Gay families are “traditionalizing” gay culture and reducing its explicit sexuality, said Dale Carpenter in last week’s Bay Area Reporter. His main example is San Francisco’s Castro District, an area known for its sexually explicit, BDSM-tinged gay-male culture. It’s no wonder families provide a stark contrast, or that they wish to make changes there.
There’s more to LGBT culture than sex-toy shops and leather outfits, though. The Castro may be full of such things, but step away and you’ll find LGBT people who knit, run, invest, and go birdwatching. LGBT culture encompasses as much diversity as straight culture. This is why it is so hard to define, and why people are quick to associate it with the most outlandish and in-your-face examples: the shops in the Castro, or the skimpy costumes in Pride parades. These are vital parts of LGBT culture, but not the sum of it.
Outside of urban areas, LGBT culture is less obvious, though it can still be distinct and vibrant, revolving around softball teams, bowling leagues, movie nights, reading groups, and the like. LGBT families don’t cause as much of a change in the culture here; there are no BDSM shops for them to worry about in the first place.
To my mind, LGBT families aren’t “traditionalizing” LGBT culture, in the sense of conflating it with straight culture. We are not, as Steve fears, leaving the LGBT community for the straight one (though we may have more occasion to visit). Rather, with our kids’ rainbow-decked strollers and “I Love My Mommies” t-shirts, we are revealing a side of LGBT culture that has lived in the shadow of the dykes on Harleys and drag queens on stilettos.
Like Steve, I find that most of my local friends here in suburbia are straight. I don’t go to bars or other LGBT venues—not on principle, but because parenting and blogging take all my time. I don’t feel I am joining the straight culture, however. I still read Curve magazine, watch the L Word, visit LGBT Web sites, and make my donations to HRC and Lambda Legal. I’m writing a blog for lesbian moms, for heaven’s sake. More important than these external actions is my constant awareness of the differences between myself and my straight friends: our legal rights, our assumed gender roles, our paths to parenthood. These tie me closer to LGBT culture than I will ever be to straight culture, no matter how many mixed (mostly straight) mom’s groups I join.
Much of what binds the disparate parts of LGBT culture together is our history. Places like the Castro and Greenwich Village, NY are our “heritage sites.” Even in suburbia, we honor the contributions of Harvey Milk and the Stonewall rioters. Any changes to to the culture of these places will reverberate through the LGBT community. If LGBT families are having a “settling effect” on the Castro, however, we need not fear the area is going straight. It will simply start to reflect LGBT culture as it exists outside our historical hotspots. This culture may more often mingle with straight culture, but is still distinctly queer.
With millions of LGBT couples having kids, I can see that families are part of our culture as well, maybe it’s just me that feels outside of it, and maybe it has less to do with having the family and more to do with my fairly rural location. I dunno.
My entire interaction with the gay community now is online. And when I go to sites like PlanetOut or Gay.com or the like, I find the ‘family’ sections are small or non-existant but there is still a huge section of personals and large sections of reviews on gay single tourist spots or things like that. I think that’s what I mean by being outside the gay culture, with the exception maybe of Rosie’s cruise line, we aren’t really marketed to or barely acknowledged. That’s slowly changing, I know, but I wonder if within our community we will always be a minority?
I agree there’s a need for more marketing to LGBT families and couples. Some of the financial firms have tried this (Amex had a campaign about joint travelers’ checks, for example), but it’s still limited. While I didn’t like the implication in Carpenter’s article that all of “gay culture” = the Castro, he does make the point that if even the Castro is changing, something must be going on. I’d venture a guess that we’re at the point where the rural/suburban/family minority within gay culture is shifting to the majority–if not in numbers, at least in mindshare.
I think it’s terribly important to open queer space for families with children. But I wonder if there is a way to do it that doesn’t paint the queer leather culture so negatively? Don’t BDSM practitioners also have kids? Knit? Run? Invest? I think we would all benefit from widening our definitions of LGBT families and of BDSM to generally be more inclusive of the “straighter” lifestyles as well as alternative ways of forming family.
Thanks for the great discussion!
Good point, Mary. There’s definitely a danger in drawing too sharp a line between LGBT-family culture and queer leather culture. Certainly there are those who fall into both categories, as well as those who would never have anything to do with the other.
I didn’t mean to imply that BDSM queers don’t have kids, knit, run, or invest. (Leather costs money, after all. :-) In fact, I was trying to say (perhaps not clearly enough) that people in the LGBT community–even the leather community–shouldn’t be judged just by what’s seen in the Castro storefronts. Even if one is a BDSM queer, one may go to the Castro to buy a shiny new harness, but then go home, cook dinner, and read one’s kids a good-night story. There’s more to our lives than just the external things the public sees in the media.
Betty Friedan, for all the good she did for feminism, did it a disservice by trying to exclude the lesbian community. I hope that in the LGBT-rights movement, we’re able to succeed without similarly excluding any part of our diverse community, especially because the parts overlap.