Today’s piece is a guest post by Lara Lillibridge, whose memoir Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home
Lesbian Tour Guide
Lara Lillibridge
Having lesbian parents makes you a spokesperson, whether you want to be or not, and I imagine that hasn’t changed much, even as society is becoming more inclusive. I am sure that any child belonging to a minority group feels as if they are serving as a diversity tour guide to the outside world—not just children of the LGBTIA community.
As a tour guide, I was asked the same questions over and over:
- So your mom’s a lesbian. Did you ever think you were a lesbian?
This was often/always asked by fathers of my high school friends—never the moms. I felt that it was imperative to always have a boyfriend as proof of my heterosexuality. It was the easiest way to answer the question. The truth was that I did feel attracted to women as well as men, all the way back as far as I could remember, but I denied them to anyone who asked.
Even as a child I could feel the leer in the voice of some of my friends’ fathers. They wanted me to be a teenaged lesbian for their own reasons. I’d encounter a variation of this question in my adult dating life when certain men accused me of being a lesbian just like my mother if I wouldn’t have sex with them.
Yet I also felt that some lesbians wanted me to become a lesbian so I would stay in the tribe—dating men was letting them down. “You’d be so much happier if you dated women,” was something I heard on more than one occasion.
My mom used to always defend gay parenting with the phrase, “all gay people had straight parents,” which is no longer true, but was at least mostly true in the 70s. But that implies that gay parents should statistically raise straight children, ergo that is the preferred child to have—necessary to prove that lesbians didn’t “gay them up” or something. I’ve heard other queerspawn echo this—that being straight is assumed to be the best way to prove that their parents were just as good as heterosexual parents.
If we aren’t straight, are we letting down the community who needs us to prove that they didn’t convert us? But what about that whole born this way discussion?
I didn’t dare allow myself to think about the attraction I did feel towards women until I was in my twenties, when I started identifying as bisexual. I sometimes still feel as if I am letting someone down by not identifying 100% with one end of the binary or the other, and yet living in either end would disappoint someone, so I might as well be myself.
- Can I look in your windows?
Asked by nearly every teenaged boy I ever told about my mother. I hated that everyone viewed my parents through a sexual lens. I tried to explain that no one wanted to see my parents naked—they weren’t porn stars; they were middle-aged women. I wanted a word that sounded less sexual to describe our family.
- I think so-and-so is gay. Go tell them about your mom and see if they’ll confirm.
Related: Why do only ugly women become lesbians? (Or other equally derogatory question.)
The problem of belonging yet not belonging to a group—as a perceived-straight girl with gay parents I was pressed into being both interpreter and spy. People wanted details: questions about how lesbian sex worked, who was or wasn’t gay, how to explain the attraction of butch women, and on and on. Do I answer in order to reduce ignorance? Or am I betraying my people by answering at all? Besides, it’s not like I was given a handbook in lesbian dating practices.
- What it’s like to be raised by lesbians?
This is an innocent question, and I don’t fault people for asking. Maybe someday I’ll come up with a good one-line response to it, but I haven’t come up with one so far. I meant to be wittier in life.
The problem is that it’s not as if there was a lesbian way to eat Cheerios, or a lesbian way to play piano. Most of my day-to-day life was just like everyone else’s—at least as long as no one was questioning me about it. The things that were different about my family went deeper than my parents’ sexuality.
And yet, who my parents are also affected everything about me. When I meet other queerspawn we have more in common than just the composition of the family portraits that hang on our walls. They feel like long-lost cousins. We are people who are not entirely at home in the straight world, and as adults no longer entirely fit in the queer community in which we were raised.
- Will my children hate me?
This question was always asked by gay and lesbian parents when I was younger—though not so much in the last decade. As a teen and young adult I always answered, “Yes! But if you were straight they’d find another reason to hate you. All teenagers hate their parents at one point or another.” It turns out I might have been kind of obnoxious as a young adult, but I meant well.
My lesbian mom friends never ask me this anymore. They all seem to have more confidence in themselves and their parenting. And I think that the lesbian parents of my generation instinctively do a lot of things better than those of my parents’ generation. When I grew up in the 1970s-80s, we sought to pass as much as possible. My brother and I called my mother’s partner by her first name, and tried our best to lie to everyone at school about our family. My lesbian mom friends now are much more open, and everyone I know has “Mama and Mommy,” or some variation to validate and reinforce the parental bond. My lesbian mom friends have something else we didn’t have growing up—other lesbian friends with children. I don’t think our generation of lesbian mothers needs any special wisdom—they got it covered.
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