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

Introduction

INTRODUCTION T hroughout the 1970s and 1980s, poet Elsa Gidlow, then an elderly woman, met a number of younger lesbians who considered her a lesbian icon. Gidlow had grown up in Quebec but had settled in San Francisco in the 1920s, and she extolled the gay community she came upon there throughout the early part of the century. ‘‘Before every half-informed person had learned to mouth the jargon of the sexologists and psychiatrists to homosexuals,’’ she insisted, ‘‘[individuals] respected one another’s privacies’’ in day to day life, no less so in their own families.1 Gidlow’s mother, in fact, had lived with her and her partner, something her lesbian visitors found intriguing, as many felt that their parents had rejected them to varying degrees. But Gidlow insisted that they see a paradox in seeking their parents’ understanding. ‘‘Do we not,’’ she would ask, ‘‘in challenging our parents’ values, reject them?’’ She did not find it ‘‘fair to expect [a] continuance of unquestioning approval.’’2 Mocking a contemporary coming-out scene, she insisted that she never would have considered taking her mother aside and saying, ‘‘Have you understood that my love and friendship for the women I lived with included sex?’’ In her view, telling parents would only bring about heartache and confusion and even prurience. ‘‘We are not responsible for the fantasies of others,’’ she wrote. ‘‘All we can do is not contribute to them.’’3 Gidlow went further, decrying a sexual voyeurism in the society at large, a corollary of a repudiation of discretion that she discerned surrounding sexual matters . ‘‘Who has ordained, and on what authority, that we must supply the world with script and justification of our intimate interactions?’’ she asked.4 Elsa Gidlow’s reflections offer an arresting assessment of both the revelation of the personal and the significance of sexuality within the family. Her call to privacy seems particularly out of sync with the relationships between gays and their parents in contemporary North America, when the coming-out moment seems taken for granted as a significant and necessary viii Introduction ritual. The polite reticence that she described seems to have long since shattered .5 How can this shift be explained, between the mid-twentieth century, when Gidlow saw a fundamental rupture, and our own times? How did gays and their parents conceive of family selves and gay selves, and how did this duality manifest itself culturally? How did it come to be that gays and their parents became particularly burdened with negotiating both conditional and unconditional love within postwar families? From the perspective of many cultural observers, gays have been largely orphans, adrift from relationships with parents and kinship ties as heterosexual families have known them. And yet, between the immediate postwar period and the 1990s, the family of origin, as both a lived relationship and a symbol, has been a central animating force and preoccupation of both gay culture and politics and has shaped gay thought more broadly. Gays also have shaped the sensibilities of their families, provoking an analysis of the meanings of family intimacy and family activist politics. This is a study of the relationship between gays and their heterosexual parents in North America starting in 1945 and ending in the early 1990s. I acknowledge the depth and the subtlety of the family’s influence not only on the intimate expressions and collective memories of these individuals but also on culture and politics, the realms in which gays and their families observed each other, represented each other, and imagined each other. The relationship between gays and their parents illuminates larger themes of intergenerational tensions between baby boomers and their elders, evolving notions of intergenerational obligation and caring, demeanors of revelation and discretion, and, perhaps most important, feelings surrounding the very purpose of family life in the post–World War II period. Despite cultural ideas and images of gays ‘‘coming out’’ to their families, or being excommunicated, the family of origin surprisingly has not been widely acknowledged by historians as a shaping force of either gay or family consciousness. In her historical ethnography, anthropologist Kath Weston has explored the biological family as a contested concept for gays, arguing that gay kinship challenges procreation and biology; in her view, gay people have pioneered new meanings and practices of kinship, with the social on a higher plane than the biological. Here ‘‘chosen’’ families—of friends, partners, activist communities, and their own children—are considered to be the crucial, and sometimes the sole...