. I don’t know how you’re going to make it happen—and I don’t want to know—but give me a grandbaby!”
In those days, before the gayby boom, I was considering motherhood. I do think my family—my father, mother, sister, and other relatives and ancestors—are wonderful, and I wanted to extend our gene pool. I’m transactional like my mother, which means it didn’t take long for my partner and me to research how to actually get pregnant, find a gay male friend to be the donor father, and then make it happen with instructions from the nascent Internet.
Generally, when you’re pregnant, people fawn over you—even the most well-spoken member of New York City’s chattering class can become rhapsodic about the “miracle of birth,” the “circle of life,” when they see a woman with child. But not everyone in my activist queer circle was excited about my pregnancy. I squared off with one of my friends at a potluck in the spring of 1996. As I walked in with a cilantro rice salad resting on my bulging belly, through hooded eyes she looked me up and down and said, “There goes your activism.” My body unwieldy and brain scrambled by hormones, I didn’t respond. When I think about it now, I feel a surge of white-hot anger. The following year as I moved down 5th Avenue in cutoffs and Doc Martens, pushing my one-year-old through the Dyke March, another surly friend, uniformed in a ripped Act Up tee, chased me down. “You’re trying to be just like them,” she said.
Intellectually, I understood what was behind each of these comments: Having children looked like a grasp at respectability and heteronormativity—a desperate plea for mainstream tolerance. Mimicking the heterosexual “lifestyle” also seemed to mean leaving our edgy, rebellious queer community behind. But for me these snarky comments signaled narrow-mindedness and a gross lack of expansiveness about commitment and family. Truth be told, we are not just like “them.” We aren’t just as good; we’re better. Of course, we go to church, coach Little League, and bake holiday cookies. But we’re also Audre Lorde, Tony Kushner, RuPaul, Elton John, Janet Mock, Harvey Milk, and a whole lot of other daring, creative spirits. We fought back at Stonewall, chained ourselves to buildings to protest the AIDS crisis, and cared for each other during the height of the plague and now.
And, of course, we figured out how to continue our legacies by making babies, by holding tight to the children of discarded heterosexual relationships or by fostering and adopting them. So, ultimately, what made me most salty about the comments of my two (White) friends was the erasure of the generations of Black queer mothers who—along with my own mom—had inspired me to have children in the first place.
Black women have always been the most likely segment of the BTQ nation to have and raise children. We often live in Black communities, without the luxury or longing for so-called “gay ghettos” in New York, San Francisco, and other large cities. In essence, Black queer mothers (and fathers) retain the values that we were brought up with—at least the ones that make sense—and infuse them into our own families in imaginative ways.
Some of the most well-known, outspoken, and transformational queer Black women, like Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, raised children and made being a mother a point of pride and an integral part of their identities. They were, as the author Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs puts it, revolutionary mothers who, while raising children, were also on the front lines, creating revolutions with their work, following the simple idea that mothering is love by any means necessary.1
My activism wasn’t deferred; it didn’t dry up and die. In fact, I became more involved, thoughtful, and angry to protect the world I had brought my children into. Their village—a tumble of exes, other mothers, a father, aunties, uncles, play cousins, guardians, and, of course, Grandma—is filled with thinkers, writers, activists, filmmakers, artists, performers, and all around brilliant, funny people. A core group of us have family dinner together every Sunday, a noisy mash-up of food and drink, sharing, crying, arguing, and blessings. The kids have their own crew of “cousins” ages eleven to twenty-four—my friends’ children whom I consider my own. On their group chat, called “gaybies,” they talk about issues, listen to each other, offer support, and eye roll their parents.
June Jordan, also a queer mom, warned parents not to burden and curse the experience of our children by limiting “the wheeling of their inner eyes, terrifying their trust, or condemning the raucous laughter of their natural love.” My college-age son and just-turned-adult daughter have found their place along the queer spectrum and have helped me keep my thinking and language fresh with their observations, insights, and energy.
And what of Grandma? On holidays, she presides over our crowded table like the stately queen of a small country. After dinner, she lets loose, a glass of Hennie in hand, bad mamma jama dancing—all hips and butt—while the children shoot videos and dance alongside her. When they told her she was almost instafamous—“we get more likes when Grandma’s in our stories”—she looked a little confused, then smiled.
Jordan Casteel
Twins, 2017
Oil on canvas, 72" x 56" / 182.9 x 142.2cm.
Image courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York
Florine Démosthène
Wounds #14, 2018
Collage on paper (ink, mylar, glitter, and pigment stick), 11 x 15 inches
Image courtesy of the artist
1. Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (Toronto, Canada: PM Press, 2016).
VILLAROSA