Mar 17th, 2006
Straight Queerspawn = Allies?
I was recently asked to speak on a panel of “allies” to the LGBT community. The panel’s focus was about how straight people could support LGBT families, by hearing first-hand from heterosexual allies.
I declined. Actually, I explained why I thought I was leaning toward declining, with a suggestion for how I might still participate. Here’s what I wrote:
While an important topic, I can hardly stomach being called an ally. Like most kids of queers, I find that being grouped with allies to the very community we grew up in is patronizing and insulting. It’s not that allies aren’t important; heaven knows we need them, but this myth that straight kids of queers are “allies” is a myth that allows queer communities to minimize the impact of homophobia on our lives, and to dismiss the need for them to be accountable to serve our specific needs.
If you want me to participate, the perspective I will bring is what makes someone an ally AND how I don’t consider myself one. That could be useful to the audience since presumably they will be hearing a perspective on the topic they probably didn’t anticipate — thus effectively educating and shattering presumptions, but it might throw your focus off too much.
I received a reply stating that the entire presentation was being tabled indefinitely. I cannot say if that decision was related to my response or not.
Rejecting the “heterosexual ally” label is tricky because of how it can be misinterpreted. Rather than hearing me say I can’t really be an ally to a community of which I am already a part, many people jump to two conclusions: 1) I want nothing to do with LGBT people and/or 2) I don’t appreciate straight allies. Both of these conclusions are the polar opposite from the truth. (I even present a lecture specifically about the necessity of straight allies.)
I know that some straight kids of queer parents are fine with being referred to as allies. I’m not. I am culturally queer. In a column I wrote for the now-defunct Alternative Family Magazine (May/June 2000), I quoted Stefan Lynch as saying, “We shouldn’t have to earn a place at the table we grew up eating at.”
What do you think? Are straight kids of queer parents allies? Are they members of the LGBT community? If you identify as LGBT, how do you feel about straight queerspawn saying they are part of the LGBT community? If you are queerspawn, how do you feel about being labeled an ally? Why does this discussion matter at all?
When you post your response, you can do so anonymously, but it would help if you indicate if you have/had queer parents, and/or if you are a queer parent, so readers have a context for your perspective.
If I, who grew up in this community and movement am an ‘ally’ then all those folks who grew up in in the straight world and came out later on are not even on the map. Being called a ‘queer ally’ has, to me, always been a slap in the face. This may be one of those things that varies depending on how old you are when your parents came out…
Where we really belong are with the other less visible non-dominant queers: queers of color, working class queers, kinky queers, etc. At least people could say, “Allies and Unheralded Queers” or somesuch.
I did an interview for a book once about allies – me and the pflag parents and straight-but-not-narrow folks…I said no to the author (Dan Woog in case anyone wants to look it up) 3 times before agreeing under the condition that he would include what I said about not being an ally. He included it, but cut most of it.
The book Stefan mentions in the above post is Friends and Family.
As a lesbian mother, I’d say that straight children of queer parents are definitely part of the queer community, not auxiliaries thereof. (Unless, of course, said children reject their parents’ queer “lifestyle”–in which case they’re not allies, either.)
At the risk of extending an already extended acronym, I’ll propose “LGBTQIF” to represent this broad community–the “F” standing for “and families.”
People call me gay, queer or some older folks say homosexual. It doesn’t matter to me what I”m called unless there is an intent to insult. My daughter’s pretty young, so right now I say she’s part of the community, because she’s part of our lifestyle, my partner and I can’t get married and she suffers discrimination because of that too.
Now, when she’s older, I don’t know. She will always be my daughter, my family, and I think she will identify in that way always. But what if she marries a guy, has kids, maybe even goes to church, and lives far enough away so that she visits us once or twice a year and calls often on the phone? Is she still part of the community then? I don’t know. That’s assuming she chooses that path too. (I hope she lives much closer and calls more often, now I’ve depressed myself) She will always be family, I guess I can just hope that by the time she’s that age, society will have progressed enough to have blurred the lines between ally and community even moreso.
Back when I identified as straight, I really, really couldn’t handle being thought of as an ally. In fact, that’s a big part of what prompted me to abandon labels for a year or two. I might not have been ready to call myself queer, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to be identified as a straight ally within the queer community.
I think there are all kinds of circumstances in which straight folks are a part of the queer community, though. And I try to make my corner of the queer community as welcoming as possible to that. Whether someone’s straight and trans, straight and questioning, straight and dating a bi or transperson, straight and queerspawn, straight and kinky, or anything else like that, there can be a lot of queerness (in a cultural sense) in people regardless of their binary sexual attraction patterns.
For queerkids who don’t feel secure, “queer” may be more of a frightening word than something to wear with pride. For them, “ally” may sound less threatening. I think that kind of insecure attitude is becoming less common, but maybe folks are still trying to cater to queerkids who want a label that keeps queerness at arm’s length. They may be trying to cater to that fear without bothering to check whether the queerkids themselves actually feel it.
At the same time, you’re right, it’s totally bogus. “Ally” imples “much-valued help from a removed position of safety*”, which is ridiculously inappropriate.
I’m transsomething, and our 9-year-old Godson (whom we’re raising) is proud of me, and he will be again someday at some college full of open-minded people – but between now and then, it’ll be interesting to see how the teenage years play out.
* – (safety until you reveal that you want to help queer people, anyway, which does itself diminish your safety in some circles)
I think its hard to answer the question when we in the “community” don’t even have a grasp of what community means. Gays and lesbians seem to travel in such different circles sometimes. It seems we only get together to form the first half of an LGBT organization to counter some sort of adversary against our “community”. Then add the relatively invisible (and often untrusted) “B”’s and the terribly misunderstood (and sometimes reviled) “T”’s, and I’m not exactly sure what community the kids are to be included into or allied with or excluded from.
All I know of community is that I grew up in one and don’t live there any more. But then, that applies to most of America.
This is a very thought provoking post.
Part of me wonders if our parents don’t claim us as queers because they’re so busy trying to reinforce the idea that we’re more likely to be straight, which is all part of the internalized homophobia of the research. But I agree that until they recognize us as an internal part of the movement then we’ll be treated as children: with a pat on the head and token seat at these conferences.
Abigail–this word troubles me, too. Having two moms is my world– and the word “ally” shoves me outside of that world . . . it’s a sort of a “you can look, but you can’t touch” philosophy, denying queerspawn the right to claim the world in which they grew up.
All I can offer is an anecdote that’s been frustrating me for months. I participated in a huge author/artist fair at our local library in December, and each of us had a small table with books or art to sell. Women holding hands–women who were obviously couples–walked by my table without a second glance at me or my memoir. They didn’t stop to examine my book jacket, and they appeared to view me as irrelevant to their world. Not only was I not an ally–I was a non-person by virtue of what my lesbian friends term my “unmistakable heterosexuality.”
Next year, I’m going to hang a freakin’ rainbow flag in front of my table, and wear my queerspawn T-shirt. Any other suggestions?
Words are critical in the discussion of any political/social issue. We have a right to challenge them.
I am comfortable calling myself an ally…but I suppose it’s because I don’t feel like I’ve grown up immersed in queer culture.
My dad first came out to me as bi when I was fourteen–over the years he came to identify more and more as gay. He and my mom got divorced when I was a freshman in college. He and my mom have both dated people over the last six years or so since they were divorced, but they are still close to each other–we still do things as a family–and it has always felt like their respective boyfriends are on the periphery of the family unit. (This might partly have to do with the fact that so far neither of them has had a [post-divorce] partner that they’ve been with for more than a couple of years.)
Anyway, I am very close to my father, and of course being gay is central to who he is, but I wouldn’t say that the broader gay community / culture have been a significant part of my life. (If they had I could see myself feeling less comfortable with the ally label.)
…One thing though is that in discussions about gay rights, I often have the urge to explain that my dad is gay–because my dad being gay makes it a very personal issue for me, not something abstract or that I’m far removed from.
Enablers, is more likely. Allies in propagating the myth that when it comes to gender — too husbands and wifes and mothers and fathers — separate IS equal after all!
Certainly having two moms is much better than one mom and no dad, much less neither of either. But it’s hardly “equal”. Separate never is.
I grew up with two Moms who have since “divorced” and “remarried”, one to a man, one to a woman. My son knows the Mom who raised me, but was not my biological mother, as his grandmother. Yet, there is no language for this. No way to explain this to society. My situation doesn’t fit into the straight world and now that I’ve aged out of the homosexual community we don’t really fit in there either. Luckily for us, the Mom who is remarried to a woman keeps us in touch with community, so I’m kind of still in the loop in a certain crowd of that community. I know when in the general gay community I often feel like I do as a caucasian when around minorities…that need to say, “Hey, I’m not like the rest of them, I’m okay, I’m not judging you.”
[...] Abigail Garner has shown in Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is, and on her blog. “Ally” implies an outsider, however supportive. People who grew up in LGBT households, [...]
[...] is, though, some children of LGBT parents prefer not to be called allies, as Abigail Garner has explained. “Ally,” she wrote, implies someone who is helping from outside a community. “I [...]