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

2. Better Blatant Than Latent

2 Better Blatant Than Latent T hroughout the 1950s and 1960s, writer and peace activist Barbara Deming never explicitly told her mother, Katherine Deming, that she was gay. For a period of more than twenty years, they wrote each other loving and supportive letters, Katherine Deming from the family home in New York City, and her daughter from various places while living abroad, as well as her own homes in Massachusetts and Maine. For both mother and daughter, a subtle, quiet knowledge of Deming’s sexuality seemed quite a livable strategy. Mrs. Deming clearly knew about and accepted her daughter’s relationships with women, signing her letters with ‘‘love to all your household,’’ or, when her daughter was partners with Mary Meigs, ‘‘love to you and Mary.’’1 In turn, her daughter acknowledged the primacy of her relationships with women, which seemed an extension of the closeness and intensity of emotion between them as mother and daughter. This dynamic shifted as Deming developed a more political conception of gay selfhood. In 1969, while informing her mother that she and Meigs would be parting and splitting up their household, a fifty-two-year-old Barbara Deming sent her mother a letter that somewhat haltingly declared her identity as a lesbian. ‘‘Dearest Mother, I have news of myself that I should give you,’’ she began and went on to explain the particulars of her living situation. Describing her new partner, Deming wrote, ‘‘[S]he too is of a radical turn of mind politically. I love her children and they seem to love me.’’2 ‘‘A radical turn of mind politically’’ might encompass a breadth of causes and sensibilities, and her mother was left to discern what these were. A more unambiguous revelation of her sexuality was to come in 1974, upon 42 Chapter 2 the publication of Deming’s new book We Cannot Live without Our Lives, which she had dedicated to ‘‘my lesbian sisters.’’ A confrontation with her mother about this dedication ensued over the telephone, and they wrote about the phone call later to try to resolve the dispute. In this letter, Deming said to her mother, ‘‘You find [the dedication] disturbing because [it is] ‘so personal.’ Yet if [a married woman author] wrote a book and dedicated it to wives everywhere, this wouldn’t be too personal, would it? I know that society . . . smiles on wives but not on lesbians and wishes us not to be so personal as to exist. But, as you know, we do exist.’’ Perhaps to exist at all, Deming’s sexuality needed to be declared publicly. In this same letter, she suggested that her previous discretion about her sexuality had been untruthful. She wrote that each time she fell in love with a woman and took on a new living partner, her life ‘‘had changed profoundly,’’ and yet ‘‘I didn’t even tell you, my mother, in honest words, and I didn’t tell friends who were close, close to me. . . . I was sure [they] would rather not be told. . . . Or I wasn’t always sure that they’d rather, but I didn’t want to risk embarrassing or estranging them.’’ According to her, role-playing— even lying—had come to suffuse collective gay consciousness. She explained, ‘‘As I tried to say on the phone, pretending not to be ourselves has made us all feel a little bit insane. Yes, we are a movement now—the Gay Liberation Movement.’’3 Not all gay daughters and sons adopted Deming’s gay political consciousness , one that she herself only came to define during the late 1960s and early 1970s, a moment when gay politics was aligning with other emerging liberation movements of the period—the counterculture, women ’s liberation, the New Left, black nationalism, the student and peace movements—giving sexuality a prominent place in a wide-reaching critique of both American politics and American social life.4 The year in which Barbara Deming had made her first tenuous statement of a gay identity to her mother, 1969, had witnessed some specific moments that gave coherence to gay activism, including the Stonewall riots in New York City and the criminal code reform to legalize homosexuality in Canada.5 The riots in particular became a mythologized event in North American gay culture, history, and ritual: annual gay pride marches started in 1970 continue to commemorate this event.6 Adapting its name from Vietnam’s National Liberation Front, the Gay Liberation Front had also formed during this year...