COLAGE’s latest issue of Just For Us is out, and the theme is school. Here’s my contribution:

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Queerspawn Visibility Still Lacking on “Friendly” Campuses
by Abigail Garner

Each time I am scheduled to speak about LGBT families on a college campus, I call in advance to interview a few students and faculty. I ask them questions about the campus climate regarding queer issues. Even at the most progressive schools, students of LGBT parents are still just a rare afterthought.

For example, here’s a recent interview with a student from a campus LGBT office:

Me: What about people with LGBT parents? How involved are they in queer activities on campus?

LGBT Student Organizer: It’s a super supportive school. Everybody’s out.

Me: But what about people who have LGBT parents?

Student: Yeah, that’s a total non-issue here. Like, our advisor was totally open when she had her commitment ceremony, and now she and her partner are raising twins. So it’s something we are totally used to.

Me: But I’m asking about students who have queer parents. How involved are they? Can I talk to a few of them to find out about their experiences on campus?

Student: Oh! Students with queer parents! Hmmmm…that’s a good question…hmmmm…no..I don’t know of any students here with gay parents. Wow. I hadn’t thought about that.

Conversations like this are the rule rather than the exception. Although queer students embrace the idea of becoming parents themselves, few recognize that queerspawn are among their peers. Everyone on the LGBT spectrum would benefit from making sure that “queer-friendly” schools are also culturally competent to serve queerspawn.

I’m talking about thoughtful inclusion, not just categorizing kids of queers as “allies” and then directing them to the workshop where they’ll be offered remedial tips for allies like “use gender neutral language” and “don’t assume everyone is heterosexual.” Presuming that 18-year-old queerspawn need to be educated with knowledge that is second-nature to them is both insulting and alienating.

I know that feeling of alienation first-hand from my own experience at Wellesley College. During my first semester, I attended a campus outreach panel of students who talked about being lesbian or bisexual. I sat there wanting to nod my head feverishly in solidarity with their stories of their daily encounters with heterosexism. But our stories deviated at the point where their biggest obstacle was acceptance from their parents, and my biggest obstacle was acceptance from them.

Many people are surprised when they learn now that I wasn’t a big queer activist on campus. But no one — and I mean no one, not my family, not queer students and certainly not straight students — understood how I could be interested in the queer community without thinking I was in deep denial and struggling to come out of the closet.

I grew weary of having to prove myself as queer enough to not be an outsider to queer-identified women, but still not queer enough to want to make out with any of them — no matter how many beers I drank.

They didn’t “get” what I was about, so after awhile, I just gave up on any hope of getting involved in queer activism. In hindsight, the “they” who wore me down were just a handful of outspoken organizers at Wellesley, and I let their judgments define me way too much.

And at the time, I didn’t have the words, “culturally queer,” to help me hold my ground. Fifteen years later, queerspawn remain mostly invisible on college campuses, but that is changing. As more of them choose to carve out an identity for themselves, more queer students who meet queerspawn will change their reactions from curiosity and suspicion to solidarity and inclusion.

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Abigail Garner, 34, is the author of Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parent Tell It Like It Is. Her blog, “Damn Straight” is at AbigailGarner.net.

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