EIGHT
THE POLITICS OF GAY FAMILIES
Whomever one seeks to persuade, one acknowledges as
master of the situation.
---KARL MARX
"Ever since they were small," remarked Jeanne Riley, "my kids have been playing same-same-different games." We sat on the couch watching her two-year-old daughter arrange small toys in rows of three, laughing to herself with delight as she pulled one away from each row and set about
working on new combinations. After a few moments, a look of concern replaced the wistful pride in Jeanne's face. "The thing is, as they get older and go out into the world, they're going to realize that their family's different. Substantially different. How will they handle that? How will we help them handle that?"
Lesbian and gay parents are part of the "we" in families we choose, but from a child's perspective, as Jeanne put it, the "context is going to be defined by having different parents. And she didn't choose it. She just has it." How can you knowingly saddle a child with the stigma of gay or lesbian parents, ask heterosexual critics, invoking cultural notions of childhood innocence. This is an argument that would deny children to the poor, the racially oppressed, and members of all other groups not assigned to the mythical mainstream of society, respond the defenders of gay families.
Earlier that afternoon, Jeanne had recounted her battle to include the children on her health insurance policy. The Internal Revenue Service considered them her dependents, but the insurance company had pronounced them ineligible for benefits because they were "related by blood" only to her lover and not to Jeanne herself. Jeanne pursued the issue with a tenacity that grew out of her fierce loyalty to her children. Though she was ultimately successful in adding them to
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her policy, the experience impressed her with a deep sense of just how different and lacking in legitimacy gay families remain.
The emergence of gay families represents a major historical shift, particularly when viewed against the prevalent assumption that claiming a lesbian or gay identity must mean leaving blood relatives behind and foregoing any possibility of establishing a family of one's own, unless a person is willing to make the compromise of hiding out in a marriage of convenience. Given that homosexuality became firmly allied with identity only at the end of the nineteenth century, and that the major period of urban gay population growth and institutional consolidation in the United States did not occur until after World War II, this entire shift has happened within a relatively brief period of time.
As constituted in the 1980s, gay families exhibited some distinct advantages over both nuclear families and the unattainable ideal of a unified, harmonious gay community. Face-to-face relations gave families we choose a fighting chance to encompass conflict and dissent without denying the difference that crosscutting identities (of race, class, etc.) can make or the divisions that can come between people. Significantly, many lesbian and gay men in the Bay Area cited a relationship's ability to weather conflict as itself a sign of kinship. Flexible boundaries released chosen families from the genealogical logic of scarcity and uniqueness that, for example, would limit a child to one mother and one father. Unlike nuclear families, gay families were not intrinsically stratified by age or gender. Their capacity to continue to embrace former lovers represents another strength. Consider how chosen families shed a different light on the issue of the alleged instability or inconstanciaof gay couples. Opinion among both gays and heterosexuals remains divided as to whether lesbian and gay couples stay together as long as heterosexual partners. If, however, the question is reformulated to take account of contemporary discourse on gay families, which allows a former partner to make the transition from (erotic) lover to (nonerotic) friend without alienating the kinship tie, one could make a good case that gay relationships endure longer on average than ties established through heterosexual marriage. If two people cease being lovers after six years but remain friends and family for another 40, they have indeed achieved a relationship of long standing.
For every way in which families we choose seem to depart from
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hegemonic understandings of kinship, however, there is another way in which the two appear to be cut from the same cloth. Certainly discourse on gay families reworks meanings and symbols that already enjoy wide currency wherever people in the United States think about, argue about, and practice kinship. Even within the relation that opposes straight to gay families, the "same" elements of blood and choice surface on both sides of the contrast between these "different" categories of kin. Chosen families incorporate the physiological contributions to procreation of gay men who donate sperm and lesbianwho bear children, while biological family encompasses the elements of selectivity implicit in counting someone as a close relative or severing kinship ties. At best, gay families and other family forms can be class)fied as simultaneously like and unlike. Just as the looking-glass language of sameness and difference obscures the complexities of relationships between lovers, so it provides a reductionist view of the relationship between gay families and more conventional interpretations of kinship.
ASSIMILATION OR TRANSFORMATION?
In the absence of close attention to history and context, there is the constant temptation for a person to view phenomena new to her experience as a reflection, extension, or imitation of something she thinks she already knows. Imagine you come across two women dressed as bride and groom, tossing rice over the heads of a crowd of onlookers. Would you consider them essentially the same as a heterosexual couple who had just been married? Different from a straight couple because both are women? Within the relationship, are they "like" based upon a common gender identity? Are they different from each other, and from the majority of lesbians, in their practice of butch/fem? What sign)ficance would you attribute to the inversion of throwing rice at the crowd, when the custom at weddings in the United States is for onlookers to throw rice toward the newlyweds? Perhaps you would revise your earlier conclusions if you learned that these women, dressed as bride and groom, were not stepping out of a chapel but rather riding a motorcycle down Market Street in San Francisco's annual Gay Pride Parade. After discovering more about its context, the scene immediately lends itself to reinterpretation. You might well find yourself searching for evidence of parodic intention
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and noticing the appreciative laughter of bystanders as the couple drives by.
Consider, then, the way most discussions of gay families have evaluated the political sign)ficance of laying claim to kinship as either inherently assimilationist or inherently progressive, without respect to ial or historical context. Though less hotly contested than in forr years, debate continues as to whether or not the struggle to ocate lesbians and gay men within the domain of kinship will, in long run, move gay people in a conservative direction. Some gay nmentators have argued that chosen families represent an impossibid for respectability, a misguided attempt to become just like the hapilly, heterosexually married Joneses who live down the street. Was this the goal of gay liberation, they ask: to deflect charges of deviancy by becoming the proud possessors of the very institution no standing citizen can do without? On the other side of the issue, advocates praise chosen families for leading to a decisive break with ealogically calculated relations. Those who fear assimilation into a dominantly heterosexual society tend to identify "the family" solely .h procreation and heterosexuality, while those who believe that 7 kinship offers an authentic alternative often accept at face value ologies that depict chosen families as independent of all social constraint.
Since the gay movement of the 19705, certain activists have conded that having no family should constitute a point of pride for i people, or at least remain a distinguishing feature of being lasbiangay. To quote Dennis Altman (1979:47), a gay proponent of the raight is to gay as family is to no family" thesis: "The homosexual represents the most clear-cut rejection of the nuclear family that ex;, and hence is persecuted because of the need to maintain the ,emony of that concept." In 1978, Michael Lynch (1982) reported ne gay men looking down upon gay fathers for having failed to ape "the family." E. M. Ettore (1980:20) has argued that lesbian 1 gay identity, in and of itself, denies the primacy of family. In ce of family ties, Guy Hocquenghem (1978) encouraged gay people elaborate friendship networks, which he portrayed as a more dematic form than kinship and a welcome alternative to Freud's deriion of sign)ficant relationships from filiation. In this view, kinship lf becomes a symbol of assimilation and marks the boundary been heterosexual and gay identity.' Why speak of lovers, friends,
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or even children as kin? "We" (gay men and besbains) should develop "our" own terminology to describe "our" (presumably distinct) experiences, rather than adopting "their" (heterosexual) language and institutions. In a twist whose irony has yet to be fully appreciated, activists organizing against the same New Right that accuses homosexuals of being anti-family ended up condemning gay people for trafficking in kinship.
"We know how myths work: "through the impoverishment of history," Hortense Spillers (I984:I85) has written. In the Bay Area many who argued against gay families interpreted kinship in a strictly procreative sense, taking it as a biogenetic given. By treating family as always and everywhere the same entity, they generally overlooked the context-dependent meanings that have given life to the concept and allowed it to become an object of contention. Gay families emerged in the context of historical developments that made coming out to relatives a possibility contemplated by most selfidentified lesbians and gay men. Also related to the timing and content of this discourse was a legacy of building nonerotic solidarities among gay people, followed by a period of community-building and the subsequent deliberation of differences that brought the concept of a unified gay community into disrepute. The very complexity of this history demonstrates that the appearance of families we choose during the 19805 represented something more than a knee-jerk reaction to the "profamily" politics of the New Right during the same decade. To formulate a critique of gay families in the abstract is to ignore the very circumstances that brought lesbians and gay men to the place of claiming and constructing kinship ties.
More useful than rhetorical attacks on a monolith called "the famfly" are ethnographically and historically grounded accounts that ask what families mean to people who say they have or want them. A basic insight to emerge from feminist examinations of kinship has been that the meanings carried by "family" can and will differ according to individual circumstances, identities, and intention to persuade (Thorpe with Yalom 1982). In the words of Kenneth Burke (1945:105), "When you have a 'Rome' term to which all roads lead, you thereby have as many different variants of the motive as there are roads." Because family is not some static institution, but a cultural category that can represent assimilation or challenge (again, in context), there can be no definitive answer to the debate on assimilationism. Rather
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than representing a crystallized variation of some mythically maintream form of kinship, gay families simply present one element in a broader discourse on family whose meanings are continuously elaborated in everyday situations of conflict and risk, from holidays and custody disputes to disclosures of lesbianor gay identity.
Significantly, lesbians and gay men have not abandoned the distinc:ion between heterosexual and gay identity in the course of refusing :o accept continued exile from kinship. Relocating the straight/gay boundary within the mediating domain of kinship made it possible for the establishment of a gay family to signify not assimilation, but (like .oming out) a "point of exit" from heterosexuality (K. Jay 1978:28). Yet it is also entirely possible for some people to talk about gay amilies with the expectation that this new category will allow them .o fit more comfortably into a predominantly heterosexual society. Others, with an interest in developing new forms of families, may portray their chosen families strictly as social experiment. A lesbian an choose to bear a child in the hope of gaining acceptance from 'society" and straight relatives, or she can embark on the same course with a sense of daring and radical innovation, knowing that children end to be "protected" from lesbainsand gay men in the United States. For someone who associates kinship very closely with racial or culural identity, the threat of assimilation might lie not in embracing the lotion of gay families but in claiming membership in a lesbianor gay 'community" where whites maintain hegemony. Politics do not inere in the term "family" per se, but in its deployment in particular ontexts.
All this is not to say that discourse on gay families lacks a radical potential. The notion of choice, for example, is very much an individualistic formulation, elevated in discourse on gay kinship to the level of a principle organizing a certain type of family. In the United States, people often tend to image social organization as the additive end product of a series of voluntary choices: individuals create groups like families) which in turn create society (Varenne 1977). Yet gay amilies can also structure lived experiences which mitigate the utopimism that is always a danger in adopting any concept so closely tied o individualism. Many lesbian mothers, for example, spoke about heir peers without children as though the latter had been deluded by he ideologies of freedom and creativity that inform chosen families. eanne Riley contrasted her own experience as the mother of two
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young children with the idealism of friends who had heard about "choosing children" but lacked personal experience as parents.
Last night, [my best friend] calls me and she says, "Let's talk." I said, "I can't. I have my two kids, and I have a little boy over here visiting. So I have three kids, I really can't. I have to feed them dinner." So she says, "Well, I'm just home alone." So I said, "Well, I'm here. Why don't you come over?" She said, "With three kids?" It's real clear that no matter how much your friends love you, if they don't want to be around kids, they're no longer your friends. They resent and chafe at the fact that they have to incorporate the family into their social environment. There's not that spontaneity. "Let's go watch whales." (laughter) You kidding?
It is ironic that parenting, one of the phenomena within gay families most frequently taken as a sign of accommodation to "the traditional," should also become a place where people can come to realize that social conditions impose limits on ostensibly unrestricted choice. There is also a radical potential associated with the one sense in which gay men and lesbians consistently concern themselves with "reproduction" in forming their own families. If "society" wants to define us as nonreproductive beings in the physical sense, some asked, why should we "reproduce" social arrangements that further the status quo? This double-edged usage of reproduction lends itself to a social critique that extends beyond gender and sexual identity to issues such as class which lie beyond the arena of concerns customarily attributed to gay people.
Having always assumed that he would marry, Stephen Richter said he had had to reevaluate everything after coming out made him realize that his life would not be "like" his parents'. People whose parents had pursued managerial or professional careers sometimes formulated a class critique by invoking images of a suburban home with its picket fence, sign)fiers of the complacent bourgeois life they attributed to their straight families. If he had not come out, Andy Wentworth insisted,
I would have just followed the same path that I was expected to, that everybody else did, that society says you should. And it's very easy to just continue the same traditions over and over again,
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get the same white picket fence that your grandparents have and your children will have after you. Where as soon as I realized I was gay, I said, hey, I've got a totally different situation going on here. My parents' expectations are now meaningless. Society's expectations are now meaningless. I have to build my own life. So that gave me more inner strength and durability and ability to be creative and in control of my environment.
lividuals from working-class backgrounds tended to experience ning out somewhat differently from Stephen and Andy. If they had dermined to live openly as lesbians or gay men, they often perceived this not so much as declining to copy their parents' lives, but as ?arting from their parents' dream of upward mobility. Believing that heterosexism and anti-gay discrimination might render that dream attainable, they saw themselves failing to reproduce not their par:s' situation but rather their parents' ambitions. In the process, they netimes began to question the value of those ambitions.
Viewed through the timeless sort of chronology that reproduction represents, a family can be pictured as an endless chain in which each lividual replicates, exceeds, or fails to attain what "your grandpar:s have and your children will have after you." Gay families, in contrast, have not incorporated the chronological succession implicit the Anglo-European notion of genealogical descent. Although chofamilies can incorporate biological symbolism through childbear, and adoption, the children raised in gay families are not expected go on to become gay or to form gay families of their own. Follow; the principle of choice, the kind of families these children establish should depend on their own sexual identities, and whether they estabfamilies at all should be left to their discretion. By substituting images of creation and selection for the logic of reproduction and cession, discourse on gay families can-and does-remind people their power to alter the circumstances into which they were born.
COMMON GROUND
Gay families not only dispute exclusively procreative interpretations kinship, but introduce a new basis for rendering heterosexuality t lesbian or gay identity commensurable. Put simply, two things that are commensurable are capable of being compared. In the context
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of the symbolic contrast between straight and gay families, kinship effectively bridges the opposition of straight versus gay by providing a third term capable of relating each to the other. Because commensurability reserves the distinctive identities of its contrasting terms in the course of establishing this common ground, it is not to be confused with the notion of likeness that informs an identity politics. In the case of gay families, the opposition between biological and chosen families reaffirms the straight/gay boundary even as the vocabulary of kinship links categories of beings hitherto isolated by the species difference often attributed to homosexuality.
To view gay identity as a species difference is to regard gay people as beings so separate, so different in kind, that many heterosexuals believe they do not know and have never met a lesbian or gay man (cf. Hollibaugh 1979). To make such an assertion with certitude implies a belief that the difference gay identity makes is so sign)ficant it should be immediately detectable. Stereotyping that reduces gay men and lesbians to sexual beings only reinforces this perception of utter otherness. But "in real life, and usually in good novels and films, individuals are not defined only by their sexuality. Each has a history, and his or her eroticism is involved in a certain situation" (Beauvoir 1972:26). Being a lesbian "is more than somebody I sleep with," protested Charlyne Harris. "I mean, that's just like saying to a straight woman that a man, is that a big part of your life?" By countering any tendency to view gay people as what one lesbian dubbed "a walking sex act," a discourse on gay families that encompasses nonerotic as well as erotic ties invites heterosexuals to abandon the standpoint of the voyeur in favor of searching for areas of shared experience that join the straight self to the lesbian or gay other.
Despite their overt allegiance to values of autonomy and individualism, people in the United States tend to conceive commonality through a notion of humanity, and species membership through kinship more than other sorts of social bonds. Former soldiers interviewed by Studs Terkel (1984) described how, during World War II, they found it relatively simple to shoot at a nameless, faceless enemy. In their narratives it is not the name of a captured soldier on identification papers, or even a glimpse of the eyes, mouths, and faces of fallen enemy troops, that shocks combatants into recognition of a shared humanity. Instead, recognition and regret come with the discovery of a letter in a dead soldier's pocket written by sister or
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sweetheart, or from stumbling across kin gathered around the picture of a boy in soldier's uniform at a residence in the war zone. The enduring image that organizes these stories of wartime, recounted nearly half a century later, is a transformation of "the enemy" into a person-someone "just like me"-at the very moment of learning about relatives he cared for and who cared for him in return.
The concept of humanity as a unified species is deeply rooted in the procreative bias of a culture that dissociates gay men and lesbians from family by defining them as nonprocreative beings. Thus the notion of a species difference that divides gay from straight resonates with the strategic location of gay people outside the domain of kinship. Viewed against the backdrop of species difference, a seemingly matter-of-fact situation such as walking into the building that two gay lovers call home can evoke a startled recognition reminiscent of the emotion felt by Terkel's veterans when enemy soldiers assumed human form in the context of familial relations. In his coming-out narrative, Stephen Richter described one of his initial encounters with another gay person:
The first time I was in a home where two men were living . . . I went off to the baths and I met a man there who had a lover and he introduced me, had me to dinner with he and his friend. And it was a very normal-looking house. I looked around and there was a sofa, and tables, and lamps. And I thought, "Isn't it amazing that two gay men can have a house that looks just like anybody else's house!" That was a fascination for me.
Situated in relation to symbols like home that carry kinship (as well as gender, class, and ethnicity), gay men and lesbians suddenly appear as social creatures rather than as self-absorbed and sexobsessed caricatures of what a person might be. That "gay people have furniture!" look says worlds about just how incommensurable essentialized notions of identity can become, and what it can take to bring them back into relation with one another.
By advancing a claim to kinship, discourse on gay families bears the potential to break apart what Michel Foucault (1978:48) has called the "frozen countenance of the perversions" without discarding lesbian or gay identity in the process. Alfred Kinsey (1948) long ago depicted homosexuality and heterosexuality as aspects along a single continuum of human sexuality. Evelyn Hooker's (1967) finding that psychiatrists
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could not sort homosexuals from heterosexuals on the basis of psychological tests was considered revolutionary in its time. Alan Bell and Martin Weinberg (1978) painstakingly documented the tremendous diversity among gay men and lesbians in order to argue that relatively little separates gays from straights. Yet such studies have had a negligible impact on the continued object)fication of gay men and lesbians by those who write "Kill Queers" on alley walls, or those who place a lower value on gay lives by failing to approve adequate funding for AIDS programs.
I am not arguing here that gay people are "just like" heterosexuals, or even that because Alfred Kinsey once placed the two along a sexual continuum that a continuum offers the best way to imagine their relationship. As a cultural category now linked to gay identity, kinship opens up new possibilities for relating gay to straight that shift discussion away from the tired rhetoric of sameness and difference. In discourse on gay families, straight remains opposed to gay, the two identities distinct but rendered commensurable through the vocabulary of kinship that conveys a common humanity to most people in the United States. The product of this discourse need not be a humanism that, like metaphor, dissolves difference into a larger whole. When lesbians and gay men can present themselves as fully social persons capable of laying claim to families, their distinctive sexual identities need no longer sharply segregate them as members of a species unto itself.
THE BIG PICTURE
After exposing the often oppressive ways in which families construct age and gender and organize inequitable divisions of labor, feminists have often been highly critical of "the family." In their works on kinship, they have warned of the twin dangers of ignoring power relations within families, and examining familial relations in isolation from relations of power in society at large. The vignette of the monkey cage introduced in chapter I offers an example of how families can structure hierarchies and gendered divisions of labor. Surely it is no coincide that of all five creatures in the cage, the animal labeled the "mommy monkey" ended up being the one who "left to make lunch." Knowing the ways such all-too-common representations are inextricably linked to practice, Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh (198Z:8)
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have called for "the total eradication of familial ideology," while Susan [arcing (I98I:73) has asked feminists to set about the task of "creating kinship without families. "
Without doubt many travesties have been perpetrated in the name family, including attempts to bar gay people from homes and orkplaces across the United States. Because gay families are not ructured through hierarchically ordered categories of relationship, however, they do not systematically-produce gendered divisions of bor or relations stratified by age and gender. Such stratification is not incompatible with chosen families and, in particular instances, erarchies can emerge within them, especially when children are volved. But neither is hierarchy essential to the constitution of gay mikes, which are often comprised primarily of relationships with ers. Rather than being organized through marriage and childrearing, ost chosen families are characterized by fluid boundaries, eclectic composition, and relatively little symbolic differentiation between otic and nonerotic ties. Where kinship terminology has developed association with gay families, it has not been particularly marked ~ gender ("lover" and "biological [or nonbiological] parent" offer two cases in pomt).
Families we choose interpose face-to-face relationships between hat Bonnie Zimmerman (1985) has called the "isolating structure" of entity and a more holistic, but exclusive, vision of a unified comunity. Does embracing gay families then mean abandoning all hope resurrecting a notion of gay and/or lesbian community? Lesbian and gay activists have traveled a long road since the time when comunity seemed to some "the place we feel at home-a radical kinship the making" (Zita 1981 :I75). By the late 19805 even white activists uated in the most privileged of circumstances had realized that not lesbians and gay men have participated in this "we," just as not eryone felt at home in what once passed for an encompassing comunity. To some activists who have spent hours negotiating their way rough the politics of identity and difference, the unresolved problem ms to be how to create "a new sense of political community which gives up the desire for the kind of home where the suppression of positive differences underwrites familial identity" (Martin and Mohanty 1988:204-205).
I have suggested that discourse on gay families offers one response the differences and divisions encountered in the search for the holy
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grail of community, though probably not the one sought by those feminists who have devoted a considerable amount of energy to analyzing the drawbacks of familialism. In the Bay Area, families we choose were not constructed solely by people willing to pay any price to create a zone of comfort or a retreat from the weariness attendant upon years of political activism. People tended to describe their chosen families in terms that were as much about sustenance as safety. Gay families have created a cultural space in which people can love but also fight, without expecting their chosen kin to walk away, much less go off to organize a faction. These families are not opposed to collectivism, nor are they inherently privatizing; on the contrary, they have proved capable of integrating relationships that cross household lines, exchanges of material and emotional assistance, coparenting arrangements, and support for persons with AIDS. Although families we choose do not offer a substitute for political organizing, neither do they pose an inherent threat to political action or collective initiatives.
This is an idealized portrait, of course. There are problems raised by identity politics that gay families may well never address. Following the individualized logic of choice, many people have a tendency to create ties primarily with people they perceive to be "like" them, using one criterion or another to gauge similarity. In that case, difference once again disappears below the personal and political horizon. At the same time, however, families we choose offer novel possibilities for healing some of the rifts and wounds left over from a painful decade of learning to deal in difference. By this point it should be evident that family can mean very different things from person to person and situation to situation. During the 19805 some women of color labeled the feminist critique of "the family" as a white feminist critique that took as its point of departure the nuclear family ideal of the white "middle class" (see Joseph and Lewis I98I). Speaking about black feminists, Barbara Smith (Ig83:1i) explained, "Unlike some white feminists who have questioned, and at times rightfully rejected, the white patriarchal family, we want very much to retain our blood connections without sacrificing ourselves to rigid and demeaning sex roles." The same year, Cherrie Moraga (1983:54) had written: "Being Chicana and having family are synonymous for me." For some people of color who felt marginal to "gay community"-partly due to experiences of racism in gay contexts, but also because they associated claiming a lesbian or gay identity with exile from kinship-discourse
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on gay families offered an opportunity to bring ethnicity and gay density into a relationship of integration rather than constant tension. Such a reconciliation of identities is by no means predetermined, however; witness the lesbians and gay men of color described in hapter 2 who found it difficult to accept the authenticity of gay families, and who linked their rejection of the concept of chosen kin D a particular racial or ethnic identification.
At this point it remains unclear how the emerging discourse on gay families will unfold, or in what directions lesbians and gay men will ursue the political implications of families organized by choice. Rayna Rapp (1987) has noted that in a period when kinship has become ighly politicized, lesbians and gay men have been somewhat less ccessful than others in making their bid for recognition of socalled alternative family forms. In the landmark Bowers v. HArdwick (1986:2844) decision that upheld Georgia's sodomy law and convicted ne man for having consensual sex with another in the privacy of his wn home, Justice White, in formulating the opinion of the Court, justified its finding that most areas of family law were inapplicable to the case by concluding, "No connection between family, marriage, or procreation on the one hand and homosexual activity on the other has en demonstrated."
One measure of the challenge gay families pose to the status quo is ask whether basic changes in the social, economic, and political -der would be required to grant gay families legitimacy and legal cognition, or whether chosen families could be accommodated by reply extending certain "rights" to lesbians and gay men and treating em as members of another minority group. From insurance compaes to the courts, major institutions in the United States will find it sier to validate domestic partnerships, custody rights for lesbian and y parents, and the right to jointly adopt children, than to recognize y families that span several households or families that include ends.
Because the relationship of lovers, like marriage, brings together two individuals united by the symbolism of sex and love, many in the United States have drawn analogies between this bond and more customary affinal arrangements. Relatives and judges alike perceive the option of treating gay or lesbianlovers as they would a childless heterosexual couple: as an exceptional relationship in a procreative world. Likewise, they have the option of treating lesbian or gay
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coparents as though only the gender of individual parents has changed, while everything else about the social conditions in which childrearing occurs remains unaffected. Due to this sort of reasoning by analogy from heterosexual relations, coming out seems to make a much clearer statement about kinship when a person has a partner or is the nonbiological coparent to a child. Without either of these ties, many gay people have reported finding it difficult to demonstrate the importance of friendship as kinship or to convince heterosexuals that lesbian and gay identity involves anything other than sex.
Pressure is building even now to take the path of least resistance. In the years to come it will be important that gay men and lesbians not become so concerned about gaining recognition for their families that they settle for whatever sort of recognition it seems possible to get. For lesbian and gay organizations that take up the issues raised by discourse on gay families, the future will bring difficult questions about where to devote limited resources. Should they work toward the legalization of same-sex partnerships, following Sweden's example (see Ettelbrick 1989; Stoddard 1989)? Does marriage have political implications that families per se do not? If gay people begin to pursue marriage, joint adoptions, and custody rights to the exclusion of seeking kinship status for some categories of friendship, it seems likely that gay families will develop in ways largely congruent with socioeconomic and power relations in the larger society. This accommodationist thrust is already apparent in the requirements for shared residence or cohabitation for a specified period of time that are built in to most domestic partner legislation (Green 1987). Following the logic of chosen families, an individual should be able to pick any one person as a partner-domestic or otherwise-and designate that person as the recipient of insurance or other employment benefits, even when that choice entails crossing household boundaries.
If legal recognition is achieved for some aspects of gay families at the expense of others, it could have the effect of privileging certain forms of family while delegitimating others by contrast. The most likely scenario would involve narrowing the definition of gay families to incorporate only couples and parents with children, abandoning attempts to achieve any corresponding recognition for families of friends. Legal recognition for friends, or at least measures that would eliminate any automatic elevation of blood ties over ties of friendship, must also assume its place on lesbian and gay political agendas. Rela
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fives calculated by blood should not be able to break a properly executed will that leaves possessions to a relative calculated by choice -whether that chosen relative be friend or lover-simply because the former can lay claim to a genealogical connection to the deceased.3 In the widest political and economic arenas, taking advantage of the transformative potential of discourse on gay families-for it is only a potential-will require great care and attention to cultural context in framing legislation, laying the basis for court cases, and selecting particular kinship-related practices to challenge as exclusionary.
REENGINEEIRINC BIOCENETICS
Change and continuity are more closely related than many people tend to think. No search is more fruitless than the one that seeks revolutionary forms of social relations which remain "uncontamiaated" by existing social conditions. Not surprisingly, then, discourse ~n gay families transfigures the exclusively procreative interpretations ~f kinship with which it takes issue in such a way that it remains of :hem but no longer completely contained within them.
By implicitly identifying family with procreation, the equation 'straight is to gay as family is to no family" concedes the entire lomain of kinship to heterosexuality. Only when displaced onto one ide of the relation that opposes straight to gay families does procreaively organized kinship become marked as "biological family" and qualified as one subset of a larger kinship universe. Although this ransformation does not challenge the interpretation of biology as a ;natural fact," it represents a truly sign)ficant departure from more onventional constructions of kinship in that it displaces biology onto
particular type of family identified with heterosexuality. Some gay nen and lesbians in the Bay Area had chosen to create families and ome had not, some had become parents and some had not, but almost 11 associated their sexual identities with a release from any sort of ,rocreative imperative. In this sense the radical potential of a disourse on gay families is not limited to contesting the species differnce of homosexuality, the "reproduction" of class relations, or even ae individualism implicit in notions of choice.
In the absence of a notion of genealogy, David Schneider (I984:I I2) as argued, kinship would cease to have meaning as a cultural domain: Robbed of its grounding in biology, kinship is nothing." After ex
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amining discourse on gay families, however, it would seem more accurate to say that, robbed of its relation to biology, kinship is nothing. Families we choose are defined through contrast with biological or blood family, making biology a key feature of the opposing term that conditions the meanings of gay kinship. To put it another way, biological family and chosen families are mutually constituted categories related through a principle of determinism that opposes free will to biogenetic givers. Through this relationship biology remains implicated in the concept of a family that can be chosen. On the one hand, discourse on gay families refutes any claim by procreation to be the privileged, precultural foundation for all conceivable forms of kinship. On the other hand, by retaining biology on one side of the symbolic opposition between straight and gay families, this same discourse removes procreation from center stage without dissolving kinship into the whole of social relations.
Lesbian and gay men have defined their own families not so much by analogy as by contrast, however overdrawn the opposition between gay and straight families might sometimes become as individuals argue for the distinctiveness of "their" type of family. Defined through their difference, blood family and chosen families assume equivalent status as they move away from the dualism of real versus ideal.and authentic versus derivative concealed within the concept of fictive kinship. Through the fear and sometimes the experience of being disowned or rejected after coming out to blood relatives, many lesbians and gay men come to question not so much the "naturalness" of a biological tie, but rather the assumption that shared biogenetic substance in itself confers kinship. This heightened awareness of the selectivity incorporated into genealogical modes of calculating relationship has shaped the constitution of gay families as families we choose, and allowed gay people to argue that their chosen families represent something more than a second-best imitation of blood ties.
Nevertheless, isn't there a danger that by subjecting kinship to choice, the concept of family will lose its sign)ficance? A similar sort of dilution has occurred with the concept of community: people now speak blithely of "the community of artists," "the sports community," and even "the straight community." With respect to family, some tendency in this direction also exists. Of late, any assemblage of persons within a household, from halfway houses for people recovering from addiction to retirement homes sheltering hundreds, may be
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billed as a site for the development of familial relationships. Where discourse on gay families differs *om these cases is in its emergence From a specific history of categorical exclusion from participation in kinship relations, an exclusion associated with claiming a lesbian or ,ay identity. A second characteristic that sets this discourse apart is ts application of the term "family" to face-to-face ties that already arry deep attachment and commitment in the absence of any corresponding recognition from society at large.
Descriptively speaking, the categories of gay kinship might better be lalbeled families we struggle to create, struggle to choose, struggle o legitimate, and-in the case of blood or adoptive family-struggle o keep. Among gay men and lesbians, there is the pervasive sense hat, as Diane Kunin put it, "gay people really have to work to make amily." In a sense, people of all sexual identities "work" to make kinship. The Victorian depiction of family as a domestic retreat from he working world disguises a variety of labors, from housework and hildrearing to the more intangible emotional work believed necessary
sustain relationships (Thorpe with Yalom 1982). Yet gay men and sbians encounter added dimensions that complicate the practice of onstructing kin ties: parenting children in a heterosexist society, laintaining erotic relationships without viewing them through the ne-dimensional lens of a gendered sameness, risking kin ties in comg out to straight relatives, interweaving peer relationships in multiles of three or four or seven, consistently asserting the importance of lationships that lack social status or even a vocabulary to describe fem. Always in the background are strictly procreative interpretaons of kinship, relative to which the opposition between biological and chosen families has taken shape. Too often in the foreground are pponents, well-meaning or otherwise, who reduce gay families to a metaphorlcal rendition of more conventional kinship arrangements, eating them as pretended family relations that will never quite meare up to a heterosexual standard.
When cast in narrative form, the shift from the identification of yness with the renunciation of kinship (no family) to a corresponnce between gay identity and a particular type of family (families e choose) presents a kind of collective coming-out story: a tale of sbians and gay men moving out of isolation and into kinship. By the )805, when gay people came out to relatives by blood or adoption, ey often were hoping not only to maintain and strengthen those
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biologically calculated bonds, but also to gain recognition for ties to lovers and other chosen relatives who could not be located on any biogenetic grid. If disclosure led to the pain of rejection, they were able to remind themselves that blood ties no longer exhausted the options open to them within the domain of kinship.
Like most stories, however, this one adopts a particular point of view. Without careful attention to the context from which gay kinship has emerged, an observer could easily overlook the rich history of friendships, erotic connections, community-building, and other modalities of lesbian and gay solidarity that have preceded the contemporary discourse on families we choose. In a sense, gay people have come full circle. According to John D'Emilio (Ig83a), a key precondition for the historical appearance of a gay or lesbian identity was the possibility of establishing a life outside "the family" once the expansion of commodity production under capitalism offered wage work to individuals in return for their formally "free" labor.4 By the end of the twentieth century, many lesbians and gay men were busy establishing families of their own.
Any attempt to evaluate the political implications of a particular discourse must take into account Michel Foucault's (1978) contention that power feeds upon resistance, and knowledge upon its apparent negation. s Inversions that protest a given dominance, like the opposition of liberation to repression or anti-family to pro-family, remain trapped within terms that frame the act of resistance as a protest against a given representation or paradigm. Significantly, chosen famflies do not directly oppose genealogical modes of reckoning kinship. Instead, they undercut procreation's status as a master term imagined to provide the template for all possible kinship relations. In displacing rather than disallowing biogenetic symbolism, discourse on gay families moves obliquely toward the future, responding to hegemonic forms of kinship not with a defensive countermove, but by deftly stepping aside to evade the paradigmatic blow.