Raising Gays

Abstract

This essay risks saying critical things about something widely viewed as wholly good: a recent glut of popular, "positive" media narratives produced in a spirit of concern for queer youth. When Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick published her urgently indignant essay "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay" in 1991, her comment that "it's always open season on gay kids" acknowledged the vulnerability of gay and lesbian young people in the face of homophobic institutions willing to erase their very existence in pursuit of normative models of gender and sexual identity. 1 For Sedgwick, these institutions included not only clinical and developmental psychology but also the family and parenting, which were all too often complicit with the distortions and abuses of the "helping professions." 2 Today, Sedgwick's grim statement is likely to strike other chords: "gay kids" are no longer quite the oxymoronic scandal they once were, and in the current popular imagination, an "open season" on queer youngsters must necessarily conjure the scourge of homophobic bullying. 3 In response to this highly publicized threat, a well-meaning segment of American society has rallied to the cause of bringing up gay kids, saving young queer lives from the linked threats of bullying and suicide through sufficient doses of "acceptance," a medicine understood to be most effective when administered by a loving family. 4 Never mind its long history on the front lines of queer persecution: today only the family can make things better for queer kids living in a world that is so very bad. 5 I am driven here by the contrary, perhaps contrarian, conviction that what young queers in fact need most is other queers. Heterosexual parents -even those determined to tolerate, love, and protect their gay children -are still unable to familiarize their children with the traditions, habits, social codes, aesthetics, or values of specifically queer communities, and this is perhaps especially true of parents who insist on seeing their heterosexual and nonheterosexual children GLQ 20:3