Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America

Epilogue: Mom, Dad, I’m Gay

EPILOGUE Mom, Dad, I’m Gay B y the 1980s and early 1990s, gays were starting to envision themselves as enduring, if contested, family members. Images proliferated of gays revealing their sexuality to their parents, bringing their partners home to meet their parents, and participating in family events. The desire for family integration appeared throughout gay advice literature and gave inspiration to gay and parental confessional stories alike. Increasingly, gays seemed to be embracing domesticity and the expressions of interiority that it offered. This impetus for family integration, however, was a long-standing one, just as the fear of family banishment was never far from the surface. During the immediate postwar period, gays devised strategies to maintain both their gay identities and their family membership through discretion. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, those gays who had adopted a liberation perspective largely abandoned discretion, claiming a more unequivocal recognition from heterosexual society, which included their families. This demand encompassed a substantial critique of the stunted emotional expression that heterosexual society, nuclear families, domesticity, and their own parents represented. Paradoxically, the very vehemence of this critique also seemed to suggest a longing for family to which the gay culture of this period also gave expression. In seeking to expand the possibilities for family intimacy, lesbian feminists embraced this liberation analysis as well but felt an even greater ambivalence, as antifamily ideas contradicted the movement ’s ethos of womanly intimacy and mother-daughter love. In turn, the AIDS crisis suggested a profound reimagination of family care and nurturance . Postwar families had come to be seen as places of emotional intimacy through self-revelation between its members, a demand that gays themselves increasingly sought throughout the 1960s and 1970s. But it was also 180 Epilogue gays who troubled this demand for emotional intimacy in the renewed respect for basic acts of familial care that the AIDS crisis engendered, one that saw gays returning to the family fold both literally and figuratively. In the wake of the AIDS crisis, however, these sentiments became supplemented by a conception of intimacy characterized by both material care and understanding and empathy, one that seems to fuse the desires of liberation cultures with AIDS caring values. Could basic care and primal love be combined with an understanding of inner lives? Could the family of origin have an unequivocal place in the chosen family? This was not an unqualified fantasy for gays, and a substantial ambivalence remained as the family of origin seemed to become more omnipresent in gay lives, perhaps more so than many gays had ever hoped for or envisioned. Parents, too, held an array of confusing feelings about their gay children during the postwar period. During the immediate postwar period, they were prompted to view gay sexuality as a psychological phase or a consequence of psychological immaturity; during the liberation period, they tended to see it as a political or ideological phase or a consequence of an experimental, exhibitionistic youth culture. Seeing children as ‘‘really’’ gay, as some parents increasingly did through parental organizing and writing, necessitated understanding a child’s lost connection to parents: any commonality through a heterosexual sensibility was now irrevocable. In turn, the AIDS crisis tended to highlight gay sexuality and gay existence even as it suggested a committed form of family caring that was not concerned with sexuality. By the end of the century, what had definitively changed in parents’ expectations of gay children and in gay children’s expectations of their family lives was the ritual of coming out. Gays could no longer live a life of discretion, a life without an increasingly formalized and scripted coming out to their families. A fully developed, mature PFLAG organization was deeply implicated in establishing the necessity of the coming-out moment for the sanctity of both parents and gay children. By 1988, PFLAG had nearly two hundred local groups and was making gains within smaller, rural areas; the national organization had relocated from Denver to Washington , where it now had an executive director and staff. During these years PFLAG developed a more formalized advertising campaign in which the organization tried to make families with gay children conventional or normal . One way they did so was by making these families white. One telling PFLAG advertisement, which served as an invitation to PFLAG’s annual Epilogue 181 dinner in New York City in 1986, titled ‘‘We Are Family!’’ featured the Norman...