Francesca Royster’s memoir of queer motherhood is a rare and wonderful book: a lyrical story of her personal path into parenthood as a Black woman with a White wife, adopting a Black girl, but also a powerful look at larger ideas of parenthood, race, family and cultural history, systemic bias, and resistance. Royster, a professor of English and critical ethnic studies at DePaul University, allows her scholarship to inform her writing, but this is at heart a memoir, not an academic work. Yet while her story is deeply personal, Royster also weaves in larger concepts and reflections—about queerness and Blackness, queer motherhood, Black motherhood, chosen family, and more.
“This is a story about queerness and, because of that, it’s about yearning for the world that we want to have, but don’t yet,” Royster writes. Her definition of queerness goes beyond just “LGBTQ,” however. “My family was queer without ever claiming the word. That queerness has less to do with sex and more to do with loving—and creating, in spite of struggle,” she explains. For example, she tells the story of her great-grandmother Cillie, whose household “reflected the spirit of queer family in the fluid shape of its membership and the permeability of its borders.” She observes, too, that “African American families share much with queer families—in our mutual associations by mainstream culture with excess and disobedience, as well as our resistant joy, pleasure, and pride.”
The perspectives of Black queer parents have been sorely lacking in existing memoirs of queer parents, which have been largely by White authors. That lack of representation extends to other media as well. As Royster observes, “That story of making queer family that I see in African American culture feels much more solidly to describe who I am than the popular images of gays and lesbians marrying and raising children that I occasionally see in popular culture.”
She writes of feeling “weird” about her initial urges to start a family, because as a queer, African American woman, “We’re not supposed to yearn for those things like motherhood and family…. One of the things that I’d love about being queer is the freedom to create my own circles of kinship, and those circles aren’t beholden to a biological clock.” Yet she also notes that queer people “have been having and raising kids for generations” (a point I’ve also tried to stress in my writing, but that I see too seldom in print), and that “So many of my favorite queer of color thinkers and artists—Cherrie Moraga, Alice Walker, Rebecca Walker, Meshell Ndegeocello—have been boldly redefining what it means to mother all along.”
The book is more than an exploration of such musings, however. It is a memoir of Royster and her wife Annie’s path to parenthood in their forties and fifties and of the paths trodden by Royster’s ancestors. And it is a rare memoir of queer mothers in which adoption is a first choice, and not one reached after unsuccessful attempts to get pregnant. “The decision to adopt rather than for one of us to give birth came easily and in keeping with our own sense of queer community,” Royster writes. “We were both more interested in gathering kin than making a baby.” For herself, she writes, “After struggling as a Black girl in a white supremacist world, I wanted to love and nurture a little Black girl, to see her, to make her feel visible, to help her shine in a world that was still not quite worthy of the task.”
The memoir looks, too, at their daughter Cece’s first several years, as she grows into her own person and her moms navigate parenting in a world not structured to welcome or include a Black girl or a family like theirs. Royster uses their experiences as jumping-off points to explore race, adoption, child welfare, media representation, queer and Black resistance, and much more, not as abstract concepts but as things that have real and immediate impact on children and families. Royster wears her scholarship lightly, though, even as we sense that it runs deep. This is an immensely readable memoir, with the personal and political seamlessly intertwined, as they are in real life.
Despite the sometimes weighty topics, this is a book of joy—not because of the absence of hardships, but because we see resilient communities formed in the face of both personal and systemic challenges. We see families surviving and thriving and navigating a world not built for them but nevertheless making space for themselves in it. And we see two loving mothers, one Black, one White, raising a Black daughter and helping her grow into the person she is meant to be.
As a White queer mother myself, I found much to reflect on here about queer motherhood, and I appreciated this window into specifically Black queer motherhood. I cannot speak for what Black readers in particular will take from it, but I think it will be a rare reader of any identity who does not gain something meaningful from this moving, thoughtful, and stimulating book.
