All Families Are LGBT Families

My husband and I spent Memorial Day Weekend in the Pacific Northwest, attending my niece’s college graduation. This was a Family Event of the first order. She’s my parents’ only grandchild, so they were there along with my sister and her husband. On the other side, my niece’s father came with his sister and their dad and another cousin. A longtime friend also came down to meet us from Seattle.

If this all sounds like a mini-family reunion, well, it was. There was lots of catching up to do, and we had dinners for a dozen, brunches for ten, and various other gatherings all weekend as people came and went. At the commencement ceremony the whole group huddled together in the intermittent rain and took way too many pictures where our graduate was lost in a sea of mortarboards.

It was all unutterably normal. Phil and I were the only gay members of our particular group, but we’re not the only gay members of the family on either side, and we were certainly not the only LGBT representatives at that graduation. Having a gay uncle, or a lesbian mother or sister, or a queer cousin, is not just ordinary on most college campuses these days; it’s practically de rigeur.

And if all families include LGBT members, what is an LGBT family, really? Oh, I know, we generally use that term to talk about gay and lesbian parenting and all the hot-button issues associated with it, like adoption rights and school access. But really, all families are LGBT families, in the larger sense.

The thing is, “family” does not now and never has meant just a mother and a father and a couple offspring. In fact, even the idea of such a group didn’t exist until seventy years ago, and in the last U.S. Census, fewer than a quarter of U.S. families fell into this so-called “traditional” category. Really, families are big, disorganized bunches of people including multiple generations, siblings, marriages, and extended members. They are defined only by their shared biological and personal history. Like my family, they often span the continent, include all kinds of lifestyles, beliefs, and political positions. And also like mine, they even manage to overlook all those differences when they get together to celebrate milestones like a graduation.

All families are LGBT families, because we are everywhere, and every family includes one or more of us. There’s no reason for that to be any more of an issue than the dueling Thanksgiving menus my husband and I navigate each year, or the big debate about who’s going to spend which holiday with whom, and whether we really, truly have to get that downstairs bedroom finished so his brother can come up and stay this summer.

All families are LGBT families. Now and forever.

Photo credit: anyjazz65