Happy Holigays: On Unbelievable Gay Futures and Confronting Luck and Privilege
by Emily Blair
When I was twenty-three and in my first year of graduate school, I stayed in Louisville for Thanksgiving break instead of driving home to the mountains of Virginia for the holiday. I had recently come out as a lesbian, and on Thanksgiving Day, sat down with six gay men to share turkey, green bean casserole, goblets of wine, and my deviled eggs. My first Friendsgiving was a revelation of chosen family and a testament to my new way of existing authentically in the world.
Three years later, after a long breakup and subsequent unmooring of my social circle, I drove from my community college office in central North Carolina to Asheville to spend Thanksgiving with my best friend and her parents. Driving into the mountains, I began to cry with gratitude, and with everything else; I had been crying a lot then. After dinner, my best friend (also queer) and her parents and I sat on their large deck in the trees and played backgammon and drank homemade chai, her parents welcoming me with open arms, their easy back and forth telling of their love. I needed my friend, then, and she shared her family with me.
Now, a year after that inflatable-mattress Thanksgiving, my partner and I have been together since January and knew early on that we were a unit, a togetherness, despite living a hundred miles apart. We discussed the holidays and decided to celebrate Thanksgiving with their family and Christmas with mine. After evaluating their graduate school schedule, my work obligations, and relative distance between all of us, their family and I came upon the only logical conclusion: I am hosting my partner’s parents and sibling in this small house for Thanksgiving dinner.
When I came out as a lesbian at the age of twenty-two, and again as pansexual at twenty-four, I never expected that a queer partner and I could be loved by our parents. The canonical twenty-first century queer love story ends with reconciliation with one’s blatantly or accidentally homophobic parents, but begins with secrecy, deception, and rejection from the family.
Instead, my partner and I announced our relationship on Instagram and Facebook, where we are friends with both our moms and siblings. We uploaded pictures of thrift shopping, plant buying, brunches, and movie nights together. My partner and mom cursed and wrestled my washer and dryer from the basement of my old apartment into a U-Haul together when I moved. In my partner’s parents’ house, I took pictures of my partner blowing out candles on their thirty-third birthday cake, all of us beaming. We have never needed the before. We are living in the happy present.
I call this an unbelievable gay future, despite being here now. When I come out to acquaintances, they fall gravely concerned about our families’ perceptions of our relationship. The best that we have been taught to hope for, after all, is some grimace of tolerance, a tight-lipped smile of barely avoided ostracization. I knew that my parents would love me when I came out, but would they like me? Would they love me as a verb, inviting my partner into their home? Would we have to meet on neutral ground, some restaurant in a strip mall, tersely exchanging news of our lives?
No. My future mother-in-law and I will drink wine and cook in my kitchen while my future father-in-law and brother-in-law play with our dog in the backyard. On Christmas morning, my partner and I will drive up to my parents’ house in the mountains, where we will unwrap and laugh, eat ham and rejoice in giving. We will split our time sadly because our families want to see us, together, as a unit, and we cannot do every holiday with every family.
Which leads me to confronting a terrifying question: What’s the future of my queerness? What’s the future of my queer identity and community when I embrace them not out of desire for any form of family, but as an additional family, a different kind of belonging?
***
I have recently seen conferences, panels, and articles discussing the death of queer culture thanks to a cis-hetero public co-opting queer aesthetics. For a while, I couldn’t put my finger on why these academic discussions elicited such a negative reaction within me. But thinking about Thanksgiving with my partner and our families, I began to see connections between my “loss” of queer identity because of our families’ acceptance and this particular thread of queer discourse.
White queer people have been stealing cultural markers (language, dancing, clothing, etc.) from black trans and queer people for many queer generations, and have always benefited from a culture of white supremacy in the queer community which mirrors white supremacy and racism in the greater society. So when I hear about the anxiety that white queer people have about cis-hetero people stealing queer culture, and about what happens when queerness is not instantly recognizable on someone’s body, I hear a lower hum of anxiety about losing what makes us, us, or rather, what makes some of us, some of us.
Put simply, white cis queer people hand-wringing about cis-hetero stealing reveals a lack of understanding of what “queer culture” actually means, where it comes from, or how it has already been uncredited, stolen, and capitalized upon by certain subsets of the queer and non-queer public.
Before I came out as a queer person, I knew I was supposed to enter a narrative of struggle: would I stay in the closet to my family, desperate but unable to come out to them? Would I be disowned, or hardly acknowledged, when I came out? Would I share this queer experience with other (white, cis) people, belonging in this cultural narrative? This rite of queer passage never came.
I wonder if this vein of anxiety centers around queer community identity, and what these communities do for one another. This conundrum seems most prevalent in white, cis queer people, as we are not experiencing racism or the intersectional oppressions of racism and transphobia or queerphobia experienced by trans women of color, trans people of color, and recognizably genderqueer or trans people. We are also seeing our way of being queer co-opted, after complicity stealing from queer people of color with every “yaaaas queen,” death drop, “werk,” and vogue we’ve blithely used as queer communication devices among other white, cis queer people. When I started going to gay bars, white gay men gave me snaps and told me I was “slaying,” “yes hunty”ing me on the dancefloor; the Broad City clip of a sobbing “Yas kween” says it all about white mainstream culture performing black queerness.
I can’t take these claims of cis-hetero co-opting seriously not because they aren’t happening, but because these indignities appear so small in comparison to the discrimination and violence faced by other queer people, and this false hurt stems from losing a queerness that was never ours to begin with.
A white supremacist society protects my partner and me, allowing us to live cocooned in privilege compounded by our economic and educational levels (we are both currently middle-class, and will both have master’s degrees by May 2020). If I bristle at a straight woman calling her boyfriend her “partner” or wearing a flannel shirt and a beanie, if I claim the fandom of a pop artist or movie as queer space only, I am doing so to protect myself and my perceived culture, which I have already stolen from black and brown queer people.
With the false veil of oppression starkly lifted by our parents’ easy love and acceptance, I am forced to confront my perceived identity as a marginalized person, and my own complicity in white supremacy, racism, and cis-normativity in the queer community via the language I use, the media I consume, and what I claim as my own.
Should I worry that I am losing a queer reality? Did I ever have that queer reality to begin with, or had I imagined belonging only in the lens of this queer narrative of struggle, which works to uphold heteronormativity anyway?
With that narrative not coming to fruition, I must grapple with an impending reality, one that forces me to uncomfortably confront white privilege, a thunderclap of luck, and a rapidly shifting social tide in acceptance of (some) queer relationships: I can have a chosen family of queer people alongside these two families who, somehow, in some unbelievable gay future, have chosen to love me, to love us, for who we are.