Spawning Generations: Rants and Reflections on Growing Up WITH LGBTO+ Parents

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Copyright © 2018 Demeter Press

Individual copyright to their work is retained by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Spawning generations : rants and reflections on growing up with LGBTQ+ parents / Sadie Epstein-Fine and Makeda Zook, editors.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-77258-163-8 (softcover)

1. Children of sexual minority parents. 2. Children of gay parents. 3. Parent and child. I. Epstein-Fine, Sadie, 1992-, editor II. Zook, Makeda, 1986-, editor

HQ777.8.S63 2018 306.874086’6 C2018-901123-8

Spawning Generations

Rants and Reflections on Growing Up with LGBTQ+ Parents

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EDITED BY

Sadie Epstein-Fine and Makeda Zook

DEMETER PRESS

For all the queerspawn, gaybies, queerlings and rainbow children of past, present, and future generations.

And to dyke moms, femme moms, butch moms, gay dads, bear dads, leather daddies, trans parents, queer parents, genderqueer parents, poly parents, non-bio parents, birth parents, adoptive parents, fairy godparents, spunkles, funkles, donors, surrogates, chosen family, blood family, community. Thanks for raising us.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Finding Each Other

Makeda Zook and Sadie Epstein-Fine

I. BEGINNINGS

1.

Rainbow Kid: Rants and Reflections

Liam Sky

2.

Spawn

Gabriel Back-Gaal

3.

Gathering Voices:

An Interview Project with Young Adults Raised in

Queer Families

Sammy Sass

4.

1986

Kellen Kaiser

5.

My Life as a Play

Micah Champagne

6.

Insider/Outsider:

Breaking the Boundaries of Heteronormativity

Cyndi Gilbert

7.

Closets of Fear, Islands of Love: Coming of Age in the 1980s

Niki Kaiser, Carey-Anne Morrison, and

Lorinda Peterson (Illustrator)

8.

The Love of the Princess: The Kids Really Are Alright

Felix Munger

9.

Sweating the Gay Stuff: The Toaster Oven Tradition

Sadie Epstein-Fine

II. MIDDLES

10.

Eighteen: My First Year as a Grownup Queer(spawn)

Devan Wells

11.

A Homophobe at Body Electric

Christopher Oliphant

12.

Glitter in the Dishwasher

Morgan Baskin

13.

Leslie’s Girl

Jessica Edwards

14.

Roots and Rainbows

Aviva Gale-Buncel

15.

Did I Make My Mother Gay?

Meredith Fenton

16.

Gayby Baby:

In Conversation with Filmmaker Maya Newell

Maya Newell, Makeda Zook, and Sadie Epstein-Fine

17.

Don’t Leave Me This Way

Suzanne Phare

III. ENDINGS

18.

Jannit’s Pink Lesbian Kitchen

Hannah Rabinovitch

19.

My Moms Are Getting Gay Married, But I Won’t Be There

Kimmi Lynne Moore

20.

If You’re Gay, What Am I?

Elizabeth Collins

21.

We Are Made of Generations

Jamie Bergeron

22.

Watching Roseanne

Dori Kavanagh

23.

Resistance, Like Leather, Is a Beautiful Thing

Lisa Deanne Smith

24.

In Between Heart and Break

Makeda Zook

About the Contributors

About the Editors

Acknowledgements

Deep gratitude for our many moms—Rachel, Lois, Alice, Annette, and Krin—thank you for encouraging and inspiring us every step of the way. A very special thanks to Rachel Epstein who has been instrumental in bringing this collection to life. Rachel has been both our cheerleader and our coach all the way through this process. Thank you for editing many drafts of our introduction and laughing/crying with us at midnight.

A huge thank you to Dr. Andrea O’Reilly and everyone at Demeter Press for approaching us with the idea and helping to see it through. Thank you for your patience and dedication. We would also like to thank the independent reviewers and other people we anonymously consulted in the fields of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies. Thank you for helping to strengthen this collection with your expertise.

And finally, the biggest shout-out goes to our contributors for embarking on this journey with us. We are grateful for every contributor’s willingness to take the risk of diving deep into their stories, and for so generously giving of their time, energy, creativity, and patience. This is your book.

You young ones

You’re the next ones

And I hope you choose it well

Though you try hard

You may fall prey

To the jaded jewel.

—Testimony, Ferron

***

Why bastard? wherefore base?

When my dimensions are as well compact,

My mind as generous, and my shape as true,

As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us

With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?

—Edmund in King Lear, William Shakespeare

Introduction

Finding Each Other

MAKEDA ZOOK AND SADIE EPSTEIN-FINE

AS KIDS OF QUEERS who grew up in Canada in the nineties, we can recall all of two children’s books that reflected our families. It often felt like we were disparate pieces of weirdness, scattered onto the monotone background of what family should look like. We were on the frontlines of classrooms and schoolyards explaining our families to our peers and teaching our teachers about what sensitivity, inclusion, and support look like. As we grew up, the gayby boom expanded, and as the definition of family was slowly redefined, we began to feel incrementally less scattered. We grew up sitting on panels, assuring prospective queer parents that we really do turn out all right, and that despite the homophobia that exists in the world, we do not grow up to resent our parents. We have watched our queer and trans friends attend the LGBTQ2+ family planning courses that our moms helped launch, become parents themselves, and then helped them find children’s books for their wee ones depicting families they could recognize as their own.

As the world of queer and trans parenting has grown, boomed even, so too have the children’s and parenting books. However, this boom and the books that accompanied it never had an easy or straightforward path. In Canada, in 1997, Asha’s Mums by Rosamund Elwin and Michele Paulse was one of three books about same-sex families initially banned by a local school board in British Columbia. The issue was finally resolved in 2002 with a Supreme Court of Canada decision allowing the three books in the school board. Heather Has Two Mommies by Lesléa Newman was at the heart of similar controversies in the United States.

Finding these children books about queer families was like finding a needle in a haystack. It was (and still is) even rarer to find a book written by kids of queers about being kids of queers. When we were approached to compile and edit this collection, we were offered both an incredible opportunity and a huge responsibility. It was an opportunity to create a vehicle for a spectrum of queerspawn voices to be heard and a responsibility to ensure that queerspawn readers will recognize themselves within this spectrum.

No book about queerspawn can fail to acknowledge the foundational queerspawn texts that do exist. Most notably, Abigail Garner—an activist, speaker, and writer of queerspawn experiences since the nineties—interviewed adult queerspawn from across the United States for her 2004 book Families Like Mine. In 2000, Noelle Howey co-edited (with Ellen Samuels) a collection of essays, Out of the Ordinary, about growing up with queer and trans parents. Howey also authored Dress Codes, a memoir about growing up with a trans parent. In Canada, Alison Wearing’s Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter (2013), a memoir about growing up in the eighties with a gay dad, has also garnered critical acclaim. In the United Sates, Alison Bechdel has written and illustrated Fun Home (2006)—a memoir in the form of a graphic novel about her closeted father’s suicide after her own coming-out. Fun Home is now an award-winning Broadway musical. In 2013, Alysia Abbott wrote Fairyland about growing up with a bisexual father in the 1970s and 1980s San Francisco gay scene, amid the AIDS epidemic. These books, written by and for queerspawn, are a relief in a mainstream literary and pop culture crowded with stories written on behalf of us, but not by or for us.

The first Hollywood film to feature queerspawn as leads was The Kids Are Alright. In this film, the moms (wealthy, white, suburban lesbians) are going through a rough patch in their relationship. When the sperm donor enters the scene, one of the moms has sex with him, which shifts the focus in unrealistic ways from the queer family and lesbian couple to the heterosexual affair; the straight sex scene becomes the only hot sex scene in this so-called queer movie. Although The Kids Are All Right was widely criticized, most scathingly (and appropriately so) by queer audiences, the screenwriters did capture with some acumen certain aspects of the kids’ experiences—including their different reactions to searching for, and finding, their sperm donor, the daughter’s struggle with perfectionism, and the ways that queer parents can unknowingly pressure their kids to act as poster children. The writers did get a few things at least somewhat all right.

The Kids Are All Right was followed by a few more nuanced versions of what queer families might look like. The Fosters, a television series on ABC’s family channel, though not written by queerspawn, is written by a queer person and does portray queer families in a more intersectional, three-dimensional way, including tackling issues of multiracial families, racism, adoption, the foster system, and internalized homophobia. Transparent, though created by someone with a transgender parent (and who later came out as genderqueer themselves), received mixed reviews from trans communities. Specifically, the choice to cast a cisgender man as the lead sparked criticism, as trans actors (and specifically trans women) are consistently under- or unemployed, and opportunities in Hollywood are limited. Some felt that this show broke new ground in telling the story of an older transwoman, coming out later in life. Others felt that the show’s creator, Jill Soloway, missed the mark on the diversity of trans representations and experiences. Despite these mixed reviews, it is refreshing to see queerspawn stories that are complicated and queerspawn characters that are at best imperfect, and at worst, wholly unlikable. Complicated stories and imperfect characters become especially important when our lives are so often curated to be palatable for mass consumption.

POSTER CHILDREN: REFUSING TO AIRBRUSH OUR LIVES

Too often, as queerspawn, we have been taught that airbrushing our lives is the best form of survival—to protect our families, we must present a particular picture of who we are to the world. Within queerspawn communities, this is referred to as poster child syndrome. As Sadie recently put it in a newspaper interview, being a visible and public queerspawn meant becoming the apple of every lesbian’s eye. The pressure to be poster children and poster families often means having to sweep under the rug experiences of family divorce, addiction, death, disease, grief, depression, and abuse. We feel shame about having feelings we are not supposed to have—for instance, resentment toward our families for being queer or the questioning of our own sexual and/or gender identities. We fear these feelings of resentment or our identification as other than heterosexual and cisgender may prove a homophobic, transphobic someone, somewhere, right. We edit our lives for both straight and queer audiences to prove straight audiences wrong and to provide possibility and role models for queer ones because we are heavily invested in seeing queer families grow and expand. These edits become more necessary if queerspawn are confronting multiple forms of oppression and the stereotypes that come with them.

As queerspawn, we have often presented our lives to conform to other people’s expectations of what has been difficult for us and what we have risen above. We have smiled for the camera, the researchers, and the reporters, who always seem to be hovering and speculating on the social phenomenon that is our intimate, personal, and family lives. We have felt the pressure to be perfect to prove to the skeptics, the disbelievers, the pessimists, and the straight-up haters that we are a social experiment gone right—one that has produced well-adjusted children.

This anthology is about carving out a space for our voices. It is an attempt to create space for our stories without the pressures of having to conform to a narrative that demands perfection and proving to onlookers, both outside of and within queer communities, that we turned out all right.

If you, the reader, are looking for that narrative here, you won’t find it. Instead you will find voices that ask the following questions: What does it mean to be well adjusted in a world that teaches us to lie about our imperfections and to believe we are alone in those imperfections, or in a world rife with problems and fraught with violence? What does it mean to be resilient in a world that will not allow us to reveal our imperfections for fear of putting our family’s safety at risk?

We are, in fact, and all at once, resilient, imperfect, and fiercely protective of our families. We exist in a world of grey and this is exactly why we are thrilled to launch this anthology—it is a reflection of our actual experiences, airbrushed for no one—at times humorous, light, joyous, prideful, and hopeful, at other times sad, and full of grief, guilt, shame, denial, resentment, and anger.

NETWORKS OF QUEERSPAWN

This book spans three continents, with most of our contributors living in Canada and the United States. The largest existing network of queerspawn is COLAGE, a national network dedicated to connecting and supporting queerspawn (colage.org). COLAGE was founded in 1990 and has chapters throughout the United States and one Canadian chapter run by the Toronto District School Board (1997 to 2013), picking up from its predecessor, OK 2 B Us (1990 to 1995). Sadie was a co-founder of Through our Roots, a grassroots network of queerspawn in Toronto, which existed from 2011 to 2013.

In Canada, there is currently no formal, national network for kids of queer and trans people. The closest to a queerspawn-specific network in Canada is an Ontario-based organization called the Ten Oaks Project (tenoaksproject.org), founded by Julia and Holly Wagg in 2004. For the past thirteen years, Camp Ten Oaks, a one-week overnight camp, has welcomed children and youth from LGBTQ2+ families and who identify as LGBTQ2+ themselves.

There are many Canadian initiatives that were (and are still) essential in growing and in politically and legally legitimizing queer and trans families. However, these initiatives have been primarily focused on parents, not kids. One of Sadie’s moms, Rachel Epstein, founded the LGBTQ Parenting Network (lgbtqpn.ca) in 2001, initially located at Family Service Toronto and currently at the Sherbourne Health Centre in downtown Toronto. The LGBTQ Parenting Network has been key to connecting, supporting, and advocating for queer and trans families over the years, often in partnership with the 519 Church St. Community Centre. Besides these government-funded programs, there have been numerous grassroots organizations designed to support LGBTQ families—groups such as Gay Fathers, Gays & Lesbians Parenting Together, Mommy Queerest, Rainbow Club, Alternative Moms, Rainbow Families, and Militant Mamas. Many of these groups assisted those who were seeking to become parents before more institutional support was available. For example, Makeda’s moms (Krin Zook and Annette Clough) and contributor Hannah Rabinovitch’s moms (Jannit Rabinovitch and Patrice Snopkowski) were part of an informal, ad-hoc group in Vancouver in the 1980s that called itself the Lavender Conception Conspiracy. This group was a do-it-yourself collective of queer women who came together to strategize about how to get pregnant in an atmosphere of homophobic fertility clinics and the fearmongering of the HIV/AIDS crisis.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Stefan Lynch was the first director of COLAGE and is famous for coining the term queerspawn. By giving a name to our identities and experiences, he laid the foundation for connecting and politicizing queerspawn; Lynch gave us a term to organize around. The term

queerspawn attempts to provide a unifying term for a diversity of experience. As such, it is not without controversy. Although some people feel empowered by reclaiming both words (queer and spawn), others do not like the association with spawn of the devil. In this collection, Liam Sky’s chapter, Rainbow Kid: Rants and Reflections, articulates this opinion with humour and clarity through a series of narrated drawings.

Other words used to describe us are similarly controversial. Some love the term gayby, whereas others find it infantilizing and only representative of people whose parents identify as gay. Where does this leave us as a disparate community? How do we find a term that is both inclusive and catchy? How do we find a word that will unite such a disparate and diverse group of people and experiences? There are those of us who were born into LGBTQ2+ families (sometimes called get-go kids), and others whose parents came out after they were born. And there are those who were not raised by their LGBTQ2+ parents because of divorce, lost custody, death, etc. Do we always have to use LGBTQ2+, or can we sometimes use the word

queer to describe our families? Does queer alienate trans families and parents who had the word thrown in their faces? Like all language used to describe identities, there are no easy or obvious answers. Whereas some of us use words with pride to describe our families, others may be more hesitant.

In this book, we have chosen to use the term queerspawn because it demands space and creates community cohesion. Like the reclaimed word queer, it is unapologetic and bold. It situates us within a political and personal landscape of community belonging. It is also the word most often used in Canada and the United States, and as such, it helps us find each other; it is a common word we can organize and rally around. We often feel highly visible in straight communities and invisible in queer ones. The term queerspawn creates a space for us, and helps us to feel strength in numbers and a sense of belonging at times when we feel all too visible. When we feel invisible, naming ourselves as queerspawn tells the queer community that we are still here, even if we have grownup.

WE ARE MORE THAN OUR CHILDHOODS

We have structured this anthology into three main sections: beginnings, middles, and endings. By so doing, we are attempting to disrupt the idea, often held by researchers and journalists, that it is only our childhoods that are of interest. Although many of our contributors do share aspects of their childhoods, the stories in this anthology eloquently weave together multiple, intersecting themes outside of childhood, including intergenerational queerness, parenthood, aging, and death/dying. The division of stories into beginnings, middles, and endings is based not necessarily on chronology, but on the understanding that various moments in our lives feel more like one than the other.

As editors, we have felt privileged to be trusted to read the rawest, most vulnerable versions of people’s stories, some of which had never been told before. By not organizing the pieces around themes, we have attempted to treat each author’s work with integrity and to hold their stories in a way that does not suffocate their spirit or misinterpret their message. The placement of each story in a particular section is our interpretation, and we recognize that every story’s ending is potentially another’s beginning. Our hope is that by organizing the volume in this way, we have allowed each story to live in the intersections of its themes.

(IN)VISIBILITY, (BE)LONGING, AND (IM)PERFECTION

Just as we are more than our childhoods, we are also more than our queerspawn identities. This book is, by definition, about being queerspawn, yet distilling our stories down to focus on this one aspect of our identity is both impossible and messy. We, like other humans, live in the intersections of multiple identities and experiences, and thus, this book, focused as it is on one aspect of identity, is imperfect from the start.

As editors, we have noted that although we have much in common in terms of our experience as queerspawn, we tell very different stories. We were both raised in Toronto in the 1990s, conceived by two moms through anonymous donor insemination, within a lesbian feminist community. We both doubly identify as queer and queerspawn, and as adults, we have frequently found ourselves in overlapping communities and social circles. But we also couldn’t be more different. As a kid, Sadie openly challenged any classmate on the playground who dared to denigrate her family. Makeda, on the other hand, went to any length necessary to hide her family from friends and bullies alike. Sadie was raised in a secular Jewish tradition, experienced her parents’ separation, and has multiple siblings and stepmothers. Makeda grew up as an only child, white, within a mixed-race family, and experienced the death of one of her moms. The more visible differences in our lives do not explain why or how we relate to being queerspawn, but taken together, they provide a clearer picture of who we are and the stories we choose to tell.

Similarly, the authors in this collection have made choices about the stories they want to tell. As editors, we sometimes have felt an urge to draw out a particular aspect of an author’s story or identity to make the book as a whole more fully representative of a broad range of queerspawn experiences. Editing has been a continuous process of challenging these urges in order to allow people to freely choose the focus and emphasis of their stories.

Some identities and aspects of queerspawn experiences are more visible than others in this collection, and some stories are not told. One significant gap is the