Unchosen Families

Those of us who study issues of family and kinship hear a lot about how lesbians and gay men do not—or should not—have families. Indeed, there was a time when the words family and gay were understood to be polar opposites, words that applied to inherently distinctive domains.¹ This separation was understood to operate on a number of levels. First, people in gay communities and in the larger society tended to assume that coming out as gay or lesbian would inevitably lead to distancing, if not outright expulsion, from one's family of origin. Beyond this, lesbians and gays were not expected to create their own families, that is, reproduction was either logically or morally outside their experience. And finally, family and gay were seen to constitute culturally antagonistic universes, with the values of each set against one another almost as mortal enemies. Being gay, in this reading, was all about individualism and being liberated from the confines of kin demands; being in a family was, well, the opposite. Recent framings of these issues in the work of many queer scholars take a similar position, often based on a different moral calculus: the desire to preserve or establish familial bonds may reveal the power of heteronormativity, a rejection of the insurrectionary foundation of queerness, and thus a kind of capitulation to the forces of straight convention.

Historian Heather Murray's book Not in This Family poses a significant challenge to these congenial truths. Instead of relegating issues of sexual difference and family to different universes, she meticulously examines the post-World War II historical record, innovatively reading kin relations during this period. Most important, she focuses not just on what gay men and lesbians said about family but on what their families, especially their parents, said about them and thus on how having a gay or lesbian child shaped parental notions of responsibility and love. Her account parallels the progression of gay consciousness after the war, as gay men and lesbians formed self-conscious communities and increasingly articulated a discourse organized around civil rights and collective pride, showing that parallel shifts also occurred in the lives of parents.

Murray argues that throughout this period gays organized much of their self-awareness in a dialogue that required the presence of family, particularly parents, as interlocutors. Psychological theories of the 1950s and 1960s gave parents a starring role in shaping their children's sexuality, and whether gays and lesbians sought cures for their perceived deviance or demanded dignity, responsibility still rested with their parents, especially their mothers. Letters written by gays during the immediate postwar years reveal a nostalgia for family and a longing to return to the fold, suggesting that the breach between gays and their kin was never easily healed. Liberation movements that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s echoed many of these concerns, not least in the central metaphor of lesbian feminism, sisterhood, which drew on widely shared ideas about mother-daughter relationships.

Ironically, as liberation movements developed in the 1980s, gay men and lesbians embraced the notion that gender roles and sexual orientations were social constructions, while their parents located explanations in nature. If their children were gay because of some irresistible force of nature, then rejecting them would mean resisting nature itself, perhaps even the will of God. Parents began to craft discourses that would help relieve other parents of feelings of blame for their children's sexuality, providing the foundation for the creation of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). Their insistence that homosexuality was not a conscious choice generated a conflict with the politics of the New Right, leading parents to see not only their children but themselves as victims of homophobic rhetoric.

PFLAG's rhetoric drew on the increasing popularity of self-revelation in memoirs and other public personal accounts while also revealing the influence of self-help movements, particularly as they developed to confront issues of sexuality, mental health, and other personal problems. These accounts...