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Introduction K-I-S-S-I-N-G Beth and Stuart sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G; first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage. We used to sing that song as kids. We would change the names depending on who was currently sweet on whom, or depending on whom we chose to torment that day. Beth is my older sister. Stuart Flurb was her first boyfriend; they met in Hebrew School. My middle sister Nina has a special knack for anointing people with nicknames, somehow revealing that specific aspect of their character you just couldn’t put your finger on. Nina called him Fluart Sturb. It’s hard to describe, but it was totally expressive. To this day, I still have to stop my brain in order to sort out which was the boy’s given name and which was the one Nina dubbed him with. I remember Beth bringing Stuart and some friends to the “den” in our home that served as her bedroom during her adolescence. I wanted to see what they were doing. I meant them no harm. But my banging on the closed door alerted my mother. All I remember after that is the scurry: kids hopping out the ground floor window from the room, mad dashes to stash stuff in the closet . . . and that I got my sister “in trouble.” Beth never married Stuart; she’s been in love but has not married nor has she born babies to put in baby carriages. She didn’t even like to push my kids in their strollers. Why did we kids think that song made any sense? Why was its sharp edge double sided: meant to recognize and support 1 2 Introduction with one side, meant to estrange and harm with the other? Why was that ditty so powerful for us? What is it about desire and its supposed connection to the inevitability of family—as if enjoying the closeness that comes from sitting with a friend in a tree is linked, in the span of a sentence, a flash of thought, to the nuclear two-heterosexually parented family. The childlike fantasy can only go as far as the creation of babies. It cannot imagine staying single. It cannot envision queerdom, divorce, abuse, disruption , re-marriage, falling in love more than once. It cannot take in the long haul of child rearing and helping to develop strong independent beings on their way into the world. I never really hear people say: “I want to raise children,” they say: “I want to have babies.” Like the ditty, the circle ends with the most regressed aspect of the fantasy, being a baby. My partner Dawn was a towheaded inquisitive child running barefoot through “cricks” and riding horses bareback. Her family were ranchers living in rural northern California. Not the rich kind, the earth is dust. I can barely breathe out there and can never stop thinking about Steinbeck. For money and to cope with the heat, in the summers the family ran a concession stand at a lake in the nearby mountains. Dawn played “garden” and considered one of the goats her best friend. They rose early in the mornings. While “mother” (in my New York Jewish home, a screeching “ma” would do) did her bible study and her own chores, she set the children down to practice piano for a full hour each before their chores and school. Dawn was raised a fundamentalist Baptist and her mom continued her early morning bible study until she died. Despite Dawn’s—let’s just call them “more ambivalent”—experiences as a member, from the outside her family embodied the ideal of “American family life” and could have been a poster family for the “Family Values” ideologues of today. Interestingly, Dawn found out at the age of fortyeight that her parents hadn’t been legally married until the birth of their fourth child, Dawn’s younger sister. That means her mom was a poor teenage white mother out of wedlock with three kids before she got herself “legitimate.” Members of the right wing in this country have been working very hard to protect the “American Family.” Crusaders charge ahead mobilizing the vast powers of the state to infantilize the family, to fashion Norman Rockwell paintings into living stories. This isn’t an easy thing to do, even for those with actual access in the U.S. legal system. I...

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