Top Quotes: “Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship” — Kath Weston
Introduction
“They walked through the Tenderloin after one of the annual Gay Pride Parades. As she and a woman friend approached a group of men in front of a Mom-and-Pop grocery store, the two stopped walking arm in arm. On her mind, she says, were the tensions out of San Francisco’s rapid gentrification, growing and escalating street violence linked to perceptions of gay people as wealthy real estate speculators. To Sharon’s surprise and delight, one of the men shouted out, “Go ahead, hold hands! It’s your day!””
“It’s my friend Mara calling for the first time in months. With a certain embarrassment, she tells me about the affair she’s been having with a man. Everything is over now, she assures me, maintaining that the affair has no wider implications for her lesbian identity. “The reason I’m calling,” she says half in jest, “is that I need an anthropologist. How would you like to ghostwrite a book about this whole thing? I’m going to call it My Year Among the Savages.”
“During the first few months of feldwork, I ask an interview participant in his early thirties for contacts and introductions. Peter Ouillette seems to be stalling for time. Finally he explains, “I really want to help you out … it’s just that I hate going through my address book. So many of my friends have died.””
“Becky Vogel and I are sitting in a cafe, talking over cappuccino about her plans to have a child through alternative insemination. “I’m on the lookout for boys,” she laughs, reveling in the irony of such a statement. “Do you know any Jewish men who want to coparent?””
“Coming out to biological kin produces a discourse destined to reveal the “truth” not merely of the self, but of a person’s kinship relations. At the end of what many lesbians and gay men imaged as long journey to self-discovery, when I tell you “who I (really) am,” I find out who you (really) are to me.”
“If you think it was rough in the 19sos . .. the 19205, you just didn’t talk about anything about [being] gay. On this side of the Atlantic. You could in Paris. But if you did here, you ended up in an insane asylum. Your family would sign you in for your own good. They could get you into there. That’s something that cannot be now. You couldn’t do anything about it.
People did get away with things. But, again, there was a lot of treachery. People would have a change of heart — then they would tell all. You didn’t know: your best friend might decide for your own good that you needed some help…What you’d be doing if you came out, you’d be declaring yourself fit for the insane asylum.”
“Laws that criminalize homosexual acts remain on the books in approximately half of the states, and while these laws are selectively enforced, the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision by the U. S. Supreme Court underscores their viability. That decision upheld a lower court ruling that convicted a Georgia man for consensual homosexual acts performed in the privacy of the defendant’s bedroom. The Supreme Court held that in this case a state law criminalizing sodomy overrode any right to privacy on the part of the defendant.”
“One woman told the story of her teenage son, who joked that now they could go to the malls together and “check out” women. On the hopeful side, a therapist with a large gay clientele knew of no child who had completely cut off relations with a lesbian or gay parent. Monika Kehoe (1989), however, reported mothers whose adult children had rejected them after learning of their lesbian identity.”
“As Diane Kunin put it, “After you break up, a lot of people sort of become as if they were parents and sisters, and relate to your new lover as if they were the in-law.” I also learned of several men who had renewed ties after a former lover developed AIDS or ARC (AIDS-Related Complex). This emphasis on making a transition from lover to friend while remaining within the bounds of gay families contrasted with heterosexual partners in the Bay Area, for whom separation or divorce often meant permanent rupture of a kinship tie.”
“Adding injury to insult are the practices of insurance companies accused of redlining neighborhoods with large concentrations of “single men,” thus denying much-needed health coverage to gay men while perpetuating the stereotype of gay people as invariably single and therefore unattached.”
“At a workshop for lesbians considering parenthood, one participant recalled thinking about asking her adult son for sperm when her lover wanted to get pregnant. The arrangement would have created legally recognized blood tie to the child that could have supported a custody claim if her lover were to die. After she realized that a genealogical mode of reckoning kinship would make her the child’s grandmother, she rejected the plan as “too intense.” Her fear was that perceived differences in generation would complicate her relationship to lover and child alike.”
“Older gays and lesbians even had the option become a grandfather or grandmother, as in this classified advertisement carried by Gay Community News: “Have Love, Will Travel -Does your baby need a grandma? Middle-aged lesbian couple need grandchild to dote on.” The very variety of these arrangements reinforced the belief that no models or code for conduct applied to gay families (aside from love), leaving lesbians and gay men freer than heterosexuals to experiment with alternative childrearing methods and novel parenting agreements.”
