Article by Abigail Garner

“Why do you feel so obligated to take on your dad’s struggle? Can’t he take care of himself?”

Those are the kinds of questions I hear from people who find out that, at the age of 29, I still have plenty to say about coming from a family with a gay dad. So much to say, in fact, that what was once my volunteer work has evolved into a full-time job of writing and speaking for acceptance and equality for LGBT people and their families.

The most common assumption about the motivation for my career path is that by speaking out against homophobia and hate, I am taking on my dad’s struggle. But this isn’t about my dad’s struggle. It is about my own. Few people besides children of LGBT parents understand this, or understand how acutely homophobia has affected our lives. When those of us who have LGBT parents become adults, our identity stops being about who we are in relation to our families and starts being simply about who we are.

“Queerspawn” is a term used by some sons and daughters of LGBT parents who claim and celebrate our identity, acknowledging that, regardless of our own sexual orientation, our heritage has “queered” us. While there are millions of kids in LGBT-parent households–up to 14 million by some estimates–I’m guessing only a fraction of them would actually call themselves queerspawn. I’m one of them.

Unlike people who avoid the boxes that come with labels, I embrace labels that obliterate the boxes. To the best of my knowledge, I’m heterosexual. But when my dad came out and re-partnered with a man 23 years ago, I was queered as a result of being surrounded and influenced by gay male culture.

Gay male values, customs and cultural factors that have carried over into my adult life include my careful use of coded language; my appreciation for musicals; my wariness of organized religion; my awareness of hankies in back pockets; my love for gourmet food; my distrust in police; and my uncompromising demand for latex. The list goes on and on, and I often have to give numerous and detailed examples from my own life before anyone really understands what I mean when I say I am “culturally queer/erotically straight.”

Even our own LGBT parents have little grasp on how much we are queered as children. (I want to stress that I mean this in a cultural, not sexual, way.) I predict that the kids currently growing up in LGBT families are going to develop into even queerer adults than I am. I, like many of my peers, was the product of a heterosexual marriage. While half of my time was spent with my dad and his partner, the other half was spent with my mom. More kids today have two-mommy or two-daddy families: all queer, all the time. Some parents have taken their children even deeper into queer culture, choosing very queer-friendly schools, moving to neighborhoods where rainbow flags are commonplace and forming playgroups where all of the parents are LGBT.

Granted, some of their kids will grow up, identify as straight, live straight lives in predominantly straight communities and never reveal even a twinge of queerness when they are away from their families of origin. I respect that path, but for me, it’s an impossible option. Living in predominantly straight surroundings means I have to deny a huge part of my identity. I’ve tried it for short periods of time in my adult life and I just can’t do it. It makes me homesick.

For kids like me who identify as queerspawn, they have Stefan Lynch to thank for inventing the word. Lynch is the son of a lesbian mother and a gay dad, and was the first director of Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere (COLAGE), a national advocacy organization based in San Francisco. In June, Lynch was featured in a San Francisco Chronicle article, “A Straight Embrace of Gay Culture–With a Twist,” which reported on a growing trend of “gay-friendly” or “queerly-affiliated” straight men. If it is indeed a trend, Lynch is in the thick of it.

The first time I met Stefan Lynch, our conversation over lunch was rapid and dense; I was making up for lost time from not knowing him when I was growing up. Fear and homophobia prevented me from finding other kids in similar families until I was in my 20s. Now, when I meet other adults from families like mine, I can almost hear the missing puzzle pieces snapping into place.

When I asked Lynch about how the term developed, he explained: “By the early ’90s, I wanted something that wasn’t so clearly about my parents, or so wishy-washy. Something about who I am. Queerspawn was the name [that] stuck as a snappy, unapologetic declaration.”

It has stuck with me, too. It’s an unapologetic declaration that’s not about my father’s struggle. It is about my own.

Originally published in San Francisco Frontiers

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