LGBTQ Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBTQ themes is welcome in this series. LGBTQ Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a kosmail to Chrislove.
I’ve been thinking lately about family. Partly because I’m currently separated from my own family by over a thousand miles and a pandemic. And partly because of RuPaul’s Drag Race (let me explain).
Season 12 of RuPaul’s Drag Race came to an end on Friday night—and although it was the twelfth season, it was the first season I’ve watched in full. My BF is the one who got me into it, as watching Drag Race became a Friday evening tradition for us. Now that he’s in Dallas on a clinical rotation, I was left to watch the finale alone with the cats. The drag queens, too, were confined (literally) by the pandemic, and the competition took place remotely in each of their homes. It was a season finale unlike any other, but one part remained the same: RuPaul asked each of the queens to directly address a picture of their younger selves. If I could find a clip from Friday night’s finale to share with you, I would, but here is a compilation from past seasons to give you an idea of what I’m talking about. (Warning: You will need tissues.)
If you watched the video, you probably noticed that (unsurprisingly) a common theme running through many of the finalists’ remarks was family. The same was true on Friday night. One of the queens very movingly talked about her mother’s undying support coupled with her father’s initial rejection, culminating with the point at which her dad said he’s proud of her. The other two queens also talked about navigating relationships with their families at different points. Most of the queens over the course of the entire season, in fact, had some kind of struggle with their moms or other family members that came up (in sometimes unexpected ways).
Watching Friday night’s episode, it wasn’t long before I found myself a blubbering mess on the couch. It brought to the surface my own fraught relationship with my family. I’ve written before about my relationship with my mother, who has since come to accept me but told me when I first came out to her that my partner would never be welcome in her home. I’ve said less about my relationship with my father, with whom I always wanted to be close but just never could (at least, not in the way my brother could). My BF (who, I’m sure, was also a blubbering mess on his couch) has had his own intense struggles with his family, and it was at least a year into our relationship before I even set foot in his parents’ house.
I promise, I have a point with this digression about RuPaul’s Drag Race. The point is that many of us queer folks have such visceral pain when the subject of family comes up. It’s a pain that lingers in the background and shapes so much of what we do and who we become, even if we try our best not to acknowledge it and to shove it deep down in our subconscious. Sometimes, like it did for me on Friday night while watching Drag Race, that pain comes to the surface. It’s there, for so many of us, and impossible to ignore completely.
And despite being such a central force in so many of our lives (here’s where I put on my academic hat), the queer person’s relationship with their family is not something that is often directly addressed by historians of the LGBTQ experience. Much like with physical violence (another gaping hole in the literature), the family relationship is something that exists in the background, while the political movements occupy the space in the foreground. Because of these thoughts bouncing around inside my head about family and what it means, I thought it would be fitting to briefly introduce a book that does examine this topic. And I really am going to try to keep it brief—I’m finding it difficult to put sentences together in the midst of these multiple crises we’re all living through, so apologies in advance if this diary seems a bit all over the place (we’re all a bit all over the place nowadays, aren’t we?). That book is Heather Murray’s Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America (2010).
I read Not in This Family when I was in grad school, and I really didn’t get much out of it. What I mean by that is that, like most Ph.D. students, I was hyper-focused on one particular subtopic within the field, and this book didn’t really give me what I was looking for. I get a lot more out of the book now that I revisit it, a few years separated from my dissertation work. I don’t think I had the perspective back then to really appreciate how fresh and innovative Murray’s work really was, and how much of a departure Not in This Family was from the gay historiography that existed when it was published. As I said, gay historiography has long focused on political movements (such as the homophile and gay liberation movements) and the construction of community and identity. There isn’t that much out there that zooms in on something as intimate (yet monumentally important) as the relationship between gay people and their families. I imagine that a large part of the reason for this is because that is a difficult topic to find source material on, and thus a particularly difficult book to write. Murray’s work—while far from perfect—represents a step in a new direction.
The first thing that struck me about Not in This Family was the subtitle: “Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America.” Unlike most LGBTQ history books, Murray does not limit herself to one particular set of national boundaries. She takes advantage of both American and Canadian sources in an attempt to tell a larger story that does not necessarily have borders:
In so doing, I wish to explore the continuities at an intimate level despite the starkly different national experiences and perceptions of national characters between Canadian gay writers and activists and their American counterparts. These examples underscore that gays experienced some collective emotions that were not always precisely attached to a geography or national character, but were based on shared emotional sensibilities rather than citizenship.
Murray’s examination of the relationship between gay people and their families is a story of change over time. She begins the book with a rather interesting anecdote about poet Elsa Gidlow, who became something of a lesbian icon by the 1970s (when she was an elderly woman)—and whose attitudes encapsulate the story Murray wants to tell.
“Before every half-informed person had learned to mouth the jargon of the sexologists and psychiatrists to homosexuals,” she insisted, “[individuals] respected one another’s privacies” in day to day life, no less so in their own families. Gidlow’s mother, in fact, had lived with her and her partner, something her lesbian visitors found intriguing, as many felt that their parents had rejected them to varying degrees. But Gidlow insisted that they see a paradox in seeking their parents’ understanding. “Do we not,” she would ask, “in challenging our parents’ values, reject them?” She did not find it “fair to expect [a] continuance of unquestioning approval.”
Mocking a contemporary coming-out scene, she insisted that she never would have considered taking her mother aside and saying, “Have you understood that my love and friendship for the women I lived with included sex?” In her view, telling parents would only bring about heartache and confusion and even prurience. “We are not responsible for the fantasies of others,” she wrote. “All we can do is not contribute to them.” Gidlow went further, decrying a sexual voyeurism in the society at large, a corollary of a repudiation of discretion that she discerned surrounding sexual matters. “Who has ordained, and on what authority, that we must supply the world with script and justification of our intimate interactions?” she asked.
Gidlow’s views on living openly certainly seem antiquated from our perspective today—they seemed old-fashioned even in the 1970s, when the concept of “coming out” was really entering the public consciousness. But that’s precisely why Murray begins with Gidlow. Something clearly changed in the relationship between gay people and their families from the time Gidlow was a young adult to the time she was an elderly woman advising young lesbians in the 1970s. What changed and why are central questions of Murray’s work:
How can this shift be explained, between the mid-twentieth century, when Gidlow saw a fundamental rupture, and our own times? How did gays and their parents conceive of family selves and gay selves, and how did this duality manifest itself culturally? How did it come to be that gays and their parents became particularly burdened with negotiating both conditional and unconditional love within postwar families? From the perspective of many cultural observers, gays have been largely orphans, adrift from relationships with parents and kinship ties as heterosexual families have known them. And yet, between the immediate postwar period and the 1990s, the family of origin, as both a lived relationship and a symbol, has been a central animating force and preoccupation of both gay culture and politics and has shaped gay thought more broadly. Gays also have shaped the sensibilities of their families, provoking an analysis of the meanings of family intimacy and family activist politics.
I am not going to attempt to fully summarize Not in This Family. Although it is not a particularly long read, it is a dense read. There is a lot to unpack in this book. As always, I will instead try to give the broad strokes of what Murray argues in her work. Rest assured that there is much, much more to read for yourself if you are interested in the book—this diary just scratches the surface.
Murray focuses on the period from 1945 to the 1990s. Like other gay historians, she sees World War II as a pivotal event in the history of gay people—and in this case, also a pivotal event in the history of the family.
Word War II accelerated a broad recognition of gays as a distinct social group that shaped how parents would see their gay children and how gay children would conceive of themselves.
[...]
World War II...was unique in that it brought young men and women into same-sex environments in the military and in defense production and transferred them in their formative years from rural to urban worlds were peer relationships took precedence over intergenerational family relationships. At the same time...expanding job markets and the growth of consumer capitalism gave gay men and women the chance to live as single adults and form their own relationships outside their parents’ homes. Psychology and psychiatry, so important to the war effort, had offered a reevaluation of gays during this period, in their suggestion that homosexuality was a mental state rather than a biological condition, as late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century sexology would have deemed it. Ironically, these pathologizing portraits of gays projected homosexuality further into the realm of the human imagination. Examples of homosexual life stories abound in the psychological works of this period, but also in the famous sexuality studies of Alfred Kinsey, as well as gay pulp fiction, and even McCarthy-era Senate investigations into gays in government, all of which suggested the existence of a community of gays, albeit a shadowy and unsavory one. This recognition...kindled gay organizing during these years. The most prominent strain of the homosexual rights movement—called the homophile movement—during the 1950s and early 1960s argued that gays were mentally sound, respectable, normal, and in fact quite close to heterosexuals.
So far, nothing really new here. Murray goes on to note that, with the development of more radical gay liberation and lesbian-feminist movements in the 1970s, gay activism became “less integrationist and more unrepentant.” Gay liberationists struck at the foundation of the nuclear family itself (prized in the postwar years) and ritualized “coming out” to “unleash the inhibitions generated in having to keep their sexuality a secret.” Then, the trauma of AIDS and the rise of the New Right (which, of course, focused on the “traditional nuclear family” that gays supposedly threatened) caused a return of reformist politics. This is the typical reformist→radical→reformist narrative often found in gay historiography (a narrative that has real problems, it should be noted, much like the feminist “wave model”). But Murray takes it in a different direction, and relates it to the history that Gidlow lived with her own mother:
This story of postwar gay community, identity formation, and gay activism, however, neglects the fact that families were always integral to these developments.
[...]
The postwar period honored and dramatized the nuclear, and presumably heterosexual, family. The family would come to take on a therapeutic function of sorts and become, in the words of religious historian Robert Orsi, “a theater of self-revelation” between its members. This sort of family style allowed gays a fascinating position within these family constellations both when they chose not to reveal their sexuality, as they were more apt to do in the early postwar period, and when they did reveal, as was more common in the later decades of the twentieth century. Families became inward looking, and relationships between parents and children more direct and less mediated by extended family relationships, mirroring a broader social trend of the decline of communal links and the growth of individualism. On the surface, children and parents also had more privacy from each other in this family setting, as home ownership increased and larger living spaces for family life became more common.
[...]
The very concept of unconditional love, so poignant for both gays and their parents in understanding their relationship, was not a self-evident concept, especially in the early postwar period. In fact, some child care writers advised against it, fretful that the demands of the all-encompassing affection that had emerged during the postwar period were simply too high for most families to fulfill.
As a result, according to Murray, parents and children often struggled to really know each other intimately in the years following the war. As she notes, the question posed (even if unsaid) between family members was: “Who are you?” Gay children (such as Gidlow) opted for discretion and maintained a separation between their developing gay identities and their family membership. The immediate postwar period and this fraught relationship between gay children and their families are the subject of the first chapter. In the chapters that follow, Murray tracks how these ideas began to change and how that wall between gay identity and family membership started to crumble.
As you may have guessed, Murray argues that the gay liberation era had a lot to do with this change in attitude:
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, those gays who had adopted a liberation perspective largely abandoned discretion, claiming a more unequivocal recognition from heterosexual society, which included their families. This demand encompassed a substantial critique of the stunted emotional expression that heterosexual society, nuclear families, domesticity, and their own parents represented. Paradoxically, the very vehemence of this critique also seemed to suggest a longing for family to which the gay culture of this period also gave expression.
This direct challenge to the postwar family gave family members of gay people a choice: either reject or accept their children. Among those families that chose to accept their gay children, that wall that had been placed between the child’s sexual identity and their place in the family came crashing down. Many parents not only accepted their children, but also became activists themselves, leading to the formation of PFLAG. The next major event in Murray’s narrative is, of course, the AIDS crisis, which sent many of these gay children back to their parents for their end-of-life care—and making it all but impossible for parents not to come face-to-face with the sexual identity of their children. By the 1990s, the family was a much different place for gay and lesbian people:
By the end of the century, what had definitively changed in parents’ expectations of gay children and in gay children’s expectations of their family lives was the ritual of coming out. Gays could no longer live a life of discretion, a life without an increasingly formalized and scripted coming out to their families.
[...]
The changing shape of gay culture and politics created a world in which opportunities for privacy are scant, the personal is named and talked about, and selves are known, as though the companionate family’s central question, “Who are you?” had had a definitive response—“Let me tell you”—and become grafted onto the larger culture.
Murray’s work is important, especially considering the very different direction in which it attempts to move mainstream gay historiography. And it is not perfect. Murray, like any historian, is limited by her sources—and as she notes herself, the only sources she has are those that were written by at least somewhat prominent activists and writers. As she admits in her introduction, this is not exactly a representative sample. There is much more to be written, but I suspect that it will be a difficult topic for a historian to uncover.
As I said, this is a very dense book, and I have only scratched the surface. Each of the major topics mentioned above is explored in at least one full chapter each. My diary, as usual, does not really do Not in This Family justice. However, hopefully it encourages you to order this under-appreciated book for your Pride Month reading.
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