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I am reading everything that I can find about queer families. I feel a deep-breathing sense of familiarity, and yet also I hear a small, persistent whisper—is it mine? Do I get to call this my history?
I do not know what to do about language.
I've been saying 'gay parents', but that isn't good enough. Gathering Voices is so deeply not about the easy words.
Hear an interview about the origins of Gathering Voices, audio by Lex Nappa from Dream Catchers podcast.
Language fails queer families. Or, maybe, queer families outsmart language.
In-house language is what queer people invented because what existed could not be used to explain our lives. But, even these words are imperfect. They are approximations and translations.
Gathering Voices started in July 2015, in a lovely and creaky wooden school house in rural Pennsylvania. I was sitting on the floor of the bedroom that belongs to my friend Abby, it was the one place we could find good-enough audio quality.
Our gay families, just like everything in our histories, impact the people that we are in daily, meaningful ways. However, I do not yet know how. So this is where I begin.
At fourteen years old I stood on the lawn of Cambridge City Hall on the evening of May 16th 2004. At midnight, when the calendar turned over to May17th, the city began issuing their first marriage licenses to gay couples. This is the story of hearing the silence that is our silence as the kids raised up in the gay marriage era.
Every year we have pride to commemorate the riot. I thought about Stonewall a lot as I marched a few weeks ago. I thought: Who invited these banks? When did the police change sides? (Have they?) How did we get here? I don't know, but I do know this: