During the time I spent at Spectrum, Gabe was a regular attendee. He is incredibly warm and kind, with something nice to say about everyone. He enjoys playing Yu-Gi-Oh! (a manga-themed trading card game) and performing in the monthly drag show, where he is a beloved favorite and regularly beats out the competition in Spectrum versions of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Gabe was one of many interviewees who, upon disclosing their sexual and/or gender identities to their parents, were surprised to be met with kindness and support. Here he describes disclosing to his father:
There was always a general fear of what they [my mother and father] might think, what they might say, what they might do. So, I came out to a couple of my cousins first, and they were okay with it, and then I started coming to Spectrum a lot more. . . . I finally had enough courage to tell my father. I wrote him a two-page note and left it under his door for when he got back home from work, ’cause I did not know how to approach him on it at all. I kind of wrote like, about me, and I wrote that I would hope that it wouldn’t change anything between us. So when he got home from work he came to me. . . . He’s always put up such a tough front that I figured he would completely, like, either blow it off or deny it, kick me out over it, or I thought so many things that were the worst possible outcome. I didn’t think there was going to be a positive outlook on it, so . . . when we talked about it we were kind of focusing on . . . it was more of me just telling him, “This is how I feel and this is who I am,” and just, he understood it, and he listened to me when I talked and, ’cause he would ask questions about it too, . . . “How did you come to this conclusion? When did this start?” It’s just, like, he would listen to me when I would answer his questions, so [he] made me feel just that much better, the fact that he took the time to kind of talk to me, he asked questions, he listened to me, and he actually still showed that nothing was going to be any different.
While Gabe imagined many outcomes as a result of the letter he wrote his father, the idea that his father would approach him calmly and respectfully to discuss his sexuality had not crossed his mind. Although Gabe was less anxious about sharing his sexuality and gender with his mother, he still waited until he was sixteen years old and was quite nervous about her response. Not only was she supportive of him, she explained that she, too, identified as bisexual. Both of his parents were also supportive in terms of Gabe’s gender non-conformance. He described how his father was protective of him, at one point taking him out of a school where he was bullied, for example. In the excerpt below, Gabe tells of his mother attending Spectrum drag shows to see him perform:
There were several times where my mom would help me dress up for drag shows. When she manages to attend, . . . she would help people with their makeup. She’d bring a whole bunch of stuff and clothes, makeup, and she’s like, “You can help yourself to whatever. If you need help with anything just let me know.” She would be so supportive and she would actually be in the crowd and cheer me on when I got up, too. . . . it was kind of weird knowing that my mom was there, but it’s also a great thing at the same time.
While certainly not every youth I encountered had parents who supported them in their self-discovery and identification of their sexualities and genders, I was surprised by how many did, simply because the dominant narrative about LGBTQ youth is one of family rejection. I, along with so many others, including many of the adults associated with Spectrum, took it for granted that LGBTQ-identified young people necessarily struggle with their parents and families over acceptance. But what I found in many cases was simply that they don’t—at least not any more than any parent might struggle with a teenager who is becoming more sexually aware and active. In many cases, it was actually the young person, having adopted the narrative of rejection, who held back from talking to their parent. But for this particular sample of youth, their fears were not realized. Recognizing that Spectrum is a unique setting located in an urban, morally and politically liberal community, my effort to understand this phenomenon in the context of Spectrum led me to the family structures and characteristics of the youth participants. In this chapter, I suggest that the straightening effect of the Standard North American Family is weakening as all of the ways that people are queering family gain validation in U.S. culture. The shifting of norms around gender and sexuality—along with varied family formations within working-class families and families of color—have manifested themselves in the formation of family in the United States.
Heteronormativity is deeply embedded in the U.S. family structure.1 What the sociologist Dorothy E. Smith refers to as the Standard North American Family (SNAF)—a heterosexual adult pair with children, where the man is breadwinner and the woman is predominantly responsible for child care and household chores—is the first place where humans are socialized into hegemonic norms around sexuality and gender and where sexist and heterosexist oppression is first internalized.2 This family type, while largely considered natural and normal throughout modern Western cultures, is socially and culturally contingent. As the sociologist Judith Stacey argues, “Anthropological and historical studies convince me that the family is not an institution, but an ideological, symbolic construct that has a history and a politics.”3 The symbolic triumph of the 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decisions that overturned Proposition 8 and found the Defense of Marriage Act to be unconstitutional is how they showed that the heteropatriarchal family formation that upholds norms in our culture can be successfully challenged. Recognition of same-sex marriage means that our society will have to rethink laws and norms around what formally defines a family, which could have an incredible impact on things like legal rights of parents (including what exactly defines parenthood), child custody, inheritance, and more: the very categories that have supported patriarchal, misogynist, white supremacist ideologies for so long.
Challenging the ideology of the SNAF has been an act of survival on the part of those who never had a shot at fulfilling its rigid requirements. While today we associate marriage equality with the LGBTQ movement, challenging norms around what is considered an acceptable family formation has long been the province of the working class, the poor, and people of color—of which some identify as LGBTQ, of course. Because the ideology of the SNAF is so deeply tied to privilege—white, middle-class, heterosexual privilege—any failure to fit into the proper family mold has been held as proof of individual deviance and pathology. Rather than acknowledge large structural systems of inequality that drive poverty and restrict access to critical cultural capital like education, the discourse of the failed family places the blame on female-headed households, children born out of wedlock, high rates of infidelity, and divorce.4 Further, little is said about the value of alternative family formations, given the failure of the SNAF to actually meet people’s needs, particularly those of women and children.
For example, the sociologists Michael Bennett and Juan Battle raise the argument that there is a distinct lack of inclusion of Black LGBTQ people in mainstream research and textbooks on the Black family. Using the various debates in sociological scholarship that either support or refute the now notorious Moynihan Report,5 they argue that the debates continue to center around the notion of a heterosexual family formation. Even among the detractors of the Moynihan Report, Bennett and Battle state that research “often does not interrogate the practice of using low rates of single parenthood and divorce as measures of ‘successful’ families. This model fails to consider that many families, especially with LGBT parents or members, may be better off with non-married co-parents of the same sex, or the divorce of parents who are not compatible, or various extended family structures.”6 Bennett and Battle’s critique is important to the argument I make here because they insist that it is a mistake to consider LGBTQ families as distinct from Black families; rather, they urge researchers to recognize how alternative family forms are the result of Black LGBTQ families. Again, the battle over family law in the United States ought not just be about same-sex marriage.
In a heteropatriarchal society, the SNAF can be an incredibly dangerous place for women and children.7 Although the narrative of risk and threat faced by LGBTQ people tends to focus on harassment and bullying outside the home—much like the myth of the stranger rapist/pedophile as a threat to women and children—the most dangerous place for queer children is actually their home, since most physical and sexual abuse is perpetrated upon children by adults in their family.8 Families where traditional gender roles and norms are particularly valued can create conditions for homophobic and transphobic harassment and violence.
Yet, because of its significance as a site of socialization, the family also has the most potential for inspiring radical change in society when it comes to gender and sexuality norms. The fight for marriage equality is not just about equal rights for same-sex couples in the United States; it is a very real threat to heteropatriarchy, which is arguably why the fight has met so much resistance. The sexual and gender order that has long been the undergirding structure of dominant U.S. society is threatened by the institutionalization of queer family. And while the possibility and formation of a new kind of family has been theorized and analyzed by feminist and queer scholars for decades, the Spectrum generation are really the first to have been socialized in a world where gay, lesbian, bisexual, and other non-heterosexual identified people have—on a large scale—publicly formed families.9 Whereas their parents’ generation came out in the context of a narrative that being gay meant forgoing family ties of any sort, a significant number of children of this generation are being raised by same-sex couples and queer people—whether that be their parents, their aunties and uncles, neighbors, teachers, mentors, coaches, or other important adults in their lives.10 The possibility of a non-heterosexual existence and a reframing of the gender binary is simply more available to this generation. And even though the SNAF maintains its iron grip on normative behavior in U.S. culture, even among heterosexual, non-queer families, tolerance of same-sex sexuality and gender non-conformity has increased radically.
Even though not all parents are hostile toward their gay children, the simple absence of same-sex desire as a healthy, valid option has often foreclosed on any sense of validation a child with same-sex desires might have. Beyond simply being absent, if there is acknowledgment of homosexuality, too often it is framed as something to feel pity about, if not abhor. Of course young people internalize these spoken and unspoken messages about homosexuality and queerness that they learn from their families at a very young age, making the SNAF a key site of oppression for kids who are queer.
Despite the major shifts in LGBTQ visibility and rights witnessed by society in the past several decades, the dominant narrative about LGBTQ kids and their families continues to be one of peril. Advice for parents of LGBTQ children suggests that having a gay kid will likely be a traumatic experience, requiring one to seek professional help as it is likely to trigger grieflike emotions.11 Having a LGBTQ-identified child is still publicly painted as a problem that needs fixing (if not a tragedy), rather than something to celebrate or even something unremarkable. Although it has historically been the case that LGBTQ-identified people have waited until they had achieved emotional and financial independence from their families before disclosing their identities, today people are disclosing LGBTQ identities at much younger ages.12 Young people faced with disclosing details about their sexuality to their families fear rejection and abandonment, fears that too often are fueled by the barrage of claims in the news media about the precarity of LGBTQ youth.13
For the young people of Spectrum,14 being out to one’s parents is the rule, not the exception. A distinct lack of traumatic stories about disclosing their identities to parents, in particular for sexual-minority-identified youths, marked this group as unique in light of the dominant discourse of precarity. Compared to others, what is different about these youths that made their coming out experiences generally positive ones? What is different about their parents? Are these young people exceptions to the rule, or is there more to the taken-for-granted narrative of tragedy that surrounds LGBTQ-identified people and their families? My findings reinforce some of what we already know to be true, that gender atypical children are more likely to adopt an LGBTQ-identity at a younger age and that this is less of a shock to their already suspecting parents.15 But they also shine light on a different trend, one that is likely the result of several decades worth of feminist and LGBTQ organizing and visibility—the queering of families. Spectrum youth typically come from non-traditional families (families that don’t fit the SNAF formula) and often have an LGBTQ-identified parent and/or relative. The LGBTQ rights movement, with its focus on abolishing the closet and adopting pride for sexual and gender diversity and the resulting normalization of homosexuality, has had a profound impact on family formations in the United States.
While horribly destructive, acts of physical violence or abandonment are hardly the only ways that queer kids are harmed by their families. LGBTQ-identified children face the ultimate rejection by loved ones when they are simply not accepted by their families because of their gender or sexuality. Therefore many of the young people of Spectrum expressed deep anxiety and stress about the anticipation of talking to their parents about their sexual and/or gender identity.
Many of the young people I interviewed told me how scared they were to share their sexual identities with their parents. The specific fear that their parents would disown them and force them to leave the house was particularly vivid for them. After his mother discovered some gay pornography websites he had been looking at on the computer, Travon—a sixteen-year-old Black boy who identifies as queer—was terrified that he would be forced to leave the house:
I was so embarrassed, and like, I was scared . . . I was expecting her to freak out about it ’cause, like, I’ve seen on movies and actually, I had seen an actual news report like, a couple days before . . . they were interviewing this entire tunnel of LGBTQ youth that were kicked out of their homes cause of who they were. It terrified me, so when she talked to me I was like, “Oh my god.” So not only was I embarrassed that I was, like, looking up stuff, but I was, like, scared that I was going to be kicked out of the house at eleven [years old].
Aaron, the film buff from chapter 4, a nineteen-year-old Mexican-American man who identifies as gay, had a similar experience when his stepfather sat him down for a talk after discovering a somewhat suggestive photo of Aaron and his boyfriend:
With my stepfather . . . I mean he asked me. I didn’t come out to him, he asked me. And . . . I was expecting some outrage and to be kicked out of the house, right? What I admire the most was he held me by the hand, and he told me that it’s going to be okay. And it’s an emotional thing . . .
Aaron trailed off as he was brought to tears in recounting this story to me, demonstrating the emotional significance of his stepfather’s acceptance of him over the rejection he had expected.
Fueled by, among other things, media-driven fears about the consequences of sharing their identities with their parents, neither Travon nor Aaron had any intention of telling their parents outright about their sexual desires. Rather, as was often the case with Spectrum youth, their disclosure was in some ways involuntary and a matter of circumstance. Whether confronted by their parents, or disclosing to their parents for the first time, in most cases, their parents were surprisingly warm and supportive.
In fact, for some youths, coming out to their parents was a non-issue. They were not afraid and more or less knew they would be supported. For example, when Brian, a twenty-one-year-old white youth who identifies as queer—he’s the kid from chapter 2 who first learned what a drag show was when he started attending Spectrum—told both his mom and dad he was gay in seventh grade, his dad then accompanied him on his first visit to Spectrum. He describes his experience as very non-traumatic:
Honestly, my coming out and my growing up gay wasn’t that bad of an experience, I mean there were some times that were a little difficult, but I didn’t have . . . the, you know, . . . Lifetime movie. . . . I wasn’t kicked out, I wasn’t abused for it. And I went to relatively good schools that were accepting.
Ditto, a twenty-year-old biracial youth who identifies as bisexual, described how it felt when her dad asked her one evening on the porch if she was gay. She says, “It was the most casual . . . it was kind of like asking me, is your favorite color blue? That’s what it felt like. There was no judging.” Isaac—the fan fiction writer from chapter 4—a nineteen-year-old multiracial Black man who identifies as gay, explains how before she knew anything about his sexual desires, his mother had already “introduced” him to the LGBTQ community, making it clear that, in her opinion, same-sex desire was an acceptable option for him: “Another thing that influenced [my sexuality]was my mom’s openness with it, so I never really had what a lot of kids have . . . this foreboding.” In the case of these examples, these young people seem to have never gotten the message that being LGBTQ-identified was a problem. It was only later, when they learned that they were supposed to have been afraid, that they describe themselves as lucky or different from most kids.
Of course, not every Spectrum youth had good experiences disclosing to their parents. When I asked Miguel (a twenty-year-old Mexican man who identifies as gay) how his father reacted to him disclosing his identity, he told me his dad returned to Mexico because of it, leaving him in the United States to fend for himself (although his father has since apologized to him for reacting this way). While Adam (an eighteen-year-old white man who identifies as gay) has a very supportive mother who has always been open about the option of same-sex desire, he has had a particularly hard time getting along with his father throughout his life. The conflict with his father seems largely to do with his father’s disappointment in Adam not being the son he had expected. Adam has been gender atypical his whole life, enjoying singing and dancing, dressing up in costumes and girls’ clothes, and wearing nail polish. Because of his father’s intolerance, Adam continues to identify to his father as bisexual rather than gay, as he feels that this identification alleviates the tension between them to some degree.
Nor was it just fathers rejecting their gay/queer sons. Lucy, a seventeen-year-old white girl who identifies as a lesbian, lives with her mother and stepfather in a rural, religiously conservative community. Lucy’s mother is very punitive in her reactions to Lucy’s sexual identity. Lucy’s mother confronted Lucy about her sexuality after reading her diary, and in reaction to Lucy’s expression of her sexual desires, she frequently takes away her posters and music and forbids her from going out of the house. Although her mother claims to not have a problem with gay people, she insists that Lucy is not a lesbian and told her once that Lucy “didn’t turn out the way she thought she would.”
The experiences of transgender-identified youths disclosing to their families were somewhat different compared to those disclosing sexual identities. In four out of six cases, transgender youths first told their parents they were lesbian. These four individuals were sexed female at birth, went through a period of identifying as lesbians, but not long after came to realize that what made them different from their heteronormative peers was their gender identity not their sexual identity. They therefore began to recognize themselves as transgender and not necessarily lesbian. The other two participants were sexed male at birth but never identified as gay before identifying as transgender, and both now identify their sexuality as pansexual. They were similar to the previously described group in that they initially were grappling with their sexualities, but they quickly began to realize that it was their gender identity more so than their sexual identity that was of issue. In the case of the previous four individuals, being transgender was more complicated than being lesbian, primarily because it was less understood by their parents. These individuals experienced various microaggressions from their parents, such as a parent failing to identify them with the pronouns they preferred or a parent being selective about when and where they would or would not recognize their child’s gender change.
In the case of the two transwomen, both experienced extremely negative reactions from their parents to their transgender identity. They were both forbidden from dressing as girls at home and severely punished for violations. At the time I met with each of them, they were estranged from their parents and experiencing homelessness. Much like sexual identity, disclosing a transgender or genderqueer identity to family can be fraught. Norms around misogyny and sexism result in experiences being quite different for transwomen compared to transmen.
It is worth noting that in all the cases where parents reacted in a severely negative way to youth disclosure, there was evidence of lifelong dysfunction and/or abuse of the children by their parents. Consistent with Ritch Savin-Williams’s argument, the youth with particularly hostile parents were coming from very unsafe family situations in which their disclosure of LGBTQ identities was just one part of the violence they were subjected to throughout their lives.16
Gender atypical young people share their queer sexual identities with their parents at younger ages.17 Those children who are particularly non-gender conforming are more likely to be confronted about their sexuality by friends and family at a younger age because of the way society conflates homosexuality with non-normative gender expression. Friends and family of flamboyant boys and butch girls often assume them to be gay or lesbian. Coinciding with this assumption, parents of gender atypical children have had some time to prepare themselves for the fact that their child might identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, and therefore they are less likely to react negatively and may be better equipped to deal with the disclosure when it comes. Interestingly, as mentioned above, parents and peers often push gender atypical children towards an LGB identity, sometimes only to learn later on that their child or friend is transgender-identified. The experiences I share below are those of sexual-minority-identified youths, not transgender-identified youths.
In chapter 3 I explained how certain boys described always having known they were gay and how this was often related to their gender atypicality in childhood. Particularly among the boys, when they disclosed their sexuality to their mothers, many claimed to have always known their son was gay. The youths sometimes described this experience as some version of “mother’s instinct.” Parents associated moments in their son’s childhood where they behaved in gender atypical ways as signs of them being gay.
An eighteen-year-old white, gay man, Nik is a tall, lanky blond with blue eyes. Today his hair is buzz cut, but it used to be longer and is typically dyed a different color every time I see him. He is wearing a green and white striped tank top with a low-slung neckline, black skinny jeans rolled up into capris, a cardigan sweatshirt, and flip flops on his feet. He’s got iridescent blue eye shadow on his eyelids and he kicks his crossed leg up and down gently while we talk. It was during his junior year in high school when Nik told his mother that the hickies on his neck were from a boy not a girl. When I asked him how she responded, he told me she said:
“I always kind of knew.” And I mean there was no way she couldn’t’ve! I mean when I was four, I had watched the [musical] Cats VHS so many times that I actually broke it. And she refused to replace it. I was like, “Mom!” She actually finally ended up caving in and getting another one. And then when I was in fifth grade I absolutely had to have the Cher Ultimate Collection CD.
Parents’ conflation of sexuality with gender—in this case, Nik and his mother associating an interest in Broadway musicals with queerness—led the parents to assume their gender atypical child was gay, and therefore they were not surprised when this turned out to be the case. Although I’m making some assumptions here about Nik and his mother, anecdotal experience leads me to believe that had Nik been a girl obsessed with Cats, this would not have become a marker of a queer sexuality for either mother or daughter.
Adam, who described himself as an effeminate boy, told me that his mother always suspected he would grow up to be gay. One of the most poignant stories he shared was of a time in middle school when he was, as he describes it now, homophobic and not gay-identified. During this time he got in a dramatic fight with his mom because she suggested to him that it was okay for him to explore his feelings for boys. He reacted with anger and frustration at this suggestion:
I was like, why would you say that to me? I’m not gay! That’s gross blah-blah-blah. And I had a giant episode about it. And she was in the room and she locked me out of her room and I would sit there and scream and kick at her door. And I was like, “I can’t believe you’re calling me gay!” And I would sit there and cry at her door because she called me gay. But she didn’t even call me . . . it was, “Adam, it’s okay if you’re having feelings for guys,” or “Adam, it’s okay to explore.” And I was just so appalled. I was like, “How could you even think that of me?”
Later when Adam did disclose his gay identity to his mom, she responded with, “I told you. I knew it.” When Gabe, described in the introductory narrative to this chapter, talked to his mother about his sexual identity, she replied, “I’ve known since the day you were born.” When he probed her, asking how a person could know something like that, she ascribed it to mother’s intuition.
During my time at Spectrum, the agency was experiencing an unprecedented number of contacts from parents who were seeking resources for children under the age of thirteen (the minimum age for youths to attend drop-in at Spectrum). This resulted in the development of a program aimed specifically at these children and their parents that was held outside regular drop-in hours. Since they fell outside the scope of my human subjects protocol, I didn’t conduct any formal research with this group. But I have anecdotal evidence, based on the few interactions I observed and my conversations with staff and interns, that the kids coming to the under-thirteen drop-in were grappling with gender identity issues more than sexual identity issues. Either the parents of these kids reached out on their own to their local LGBTQ center for help, or concerned teachers, counselors, or other community members might have referred them there. Regardless, this is an example of a significant shift in the age when parents and children begin to address matters of marginalized sexualities and genders.
One explanation for why the participants in my study so frequently disclosed their sexual identities to parents at a young age is their genderqueerness. Many of these young people expressed queer genders, therefore their parents, conflating sexuality and gender, suspected they might eventually identify as gay. Similarly, the lack of negative experiences might also be due to the fact that the parents of these children had more time than other parents to prepare themselves for that moment when their child might disclose to them and therefore were able to react in a mild manner. But not all of the youths of Spectrum could be described as genderqueer. What follows is a discussion about the queering of family and its effect on youths’ experiences disclosing their identities to their families.
Exposure to LGBTQ-identified parents, relatives, and family friends was another common characteristic among the young people of Spectrum. Eight of the mothers or fathers of youths interviewed claimed a gay, bisexual, lesbian, or pansexual identity, meaning that more than 20 percent of the people I interviewed had an LGBTQ parent. Similarly, of the youths I interviewed, nine had gay, lesbian, or bisexual brothers and sisters. In fact, there are two pairs of siblings among my participants. Youths in my interview pool identified fourteen LGBTQ cousins, aunts, uncles, godparents, and grandmothers in their families (not to mention several other friends of the family). These youths constituted more than two-thirds of the youths I interviewed.
This demonstrates that a significant number of the youths who are LGBTQ and attending Spectrum on a regular basis have been exposed to LGBTQ people in their family circles. In liberal, urban communities like the one where Spectrum is located, the normalization and routinization of same-sex desire, behavior, and relationships has resulted in far less stigma being attached to homosexuality today than in decades past.18 Many more people identify—in friend, family, and professional circles—as LGBTQ, therefore it is not surprising that so many of the young people of Spectrum have adult LGBTQ family members, particularly aunts, uncles, and cousins. But it is also likely that being LGBTQ at a younger age is aided by the reality of having an LGBTQ-identified parent or sibling, simply because early exposure to same-sex desire, same-sex relationships, and gender atypicality presents this identity as a viable option for these youths. In other words, LGBTQ-identified family members, particularly parents, are counterhegemonic to compulsory heterosexuality.
Trevor, a twenty-year-old white man, first identified as bisexual, then as gay, not long after he got out of high school. A daily regular at Spectrum since I started coming, he is a bit naïve for his age. He’s a round-faced kid with acne, a gap between his two front teeth, and a warm, joyful smile. He often wears oversized, black pants that are covered in buckles, pockets, and zippers, along with concert T-shirts of his favorite bands. He’s often sporting various accessories purchased from Hot Topic, like a pink faux fur hat that hangs down like ponytails on either side of his face and fingerless gloves. Although he is a fan of all kinds of music, he is crazy about Lady Gaga and names her first when I ask him to tell me who the most important people in his life are. Trevor has been raised by his grandparents. He told me it was through his introduction to his estranged lesbian sister that he learned about being LGBTQ:
That’s how it kind of all started and then I started getting involved with my sister and her partner. . . . And then, um, so then, that was like, the really big start of me getting to know more about the LGBTQ people and stuff like that. And then, um, I remember that I first came out as bisexual.
This is not to suggest that LGBTQ-identified parents necessarily raise LGBTQ-identified children, as research shows that correlations between sexual identity of parents and the sexual identity of their children should not be confused with causation. Rather, as the sociologists Judith Stacey and Timothy J. Biblarz argue, the influence a parents’ sexuality—heterosexuality included—has on the sexuality of their child has more to do with patterns of gender roles and cultural socialization than it does with any notion of inherent sexual orientation.19 Young people who are presented with alternatives to compulsory heterosexuality may be more open to exploring their feelings of same-sex desire as well as more open to assigning an identity label to those feelings such as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Similarly, youths who spend time with transgender or gender atypical family and friends may be more open to questioning and exploring their gender identity.
It’s also worth noting that lack of exposure to LGBTQ identities results in a different framing of queer sexualities and genders. In his discussion of space and sexuality, Jack Halberstam reflects on the experiences of “rural queers,” suggesting how little they may have in common with LGBTQ-identified people in U.S. urban areas: “In climates where homosexual identity is not forbidden but simply unthinkable, the pre-adult sexual subject who pursues same-sex eroticism may do so without necessarily assuming that this sexual activity speaks the truth of one’s identity.”20 I use Halberstam here to show how sexual identity formation is influenced by space and place, suggesting that “normal” is contingent on the context within which you live.
Ernie learned from and felt supported by his mother’s roommate, who at the time we spoke was a transwoman, but who was living as a man when they first met. He told his mother’s roommate he was gay before telling his mom:
Me and her would talk all the time. Well, before, she was a drag queen. So she would do drag. And sometimes . . . she would sneak me in the club with her when she’d do her drag shows. So that was cool, but me and her would just talk. . . . At first I was like, “What are you talking about?”
Both Trevor and Ernie describe how LGBTQ family members and family friends had a profound impact on their understanding of themselves as LGBTQ-identified. Consistent with stories told by other participants, these LGBTQ family members often encouraged the youths to embrace their identities and provided the support they needed to do so.
In and of itself, this finding is not a surprising one. But it’s important to reflect on how the queering of family has implications for the larger U.S. society. The visibility of LGBTQ people in U.S. society has meant not only that most people know someone who is LGBTQ but that most people are likely to have a family member or loved one who identifies as LGBTQ, therefore compassion through empathy for a friend or family member has been a powerful strategy of the LGBTQ rights movement. It has also meant that even within traditional SNAF structures, tolerance, if not acceptance, of LGBTQ people has been on the rise. This broadening tolerance and acceptance results in expanded options for everyone. This process of normalization has resulted in a paradigm shift when it comes to U.S. culture and homosexuality. The youth of Spectrum—and their adolescent peers—have grown up in the midst of this normalization that their parents’ generation has worked to achieve. This has resulted in more LGBTQ-identified young people, but, more important, it has also resulted in a shift in how all young people form their sexual subjectivities.
As mentioned above, growing up genderqueer and having LGBTQ-identified parents and other adults in their lives both might explain why some of the Spectrum youth had non-traumatic experiences sharing their sexualities and genders with their parents at relatively young ages. Another important reason that parents of these youth were more accepting of them may be that their family formations don’t resemble the SNAF model. In particular, a lack of conformity to traditional gender roles, adherence to secular rather than religious belief systems, and life-course patterns that differ from the middle-class norm were characteristics of the families of many of the Spectrum youths I spoke with.
Among the family characteristics of the study’s participants, it was striking how few of them came from households that fit the SNAF model with a father and a mother who fulfilled traditional gender roles. I saw this manifested in several different ways, including father-headed single-parent households (five), mother-headed single-parent households (eleven), and LGBTQ-identified parents (two lesbian mothers, three bisexual mothers, three gay fathers, and one pansexual father). For example, this is how Isaac describes his mom, who has raised him without his father’s involvement:
My mom is . . . to put it like very bluntly, sort of the hippie mom. She struggled a bit with me growing up being that I was like a first child, and when my father left, she had to play the role of both the disciplinarian and the nurturer. So it got a bit confusing for a while. But she’s always been really open and accepting of basically everything.
Even among the youths who grew up in a household with a heterosexual parent couple, there were often things that suggested that the parents were not modeling traditional gender roles. These include both parents typically working outside of the home and family structures where the mother was more often the biological parent of the child and therefore the dominant parent in the family.21 These parents were often described by their children as rebellious, as having been teen parents, and/or as having had children from multiple partners. One mother had a burgeoning career as a professional dominatrix. The youths of Spectrum had fathers who were primary nurturers and mothers who were wage earners. I would characterize few of their parents as fulfilling traditional gender roles.
Devout religiosity can often be a driver for the maintenance of traditional gender roles in the family.22 While the majority of people interviewed did associate their upbringing with some nod to religion (only nine youths did not identify their families as being religious at all), only a small handful were raised in a devoutly religious home. Two youths who were siblings were raised practicing Wicca, a religion that rejects the traditional family and gendered ideologies of the Judeo-Christian majority in the United States. Another youth became an evangelical Christian of his own accord in late adolescence but was raised by non-religious parents. The fourth was raised by a devoutly Catholic mother and identifies himself as a devout Catholic. Among the other youths who identified themselves with a religion, they typically described their families as being casually religious, attending church irregularly, if at all. Or, as was often the case, they may have had devoutly religious grandparents who exposed the youths to religion, but their parents had not maintained a strict religious practice in the home. When I asked Gabe if his family practiced religion, he explained that his maternal grandmother was religious and would sometimes “ride” him and his cousins about religion, but his parents were not:
My grandmother, she’s, the term I would use is “overly Christian.” So . . . she’s kind of targeted me, she’s targeted my cousins . . . she still accepts us and everything, but she has her moments where she just kind of, like, rides on us just a little bit. She apologizes for it every time but just, there are times where . . . she’s the only one who’s really had any negative outlook on it in any way when it comes down to religion. . . . One thing that I enjoy about my family is that we’re all kind of, like really open with religion. . . . We believe different aspects of all kinds of different religions so in a way we all kind of live in our own kind of religion that best suits us. So there was like never any religious pressure or anything.
More important, while many of the youths had stories about attending worship, being involved with a church at one point, and in some cases experiencing discrimination in these spaces, I would not describe their home lives as devoutly religious. With the exception of two white, gay men who had Catholic family members, religion was not mentioned by participants as a point of contention when it came to disclosing their identities to their parents. It is clear that secular belief systems are more prominent among these young people and their families and could be a contributing factor to parental tolerance and acceptance of an LGBTQ-identified child.
Finally, the SNAF model relies on conforming to a dominant series of normative middle-class life-course stages that include getting a college education and pursuing a career, marriage with a suitable partner, and having children, strictly in that order.23 This life-course pattern may simply not be an option for many people living in poverty, for members of the working class, and for some communities of color that bear the legacy of centuries of economic disadvantage and oppression. Considering that graduating high school was a challenge for many of them, the opportunity to attend college and earn a degree seems out of reach for many of the youth of Spectrum. Many people outside of the middle and upper classes in the United States do not get an education, start a career, get married, and have children, in that order. Their lives follow a different course, sometimes one that does not include college and a career at all and, in many cases, one in which children come before or outside of a marriage.
Are parents who hold more dearly to middle-class expectations of life-course patterns more deeply disappointed when they learn their child is not going to conform to a heteronormative pathway? Perhaps the parents of Spectrum youth did not see their child’s gender or sexual non-conformity as a sign of failure, either theirs or their child’s. Further, the middle-class pressure on parents who see their children as extensions of their own success doesn’t extend in the same way to the families described here.24 This does not mean that these parents do not hold high hopes for their children; rather, what those hopes are and how they manifest themselves as successes and failures are different for families outside of the hegemonic norm. The very fact that many of the youths’ parents had themselves not followed the dominant path towards a SNAF family formation may be a reason for their compassion for their queer kids.
Most of the participants in this study had relatively positive experiences with their parents regarding the disclosure of their sexual identities, and they identified as LGBTQ to their parents at a rather early stage in their lives. These positive experiences might be due to the gender non-normative behavior of the child, which prepares parents in advance for the possibility of having a child who identifies as LGBTQ. Further, I suggest that having LGBTQ-identified family members and the non-traditional nature of the child’s family structure may be significant factors in how families respond to their LGBTQ-identified kids. While it should come as no surprise to the reader that the more traditional (and hegemonically normal) the family formation, the less tolerance there is for queerness in its midst, this discussion serves to remind all of us that the battle over family and marriage is not just one that belongs to the LGBTQ movement. The far-reaching implications of marriage equality—as an LGBTQ initiative—has the power to reorganize one of the most entrenched social norms in our society.
As the sociologist Jessica Fields shows in her study on Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) members, parents’ anxieties about having sexual minority-identified or gender atypical children are linked to the parents’ heteronormative expectations of their children: that they will grow up to marry and have children and that they will not be queer in a society that rewards normality.25 Yet the queering of family, as demonstrated by the experiences of Spectrum youth, likely contributes to parents’ positive reception to the disclosure of their LGBTQ-identified children because the less invested parents are in being normal, the less of a threat a queer child poses to their sense of themselves as “good” parents.
Further, queer family formations are counterhegemonic to compulsory heterosexuality and the SNAF. The gender order has shifted profoundly in the last fifty years, and parental acceptance of LGBTQ-identified children, along with young people’s understanding of gender as malleable and unstable, could very well be part of the result. In the book Gaga Feminism, Jack Halberstam discusses the possibilities that open up in the face of queer family:
The butch dad and the femme mom raise the possibility of authority without patriarchy (because the butch does not access male privilege), gender polarity without compulsory heterosexuality (because the femme does not always access heterosexual privilege), and they make possible an education for potentially gender-normative kids in the arbitrariness of all gender roles—so kids raised by a femme mother and a butch father might learn about gendered forms of power untethered to gender hierarchies; they might see masculinity and femininity as more malleable, and they might understand gender as something that someone does rather than something someone is.26
Children raised within family formations that reject the dominant gender order—or what has historically been the dominant gender order—are not likely to reproduce that order themselves. These changes have implications across all family formations, including those that are formed around heterosexuality.
The stories shared here by the youths of Spectrum contradict the discourse of tragedy, danger, and risk that surrounds the phenomenon of LGBTQ children coming out to their parents. Of course, for some parents, learning that their child is LGBTQ-identified is upsetting or perhaps even tragic, and for some young people, telling their parents about their sexuality is risky, if not outright dangerous. But, with changing cultural acceptance of sexual diversity and gender atypicality, perhaps more parents will learn to celebrate their children’s sexual and gender development—queer or otherwise—as a regular process of self-discovery, maturity, and independence, a complement to their roles as parents in their children’s lives, and not as a sign of their failure.
A non-traditional family structure opens the options available to a young person, particularly at an exploratory stage of their lives. Homosexuality is a modern social construction, the definition of which is dependent upon biological and psychological presumptions about sexuality. At the same time, we have entered a postmodern era in which we understand sexuality and gender to be socially and historically constructed, not simply biological. We have shifted from defining homosexuality as pathology to the adoption of identities that more accurately reflect the fluidity of individual sexual and gendered desires, behaviors, and communities. Exposure—through family and peers, media, and other cultural resources—to same-sex desire, sexual fluidity, and the expansion of categories and options for identification results in a larger group of young people who are more willing to explore their same-sex desires in a visible way. In other words, queer sexualities are the result of the destabilization of fixed categories. Youth sexualities reflect this instability as adolescents begin the journey of discovering and exploring their sexual selves. The young people of Spectrum and their peers across the country are learning how to be sexual and gendered beings in an era in which LGBTQ rights are more and more being accepted as human rights. They are the children of a generation that invested in dismantling patriarchal systems of oppression. Therefore their explorations of self reflect a more open, fluid, queer relationship to sexuality and gender.
Because heteropatriarchy is the bedrock of the SNAF, this adoption of fluidity as a way to understand sexuality and gender has profound implications for family formation now and into the future. Heteropatriarchal family structures limit young people’s sexual options. They are the normal that queer is organized in opposition to. What does a society that rejects heteronormativity look like? Have we achieved the goal of eliminating the closet? Are we moving toward a society in which LGBTQ identities are not just celebrated but perhaps unremarkable? Or will it simply be the case that same-sex attractions, couplings, and family formations will be acceptable only insomuch as they resemble the heteronormative? I reflect on these questions and more in the conclusion.