Family by Carmen Vazquez

Family
Speech Delivered at Sarah Lawrence College, 2006
by Carmen Vazquez

Thank you for the invitation to share my thoughts with you. Nine years ago I gave a speech entitled “Wounded Attachments” at the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force annual conference, Creating Change. That speech centered on a critique of the opening skirmishes of the national dialogue and fight with the Conservative Christian Right that the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Movement (LGBT) and our allies have been engaged in this last decade over the right to marry. I delivered the speech in the presence of my lover at the time, Marcia Gallo, and her bothers and sisters in law and my own biological brother Eric who was hearing me speak in my capacity as an out dyke and LGBT activist for the first time. I was also making the presentation in front of the woman I had fallen in love with, Carlie Steen - about a month before that presentation and whom I would eventually come to know and love as family every bit as much as the people I had been creating family with for a decade before. We walked through much grief in that short time – the death by suicide of her best friend, two miscarriages in four years of trying to have a child, the death of her dog Tret and the death of her grandmother who was also the woman that raised Carlie. This year we decided that our relationship as lovers was over and so had to walk through that grief as well. Bur Carlie remains my family as does Marcie.

I share my loves with you because when heterosexuals who have been married for ten, twelve or twenty years decide to end their relationships but retain their commitments to each other as family, they are celebrated for their maturity. When we do exactly the same thing without benefit of marriage or divorce proceedings, we are called unstable, too emotionally insecure to sustain relationships. Well, piss on that shit. I won’t have it. The family I choose to create with past and present lovers and friends is as sacred and worthy of celebration as any other.

I share my loves with you because family is what I came to talk about tonight. I will address the question of marriage again, but with much more of a focus on family than marriage because I believe our relationship to family both personally and politically is much more complex and much more the cause of our past and present struggle to win equality and justice that the matter of civil marriage itself.

Family is where the heart starts beating, where it heals and where it is first broken. Mother brings you home, her bundle of joy. Mother strokes you and sings to you, kisses the scrape on your knee, makes you rice soup, swings you in the cradle of her heart. Mother leaves you with a key in your hand and your heart pounding against your chest, your throat dry, and fear creeping through your belly. Will she ever come back? Daddy throws you in the air and catches you and your glee every time. Daddy rides you on his shoulders and teaches you how to play beisbol like the little men on TV called the Yankees. Daddy’s beard tickles your cheek and he crushes your skinny bones to him, calls you baby doll. Daddy beats you with the belt, long thick welts on your back, but you shed no tears. Big girls don’t cry.

Except at fifty- plus years of age, I cry all the time. I want to cry now from remembering the joy and innocence, the fear and the pain of my own family and growing up. Being queer, I think, doesn’t make it worse or better. Everyone first gets wounded in the very place they expect to find comfort and safety. It’s just that most of us queer ones don’t get to go back. We get to walk around in broad daylight with our hearts broken, looking for that rainbow, looking for daddy, looking for mom, dissing the breeders, drowning at tea dances on ecstasy pills, crystal meth and loneliness, looking for love anywhere.

The myth and lure of the idealized American family and community is difficult enough for most people to grapple with as they grow into adulthood, but for most queers it’s close to impossible. We’re not even supposed to be here, much less create family.

It is our relationship to family, however, and our ability to define and politically defend our families that will ultimately give us the winning message we need to attain equality under the law and the right to participate fully in the evolving democracy of the United States. But defending our family and kinship inventions will be much harder than defending ourselves as individuals, particularly in light of the American cultural schizophrenia in relation to family. As Americans, we pine for the warmth of hearth and family and a sheltering community, but our idealized hero, our cultural historical character has not been “communal.” The heroic individual, the rugged individualist, the loner, and the cowboy who chooses prairie and the lure of the wild to wife and family, the anti-hero, brooding and self-destructive – these are the faces of our national character. You can also paint the face of that character white and he most decidedly is not queer.

I don’t suggest there is anything wrong with independence. But close to independence is isolation. On the edge of isolation is despair. The cure for despair, of course, is a transforming experience such as that experienced by George Bailey, the hero of director Franz Kapra’s film, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” In this classic Christmas tale, George Bailey is a man who, contemplating suicide after losing twenty thousand dollars his little independent savings and loan needs to stay open, is saved by an angel and given the opportunity to see what his community would have looked like had he never been born. What he sees is a horror of gloom, a triumph of greed and destruction of community so horrible that he begs to live out his life after all – money or no money. Lo and behold, the townspeople gather around George and his family, come up with the money and Christmas bells ring joyfully.

The almost universal appeal of the film among Americans speaks to the longing we have for the comfort of family and a community within which to root that family. The reality is that most of us come from messy families, families created by necessity, families separated by thousands and thousands of miles and our deepest roots are at the strip mall. We make up family as we go along.

I drag George Bailey into this because we need to understand the historical context from which gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people are excluded. Our isolation is not the result of individual pathology. It is a cultural, social and political isolation that allows us to be neither the individual hero/anti hero nor the transformed individual basking in the bosom of family and community. There is no context for us unless we do the work of discovering ourselves in history and building queer kinship, family and community in the present.
Some of our people are working on uncovering our history; some of us are feverishly trying to create communities. The community building efforts, however, are doomed to fail if we don’t begin to develop some consensus among ourselves about how to secure legal, cultural and political recognition of our families, however we define them. Conservatives argue that we are destroying family, but the truth is that among ourselves, family is a big empty thought balloon in someone’s cartoon. When we do think about it, some of us eschew family as antithetical to queerness, while others of us are trying to have George Bailey’s family.

Which is it? It is both and neither. Our movement and our individual coming out stories reflect most people’s coming of age. But we don’t seem to get beyond the prom. Stonewall was followed by the euphoria of the sexual liberation ethos of the seventies – for gay men and lesbians, let us not forget, since feminism and its call for sexual liberation was also the time when the joyous sexual abandon of gay men was at it’s epoxy. But then came AIDS and the feminist backlash and we haven’t found our way clear since. Much has been chronicled about the gay male seventies to eighties to AIDS experience. Very little has been written of what lesbians were experiencing at virtually the same time. This is not surprising, given the little importance paid to women’s sexuality or to our contributions to any particular era. We have yet to engage, however, in any serious dialogue about what this cultural phenomenon of coming out but not really coming of age has meant for us as individuals and as a movement. Or rather, what passes for dialogue is stagnant commentary from Gay conservatives who espouse supposedly new ideas (they’re actually very old ideas and well known to straight conservatives) about gay male nihilism or lesbian political correctness, about the virtues of monogamous marriage and the dangers of promiscuity and equally stagnant rebuttals from queer leftists who have forgotten that Marx, Foucault and most left intellectuals have asked us to examine the material conditions of our society and create social change based on those conditions, not invent them.

Most sexologists, historians and anthropologists agree that queers, or at least homosexual behavior, have been with us from the dawn of civilization. I’m certain cave men and women had less judgment about it than we do, given their limited understanding of the precious character of that white stuff squirting from the ones who peed standing up or the existence in the ones who squatted of a place where humans could be created. Somewhere in time we came to understand that what we call sex between the male and female of the species led to making babies. That knowledge did not stop humans from continuing to engage in sexual acts with members of their own sex, but it did lead to judgments that would ultimately be enshrined in religious cannons and codes of law. Despite the homoerotic culture of Athens and even the early Christian acceptance of same sex couples, western civilization has seen at least three thousand years of religious, social and political persecution of homosexuals and homosexual behavior. The names assigned to us vary from descriptive to vulgar, but no matter what we are called, we continue to be seen and treated as deviants, people outside the framework of what most humans understand to be good and necessary for the survival of the species.

Still, we are here. Of course, we don’t like calling ourselves deviants since the term has been itself perverted to mean demon, but, in scientific fact, that’s what we are: deviants from the norm. For most of recorded history we hid ourselves so well that it takes a great deal of talent and hard work to uncover us. We had to become experts at camouflages because discovery meant great suffering or even death. In some parts of the world that reality still keeps us hidden.

The scientific and industrial revolution that transformed most of the western world, however, would ultimately lead to a different reality for same gender loving people. The nascent science of sexology, revolutionary advances in reproductive technology (infertility treatments, in vitro fertilization, sperm banks to name a few,) global wars and the impact of the industrial revolution on the economy, job opportunities and the actual structure of families all converged to create conditions in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century that allowed us to start coming out of our caves and closets and to walk and love in the warmth of the sun.

Shifting the locus of economic production to large urban areas created more jobs and greater opportunity for people once bound to their families for survival to strike out on their own, to travel far and wide; to even go to war. Queers found each other and centuries of isolation began to shed away. We could begin to whisper if not yet speak out loud the name of our love. The underground communities we created in large urban areas such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Paris, London and Berlin after the first and second world wars were the incubators for Stonewall and what we now call the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (lgbt) movement in the western world. We were able for the first time in history to name ourselves, to chronicle our lives and community events, to develop our own iconography and archetypes, to fine tune our gaydar, to invent camp and give it to the world, to identify our writers and playwrights and actors and visual artists, to let queer culture seep into one generation and then another and another. The “spontaneous” riots that pitched drag queens, queer people of color and plain, run of the mill lesbians and gay men against the police in the streets outside a small bar named Stonewall in Greenwich Village took one hundred and fifty or more years to germinate.
Those riots, in 1969, also took place in the midst of both the Civil Rights, Peace and Women’s movements, a period that marked the most political and social unrest in the United States since the labor movement upheavals of the thirties and the Civil War.

Since Stonewall, we have made unprecedented inroads into the cultural/entertainment and political worlds. Elton John, Melissa Ethridge, kd Lang, Ellen Degenerous, Michael Boatswain, Cherry Jones, and countless others have declared their queerness and survived; some have actually thrived post disclosure. We have passed non-discrimination laws. The Boy Scouts have to go to the Courts to keep us out. We have elected out queers to Congress and to dozens of state seats. Some of the most powerful donors to the Democratic and Republican parties are gay. Right, left and Center all court our votes and our money. We have community Centers in more that100 cities. We got culture and we got clout. But we don’t got family – not legally. It behooves us to understand why and to understand that the step beyond Stonewall centers on winning cultural acceptance and legal recognition of our families; it centers on being the people who, whether we choose it or not, represent a kind of historic town crier, forever shattering the link between reproduction and sexuality and the legal and cultural definitions of family that link has created.

The right knows this fully well. They draw direct lines between us, abortion, reproductive choice, and the stem cell research made possible by reproductive technologies. We need to draw our own lines and stop being confused. It’s not the sex, folks. It’s the family that has the rifles of our enemies pointing at our hearts.

Marriage may be the political football and wedge of the day, but family is what we are embattled over.

This is not theory only. It is the truth of my own life. Growing up on welfare in the projects of Harlem as the eldest of seven with an alcoholic dad and a mother who worked feverishly to keep us together and whole and healthy, frame much of who I am today. Having to leave that family so I could find the room to become a dyke and love myself and the almost twenty years it took to come back to that family also frames and shapes who I am and what my life has been about, as I have gone about trying to create and sustain love and family in my life as a queer. For twelve years, I created family with Marcie in the midst of the AIDS pandemic. Among the people we called family and brother was Doug Warner. Doug was every bit the sassy, high living gay man of the early eighties. Short of stature, yes, but chiseled like a Greed warrior, blue eyes blazing and camp wit flaring. He was also the center of the civil rights work everyone else was throwing overboard because AIDS had become the locus of our every day, of our activism, of our fears. Not Doug. He was bent on making the fledging Gay Rights chapter of the Northern Cal ACLU flourish with the same passion he poured on his bougainvilleas. They would grow by the sheer force of his will and they did. AIDS claimed him in the end, but for two years, Marcie and I and Doug’s much extended biological and queer family fed him and his dream with every last ounce of our energy. And so the Gay Rights Chapter – now a project of the National ACLU - lives on.

What happened to his story, to our story? What happened to the heroism of Doug’s mom? One B grade movie made for television called “Early Frost” movie and that’s it? We’re still fighting this war, still building fortresses of love and compassion around our brothers and sisters – as we always have – from as long ago as the caves, through the inquisitions that claimed Joan of Arc and into today in some lonely hospital ward where yet another of us succumbs and is claimed by the arms of his lover. Where’s that story? Are Will and Grace all we get?

Yes it is, because we can be funny but we can’t be heroic. That would require recognition of our tribe, of our ability and determination to create circles of kinship and caring that look very much like those Doug and you and me and everyone else came from. To tell that story would be to legitimize our family, our tribe. Conservatives won’t have it and we are loath to poke that hornet’s nest of lost dreams, unattainable as the clouds floating above us, frightening as nightmares of falling from the sky. We have inured ourselves to heterosexual smugness by disdaining that, any resemblance to heterosexual life that might implicate us in their conspiracy of hatred. No strollers in my neighborhood say the boys in Hollywood and the girls in the District, please. It’s unseemly.

Nonetheless, we need family and we’re going about creating them in ways that are inventive, interesting, sometimes heroic and sometimes heartbreaking. We always have. What those families look like and how we continue to shift our relationships to accommodate our need for family is what is interesting and even revolutionary. We have the couples that have been together forty or more years and built into their lives discreet relationships with other couples – queer or straight – that accept our lovers as part of family because, if for no other reason, they’ve always been there. We have single men and single women raising children from failed heterosexual marriages. We have transgender men and women choosing to stay in relationships with partners who were once of a different gender. We have lesbians and gay men choosing to have and raise children together. We have lesbian or gay male couples with offspring through adoption or alternative insemination cropping up in every suburban mall in America; we have gay men creating queer kin of friends and former and present lovers who share homes on Fire Island. We have very similar arrangements among lesbians living on more or less communal lands in New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon and Florida.

And - we’re not the only ones driven by changing desire, economic status, the need to care for children, the elderly or dying partners, or sheer loneliness that find themselves rearranging faces on the old family portrait. Nor are we the only ones being excoriated by the right as unfit to bear children or keep them. The forced sterilization of poor women has gone on for decades and when that doesn’t work, conservative and “centrist” legislators make welfare reform so punitive, it virtually prohibits poor women from reproducing by making them choose between survival and bringing a pregnancy to term. As far as conservatives are concerned, Queers and the poor share the same province. In it, we have no choice and we should have no family.

The reality of Katrina and what it has left in its wake in Mississippi and Louisiana and most especially in New Orleans overtakes my senses and my heart and my soul.
It isn’t just that a great American city, a sultry, sexy, extraordinarily diverse city in culture and history lies in ruins. It isn’t just that we have seen days and days of images depicting the poorest and least empowered among us – the black people, the poor white people, children, the elderly, the disabled - left to die. It isn’t that we couldn’t fight back a hurricane of biblical proportions.

It is that the people we entrust with our survival knew it was coming and they didn’t prepare and they didn’t prevent what they knew to be inevitable because they didn’t care.

Never have I been more ashamed of being an American. Never has my belief in the capacity of our democracy to survive and reach for justice been more shaken than it is now. As I talk with you about family tonight, I need you to understand that Katrina and what happened in New Orleans, the mean spirited and very deliberate policies of our government to suck the life out of any policies or programs meant to support the poor and what we talk about tonight are all of a piece. Queer people died in New Orleans at the hands of Katrina and at the hands of our government’s lack of preparation and neglect afterwards. But those queer people who died, who tried to survive in putrid waters or on their rooftops waiting for help that never came, those people who witnessed the terror of anarchy in shelters or tried to protect their homes and businesses were, like most people who died in this tragedy, poor people. They were poor or black or both. As we reflect on the tragedy we need to ask ourselves not what happened to the “queer people” but instead ask what happened to the poor people?

I reflect on Katrina and economic injustice and the assault on vulnerable American families including the ones we are creating because despite the reality of marriage for same sex couples in Canada and Spain and Massachusetts and almost in California but for Mr. Shwertrzeneger, we don’t have a groundswell of grassroots support for marriage equality in this country. Many would blame the queer left for this lack of fervor, but I think that’s giving us far too much credit for influence we don’t have over Joe and Susie Queer, much les the general population.

It is more likely that Joe and Susie Queer equate family and marriage with heterosexuality and their own families of birth, with the very source of most of their pain and alienation and who needs to go there again? It is also more likely that we have grown up in a queer culture so besotted with middle and upper class images of the queers at leisure on cruises and beaches, clad in Versace and DKNY wear, Gucci bags slung over their shoulders that our image of ourselves and what we might become simply doesn’t extend beyond the confines of the beautiful people market or we are repulsed by them. Gay men contemptuous of breeders and lesbians who think it bad enough to have one mother and one father, let alone two moms or two dads are not a figment of my imagination. They exist and their resistance to that which resembles their past or fundamentally contradicts their values is not inconsequential or to be arrogantly dismissed. We’re not moving much beyond Stonewall until we can speak to and listen to each other in a manner that reflects and values how we really live and the ways in which we quietly and tenderly go about our lives taking care of each other. For some of us and for a slice of America, that way may look very much like George Bailey’s family, but it doesn’t for most of us. When we start thinking about ways of protecting and defending the two gay men and one lesbian sharing a household and two kids; when we include single parents in our conversation; when we understand that reproductive choice is as intrinsically queer an issue as is our sexuality; when we start talking about equal benefits for lovers who don’t share a household, when we hold up the rainbow mirror of our diversity and not just the glitter of the privileged or yesterday’s sorrow, we will have the audience we need to move beyond Stonewall.

We will also have the language we need to talk outside our own communities about what is fundamental to our oppression. Family and love are a very different conversation than one about civil rights or the abstraction of democracy.

What would the work look like? There would be research that we could call “Focus On Our Families.” There would be coordinated legal and policy work at state and national levels with an emphasis on equal benefits, non-harassment in schools, eliminating economic and legal barriers to adoption and reproduction, reform of social security, health care and all forms of insurance regulations as they relate to the designation of family members. If it is true that there are over 1,800 federal and state benefits that come with marriage for heterosexuals, then there are at least 1,800 legal and policy changes to be made, in addition to winning the right to marry.

We know what the work needs to be. What we don’t know as well is how to do it. I am here to say, again, that we do it through coalitions and alliances. To those who protest and say, “Oh, we’ve done that,” I say, no we have not. We’ve stayed in our own damn room and asked everyone to come to us. Come to our national march, come to our parade, come to our center, come to our house that we’ve already built and furnished and don’t mess with it, don’t talk too loudly in it, don’t get upset in it, don’t bring your issues in here. It doesn’t work that way.

We need a new house. We need a new way of organizing. We need allies. We need to come out as people in families.

At dinner with friends a while back in Provincetown, soothed by the soft brine in the breeze and sipping Rioja, we talked about family and as in any gathering between lesbian feminists, we had various takes on my talk of a queer movement and what family means to it. They pooh-poohed the notion of a movement, which I found a curious thing since we were talking about it and what would all these strikes and counterstrikes on non-discrimination laws in Colorado and Oregon and Florida and so many state constitutional amendments on marriage be about? Why is the right trying to introduce something so monumental as an amendment to the constitution of the United States defining marriage once and for all as the province of a man and a woman and biological ones, I’m sure. What, for that matter, were we doing in Provincetown facing the bay calm as you please with the certain knowledge that our queerness was routine and even celebrated on Commercial Street – without a movement?

I think their discomfort with acknowledging the existence of a movement has more to do with their repudiation of the political character of that movement, which is decidedly not of the left, no matter what Andrew Sullivan says. It is, and always has been, a centrist reform movement, led by largely middle class men and women who are uncomfortable with perceived extremes of the left or right, much like the country we live in. That is neither good nor bad; it just is. Most social change in the western world has been achieved through the alliance of progressive ideals and values with middle and upper class resources. I don’t see why we would be different. We have our radicals and left thinkers and activists and thank God for us, but we are a minority within a minority. We are not the thing itself. Rather than deny the existence of a movement, we need to examine it and find ways of using the resources and spontaneous tendencies for progressive ideas of that movement to create radical change that will have broad social impact not just on us but on all the other families our Government and the right wing are assaulting daily. Re-defining family and the State’s relationship to the most fundamental and necessary of social units gives us that opportunity.

We need to seize it and bring that conversation to our families of origin, to our neighbors, to the people we worship with, to the people we work with, to communities of color, to poor women, to activists in other movements for social justice. Winning the right to marry and achieving all the other policy changes necessary for the protection of all those who won’t or can’t marry is not up to us. The struggle is not just about us and neither will the solution be just about us.

We need allies and the only way I know to create allies is to tell the truth. To tell them what I need. To be willing to engage in alliance with them. To be generous and open and humble. To speak from the heart and not just about constitutional law, civil rights, equality and justice, non-discrimination, etc. People don’t walk with us or struggle shoulder to shoulder with us because they share an idea with us. They come when they are allowed to see our hearts.

Now, more than ever, is the time to rededicate ourselves to coalition and alliance with those who, like us, suffer the violence that is a deprivation of their rights. It is now more imperative than ever that we have the courage to envision a just world and act in defense of that vision. We need Planned Parenthood. We need the NAACP. We need the Palestinian and Islamic communities. We need the American Civil Liberties Union. We need the trade Unions. We need welfare moms and soccer moms. We need the people defending abortion clinics. We need all of them to understand and support the families we are and the families we dream of creating. We need them to say yes, we will support your legal, cultural and political struggle to define and protect your families. And we need to protect and defend their families.

For the sake of cold, clean air in our lungs, for the sake of melon moons, for the grown ups, children and puppies we love, for the sake of music and laughter, for the sake of our spirits, for the sake of grand adventures and inexplicable mysteries that a re the essence of life, I beg us to heed the call of our time. That call is not just to come out, to say I’m here and queer. It is not just a call to win the right to marry. It is a call to be bigger than our individual selves, to learn genuine compassion. It is a call to take the hand of those who have been beaten down and ask them to walk with us. It is a call to leave white only organizing forever behind because it wrong, unnecessary and not in our interest. It is a call to create and celebrate queer family and queer kinship, to celebrate that which we create not with blood but with trust and respect, with humor, with great sex, with courage, with honor, with love.


© Carmen Vazquez
Sarah Lawrence College
October 5, 2005