Queer Families and Relationships After Marriage Equality 2018003510, 9781138557451, 9781138557468, 9781315151083

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Illustrations
Contributors
Preface
Introduction : For better or for worse? Relational landscapes in the time of same-sex marriage
PART I The material impacts of same-sex marriage
1 Living lesbian relationships in Madrid: queering life and
families in times of straight living fossils
2 For the richer, not the poorer: marriage equality,
financial security, and the promise of queer
economic justice
3 “What makes our conflicts queer?” An interview with
Rachel Epstein
PART II Is marriage normalizing LGBTQ relationships?
4 From public debate to private decision: the normalization
of marriage among critical LGBQ people
5 Reflections on marriage equality as a vehicle for
LGBTQ political transformation
6 Simultaneous assimilation and innovation in the
construction of queer families: married same-sex
couples in Cape Town, South Africa
7 From homonormativity to polynormativity:
representing consensual non-monogamy
PART III The present and future of relational diversity
8 The Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement
ten years later
9 Making connections: an interview with
Ignacio G. Rivera
10 Beyond the sex–love–marriage alignment: xinghun
among queer people in mainland China
11 “Zoning is a way of sorting people”: an interview
with the Scarborough Family
12 Queer street families: place-making and community among LGBT youth of color in iconic gay neighborhoods
13 Future fronts in the fight for family diversity:
a panel discussion
Index

Citation preview

QUEER FAMILIES AND RELATIONSHIPS AFTER MARRIAGE EQUALITY

After years of intense debate, same-sex marriage has become a legal reality in many countries around the globe. As same-sex marriage laws spread, Queer Families and Relationships After Marriage Equality asks: What will queer families and relationships look like on the ground? Building on a major conference held in 2016 entitled “After Marriage: The Future of LGBTQ Politics and Scholarship,” this collection draws from critical and intersectional perspectives to explore this question. Comprising academic papers, edited transcripts of conference panels, and interviews with activists working on the ground, this collection presents some of the first works of empirical scholarship and first-hand observation to assess the realities of queer families and relationships after same-sex marriage. Including a number of chapters focused on married same-sex couples as well as several on other queer family types, the volume considers the following key questions: What are the material impacts of marriage for same-sex couples? Is the spread of same-sex marriage pushing LGBTQ people toward more “normalized” types of relationships that resemble heterosexual marriage? And finally, how is the spread of same-sex marriage shaping other queer relationships that do not fit the marriage model? By presenting scholarly research and activist observations on these questions, this volume helps translate queer critiques advanced during the marriage debates into a framework for ongoing critical research in the after-marriage period. Michael W. Yarbrough is an interdisciplinary social scientist whose work explores the intersection of law, culture, and family. He is Assistant Professor of Law and Society in the Political Science Department of John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), and Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Humanities, at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Angela Jones is Associate Professor of Sociology at Farmingdale State College, SUNY. Her research interests include African American political thought and protest, gender, and sexuality. Jones is the author of four books and numerous scholarly articles that have been published in peer-reviewed journals. Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis is the founder and former Executive Director of Queers for Economic Justice, and worked as an activist for over two decades. He is currently Assistant Professor of Social Work at Seattle University, USA, and has written about queer social movements, poverty, and marriage politics.

QUEER FAMILIES AND RELATIONSHIPS AFTER MARRIAGE EQUALITY

Edited by Michael W. Yarbrough, Angela Jones, and Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Michael W. Yarbrough, Angela Jones, and Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Michael W.Yarbrough, Angela Jones, and Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Yarbrough, Michael W., 1975–, editor. | Jones, Angela, 1978-, editor. | DeFilippis, Joseph Nicholas, 1967-, editor. Title: Queer families and relationships after marriage equality/edited by Michael W. Yarbrough, Angela Jones, and Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis. Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2018. Identifiers: LCCN 2018003510| ISBN 9781138557451 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138557468 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315151083 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Same sex-marriage. | Gays–Family relationships. | Families. Classification: LCC HQ1033.Q44 2018 | DDC 306.84/8–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003510_ ISBN: 978-1-138-55745-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-55746-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-15108-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Sunrise Setting Ltd, Brixham, UK

CONTENTS

List of illustrations List of contributors Preface Introduction: for better or for worse? Relational landscapes in the time of same-sex marriage Michael W. Yarbrough

viii ix xvi

1

PART I

The material impacts of same-sex marriage 1 Living lesbian relationships in Madrid: queering life and families in times of straight living fossils Luciana Moreira 2 For the richer, not the poorer: marriage equality, financial security, and the promise of queer economic justice Liz Montegary 3 “What makes our conflicts queer?” An interview with Rachel Epstein Rachel Epstein and Michael W. Yarbrough

15

17

31

46

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Contents

PART II

Is marriage normalizing LGBTQ relationships?

57

4 From public debate to private decision: the normalization of marriage among critical LGBQ people Abigail Ocobock

59

5 Reflections on marriage equality as a vehicle for LGBTQ political transformation Mignon Moore

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6 Simultaneous assimilation and innovation in the construction of queer families: married same-sex couples in Cape Town, South Africa Lwando Scott 7 From homonormativity to polynormativity: representing consensual non-monogamy Lital Pascar

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PART III

The present and future of relational diversity 8 The Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement ten years later Featuring Terry Boggis, Debanuj DasGupta, Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis, Lisa Duggan, Amber L. Hollibaugh, Nancy Polikoff, and Ignacio G. Rivera 9 Making connections: an interview with Ignacio G. Rivera Ignacio G. Rivera and Michael W. Yarbrough 10 Beyond the sex–love–marriage alignment: xinghun among queer people in mainland China Shuzhen Huang 11 “Zoning is a way of sorting people”: an interview with the Scarborough Family The Scarborough Family and Michael W. Yarbrough

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111

127

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Contents

12 Queer street families: place-making and community among LGBT youth of color in iconic gay neighborhoods Theodore Greene 13 Future fronts in the fight for family diversity: a panel discussion Featuring Martha M. Ertman, Andy Izenson, Ricci Levy, James Lopata, Hugh Ryan, and Sarah Wright Index

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 10.1 Simple xinghun 10.2 “Ideal” xinghun 13.1 Spectrum of relationship legality

146 146 184

Table 7.1 Stereotypes of non-monogamy and polynormative responses

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CONTRIBUTORS

Terry Boggis is a nationally recognized leader and activist whose work has focused

on LGBTQ families. She currently works with the Funders for LGBTQ Issues’ President and Board of Directors to increase the organization’s efficiency and effectiveness. For 17 years, Terry was the Director of Family Programs at the LGBT Community Center in New York City, where she led programs to provide comprehensive family social support, education, and advocacy for LGBTQ parents, their children, and those considering parenthood. Before this, she served as the Center’s Director of Communications for two years.Terry also directed the Ettelbrick Family Project at Stonewall Community Foundation, an 18-month Ford Foundationfunded project to advance and enhance understanding of LGBTQ families and their contribution to family evolution and sociology. Terry was a founding board member of Queers for Economic Justice, working as a board co-chair and serving on the board for more than ten years. Debanuj DasGupta’s research interests are in the fields of international migration,

HIV/AIDS prevention, sexual rights, and global governance. Dr DasGupta is particularly interested in the areas of HIV/AIDS prevention within men who have sex with men and transgender communities in the Global South, the geopolitics of HIV/AIDS-related mobilities regulation, and the political economy of PrEP and access to PrEP in the Global South. He is currently working on two projects: (1) a comparative spatial study of transgender rights politics in India and the USA; (2) a project on the securitization of HIV/AIDS in the USA. Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis is Assistant Professor of Social Work at Seattle University. He received his BA at Vassar College, a masters’ degree in community organizing at the Hunter College School of Social Work, and a PhD in Social Work and Social Research from Portland State University. His teaching has focused on

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Contributors

social welfare policy, social justice, public policy, family law, sexuality, political economy, and community organizing. In addition to his teaching, Joseph has more than 15 years of practice in community-based work. He spent years doing volunteer work as a welfare rights organizer, and then served for four years as Director of SAGE/Queens, an organization for LGBT senior citizens. In 2003, Joseph became the founding director of Queers for Economic Justice, an organization working with low-income and homeless LGBT people; he led the organization for six years. He has published numerous articles on a range of issues, including LGBT communities, poverty, marriage politics, and feminist research. He is one of the primary authors of 2006’s infamous Beyond Same-Sex Marriage (which publicly critiqued the direction of the marriage equality movement), and one of the editors of A New Queer Agenda, published in 2012 by the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Joseph was born and raised in New York City. He is the bi-racial son of two immigrants. Lisa Duggan is a journalist and activist, and is Professor of Social and Cultural

Analysis at New York University. She is the author of Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Sensationalism and American Modernity and Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy; co-author, with Nan Hunter, of Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture; and co-editor, with Lauren Berlant, of Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and National Interest. She is working on Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and Neoliberal Greed, forthcoming in the ebook series American Studies Now which she is co-editing with University of California Press. She was president of the American Studies Association during 2014–2015. Rachel Epstein (PhD) is a longtime LGBTQ parenting activist, educator, and

researcher and was the founding coordinator of the LGBTQ Parenting Network at the Sherbourne Health Centre in Toronto (lgbtqpn.ca). She has published on a wide range of LGBTQ+ parenting issues, including assisted human reproduction, queer spawn in schools, butch pregnancy, adoption, and the tensions between queer sexuality, radicalism, and parenting (https://brocku.academia.edu/RachelEpstein). Rachel is the editor of the 2009 anthology Who’s Your Daddy? And Other Writings on Queer Parenting, and in 2014 completed a doctoral dissertation on LGBTQ people’s experiences in fertility clinics. She was the 2008 winner of Community One Foundation’s Steinert & Ferreiro Award, recognizing her leadership and pivotal contributions toward the support, recognition, and inclusion of LGBTQ+ families in Canada, and the 2015 winner of the Barbara Gittings Award from the Association of LGBTQ Psychiatrists. From 2015 to 2017 Rachel was a Banting postdoctoral fellow at Brock University, conducting research on LGBTQ+ family conflict and reconfiguration. She is currently Executive Director of the United Jewish People’s Order, Toronto (winchevskycentre.org), an organization with a long history of promoting secular Jewish culture and education with a commitment to social justice.

Contributors

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Martha M. Ertman is the Carole & Hanan Sibel Research Professor of Law at the

University of Maryland. She teaches contracts, commercial law, and contract drafting courses and writes about the role of contracts and mini-contracts, which she calls “deals,” in family relationships. Professor Ertman’s book Love’s Promises: How Formal & Informal Contracts Shape All Kinds of Families (2015) speaks to a broad audience by blending memoir with family law stories about exchanges in reproductive technology, adoption, cohabitation, and marriage. Her other law review articles and book chapters uncover the often hidden role of contracts and deals in the legal rules governing the value of homemaking labor; what she calls “Plan B” baby-making through reproductive technologies; and polygamy. Professor Ertman is a member of the American Law Institute and has received the Service Award from the Intellectual Property Section of the DC Bar Association. Before entering academia, she clerked for the Honorable Peter H. Beer—a US district court judge in Louisiana—and practiced law in Denver and Seattle. Theodore Greene is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bowdoin College. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of sexuality, urbanism, and culture. His work has appeared in City & Community and will be featured in an upcoming edited volume entitled The Handbook of Research on Black Males. His current book project draws on ethnographic, archival, and interview data collected from iconic gay neighborhoods in Washington, DC and Chicago to develop a framework for understanding how community actors legitimate claims of ownership to a neighborhood community in the absence of residential, network, and material ties (a process he calls “vicarious citizenship”). Amber L. Hollibaugh is an American writer, filmmaker, and political activist, largely concerned with feminist and sexual agendas. She is a self-described lesbian sex radical, ex-hooker, incest survivor, gypsy child, poor white trash, high-femme dyke. She is also an award-winning filmmaker, feminist, Left political organizer, public speaker, and journalist. Her first book, My Dangerous Desires, presents more than twenty years of her writing, a specially written introduction, and five new essays. Amber L. Hollibaugh is currently a Senior Activist Fellow at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, where she directs the Queer Survival Economies project. Shuzhen Huang is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication

Studies, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. She is also a volunteer editor of a community-based support group for LBT women in China. Her research is oriented around culture and resistance, investigating alternative cultural practices that open up opportunities to extend and rethink dominant frameworks of knowledge. Situating her research at the intersection of queer of color critique, transnational feminism, and critical intercultural communication, she is particularly interested in the communicative practices of marginalized groups and their global cultural and material articulations through gender, sexuality, race, and class.

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Contributors

Andy Izenson is Associate Attorney with Diana Adams Law & Mediation, and is a

passionate advocate for queer and non-traditional families and for trans and gendernonconforming youth. As an attorney, Andy aids clients with a broad array of legal needs, including alternative reproduction agreements, estate planning, advanced directives, adoptions, cohabitation agreements, divorce, and separation. Andy studied sociolinguistics at Skidmore College, focusing on non-binary gender and paralinguistic communication. Andy then attended New York Law School on a trustee scholarship and affiliated with the Justice Action Center, concentrating on social justice and family law.Andy is professionally affiliated with the NYC Bar Association and both national and local LGBT Bar Associations, including as a member of the Family Law Institute and Le-Gal’s Family and Matrimonial Law Committee. Andy educates at organizations, schools, and conferences all over the country, including the LGBT Bar Association Conference, Creating Change, the Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit, and several universities. Angela Jones is Associate Professor of Sociology at Farmingdale State College,

State University of New York. Jones obtained her PhD from the New School for Social Research. Her research interests include African American political thought and protest, gender, and sexuality, and her current research is on online sex work. Specifically, she is conducting a mixed method study of adult webcam performers, and her book based on this research is forthcoming. Jones is the author of three books: African American Civil Rights: Early Activism and the Niagara Movement (2011); The Modern African American Political Thought Reader: From David Walker to Barack Obama (2012); and A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias (2013). She is also the author of numerous scholarly articles that have been published in peer-reviewed journals. Ricci Levy has been engaged in sexual freedom activism for several decades, having

helped found Woodhull Freedom Foundation and Woodhull Freedom Federation after a successful career in corporate America.Woodhull is the only national human rights organization with an exclusive focus on gender and sexual freedoms. As Executive Director and then President and CEO of both the Foundation and the Federation, Ms Levy has been instrumental in Woodhull’s growing leadership in the sexual freedom movement, including recognition by proclamation in Washington, DC as the nation’s leading sexual freedom and human rights organization. Woodhull’s testimony can be found on a wide variety of human rights and sexual freedom issues, from the shackling of incarcerated women in labor, to prostitutionfree zones, to marriage equality and the maintenance of domestic partner registries, to the right to family and freedom of speech and sexual expression. Testifying on behalf of Woodhull at various legislative hearings around the country, Ms Levy has established Woodhull as the go-to organization for non-partisan human rights advocacy, often presenting contentious issues in a way that allows for collaborative dialog intended to build bridges and foster alliances. James Lopata is Editor in Chief of Boston Spirit magazine and a nationally recognized LGBT journalist whose work has been featured in the New York Times and

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Boston Globe, and on NPR. He has written widely on rights for unmarried people. He also works as a professional coach. Liz Montegary received her PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of California, Davis and her MA in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University. Her research and teaching interests include feminist and queer cultural studies; transnational American studies; LGBT activist movements; the militarization of everyday life; and mobility, dis/ability, and the body. Her current book project, Familiar Perversions: The Racial, Sexual, and Economic Politics of LGBT Families, investigates the growing acceptance of LGBT-identified parents in the United States and asks what this means for the future of queer family politics. Refusing to interpret all forms of domesticity and reproductivity as dulling the possibility for any critically queer edge, the book contextualizes the rise of the LGBT family with respect to the reconfiguration of US racial and sexual politics at the turn of the twenty-first century. In her next project, she will extend her research on family politics by focusing on US military policies and programs that target the spouses and children of service members.This work considers the Pentagon’s interest in the fiscal and physical fitness of military families as a less discussed dimension in the privatization of war and empire. Mignon Moore received her PhD in 1998 from the University of Chicago and is Associate Professor of Sociology at Barnard College-Columbia University. She is the recipient of several honors, including a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar position, a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Early Career Award, and a Human Rights Campaign award for her work and outreach with LGBT communities of color. She is the author of Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships and Motherhood among Black Women (2011). Her current research is supported by an NIH grant to examine health and social support systems for sexual minority seniors. She is writing a booklength manuscript tentatively titled In the Shadow of Sexuality: Social Histories and Social Support of African American LGBT Elders. Luciana Moreira is currently a PhD student in the Human Rights in Contemporary Societies program at University of Coimbra, Portugal. Since 2014, she has been Research Fellow in the project “INTIMATE: Citizenship, Care and Choice: The Micropolitics of Intimacy in Southern Europe” (2014–2019), funded by the European Research Council and coordinated by Ana Cristina Santos, at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra. Abigail Ocobock is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at

the University of Notre Dame. She obtained her PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago in 2015. Her work combines family sociology and gender and sexualities studies. Her research has been supported by a National Science Foundation SBE Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, has been published in The Journal of Marriage and Family and Current Sociology, and has won American Sociological Association paper awards from the Sexualities and Family Sections.

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Lital Pascar is a doctoral candidate in Northwestern University’s Rhetoric and Public Culture program. Her research investigates both normative and dissenting discourses from feminist, critical race, and queer theory perspectives. Her dissertation focuses on US popular discourses about non-monogamy, examining how they relate to contemporary conditions of living and how they are shaped in relation to a long tradition of racialized and gendered narratives. She has published on queer safe spaces, using critical analysis to examine their inherent contradictions and their connection to securitization discourses. She holds an MA in Cultural Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a BA in Psychology and Sociology from Tel Aviv University. Nancy Polikoff is Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law, where she teaches family law and a seminar on children of LGBT parents. For more than 40 years, she has been writing about, teaching about, and working on litigation and legislation about LGBT families. Her book Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage:Valuing All Families under the Law was published in 2008. Professor Polikoff coordinated the representation of hundreds of protesters arrested in October 1987 for civil disobedience at the US Supreme Court in protest of the 1986 ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick. Her 1996 article reflecting on that and other lawyering experiences, Am I My Client? The Role Confusion of a Lawyer Activist, is assigned in numerous law school courses. In 2011, she received the National LGBT Bar Association’s Dan Bradley award, the organization’s highest honor. Ignacio G. (Hutiá Xeiti) Rivera, MA—who prefers the gender-neutral pronoun

“they”—is an activist, writer, educator, sex(ual) healer, filmmaker, performance artist, and mother. Ignacio has more than twenty years of experience on multiple fronts, including in economic justice, anti-racist and anti-violence work, as well as mujerista, LGBTQI and sex-positive movements. Their work is influenced by their lived experience of homelessness, poverty and sexual trauma and driven by the strengths of identifying as transgender, Yamoká-hu/Two-Spirit, Black-BoricuaTaíno, queer, and a survivor. Hugh Ryan is a journalist, curator, and speaker in New York City. His writing—

covering queer culture, art, and politics, among many other topics—has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, VICE, Slate, and other places. Ryan has been the recipient of the Martin Duberman Fellowship at the New York Public Library and a New York Foundation for the Arts grant in Nonfiction Literature to further his research on the queer history of Brooklyn and was resident artist at the Watermill Center as he finished his book When Brooklyn Was Queer, due for release in 2019. Ryan’s research into queer Brooklyn is to serve as the source material for a 2019 exhibition at the Brooklyn Historical Society entitled On the (Queer) Waterfront, which will examine the economic opportunities that led queer life in Brooklyn to flourish along the waterfront, and the incredible social ramifications that spiraled outward from there.

Contributors

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The Scarborough Family are an intentional family of eight adults and three children living together in Hartford, Connecticut who became entangled in a legal and political dispute over local zoning laws. Lwando Scott is currently a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Cape

Town (UCT). Scott’s research is on same-sex marriage in South Africa, with the working thesis title “Will marriage normalize queers, or will queers radicalize marriage: Same-sex marriage in South Africa.” He was an Inspire Program fellow at Ghent University and was also awarded the Yale-Fox Fellowship at Yale University. Scott has been involved with the SHAWCO winter school, teaching critical sociology of volunteering at UCT (2015, 2016, 2017), and was also Assistant Lecturer in Diversity Studies at UCT. He holds a Master of Science in Social Responsibility (2010) from St Cloud State University in Minnesota. Scott’s work, academic and otherwise, is centered on advancing queer politics in South Africa, and interrogates narrow definitions of “Africanness” that position African LGBTI people as outside of that “Africanness.” Sarah Wright is a board member of Unmarried Equality and the founder of Social

Work in Progress. Michael W. Yarbrough is an interdisciplinary social scientist whose work examines the intersection of law, culture, and family. He is especially interested in the ways people define their relationships to each other, and how these definitions both reflect and shape struggles for power. His current book manuscript pursues these questions through comparative ethnographic research among two groups recently incorporated into South African marriage law: people living in communities that observe African customary law, and people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender. His research has been published in Social Politics, Law & Social Inquiry, Sexualities, and the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, and it has received a Fulbright-Hays fellowship and other awards. Yarbrough is currently Assistant Professor of Law and Society in the Political Science Department of John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), where he received a Distinguished Teaching Award in 2015. He also serves as Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Humanities, at the University of Johannesburg, and is a former member of the Board of Directors of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies.

PREFACE

Two Junes, a year apart, frame the mission of this collection. In June 2015, the US Supreme Court ruled that that country’s constitution forbids the exclusion of same-sex couples from legally recognized marriage. Arriving after a hard and often painful fight, the ruling seemed to many to mark a new kind of inclusion. Rainbows wrapped many of our public spaces, from profile pics to the White House, in triumphant celebration. One year later, in June 2016, a massacre on Latin night at Pulse nightclub in Orlando shocked the nation and the world. Many felt the shock of disbelief. But many LGBTQ people, especially Latinx and LGBTQ people of color, felt the shock of recognition at a familiar violence that marriage did little to address. Fiercely debated for many years, same-sex marriage has become a legal reality in a rapidly growing number of jurisdictions around the world. First enacted in 2001 in the Netherlands, same-sex marriage is now legally recognized in more than twenty countries,1 approximately three quarters of which legalized it in the past half-decade. At the same time, these sweeping gains have often triggered significant backlash both where they have occurred and elsewhere. Homosexual acts are currently criminalized in seventy-five countries, including ten where they can be punished by death. Such violent backlash is an especially visible manifestation of a complex range of consequences that have accompanied same-sex marriage. In the United States, for example, same-sex marriage has channeled the priorities of national LGBTQ and statewide equality organizations away from other issues, reduced the availability of other forms of legal recognition for families, and generally reinforced mainstream family norms. The time is thus ripe to (1) examine this key moment in the ongoing history of LGBTQ communities; (2) interrogate predictions by scholars and activists about the social changes same-sex marriage would produce; and (3) consider paths forward for LGBTQ scholarship and politics.

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The After Marriage Equality collection was designed to tackle these three broad themes. Queer Families and Relationships After Marriage Equality focuses on the legal, material, and cultural impacts of legal marriage equality on diverse queer families and relationships. Queer Activism After Marriage Equality focuses on the implications of legal same-sex marriage for LGBTQ social movements and examines what queer activism looks like now that the national gay and lesbian organizations have succeeded in achieving their main priorities. The Unfinished Queer Agenda After Marriage Equality focuses on dire issues facing LGBTQ individuals and communities that were eclipsed by the marriage equality movement, such as policing, immigration, health care, homelessness, violence, poverty, and more. All three titles draw their materials from a major conference held at John Jay College of Criminal Justice on October 1–2, 2016 and organized by CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies, based at the City University of New York (CUNY). This conference, entitled “After Marriage: The Future of LGBTQ Politics and Scholarship,” staged an open, diverse, and critical conversation among more than 175 academic, activist, and artist speakers. Approximately 450 people attended, and the conference also streamed online. Building on similar conversations that LGBTQ activists have been having among themselves for some time, this was to our knowledge the largest public conversation focused on this theme, and the only one combining critical and intersectional perspectives with extensive dialog among both scholars and activists. The conference was supported in part by a grant from the American Sociological Association and the National Science Foundation, by the Office for the Advancement of Research at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. We also thank our colleagues on the CLAGS staff and the conference organizing committee who helped make the conference a reality: Yana Calou, Stephanie Hsu, Bianca Laureano, Kevin Nadal, Noam Parness, Jasmina Sinanovic, Andrew Spieldenner, Nicole Vitrit, and Kalle Westerling. In addition, we are grateful to our editor at Routledge, Alexandra McGregor, whose support and enthusiasm for this project was unwavering. We would also be remiss if we did not thank our editorial assistant at Routledge, Kitty Imbert, who shepherded us through the entire publication process. As the lead editor of this volume, Michael would also like to thank several colleagues and loved ones who helped make the conference and the volumes a reality. First, he would like to thank his partner, Rafael de la Dehesa, the first and most steadfast supporter of this project from the conception of the conference to the completion of the volumes. Second, Michael offers effusive thanks to the entire CLAGS team, who welcomed the project from the start and put in untold hours to make it happen. He also thanks his colleagues at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who variously offered logistical, financial, and at times emotional support for the conference. He especially thanks his former students Nicole Vitrit and Aida Garcia, who assisted with conference planning and publishing assistance related to this volume, as well as many other John Jay students who volunteered during the conference itself. Finally and most importantly, he thanks the incomparable Angela

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Jones, his fearless conference co-organizer, as well as the third co-editor on this collection, Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis, who played an outsized role in making the conference a success and an even bigger one in bringing this collection of volumes to fruition. All three titles use critical and intersectional lenses, focusing on the problems and limits of marriage and on those queer and trans people also disadvantaged by racism, immigration status, socioeconomic class, and other intersecting factors. The rapid spread of legal same-sex marriage increases the relevance of longstanding queer critiques of marriage. Many of the chapters in this collection thus use as a starting point queer critiques of the same-sex marriage movement, investigating their implications now that marriage is legal. By presenting research on these and other trends, these volumes help translate queer critiques advanced during the marriage campaigns into a framework for ongoing critical research in the aftermarriage period. In light of these important intersectional and queer critiques of marriage, we would like to address the problematic titles of these books. We originally proposed the books to have the same title as the conference: After Marriage. In working with the publisher, there was concern that some readers might become confused, associating the phrase “After Marriage” with newlyweds or with divorce. We needed to find a framework that would be easily recognizable to a mainstream audience, and “marriage equality” had become the dominant frame used by same-sex marriage rights advocates in the United States and many other countries.We want to reassure our readers that we both recognize and reject the implication in the title After Marriage Equality that the Obergefell decision created equality for LGBTQ communities. Not only is that emphatically not true, but the central point of the conference and these volumes is to highlight the reality that so many queer and trans people, particularly queer immigrants and queer people of color, know all too well—that legally sanctioned same-sex marriage did not create equality or address the myriad issues facing queer and trans people. Obergefell did not foster economic justice; it did not address poverty; it did not address racist and heterosexist policing; it did not address a bigoted immigration system; it did not address a broken healthcare system; it did not address systemic violence and any of the other ominous issues facing queer and trans people that were ignored by the marriage equality movement. It did not even provide legal protections for most LGBTQ families. Despite the issues we had with the title After Marriage Equality, we do believe that this framing can help bring in readers who may not be familiar with queer critiques of marriage equality. To help open these volumes up to such readers, we use a variety of materials, including research studies, essays, interviews, and transcripts from the conference. Our contributors include activists working on a wide range of issues and scholars from numerous disciplines, from across the United States and around the world. We also asked contributors to write in accessible language suitable for undergraduate students in a variety of courses (including LGBTQ studies, gender studies, social movements, social work, family studies, law and society, and political science), as well as for a wide range of audiences outside the

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academy. Finally, each of the three volumes was designed so that it could be read individually as a stand-alone book, but also to complement and build off the others so that they could be used together as a complete set. We see this moment as an opportunity to reorient the direction of LGBTQ thought and action. We hope that the diverse perspectives found in this book collection will open up conversations among students and community members about what can or should happen next for LGBTQ families, activists, and communities. Michael W. Yarbrough, Angela Jones, and Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis

Note 1

While not an exhaustive list, as same-sex marriage laws are constantly changing, nations that have legalized same-sex marriage include: Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, England and Wales, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Scotland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the United States, Uruguay, and many states in Mexico. As these volumes were going to press, Taiwan, Chile, and Australia all took steps moving toward legalization.

INTRODUCTION For better or for worse? Relational landscapes in the time of same-sex marriage1 Michael W. Yarbrough

The spread of same-sex marriage is a landmark event in ongoing global histories of family. It carves a major change—a defining change, according to many—into the boundaries of an institution that dominates relational landscapes in most societies. As fierce debates give way to gender-neutral marriage laws in a rapidly growing list of countries, studying what comes next can teach us a lot about the ways marriage works as a social institution. The promise is that same-sex marriage will make it possible to live a wider range of family lives. Most directly, it should make it easier for at least some LGBTQ people to build the kind of socially honored, couple-based households most straight people take for granted.2 But some advocates foresee—and opponents fear—a deeper transformation. They suggest that these new marriages, grounded more in gender similarity than difference, could help everyone develop new, more equal models for how to live as a married couple. Even more ambitiously, some hope— and again, others fear—that same-sex marriage will promote respect not just for different forms of marriage but for all the diverse types of relationships people build with one another. Behind these hopes and fears lies the fact that same-sex marriage has emerged in contexts of increasing family and relational diversity. In the northern European countries that first legally recognized same-sex marriage in the early 2000s, unmarried cohabitation (that is, “living together”) and registered partnerships have long been widespread, institutionalized alternatives to marriage (Andersson, 2017; Badgett, 2009). When South Africa legalized same-sex marriage in 2006, it did so five years after recognizing marriages that follow African legal customs, including polygamy (Stacey & Meadow, 2009; Yarbrough, 2015). In Taiwan, one of the countries to have moved toward same-sex marriage most recently, a key activist organization working on the issue frames it as part of a broader “Diverse Families” agenda that also includes unmarried partnerships and multi-partner households (Hsu, 2015).To be sure, family laws are

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still quite narrow in many countries with same-sex marriage, including the especially high-profile instance of the United States (Polikoff, 2008; Stacey & Meadow, 2009). But virtually all societies have seen dramatic changes ripple through actual family and relational practices on the ground, outside official law, and same-sex marriage is intertwined with these trends (see, e.g., Brainer, 2017; Yarbrough, 2017). With these ripples of change, previously disparaged relational practices—divorce, cohabitation, unmarried parenthood, same-sex coupling, and more—have become more common and at least somewhat less stigmatized than before. Even still, nowhere have these openings been limitless. Some relationships remain more recognized, more supported, more privileged—more central—than others. Some people get more leeway to make their own choices from the changing list of options, while the “choices” of queer, trans, and poor people and people of color remain surveilled, regulated, or punished. Even as relational landscapes become more diverse and more fluid,3 they nonetheless continue to be ordered in ways that elevate certain forms of caring, and certain people, over others. Same-sex marriage offers an especially useful vantage point for studying this tension. On the one hand, it has opened a major expansion in the most important relationship recognized by most societies, diversifying family norms so dramatically that it often seems to symbolize family diversity itself. On the other hand, it has channeled that dramatic change . . . through the most important relationship recognized by most societies, powerfully ratifying the central role marriage still plays in ordering relational landscapes, even as they diversify. To illuminate this broader tension between diversity and order in contemporary relational landscapes, it is not enough to study same-sex marriage as just an isolated change in the status of some same-sex couples. We must instead study it as practice that is emerging into, and out of, a broad range of complex social settings, where all people sustain many different types of intertwined relationships. Much of how same-sex marriage plays out, even for married couples, will depend on how it interacts with other relationship forms, and it will in turn exert its own complex influences on them. In different ways, all of the chapters collected in this volume adopt this contextualized perspective.

Insights through exile: queer critiques of marriage There is a long tradition in queer scholarship and activism of looking at marriage in this contextualized way. As queer people, we have often been cast out of our families or have cut ties ourselves, unable or unwilling to squeeze our gendered and sexual selves into the narrow family roles expected of us. Marooned from mainstream kinship structures, we have created diverse “chosen families” of friends, neighbors, lovers, exes, and children on whom we depend for support and around whom we organize our lives (Ferguson, 2003; Stacey, 2004; Weston, 1991). These experiences have enabled us to see mainstream kinship norms as norms created and policed through relations of power, not as the natural laws they often claim to be (Warner, 1991).

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Legions of us have mobilized this perspective by questioning the heterosexual definition of marriage, forcing the legal changes now spreading around the globe. Some of us, meanwhile, have questioned the institution of marriage itself. As mainstream lesbian and gay activism, especially in the US, began to focus on same-sex marriage in the 1990s, queer critics asked whether this was our most important goal, or even a desirable one. Lesbian feminist critiques underscored the ways that marriage has historically subjugated one spouse to the other (Ettelbrick, 1989; see also Rubin, 2006), while sex-positive critiques highlighted marriage’s role in defining most sexual desires and practices as “immoral” (Warner, 1999; see also Rubin, 1998). Queer of color critics emphasized how these gender and sexual norms radiated out from white, middle-class communities to police families of color (Ferguson, 2003; Reddy, 1997). Banished to the margins of relational landscapes, queer people have forged creative intimacies that resisted these gender, sexual, and racial hierarchies. What would happen to this resistance as we moved within the reach of marriage’s surveilling light? The worry was that marriage would not simply be a neutral option for some LGBTQ people to “choose” while others did not. Draped in prestige and privilege, marriage distributes major social and material benefits to those who marry while withholding them from those who don’t. The crucial point running through many queer critiques of marriage was that the distribution and the withholding depend on each other. As Warner (1999) put it with respect to marriage’s symbolic qualities, “To a couple that gets married, marriage just looks ennobling . . . Stand outside it for a second and you see the implication: if you don’t have it, you and your relations are less worthy . . .The ennobling and the demeaning go together” (p. 82). Similarly, the material benefits distributed through marriage are benefits precisely because they are denied to those outside of it. In other words, marriage doesn’t just sit alongside other relationships, one option among many. Rather, it helps to define these other relationships as less-than, carving inequality into relational landscapes. Because of this, many queer critics expected that same-sex marriage rights would pull some LGBTQ people toward married coupledom while legitimizing continued discrimination against all people who, for whatever reason, do not marry. Perhaps the most fully developed account of how that could happen came from scholar Lisa Duggan, who diagnosed a “new homonormativity” (Duggan, 2004, p. 50) in US lesbian and gay politics in the mid-1990s. Duggan argued that the most prominent lesbian and gay writers and activists of the time “did not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions.” They aimed only to combat discrimination against same-sex couples, while leaving all other norms surrounding conventional relationships in place. Of particular importance, they accepted the assumption that a sharp boundary should separate the private sphere of family and sexuality from the public sphere of politics. This boundary has long been built through marriage in the white middle classes of North America and Western Europe (Lasch, 1977), constructing the married household as a private refuge at the center of human life, led by a male head who represented the household’s interests in public. Duggan argued that homonormative advocates were effectively offering

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a bargain built around this public/private boundary: If you let gays into marriage, then we’ll go there and keep quiet. Representing themselves as the gay mainstream, these voices “worked to position ‘liberationists’ and leftists as irresponsible ‘extremists’ or as simply anachronistic” (Duggan, 2004, p. 50), discrediting queer calls for a more fundamental transformation of the prevailing relational order. Duggan thus located the engine of normalization in the political struggle over same-sex marriage itself, arguing that segments of the LGBTQ populace who were ideologically and institutionally closest to ruling elites framed the agenda for LGBTQ justice in a narrow way that disturbed the status quo as little as possible. She similarly located normalization’s consequences primarily in the political sphere, analyzing same-sex marriage campaigns as a key example of a broader politics that used diversity rhetoric to legitimize economic agendas aimed at cutting public support for social welfare, in this case by shifting more of that burden onto private, married families. Queer critiques of marriage thus focused on the ways marriage helped regulate and assign value to all relationships, both married and not. Duggan’s critique in particular traced how this role for marriage is grounded in intertwined legal, political, economic, and cultural structures. Now, as same-sex marriage becomes legal, these critiques offer crucial resources to help us study the inequalities and power relations structuring relational landscapes even as they become more fluid and diverse. Happily, research is already emerging on how families are changing in the aftermath of same-sex marriage. To take one early line of this research, several studies suggest that same-sex couples who marry may enjoy stronger health outcomes than those who don’t. For example, early research suggests that for lesbians and gay men, being in a legally recognized partnership might be associated with better selfreported health (Reczek, Liu, & Spiker, 2017), more consistent doctor’s visits and access to health insurance (Elwood et al., 2017), lower stress levels (Riggle, Rostosky, & Horne, 2010), and lower use of alcohol (Reczek, Liu, & Spiker, 2014).4 These findings generally echo a long line of research finding health differences between married and unmarried different-sex couples, although in some studies the health associations with marriage are weaker for same-sex couples, or play out differently for gay male versus lesbian couples (e.g., Reczek, Liu, & Spiker, 2017). These are important early findings with the potential to teach us a lot. But they can teach us even more when viewed through queer critiques of marriage. For example, queer critiques remind us that the health advantages enjoyed by married couples represent, by definition, disadvantages for the unmarried. The obvious question follows: What is it about marriage that drives this inequality? To be sure, family scholars researching both different- and same-sex marriage have already spent much time on this question. Possible answers include the gendered care wives perform to look after their husbands’ health but that unmarried partners do less of (Umberson, 1992), or the material benefits that flow to married couples, which in the US often include health insurance (Ash & Badgett, 2006; Ponce et al., 2010). Another possibility is that marriage doesn’t make people healthier, but instead healthier people are more likely to get and stay married in the first place

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(Waldron, Hughes, & Brooks, 1996). Research on married same-sex couples will certainly advance this debate. But critical queer perspectives on marriage remind us that all three possibilities presume an underlying relational landscape tilted in favor of marriage. When caring relationships can take many forms, what is it that makes marriage the price of admission to health-promoting supports, whether in the form of intimate care or of legal benefits? And what is it that makes that price higher for those who are less healthy in the first place? Truly open and equal relational landscapes are impossible without answers to questions like these. What I am suggesting here is that critical queer perspectives on marriage can deepen our analysis of the data now emerging on married same-sex couples, by pushing us to identify and theorize the institutional, economic, cultural, legal, and political factors that help produce the inequalities we observe in and around marriage. This sort of critical intervention has improved family social science in the past, when feminist scholarship revolutionized the study of gender inequalities in marriage by placing those inequalities in their broader social contexts. For example, consider scholarship on the link between marriage and household labor. On average, women in different-sex relationships do much more household labor than men, and this is especially true when the couple is married rather than living together outside of marriage (Davis, Greenstein, & Gerteisen Marks, 2007). Why is this pattern worse in marriage? One of the most influential early theories came from the economist Gary Becker (1981), who suggested the reason was that marriage provided a kind of insurance that allowed each spouse to “specialize” either in paid work outside the home or in unpaid housework.When both partners specialize, he argued, things are more efficient overall because each person gets better at their respective job. But, he suggested, this is risky for the housework-focused partner without the promise of marriage. Marriage lowers the likelihood that their partner will leave them, and Becker argued that this allowed them to focus on housework, and the couple as a whole to reap the benefits of efficiency. Becker’s theory launched a long line of research, but feminist critics pointed out that it has a massive empirical problem. By itself it cannot explain why wives, specifically, almost always end up on the housework side of the marital bargain. After all, women do much more housework than men even when they are cohabiting, even in married couples where both spouses work for pay, even in married couples where the wife earns more (Bittman et al., 2003). Something beyond a simple bargain between spouses must explain this large and consistent gender inequality. Ideologies linking different types of work to different gender and family roles are one possible explanation (Davis & Greenstein, 2009; Legerski & Cornwall, 2010). Another possibility is that, because women earn less on average for paid work as compared to men, the wife has less bargaining power when a married couple divides up the housework. Whatever the explanation, feminist scholars have shown how one of the most fundamental inequalities of marriage can only be understood by analyzing marriage within the broader ideological, economic, political, and legal contexts that create marriage and shape how it plays out in practice.

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Same-sex marriage obviously represents an excellent opportunity to further advance our understanding of gendered housework inequalities in marriage (Schultz & Yarbrough, n.d.; Widiss, 2012). But my main point here is even broader. Just as feminist critiques fundamentally reshaped marriage scholarship by analyzing married families in their ideological and structural context, queer critiques can help us view the advantages associated with marriage in a wider frame. They can help us think about the differences not just between married and unmarried couples but between married couples and all other forms of committed caring, from siblings raising children together, to close friends living as roommates, to polyamorous relationships. Moreover, queer critiques can help us see the differences between married couples and everyone else not just as differences but as hierarchies where the benefits of marriage flow from its elevated legal and social status. In same-sex marriage we have a unique opportunity to better understand how these hierarchies are built, and in queer critiques we have a crucial set of tools for doing so.

Overview of the volume The chapters in this volume take up this opportunity, using queer and other critiques of marriage to examine the shifting contours of relational inequality after same-sex marriage. As described more fully in the preface, this volume is part of a threevolume collection exploring the impact of same-sex marriage rights on LGBTQ relationships, activism, and political priorities. All three volumes are based on a conference titled “After Marriage: The Future of LGBTQ Politics and Scholarship,” which was organized by CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies and held at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) in New York City on October 1–2, 2016. The volumes in this collection gather scholarly essays presented at the conference, interviews with activist speakers, and transcripts from key conference panels to help carry the conference debates to a broader audience. In this volume, the core debate is: With the spread of same-sex marriage, are relational landscapes opening up to a more diverse range of caring relationships? Or are they instead continuing to channel relational life in normative directions, whether heteronormative or homonormative? The voices collected here reach different conclusions about this debate, but they all take the question seriously, and their analyses all include frameworks drawn in part from queer theory and activism. In doing so, they also further develop these frameworks, beginning to specify how their parameters apply to concrete relational experiences playing out on the ground. The volume is organized in three parts. The first part begins with the material consequences of marriage and legal regulation in the daily lives of queer families. In Chapter 1, Luciana Moreira’s research among women in lesbian relationships in Madrid suggests that these consequences can be complex and uneven. She finds that, although Spanish law has recognized same-sex marriage and same-sex parents for more than a decade, persistent heteronormative assumptions haunt her interviewees’ interactions with families of origin and government bureaucracies, limiting the law’s impact. In Chapter 2, Liz Montegary also finds uneven material effects of

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marriage, in this case because the law itself triggers very different financial consequences for rich and poor same-sex couples in the US, to the advantage of the former. An interview with Canadian researcher and activist Rachel Epstein in Chapter 3 closes the section. Epstein shares some of her current research, which shows how the Canadian legal system has a hard time understanding conflicts that emerge out of queer and trans families whose structure doesn’t fit normative assumptions. All three chapters show how the material consequences of marriage and family law reflect enduring norms, making life difficult for those who don’t fit them. The second section focuses squarely on the question of whether marriage is pulling queer relationships in a more normative direction. The debate begins in Chapter 4 with Abigail Ocobock’s extensive interview research among LGB people in Massachusetts, the first US state to legalize same-sex marriage. Ocobock finds that many who expressed queer critiques of marriage before it became legal now suppress or soften their criticism. Sociologist Mignon Moore offers a different take in Chapter 5, where she reflects on her research and on her own family’s experiences as a Black, married, lesbian couple with children moving across different social spaces in New York City. Moore is skeptical of the queer critique of marriage, arguing that the legitimacy conferred by marriage has opened space for her to express her family life openly, especially in Black communities such as the socially conservative church where she grew up. In Chapter 6, Lwando Scott takes a middle position in this debate, arguing that his research among married same-sex couples in South Africa shows these couples both reinforce and disrupt existing family norms.To close the section, in Chapter 7 Lital Pascar analyzes media representations of consensual non-monogamous relationships, arguing that some advocates from within this community are consciously developing “polynormative” strategies based on homonormative strategies from the same-sex marriage debate in order to win social legitimacy, and possibly marriage rights, for poly relationships. Pascar’s chapter on poly relationships serves as a bridge to the final section, which expands outward from the normalization debate to consider how a diverse range of intimacies beyond same-sex marriage are playing out today as same-sex marriage spreads. The section opens in Chapter 8 with a full reprint of the foundational Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement issued in 2006 by a team of critical activists and scholars.This statement challenged the US gay and lesbian movement’s focus on same-sex marriage, arguing for a broader legal framework supporting not just different kinds of marriage but also unmarried partnerships, close friend relationships, adult children caring for parents, and more. The chapter includes transcribed remarks from several of the statement’s authors on its continued relevance today, drawn from a panel at the “After Marriage” conference reflecting on the statement’s legacy. Four chapters looking at examples of specific non-normative, non-same-sex-marriage relationships and communities follow. Chapter 9 begins with an interview with activist, artist, and writer Ignacio G. Rivera. Rivera celebrates the diverse poly, kink, and other relationships and communities that make up their life, and thinks that marriage will do little to help these communities thrive further. Chapter 10 turns back to marriage with Shuzhen Huang’s research on xinghun

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marriages in mainland China, in which a lesbian and a gay man marry each other. Huang sees these as relationships of creative resistance, arguing that they open space for Chinese queer people to combine same-sex romance with family obligations. In Chapter 11, the Scarborough Family, an intentional family of eight adults and three children living together in Hartford, Connecticut, relate how their wealthy neighbors—including two married same-sex couples—tried to use zoning laws to push them out of the neighborhood. Finally, Theodore Greene’s research in Chapter 12 traces how recent conflicts around queer youth of color hanging out in Chicago’s Boystown neighborhood reflect, among other things, a tension between the growing homonormative family norms of the white, middle-class gays who dominate the area and the “queer street family” model of public interpersonal care that the youth construct for themselves. The section and the volume close with excerpts from a key panel at the “After Marriage” conference, titled “Where Do We Go From Here? Future Fronts in the Battle for Family Diversity.” In this chapter, scholars, lawyers, activists, and journalists gather to consider different legal and political approaches that could support truly open relational landscapes.

Toward a queer research agenda on relationships after marriage Collectively, all the chapters engage queer critiques of marriage to suggest directions for research on families after same-sex marriage. Regarding the volume’s core debate, several chapters do suggest that marriage is channeling LGBTQ people toward more normative forms of relational life. For example, Abigail Ocobock finds that her interviewees now see marriage not as a public issue but instead as a private choice, and that this is narrowing the ways people talk about it. Similarly, Lital Pascar finds that non-monogamous people arguing for multi-partner marriage rights are attempting to distance themselves from negative stereotypes of nonmonogamy, much as same-sex marriage advocates did with negative stereotypes of LGBTQ people before them. The Scarborough Family tell how their neighbors actively tried to force them out of the neighborhood because their family did not fit the married-couple model. Similarly, Theodore Greene shows how predominantly white, middle-class residents of Boystown see queer youth of color’s street families as a threat, and attempt to mobilize police against them. Liz Montegary also argues that marriage is benefiting advantaged gays to the detriment of disadvantaged queer people, as wealthy gay couples strategize around marriage to minimize their tax payments while poor queer people struggle to maintain their eligibility for social services. The reflections by the original drafters of the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement discuss, among other things, how the legalization of same-sex marriage has been accompanied in some places by the retraction of legal recognition for domestic partnerships and other non-marital family forms. At the same time, several chapters emphasize the ways LGBTQ people continue to disrupt mainstream family norms today. For example, while Ignacio Rivera criticizes the mainstream lesbian and gay movement’s heavy focus on marriage, they also see enduring relational creativity in the kink and polyamorous communities

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they inhabit. Similarly, Luciana Moreira’s research highlights the diverse intimate and community relationships that her participants form to survive the “slow violence” of cisheterosexism they still face today after same-sex marriage. While Theodore Greene’s chapter highlights the pressures placed on queer youth’s street families, he also finds that these families remain effective and vibrant support structures even as marriage spreads among older, wealthier gays and lesbians. Shuzhen Huang’s research on xinghun marriage offers a particularly interesting case of disruption, as discourses of LGBT rights and same-sex marriage meet existing Chinese family norms to produce a new type of marriage that looks conventionally heterosexual from the outside but operates very differently on the inside. Meanwhile, two chapters argue that disruption is occurring even within married same-sex couples. Lwando Scott finds that same-sex spouses in Cape Town, South Africa are almost inadvertently creating a diverse and unpredictable range of twists on traditional family relationships as they take on roles, including vis-à-vis children, that don’t fit existing norms for people of their gender. Mignon Moore, meanwhile, argues that her and her family’s mere presence disrupts norms—but in different ways in different spaces, because family norms differ across social contexts. I see this range of responses more as a difference of emphasis than as a fundamental disagreement. None of the chapters see only normalization or only disruption in the contexts they study. Rather, all see some sort of combination. This is in line with findings from previous research (see Bernstein & Taylor, 2013). However, where previous scholars have contrasted these nuanced combinations against the most sweeping predictions of some queer critics, implying that the nuance proves the critics wrong, I would propose a different framing.While early research suggests that normalization of queer relationships is not total, it also rather consistently suggests that some degree of normalization is happening in perhaps every context same-sex marriage has touched. The real question, then, is not whether there is normalization, but instead how much, in what forms, and under what conditions. Queer critiques are essential for pursuing these questions. At the same time, these critiques need further development in order to enable research that is sensitive to the different ways normalization plays out in different contexts (Ferguson, 2003).The chapters gathered here identify key themes to help ground that development. First, at the broadest level, several chapters emphasize that different communities value different norms about marriage, family, and relationships. The Scarborough Family’s story is an especially clear example. When they lived in a working-class neighborhood, their neighbors easily accepted them. It was only when they moved into a previously abandoned mansion in Hartford’s wealthiest neighborhood that their struggles began. Similarly, Lital Pascar’s analysis suggests that polynormative discourses emerge when non-monogamous people enter the broader public sphere, but that they are actively contested within poly communities themselves. This variation of family norms across social contexts is a central theme of Mignon Moore’s chapter, which shows that the negative stereotypes she and her wife combat are very different when attending Moore’s childhood church in Queens than when at their children’s school in Manhattan. If relationship norms differ across communities, that

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means that different LGBTQ people embedded in different communities will face different kinds of normalizing pressures. Moreover, different communities themselves stand in complex and unequal relationships to each other. As queer of color critics have repeatedly emphasized (e.g., Ferguson, 2003; Muñoz, 1999), these points are crucial for understanding how hierarchies of race, class, religion, disability, and more intersect with sexual and gender expression to shape queer lives. Second, and relatedly, many chapters emphasize that marriage is shaped not just by the law of the state but also by religion, culture, economic arrangements, daily practices, and more. At its heart, marriage is a creature of what law and society scholars call “legal pluralism” (Griffiths, 1986; Merry, 1988), a phenomenon that occurs when multiple legal systems, both formal and informal, regulate the same thing at the same time. The chapters collected here find widely varying relationships among legal and normative systems in the cases they study. For example, in Luciana Moreira’s chapter, the cisheterosexist norms of the “straight mind” in Spain still powerfully limit the same-sex marriage law’s impact a decade after its enactment. For Abigail Ocobock, by contrast, social norms have magnified the law’s impact. By observing etiquette around their friends’ weddings, former critics of marriage treat the legal debate as settled, and in this way help make the law itself a more settled feature of daily life. In Mignon Moore’s chapter, she and her wife mobilize both the law and the social etiquette surrounding marriage to challenge heterosexist, patriarchal, and racist social norms in their communities. In Shuzhen Huang’s chapter, Chinese law has not changed to permit same-sex marriages, and strong kinship norms of parental obligation persist. Nonetheless, new desires generated by global LGBT social movements have helped inspire new forms of marriage among gays and lesbians. The “Beyond Marriage” and “Future Fronts in Family Diversity” panelists, meanwhile, see people creating new family forms that gallop ahead of law and norm alike. This variation highlights that the social arrangements that produce marriage and its effects can be quite complex, and same-sex marriage provides a unique opportunity to study key features of these arrangements. In an important sense, same-sex marriage did not arrive with any specific court decision or legislative enactment. Rather, it began to arrive long ago in the daily practices and movement demands of some LGBTQ communities. Through a series of both private and public battles it has become more and more institutionalized in many places (see Cherlin, 1978, 2004), yet it often remains incompletely institutionalized today even in those places where it has become law. The chapters collected here thus push us to think about the legal enactment of same-sex marriage as one moment in a number of longer, open-ended processes that vary from one social context to the next. Finally, several chapters insist that queer people have continued to show agency and creativity in constructing their caring relationships, even as the pressures they face have changed. Lwando Scott describes how married same-sex spouses in Cape Town deploy traditional relationship terms such as “mother” and “friend” in new ways. Rachel Epstein relates how queer and trans families create complex relationships beyond what the law can comprehend. Ignacio Rivera celebrates the affirming play with gender and sexuality that is found in kink and poly communities. The

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Scarborough Family fight back against local political and economic elites who are also their neighbors, winning broad political support for their non-conventional family. Chinese queers develop and start to culturally institutionalize a new, queer form of marriage. Queer street families build space for young people of color in wealthy, predominantly white gay neighborhoods. Again and again throughout the volume, queer people do what they can to sculpt new forms into the relational landscapes around them.While critical perspectives on marriage have, understandably, focused more on the structural forces that pressure people’s relational lives, a diverse range of evidence reminds us that these relational lives are lived on a daily and intimate scale that is hard for macro forces to fully colonize.This was true before same-sex marriage and it will remain true, in different ways and to different degrees for different people in different contexts, after it. The task for a critical scholarship of relational life after marriage is not to deny that these spaces of agency and change exist, but to understand what makes them possible so that we may, in these changed and changing landscapes, expand them.

Notes 1 2

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Thank you to Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis, Rafael de la Dehesa, Minwoo Jung, and Abigail Ocobock for suggestions and feedback that improved this chapter. Throughout this chapter and this volume, all authors use whatever variation on the LGBTQ umbrella is most appropriate to the people, movements, legal provisions, and so on being discussed at that moment. For example, here I use “LGBTQ” because a variety of LGBTQ-identified people may be able to benefit from same-sex marriage rights, depending on their circumstances. But in the next paragraph I speak about the “gay and lesbian movement,” because that is the best way to understand the target of the queer critique I am discussing there. British family sociologist Carol Smart (2007) has used the term “relational landscapes” to describe how same-sex couples are embedded in broader social networks of friends, family, etc., whose own views on marriage and family shape whether same-sex couples want to marry, or whether they feel that they can marry while maintaining their friend and family connections. The term emphasizes that different relationship types do not exist in isolation from each other, but instead interact within shared social fields. At the most concrete level, any given individual is simultaneously a part of multiple different relationship types and must negotiate how these interlock. At a more abstract level, the meanings and consequences of any particular relationship type are defined in part by how it is understood to compare to, and fit with, other relationship types. While a fully developed theory of relational landscapes would require more space than I have here, I find the term useful because it highlights the importance of these interconnections, while leaving open the question of how any particular relational landscape is structured or how it may change over time. One can think of a relational landscape as a kind of terrain that people traverse over the course of their lives, where certain options and obligations appear in particular arrangements that are largely predetermined, from the perspective of an individual, but that can also change over historical time. Some of the studies in this line of research focus specifically on marriage, while others focus on any legally recognized partnership. Similarly, some studies use unmarried couples as the comparison group and others use all unmarried people. Also, not all of the results mentioned here were found to be statistically significant. One complicating factor at this stage of the scholarship is that reliable quantitative measures are still in development, in part because there has been a very complex mix of legal and social recognition for samesex couples in recent years as same-sex marriage has been actively contested.

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References Andersson, C. (2017). Governing through love: Same-sex cohabitation in Sweden. Sexualities, 20(5–6), 604–21. Ash, M. A. & Badgett, M.V. L. (2006). Separate and unequal: The effect of unequal access to employment-based health insurance on same-sex and unmarried different-sex couples. Contemporary Economic Policy, 24(4), 582–99. Badgett, M.V. L. (2009). When gay people get married: What happens when societies legalize samesex marriage. New York, NY: NYU Press. Becker, G. S. (1981). A treatise on the family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bernstein, M. & Taylor, V. A. (2013). The marrying kind? Debating same-sex marriage within the lesbian and gay movement. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bittman, M., England, P., Sayer, L., Folbre, N. & Matheson, G. (2003). When does gender trump money? Bargaining and time in household work. American Journal of Sociology, 109(1), 186–214. Brainer, A. (2017). New identities or new intimacies? Rethinking “coming out” in Taiwan through cross-generational ethnography. Sexualities. doi:10.1177/1363460716677282. Cherlin, A. (1978). Remarriage as an incomplete institution. American Journal of Sociology, 84(3), 634–50. Cherlin, A. J. (2004). The deinstitutionalization of American marriage. Journal of Marriage and Family, 66(4), 848–61. Davis, S. N. & Greenstein,T. N. (2009). Gender ideology: Components, predictors, and consequences. Annual Review of Sociology, 35(1), 87–105. Davis, S. N., Greenstein,T. N. & Gerteisen Marks, J. P. (2007). Effects of union type on division of household labor. Journal of Family Issues, 28(9), 1246–72. Duggan, L. (2004). The twilight of equality? Neoliberalism, cultural politics, and the attack on democracy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Elwood, W. N., Irvin, V. L., Sun, Q. & Breen, N. (2017). Measuring the influence of legally recognized partnerships on the health and well-being of same-sex couples: Utility of the California Health Interview Survey. LGBT Health, 4(2), 153–60. Ettelbrick, P. (1989). Since when is marriage a path to liberation? Out/Look: National Lesbian & Gay Quarterly, 6, 14–16. Ferguson, R. A. (2003). Aberrations in Black: Toward a queer of color critique. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Griffiths, J. (1986).What is legal pluralism? Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 18(24), 1–55. Hsu, V. H. (2015). Colors of rainbow, shades of family: The road to marriage equality and democratization of intimacy in Taiwan. Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, 16(2), 154–64. Lasch, C. (1977). Haven in a heartless world:The family besieged. New York, NY: Basic Books. Legerski, E. M. & Cornwall, M. (2010). Working-class job loss, gender, and the negotiation of household labor. Gender & Society, 24(4), 447–74. Merry, S. E. (1988). Legal pluralism. Law & Society Review, 22(5), 869–96. Muñoz, J. E. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Polikoff , N. D. (2008). Beyond (straight and gay) marriage: Valuing all families under the law. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Ponce, N. A., Cochran, S. D., Pizer, J. C. & Mays,V. M. (2010). The effects of unequal access to health insurance for same-sex couples in California. Health Affairs (Project Hope), 29(8), 1539–48.

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Reczek, C., Liu, H. & Spiker, R. (2014). A population-based study of alcohol use in same-sex and different-sex unions. Journal of Marriage and Family, 76(3), 557–72. Reczek, C., Liu, H. & Spiker, R. (2017). Self-rated health at the intersection of sexual identity and union status. Social Science Research, 63, 242–52. Reddy, C. (1997). Home, houses, nonidentity. In R. M. George (Ed.), Burning down the house: Recycling domesticity (pp. 355–79). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Riggle, E. D. B., Rostosky, S. S. & Horne, S. G. (2010). Psychological distress, well-being, and legal recognition in same-sex couple relationships. Journal of Family Psychology, 24(1), 82–6. Rubin, G. (1998). Thinking sex: Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In P. M. Nardi & B. E. Schneider (Eds.), Social perspectives in lesbian and gay studies: A reader (pp. 100–33). New York, NY: Routledge. Rubin, G. (2006).The traffic in women: Notes on the “political economy” of sex. In E. Lewin (Ed.), Feminist Anthropology: A Reader (pp. 87–106). Oxford: Blackwell. Schultz, V. & Yarbrough, M. W. (n.d.). Will marriage make same-sex couples less egalitarian? A cautionary tale. Unpublished manuscript on file with authors. Smart, C. (2007). Same sex couples and marriage: Negotiating relational landscapes with families and friends. Sociological Review, 55(4), 671–86. Stacey, J. (2004). Cruising to familyland: Gay hypergamy and rainbow kinship. Current Sociology, 52(2), 181–97. Stacey, J. & Meadow,T. (2009). New slants on the slippery slope:The politics of polygamy and gay family rights in South Africa and the United States. Politics & Society, 37(2), 167–202. Umberson, D. (1992). Gender, marital status and the social control of health behavior. Social Science & Medicine, 34(8), 907–17. Waldron, I., Hughes, M. E. & Brooks,T. L. (1996). Marriage protection and marriage selection— Prospective evidence for reciprocal effects of marital status and health. Social Science & Medicine, 43(1), 113–23. Warner, M. (1991). Introduction: Fear of a queer planet. Social Text, 29, 3–17. Warner, M. (1999). The trouble with normal: Sex, politics, and the ethics of queer life. New York, NY: Free Press. Weston, K. (1991). Families we choose: Lesbians, gays, kinship. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Widiss, D. A. (2012). Changing the marriage equation. Washington University Law Review, 89(4), 721–94. Yarbrough, M. W. (2015). Toward a political sociology of conjugal-recognition regimes: Gendered multiculturalism in South African marriage law. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 22(3), 456–94. Yarbrough, M. W. (2017). Something old, something new: Historicizing same-sex marriage within ongoing struggles over African marriage in South Africa.Sexualities. doi:10.1177/ 1363460717718507.

PART I

The material impacts of same-sex marriage

1 LIVING LESBIAN RELATIONSHIPS IN MADRID Queering life and families in times of straight living fossils1 Luciana Moreira

Editors’ introduction: Part I opens the volume by considering the material consequences of same-sex marriage laws for queer families. We begin with Luciana Moreira’s research among women in lesbian relationships in Madrid, which highlights the limits of law. In 2005 Spain became one of the first countries to legalize same-sex marriage, and its parenting policies also include same-sex couples.Yet Moreira’s interviews, conducted more than a decade after same-sex marriage was legalized, reveal that her interviewees still confront a quiet yet pervasive “slow violence” of homophobia and transphobia in families of origin, public spaces, and state and medical institutions. Moreira argues that this slow violence reflects the “straight mind” of heterocisnormative assumptions that persist today, beyond the reach of law. Moreira’s research thus highlights the limits of law as a tool for improving queer families’ circumstances.

Introduction: homo/transphobia as a form of slow violence Sexual and gender dissidents have been silenced for centuries in Western societies, because they hold the potential to undermine patriarchal and heterosexist frameworks. Although some important changes have been achieved using human rights claims and legal processes in various countries, queer people are still struggling, often on a daily basis, against invisibility and hostility. Spain offers an interesting case for studying this contrast, as the country approved same-sex marriage and adoption in 2005 and continued to strengthen its queer family laws after that, and yet many Spaniards in queer families denounce a continuing and pervasive non-recognition at both private and institutional levels. This chapter focuses on this contrast, drawing on interviews I did in 2015 and 2016 in Madrid with women in lesbian relationships. Based on those interviews,

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it can be seen that nowadays it is possible to openly live out lesbian relationships and to marry someone of the same sex. Those who wish to be mothers also have access to assisted reproductive techniques (ART) or adoption. However, the interviewees also shared dissatisfaction and experiences of disrespect, providing pointers to what still needs to change. My biographical interviews in Madrid about lesbian coupledom and parenting revealed a more or less generalized feeling of non-recognition, both in the private sphere within families of origin, and in the public sphere in social and institutional spaces. The interviewees shared stories about accumulating non-recognition and hostility that caused them pain, which I analyze using Rob Nixon’s (2006–2007) concept of “slow violence.” Nixon develops the concept of slow violence to describe and understand “formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time” (p. 14), such as environmental problems whose repercussions for people’s lives do not involve any immediate drama. Problems characterized by slow violence have no media visibility and often affect a limited geography of people far from centers of power, whose lives are considered unimportant.2 While Nixon uses slow violence to understand environmental damages and their related health and nutrition problems, I find that it also resonates with the long and diffuse processes that hurt people who are considered less important in a capitalist, patriarchal, and heterosexist system. In this chapter, the concept of slow violence refers to the personal wounds caused by discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Just as in the case of gradual environmental destruction over years or decades, homo/transphobia acts slowly but continuously. Most homo/transphobic actions seem relatively insignificant if they are considered separately, and therefore they remain invisible. The media are not interested in small incidents. However, the continuous occurrence of these small incidents throughout the years on the one hand causes constant harm to people, and on the other constructs a broader structural problem of social homophobia and transphobia whose answer lies beyond legal solutions, but needs to be addressed somehow. From this point of view, although homonormativity (Duggan, 2003) exists in Western societies, especially among gay men and to a lesser extent among lesbians, the intersection with sexual and gender identity of different categories such as social context, class, ethnicity, age, dis/ability, and so on brings people closer to or pushes them away from homonormative practices. In fact, despite some legal and social changes, heterosexuality lives on as a fossilized norm, and everything that goes beyond it may still be considered abject. These heterosexual assumptions, dissected by Wittig (1992) with her concept of the “straight mind,” remain living fossils today, as proved by the constant episodes of slow violence denounced by the interviewees in my research. Thus, in this chapter I explore the effects of slow violence on lesbian couples in Madrid, Spain. After a brief note on my sample and methodology, I outline the legal and social context of a country where same-sex marriage has been legally possible since 2005. Then I provide several examples of slow violence suffered in both the private and public spheres by the interviewees, and point out where there is still

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need for change in daily life. I close by identifying the causes of slow violence in this specific context and analyzing the importance of informal networks and collective action in my interviewees’ lives.

Sample and methodology In this chapter, I draw from the research I carried out in Madrid for the project “INTIMATE—Citizenship, Care and Choice: The Micropolitics of Intimacy in Southern Europe,” which is a five-year project involving qualitative studies of LGBT partnering, parenting, and friendship across Portugal, Spain, and Italy. Between April and June in the years 2015 and 2016, a sample of twenty in-depth biographical interviews was collected in Madrid on the topics of partnering and parenting using the Biographic–Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM) designed by Tom Wengraf. In this chapter, I will explore eight interviews with women (seven cis and one trans) in lesbian relationships at the time of the interview, four of whom were legally married. In BNIM interviews, the interviewer first asks a single narrative question, such as: “As you know, I am interested in lesbian relationships. Please tell me your story, all events and experiences that have been important to you personally.” The interviewer then listens to the interviewee, without interrupting her, for as long as she wishes to speak. The method’s basis is the idea that individual narratives express both conscious concerns and unconscious presuppositions and subjectivities. In the second part of the interview, the interviewer uses narrower, strategic questions to explore specific pieces of information.The data collected is validated by comparing it to other sources: for example, legal documents, documents from non-governmental organizations, and online newspapers.

Lesbian coupledom and the Spanish social and legal context Spain’s twentieth century was full of political, social, and cultural turmoil. The end of the monarchy and the two republican periods that followed (from 1873 to 1874 and then again from 1931 to 1939) led to a civil war (1936–1939) between progressive forces and the right-wing ultra-conservatives led by Francisco Franco, who won the war and in 1939 established a dictatorship that would end only with his death in 1975. State laws punishing sexual and gender dissidents were strongly reinforced during the dictatorship, when Franco ruled with the support of the Catholic Church. This alliance helped maintain and reinforce conservative conceptions of gender and sexuality. In 1933, during the pre-war republican period, the Vagrancy Law (Ley de vagos y maleantes) was implemented, imposing criminal penalties on vagrants and panderers (that is, sex workers). Homosexuals were added to the list in 1954. During the dictatorship this law was applied arbitrarily, with homosexuality used as a pretext to jail political dissidents opposing the dictatorship (Calvo & Trujillo, 2011). The prison terms increased in 1970 with the Social Danger and Rehabilitation Law

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(Ley sobre peligrosidad y rehabilitación social), which replaced the old Vagrancy Law. Occurring during a long political context of a total lack of civil liberties, these legal measures deepened the assumptions on which the straight mind (to use Wittig’s term) was based, as people did not understand or accept other possibilities of living beyond heterocissexual norms. Just after the dictatorship ended, an initial wave of reforms began to relieve the prohibitions regarding non-normative sexual orientations.This wave began in 1979 with the decriminalization of same-sex relations, four years after the beginning of the transition to democracy, but the Social Danger and Rehabilitation Law would only be fully abolished in 1995 (Pichardo, 2011, p. 546). As of 1983, homosexuality was no longer considered a Public Scandal crime, and that item of the penal code was repealed in 1988 (Mérida Jiménez, 2013). Some sections of society wanted the country to recover from its long absence of liberties as quickly as possible, and these reforms, prompted by discussions in Europe, were seen as a kind of purge of the conservative and religious recent past. From the beginning of the 1970s, social movements were crucial to ending criminalizing legislation and achieving legal equality (Pichardo, 2011; Santos, 2013; Trujillo Barbadillo, 2008). The end of the dictatorship and Spain’s joining of the Council of Europe in 1977 and the European Union (at that time called the European Community) in 1986 were also crucial for these changes. After a long period under a conservative regime, consolidating a young and fragile democracy was a priority. One way to ensure this was to accept the liberalizing social measures that came from these European institutions. But this was also a ground-up transformation, as sexual dissidents were getting organized even before the end of the dictatorship (Mérida Jiménez, 2013; Trujillo Barbadillo, 2008). By the mid-2000s, thirty years after the end of the dictatorship, Spain was an almost unique example of a country with respect for lesbian and gay couples’ legal rights. It was the third country in the world to approve same-sex marriage (2005), and it legalized joint adoption at the same time. A 2006 law granted both single women and lesbian couples access to ART.3 However, even though sexual orientation was added as a non-discriminatory item, legislators and policymakers seemingly forgot that lesbian couples would want to establish their legal parenthood of babies born through ART. So in 2007 a provision giving the right of legal maternity to non-biological mothers was enacted—strangely, added to a new law focused on gender identity. Moreover, this right applied only if the lesbian couple was married;4 meanwhile, marriage was not required for heterosexual couples using ART to be legally recognized as parents. Effectively, these laws only partially solved the problems lesbian families were experiencing, and it is possible for them to be used to go backwards when other legal changes raise issues that conflict with the views of the more conservative strata of society who maintain the straight mind. Although the law has made huge steps toward equity, its implementation does not lead conservatism to disappear. There is, therefore, strong social resistance to the laws adopted in Spain to establish and strengthen the rights of gender and sexual dissidents.

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Lesbian identities and/or relationships and slow violence In this section, I use the concept of slow violence to highlight the long-term psychological consequences of drop-by-drop discrimination in the lives of sexual and gender-dissident people.Their existence, identities, and lifestyles trigger certain reactions in fossilized “straight minds,” which produce a series of negative experiences for sexual and gender dissidents that add up to a situation of slow violence. Santos (2012) proposes the concept of queer public sociology for scholars who address queer theory and queer activism in their scholarly work. Queer public sociology sees “discrimination [as] a collective product that stems from unequal power relations, instead of an individual problem. Therefore, the focus [in queer public sociology] is moved away from the (individual) victim to the structural system that enables and legitimises discrimination” (p. 250). At the same time, however, Santos insists on the necessity to echo in academic research the voices and demands that arise from social movements and collective action.To balance both of these principles, I use the concept of slow violence to interpret my interviews with members of lesbian couples in Madrid about partnering and parenting. My interviewees perceived many hostile attitudes within their families of origin and in public spaces, and also at an institutional level, where slow violence is sometimes inflicted by the very state that grants them equal rights.Their individual stories speak to an enduring structural condition of slow violence that makes their lives, both as individuals and as families, insecure. A vivid example of slow violence within families of origin comes from Elisa.5 Elisa is an early-thirties pansexual cis woman who started dating women at the age of eighteen when she went to Madrid to study at university. Before this she had lived in a small village, where she could never face her sexuality. In her first year in Madrid, she started a relationship with an older woman. Her cousin, with whom she was living, tried to persuade her to end the relationship.When Elisa did not, her cousin kicked her out of her flat and told Elisa’s parents about the relationship. From that moment on, Elisa encountered very difficult moments of slow violence. She recalls: I remember a trip to Berlin with my parents; we were drinking something and then my father shot the bullet: “You have made me suffer a lot.” And I asked: “But why?” He said, “You have made me suffer a lot. I’ve cried more because of you than because of my parents’ death.” My heart missed a beat. I thought, “You’re saying it, but you are not even thinking,” because it is a statement with a strong connotation. I have always tried to put myself in their shoes, to think where they come from, the education they had. I can even understand their first reaction, but then you cannot go on with the same speech. You have to accept me, and if you really love me and want to share my life and the things that happen to me, you cannot keep saying these things.6 Interview with Elisa, 2015

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Aware of her parents’ conservative education during the period of dictatorship, Elisa decided take a pedagogical approach with them, trying to address their homophobic reactions through her presence and care. She described the culminating moment of a series of incidents of slow violence that hurt her, but also gave her the strength to write a letter to her parents in which she denounced the tension under which they had lived for years, with the intention of making them finally realize that they should care more and stop aiming accusations at her. Another example is Irene’s story. Irene is a mid-forties trans woman and actress who defines herself as lesbian. She told me how she had interrupted her relationship with her mother because she could not bear her mother’s hostility every time they were together or spoke to one another. She shared the following episode: My second sister has two children, and I love her little daughter—she looks a lot like me. She had them with a man who turned out to be a nice guy, in fact a great guy, and one day they decided to marry. It was after I started the hormonal treatment. My mother managed to arrange things so that I couldn’t go to the wedding. It is also my responsibility, I wasn’t strong enough, but it was also the context in which I . . . I just wasn’t strong enough at the time. Interview with Irene, 2015 Irene knows that the reason she did not go to her sister’s wedding was her mother. Their relationship had been difficult ever since she told her mother that she was determined to embrace her gender identity. Irene experienced her mother as having a paternalistic attitude toward her, assuming that she had a better idea of what was best for her adult daughter. Meanwhile, Irene did not even mention her sister’s opinion or receiving any kind of positive support from her in response to their mother’s actions. This might indicate passive acceptance of transphobia within the family. Perhaps worst of all, Irene considered herself to be jointly responsible for what happened. Another good example of slow violence in families of origin is Juana’s parents’ reaction when she and her partner first told them they were thinking about having children. Juana is a cis woman in her early forties. Her parents are a religious couple who live in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Madrid, where everyone knows each other. Juana and her partner live nearby, since they work in the area. They had already experienced difficult times in their relationship with Juana’s parents before this culminating moment: Well, I told my mother that we wanted to be mothers. And then, she got very hostile. She asked me how could I do that to her, she said that I was going to ruin her life . . . We weren`t very close to one another for a while, my mother and me. I almost did not want to visit my parents, because there was a lot of tension. Interview with Juana, 2016 After many difficult moments due to Juana’s parents’ response to her sexual orientation, the reference to a possible pregnancy within a lesbian relationship was the

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breaking point that led to a temporary distance between Juana and her parents. Nevertheless, her parents are now part of the couple’s support network, having reestablished their relationship since the child was born. Beyond their families of origin, some women have problems living out their relationships in public spaces, even many years after the laws on same-sex marriage and adoption were put in place. For example, consider the story of Amaranta, a cis woman in her early thirties who attended university between 2005 and 2010. During those years she had a secret relationship with another student in the same academic department, who was afraid of being rejected on campus. This is how Amaranta elaborated the story: It bothered me that there was never a moment of intimacy between the two of us, even if we were out for six hours . . . We went to college and it was always a tense moment, because she was concerned about what people were going to think . . . The moment the door closed, it was . . . It was another world, you see? It was all about the body and . . . And one “I love you” after another and, and . . . A different universe, right? So sometimes, I found that sudden change very uncomfortable. Interview with Amaranta, 2015 It is important to point out that the difficulties that arose in this relationship were in part the result of Amaranta’s partner’s internalized homophobia, which in turn was shaped by a society that discriminates. Yet, the slow violence my interviewees experienced is also visible at an institutional level. In Spain, as previously mentioned, same-sex marriage and adoption were legalized in 2005, and every woman has been able to access ART as of 2006, regardless of her marital status or sexual orientation. But in 2007 an additional provision was enacted to allow two women to register a child only if the couple was married—a requirement that does not apply to different-sex couples. This situation is a great example of how the straight mind operates at a social level, raising further legal obstacles. Clinics, civil registry offices, and even politicians could not accept that two women could simply register their children just like any heterosexual couple, so the new provision came into force one year after the expansion of ART access. My interviewees were very aware of this discrimination, and some of them said that they married just to avoid another process of co-adoption by the non-birth mother. For example, Mónica, a mid-thirties cis woman, stated: We had to get married before we had the babies, otherwise we would not have been able to. It would have been more complicated, we would have to adopt . . . But, well, we had always thought about getting married . . . Because for the mother of my girlfriend . . . the only valid marriage is the one in the Catholic Church. In fact, she was trying to avoid by all means that we get married. She wanted us to do just a de facto union. Interview with Mónica, 2016

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A de facto union would have not allowed the couple to avoid the complicated co-adoption process, however, so they married. Similarly, Juana, previously quoted above, described the following experience: Well, the decision to get married, I tell you, it was mainly to avoid problems in registering the child with our two surnames . . . And then, the law forces you, in our case, to get married, because if you don’t, you have to start an adoption process, which takes a long time, I suppose, and it will also be expensive and unpleasant. And it means having someone over you constantly watching what sort of life you have, with whom you sleep, with whom you live. Interview with Juana, 2016 On the one hand, marriage is mandatory for lesbian couples if both of them want to automatically register a child and be recognized as its parents and caregivers. On the other, families of origin often understand marriage and reproduction through a normative lens that leads them to reject the idea that their lesbian or bisexual daughters can get married or have children. My interviewees also reported some strange episodes in civil registry offices and, albeit to a much lesser extent, in clinics and hospitals. For instance, Tasha, an early forties cis woman, relates a story about the hospital in which she gave birth, where a gynecologist confronted her and her partner: A gynecologist went there . . . well, the typical, right? She asked Luna, “Who are you?” and Luna said that she was the mother of the children. And the gynecologist asked if it was an insemination and after Luna’s explanation . . . she replied something like this, “Ah, it is a donation, then do not say it out loud because that’s illegal.” And Luna said, “Well, it is not illegal, you can call it legal void, or loophole, or whatever, but it is not illegal.” And the gynecologist replied, “Yes, yes, yes, it is illegal, fertility clinics do what they want, and they do not care about legality.” I was hallucinating, of course I wasn’t strong enough to defend myself, obviously . . . Luna and I weren’t strong enough to defend ourselves because we had been awake for 48 hours [of difficult labor]. More concerned about our babies than about what that crazy lady said, right? And we were not able to defend ourselves. Interview with Tasha, 2016 This episode occurred in 2014, long after the law around ART and lesbian-couple parents had been reformed.7 Another example of slow violence—one shared by many interviewees—is found in civil registry offices. Lesbian couples wishing to register a birth have to follow a set of bureaucratic rules that are not applicable to heterosexual couples. For

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example, Raquel, a late-forties cis woman, discussed the mandatory pre-registry required before birth. Both mothers must undertake this, and it is mandatory to present a document from the clinic confirming that the pregnancy was achieved through ART: You need a certificate saying that you are married, that you have the consent of your wife, so that you can be inseminated or do an in vitro. An incredible amount of paperwork. And before I gave birth, we went to the registry office so I could give consent and say, “Gentlemen, I certify that this lady, who is my wife, is going to come in my name to register our children.” Because if I wouldn’t do that, they would not let her register, and even so she had a lot of problems . . . It’s just that straight people don’t have these problems, you know, even if the fathers are not the biological ones. Interview with Raquel, 2016 Raquel is referring here to two different moments of the legal process. First, a couple made up of two women needs to prove to the clinic that they are married, so they may obtain a document attesting they started the ART process together.8 Second, once one of them is pregnant they both must go to the civil registry with the document from the clinic to start a pre-registry before birth. If they do not proceed in this way, they will face many bureaucratic problems after childbirth. The Spanish case is a good example of how the law continues to work within a straight, monogamous, and gendered paradigm that demands more from lesbian couples than from straight ones. It is as if the law requires them to be extra-normative, beyond what is required of different-sex parents, in order to be recognized as parents (at least legally). In a heterocisnormative society, sexual orientation, gender identity, and non-normative relational status carry the perception that some people are not allowed to be coupled, and especially to reproduce and rear children, because they challenge the conservative and fossilized values of a straight-only ideal of society.

Collective action and resistance to slow violence in a heterocissexual society This shows that the “straight mind,” a concept originally proposed by Monique Wittig in 1979, still applies nowadays, despite some legal and social changes. Although less restrictive now than seeing it as the “only truth,” as Wittig put it at the time, the interpretation of heterosexuality as the norm for all individuals still frames sexual and gender diversity as exceptional rather than normal. This framing generates the slow violence described above. After some achievements by queer movements in Western societies, such as gaining the right to marry and to adopt or to access ART, conservative assumptions are not as rigid as they were in the past. Yet fossilized cisheterosexist norms still frame social and cultural conceptions of family and relationships, leading to continuing episodes of slow violence.9 As Ahmed (2004) describes it, heteronormative societies frame love around the general assumption of

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“love for difference,” which triggers the marginalization and rejection of those who do not fit the norm because they feel “love for sameness” (p. 126). Nevertheless, my interviewees managed to overcome the slow violence imposed on them, by using collective action and activism on the one hand, and friendship and family networks and intimate relationships on the other. They shared episodes with me in which they had or have the feeling that they do not fit in the world where they live.They left, or are trying to leave, what may be called zones of silences and of the untold, and they look forward to finding different communities where they can enjoy a stronger feeling of belonging. For example, Jasmin, a Belgian lesbian in her late twenties now living in Madrid, told me how in Madrid she could finally search for what she likes or cares about. She found people—women, mostly—with the same interests, and it just so happened that half of them were lesbians. After a difficult adolescence and early youth in “straightland,” as she puts it, going to Madrid was a turning point in her life and the ticket to “dykesland.” She participates in a feminist women’s percussion jam session group who play in regular gigs and at activist events. This is how she describes it: In fact, in the women’s percussion jam session group, we have a hairdresser who cuts the hair of almost everyone, of all dykes, and she does lesbian haircuts, she does it well, actually. And it’s funny because this hairdresser is straight and she also cuts the hair of the straight girls there, and then they seem more lesbians than me, it is great! Because in the end, I’m talking about lesbians, but . . . within this feminist jam group there are heterosexuals, there are bisexuals, then we talk about lesbians. I say lesbian but it is no longer a lesbian as a woman who sleeps with women, in fact I mean lesbians as a collective, then, it includes straights. Interview with Yasmin, 2015 Another beautiful example of care and empowerment is described by Irene, whom I quoted above. Because Irene is a trans woman and her girlfriend is fat, they both challenge normative body models. Irene believes that one of the strengths of their relationship is her ability to share the tools she has with her girlfriend and thus improve her self-confidence: Both of us, and this is important in a world that judges you from minute one, we have non-normative bodies and we both suffer the same kind of constant questioning in the social environment . . . And I realize that I have developed some tools that give me the self-confidence that she lacks, and the truth is that I have a secret program for her to acquire them. Interview with Irene, 2015 Besides these informal networks of love and friendship, many of the interviewees also referred to LGBT rights associations. In particular, associations of homoparental families were a recurring theme in interviews with mothers. Some of these women were not activists before, but when they became mothers they wanted to find

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homoparental families who might serve as examples for their children. They became part of these associations out of love and to protect their young families, who are still fragile due to a wide range of obstacles. One woman told me: We have signed up for Galehi, an association of homoparental families. Well, we have joined them to find more support from people who have already raised kids . . . so that ours could also see there are more families . . . And also, we hope to find some strategies: how they live, schools. The scariest thing for us is this issue, school. Interview with Tasha, 2016 Friendship, collective action, and peer care networks seem to be solid strategies of resistance in the lives of the women interviewed. This echoes Roseneil’s (2004) emphasis on the importance of queering care and friendship. She underlines the importance of friendship as a form of legal and social resistance to normative obligations that are usually more of a burden than a choice and that may lead to slow violence, even within families of origin. However, it is also worth noting that in Spain families of origin often go from one side of the divide to the other: They often start as a space of violence and later become part of the support network. While friendship networks and LGBT rights associations often provide help, some of the collective social dynamics and collective actions have produced situations that have some negative side effects and cannot easily be classified as positive for queer communities, for example, assimilationism and homonormativity can be clearly observed in the current process of gentrification that has taken place in the queer neighborhood of Chueca in Madrid, and in the growing number of queer symbols in specialized stores, hotels, and hostels, saunas (the majority of which are gay), and travel agencies. In addition, Pride Madrid has gradually become a conventional consumerist festival, as has World Pride, which Madrid hosted from June 23 to July 2, 2017. At that time the city was invaded by advertisements that have, perversely, transformed the rainbow flag of diversity into a symbol of capitalism. It is important to note that forty-one episodes of homophobic violence occurred during World Pride, thirty-two of them in Madrid (León, 2017). This is because, to put it in Ahmed’s terms,“love for sameness” and its celebration in the media generates not only silenced episodes of slow violence with no media interest, but also acts of physical and/or verbal open and “quick” violence that are reported in the newspapers. Thus, along with the commercialization of non-normative identities and their struggles and symbols, the augmented visibility caused by these processes also leads to an increase of violence. In addition, during the twelve years since the approval of the same-sex marriage law (at the time of writing), several difficulties and a series of episodes of slow violence have arisen that have marked the lives of those who decide to live their dissident sexual orientation and/or gender identity openly. Law is not a comprehensive solution by itself, and legal rights are but a part of a very incomplete process of changing hetero/cis conceptions of society.

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Conclusion In my interviews, I heard almost unbearable stories of hostility and suffering, but also tales of happiness, love, friendship, families, and activism. Some of the interviewees are activists in queer feminist groups and anti-austerity movements in Spain, and in almost all cases, the ways that interviewees live out their conjugal relationships and collective action are all about refusing patriarchal and heterosexist Western systems. In a heterocisnormative society, lesbian relationships lived openly constitute part of a change that is slowly taking place, despite all obstacles. It is undeniable that some gay and lesbian people have accommodated to a hegemonic system, embracing homonormativity and the neoliberal regime and assuming that Western societies in general, and some countries or cities in particular—such as Madrid—are highly “developed” regions where homophobia is almost nonexistent. Even so, the violence that sexual and gender dissidents continue to endure is also a product of these very normative societies. Heteronormativity and the gender binary are ideas that legitimize patriarchy and capitalism, and they manifest through the slow violence of small, pervasive acts of prejudice and discrimination. In Madrid, these women’s lives and their relationships, friendship networks, and social and political engagement challenge this system. Political change matters, but my interviewees are supported and cared for primarily by their networks of choice. As Gracia Trujillo Barbadillo (2008) said, while stressing the role of social movements in the mostly legal transformations implemented thus far, “They never gave us anything.Why would they give us something now?” (p. 249).This highlights that legal achievements have never been a voluntary gift bestowed upon the community by politicians or political parties, but are the result of continuous social struggles. Straight-minded people are not changing voluntarily, but only if they are confronted and convinced. In this sense, the experiences shared here are part of the process of making socially real what the law already allows. Enduring conservative assumptions about family and relationships lead to slow violence against those who live out their identity openly, using the tools law has finally given them. In 1979, Monique Wittig claimed that the presuppositions of the “straight mind” were understood as the only truth.The “straight mind” is still dominant; however, it is no longer the only truth. The different possibilities of existence visible in my interviewees’ narratives show this, since each constitutes, in its own way, an escape from a supposedly universal heterocisnormative system. The law allowing same-sex marriage was insufficient, but it was a positive turning point in a society where new forms of living out relationships and family are more and more visible, despite all obstacles. It is possible to live beyond the fossilized straight models of coupledom and parenthood that compose a broad context of slow violence circumscribing people’s daily lives. Gradually, through their own existence, their daily practices, their decision to live a non-traditional life, and their ability to manage violence, people such as my interviewees are increasing the possibilities of building queer families and relationships.

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Notes 1

2 3

4 5 6 7 8

9

This study was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement “INTIMATE – Citizenship, Care and Choice:The Micropolitics of Intimacy in Southern Europe” [338452], under the coordination of Ana Cristina Santos at the Centre for Social Studies (University of Coimbra, Portugal). The chapter also benefited from the insightful comments of Doris Wieser and Michael Yarbrough, who also helped with a previous English revision. Such problems include, for example, the slowly accumulated damage caused by pesticides, deforestation, and so on. Since 2001, a document prepared by experts has allowed different readings of Law 35/1988 of November 22, on ART: the lack of a straight relationship (for lesbians or straight single women) could be understood by some private clinics as an “infertility problem,” for the purposes of allowing legal access. Later, Law 14/2006 of May 26 on ART opened the possibility of access to ART through either public health services or private clinics. However, as there are long waiting times to access public health services, women usually go to private clinics. Law 3/2007 of March 15 reads: “When a woman is married, and not legally or de facto separated, to another woman, the latter may express to the civil registrar her agreement (before childbirth) to also register the child in her name” (my translation). Names and other identifying details have been anonymized. All interview translations in this chapter are mine. It is not clear why the doctor said this, but the interviewee and I tend to think that the conflict arose because the couple used the “ROPA” method, in which one of the members donates the eggs and the other carries the baby. If they are not married, the non-biological mother will need to start a co-adoption process after the birth, as stated before. In addition, this is a way to push women into the clinics and away from “do it yourself ” techniques. In February 2017, after a legal battle, two married women were able, for the first time, to register a child conceived without using ART. At an earlier stage, the non-biological mother had been prevented from registering the child (Kett, 2017). Queer sexuality is more easily forgotten than queer relationships and families, as sexuality is considered a private issue. Partnering and parenting have an even more political dimension insofar as they expose people to institutional places such as hospitals, schools, or civil registry offices.

References Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Calvo, K. & Trujillo, G. (2011). Fighting for love rights: Demands and strategies of the LGBT movement in Spain. Sexualities, 14(5), 562–80. Duggan, L. (2003). The twilight of equality? Neoliberalism, cultural politics, and the attack on democracy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Kett, S. (2017, April 21). Benidoleig mums’ case sets legal precedent. Costa Levante News. Retrieved from www.pressreader.com/spain/costa-levante-news/20170421/2818872981 89014. León, P. (2017, July 6).Violencia homófoba durante el Orgullo: 41 incidentes de odio. El País. Retrieved from www.elpais.com/ccaa/2017/07/06/madrid/1499340644_858711.html. Mérida Jiménez, R. M. (Ed.) (2013). Minorías sexuales en españa (1970–1995): Textos y representaciones. Barcelona: Icária Editorial. Nixon, R. (2006–2007). Slow violence, gender, and the environmentalism of the poor. Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, 13(2)–14(1), 14–37.

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Pichardo, J. I. (2011). We are family (or not): Social and legal recognition of same-sex relationships and lesbian and gay families in Spain. Sexualities, 14(5), 544–61. Roseneil, S. (2004). Why we should care about friends: An argument for queering the care imaginary in social policy. Social Policy and Society, 3(4), 409–19. Santos, A. C. (2012). Disclosed and willing:Towards a queer public sociology. Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, 11(2), 241–54. Santos, A. C. (2013). Social movements and sexual citizenship in southern Europe. Houndmills: Palgrave-Macmillan. Trujillo Barbadillo, G. (2008). Deseo y resistencia:Treinta años de movilización lesbiana en el estado español (1977–2007). Barcelona and Madrid: Egales. Wittig, M. (1992). The straight mind and other essays. Boston: Beacon Press.

2 FOR THE RICHER, NOT THE POORER Marriage equality, financial security, and the promise of queer economic justice1 Liz Montegary

Editors’ introduction: Few consequences of marriage are more material than money. Historically, marriage has been a tool that many families use to pool and protect their assets, and the laws of most countries continue to provide financial benefits to many married couples and their families. While such policies benefit these families, from the perspective of society as a whole they help keep economic assets in the hands of the economically privileged. In this chapter, scholar Liz Montegary explores the complex financial consequences of marriage in US law for wealthy and poor same-sex couples. She first examines an LGBTfocused financial advisory firm that helps its wealthy clients to minimize their taxes by strategically deciding whether and when to marry, and then analyzes an Obama-administration effort to promote marriage to same-sex couples and LGBT people receiving public assistance. Arguing that the wealthy families’ tax strategies contribute to the class politics that disadvantage the poorer families, Montegary suggests that same-sex marriage will do little to promote economic justice in the US, and may even worsen matters. Before Windsor and Obergefell, LGBT rights activists in the United States often argued for the right to marry by highlighting the financial harms that marriage inequality inflicted upon LGBT couples and their children. According to the freedom-to-marry movement, same-sex marriage bans were the only thing preventing LGBT families from achieving the economic security enjoyed by straight families. Now, after marriage, we can see that marriage equality has neither eliminated financial complications for same-sex couples nor resolved the economic disparities facing LGBT households. The lived experience of same-sex marriage looks quite different depending upon a couple’s combined income and wealth. On the one hand, wealthy LGBT families are reaching out to financial planners to determine whether marrying will help or hinder them in maximizing their personal net worth. On the other, same-sex

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couples who rely on public assistance are trying to figure out if getting married will impair their eligibility for the social welfare programs on which they depend. This chapter explores the uneven effects of marriage equality on different LGBT populations. Specifically, I focus on the ways that marriage, gay and straight alike, functions as a tool that both the nation’s richest citizens and the national government use to preserve their wealth.There are two parts to the chapter. In the first, I examine Christopher Street Financial, a New York City-based advisory firm that has been providing financial services to LGBT communities since the early 1980s. Because many of the firm’s advisory practices are designed to aid couples in minimizing the amount they owe in taxes, a closer look at Christopher Street shows us how wealthy same-sex couples use marriage, along with other financial mechanisms, to manage their private assets. Such practices, I argue, threaten the economic stability of the most vulnerable LGBT households. These families are the focus of the second part of the chapter. In this part, I consider an initiative by the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to develop marriage-promotion programs for low-income same-sex couples. Initiatives of this kind help us understand why marriage equality can enable the federal government to save money by further privatizing its poverty-alleviation programs. Together, Christopher Street’s advisory practices and the HHS’s marriage-promotion initiative demonstrate how a narrow focus on marriage rights undermines a longer queer tradition of building broad-based movements in the name of racial, sexual, and economic justice.2 I conclude by highlighting how activists can call upon these legacies to think beyond marriage and to develop more transformative strategies for supporting all families, LGBT or otherwise.

State-sanctioned tax evasion According to Christopher Street Financial’s website, the company was the “first investment and financial services firm committed to serving the gay, lesbian, and supportive community.” What started in 1981 as a one-man operation, with the firm’s founder managing $1 million for fewer than a dozen New York City-based clients, has since grown into a life and wealth management company currently responsible for more than $300 million in assets. Following the death of the founder in 1996, Jennifer Hatch, a white lesbian who “hated her Wall Street bond sales job,” purchased the company and launched a second career for herself (Garmhausen, 2010). Like her predecessor, she saw the firm as providing an invaluable service to same-sex couples who were being treated unfairly by the state. By denying lesbians and gay men the right to marry, Hatch argued, the US government was compromising their ability to protect and grow their wealth. When two people get legally married, they become a single economic unit. As such, married couples can often share money and property without any tax implications, and when one of them dies, their shared wealth automatically transfers to the surviving spouse tax-free. In contrast, unmarried couples (whether same or different-sex) are considered legal strangers, which means they can face steep tax penalties when

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they try to combine their assets and when, after the death of one of the partners, the survivor tries to claim their inheritance or retain control over their communal property. To assist same-sex couples in lowering their tax burden and increasing their growth potential, Christopher Street showed clients how to use legal contracts and financial products to approximate a marriage. For example, the firm aided couples in drafting wills, designating one another as beneficiaries on investment accounts, drawing up documents to ensure the smooth transfer of jointly owned homes to surviving partners, and determining the size of the life insurance policy they would need to cover any anticipated estate taxes (that is, the taxes that are owed when a person dies and their assets are transferred to someone else). This approach did not challenge the way the US tax code benefits people who follow the white, middleclass ideal of marital family life. Instead, Christopher Street took issue with the law’s exclusion of lesbians and gay men and, in response to this discrimination, sold clients a solution to the problem. Although Hatch was technically profiting from marriage inequality, she regularly spoke out in favor of same-sex marriage. In interviews with the press, she would stress the “very practical” set of concerns underlining the desire to marry while also describing the emotional side of this “economic issue” (Blackman, 2005). Specifically, she zeroed in on what she saw as the horror of denying lesbians and gay men the privilege of enjoying romantic love. What, Hatch seemed to be asking, could be crueler than forcing couples to think about the economic aspects of marriage and to admit that their love lives were deeply entangled with money matters? Whereas the “average straight couple [could get] a lot of their financial setup simply by saying ‘I do’” (Quittner, 2010), her clients were forced to have “terribly unromantic conversation[s]” about their futures (Wiedeman, 2012). Marriage equality was thus held up as the key to ensuring the financial health and emotional happiness of same-sex couples. In practice, however, the legalization of same-sex marriage has failed to deliver on these promises. For starters, LGBT-specific financial planning services are still marketable in the age of marriage equality. In fact, the freedom to marry raised new concerns for lesbians and gay men and thus generated new consumer demands for the finance industry to meet. The lengthy and uneven process of legalizing same-sex marriage in the United States created much confusion and frustration across the country. Before Windsor, couples who were married in states where same-sex marriage was allowed were often unsure of how their marital status translated at the state and federal levels. As a result, those who could afford it often turned to financial experts for advice. In the state of New York, the passage of the Marriage Equality Act of 2011 was a boon for accounting firms and wealth management companies, Christopher Street included (Hampton, 2012; Wiedeman, 2012). Many newly married couples were enraged to learn that, because the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) prevented the US government from acknowledging their marriage, they would have to file their federal income taxes as two single adults. Some of the firm’s clients expressed an interest in joining the “Refuse to Lie” campaign. This initiative urged couples to take a stand against the discriminatory law either by ignoring the rules and filing their federal returns jointly or by attaching an addendum to their returns

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clarifying their marital status.3 In spite of this political outrage, Christopher Street encouraged married couples to file separately at the federal level. In doing so, the firm’s advisors explained, couples not only avoided committing tax fraud but also, in many cases, were likely “better off ” in terms of minimizing their tax obligations (Wiedeman, 2012). Over the next few years, the Supreme Court alleviated much of this anger and uncertainty, first in Windsor by overturning the section of DOMA prohibiting federal recognition of state-level marriages, and eventually in Obergefell by recognizing same-sex couples’ fundamental right to marry. Nevertheless, Christopher Street remained relevant. In an interview with Reuters just a few days after the Obergefell decision, Hatch cautioned lesbians and gay men against dropping their guard on the financial planning front: “I wish I could say marriage makes it easy,” she lamented, “but it doesn’t” (Pinsker, 2015). For wealthy same-sex couples deciding to marry after a long time together, she explained, Christopher Street could help them reassess their wealth-management plans and untangle the complex arrangements they had made over the years. In other cases, two people who wished to marry but wanted to retain their respective economic independence would benefit from the firm’s expertise in developing pre- and post-nuptial agreements. Finally—and most surprisingly, given the freedom-to-marry movement’s insistence on the universal appeal of marriage—one of the primary dilemmas facing Hatch’s clients has been whether to even get married at all. Following Obergefell, many couples were just trying to figure out if marriage made financial sense for them. The answer depends on a couple’s specific situation. In the case of a middle-class LGBT household, marriage has the potential to make everyday life more affordable in the immediate present. For example, parents who, after marrying, become eligible to use tax-free dollars to cover their partners and children under employer-based health insurance plans might find that marriage really helps the family’s monthly budget. That said, the financial benefits of marriage are often most deeply felt by couples in which one person earns much more than the other. The US tax code is designed to benefit patriarchal families where a breadwinning father supports a stay-at-home mother who makes little or no money.When a married couple of this kind files their income taxes, they are taxed as if they are two individuals, each making half of the total of their combined salaries. This income-splitting process has the effect of lowering the amount they owe the government. To clarify, because the tax code is progressive (that is, you are taxed more when you make more), the breadwinner who files jointly with his low- or non-earning spouse pays less in taxes than he would if he were filing as a single person and taxed on the entirety of his income. Following the legalization of same-sex marriage, lesbian and gay couples who make vastly different amounts of money are now entitled to the tax-saving benefits that come with filing jointly as spouses. For many of Christopher Street’s clients, however, the advantages of marrying are less clear-cut. Since taking over the firm in the mid-1990s, Hatch has focused on serving the wealthiest segments of the lesbian and gay community. While the firm had historically served clients from across the country who were drawn to its

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gay-specific focus, the majority of Christopher Street’s clients are now from the New York metro area (Quittner, 2010). By the early 2010s, the average client was worth a little over $1 million, and new clients were required to have at least $500,000 ready to invest (Garmhausen, 2010). For these people, the question of whether to marry often requires a cost–benefit analysis of marriage as an economic arrangement. Take, for example, income-tax planning. Before marriage equality, lesbian and gay couples who shared money, property, and/or the responsibility of raising children were forced to file their taxes as two single people.Their actual economic lives may have been intimately intertwined, but on paper they needed to produce two separate tax returns. Not surprisingly, many families turned to financial experts for assistance. Interestingly, because there were no set rules on how to proceed, advisors and accountants could play around with the numbers: The goal was to strategically divvy up children and other deductions across the two tax returns to minimize a couple’s total tax burden. After the Windsor and Obergefell rulings, same-sex couples realized that the freedom to marry seriously limited their ability to be creative in tax planning. Much to the dismay of Hatch’s clients, marriage is often “more detrimental . . . than positive” when it comes to paying income taxes (Arden, 2014). Since most of the couples working with Christopher Street consist of high earners partnered with other high earners, the shift in filing status from single to married tended to increase their total tax obligations. In other words, these couples faced what their straight counterparts have long termed the “marriage penalty” (that is, the increase in taxes that married couples experience when both spouses have similar incomes). On a year-to-year basis, marriage tends to cost wealthy LGBT families money. Yet, as Hatch advises her clients, it is necessary for couples to weigh these “losses” against what they stand to “gain” by eventually avoiding estate taxes. Put more crudely, for Christopher Street’s clients, the question of marriage can boil down to deciding whether it is worth paying more in annual income taxes while both members of the couple are alive, in order to ensure that, when death does them part, the surviving partner can take advantage of laws that allow for the unlimited and tax-free transfer of assets from a deceased spouse to their widow/er. Given that the benefits of being married can become most obvious after a spouse dies, it is hardly a coincidence that the two names attached to marriage equality in the United States, Edith Windsor and Jim Obergefell, belong respectively to a widow and a widower. There is, of course, a significant difference between these two cases. Obergefell’s fight to be named the surviving spouse on his husband’s death certificate only involved accessing $255 in monthly social security survivor benefits. In contrast, Windsor’s lawsuit against the US government was motivated by her resistance to owing over $300,000 in estate taxes.4 For wealthy same-sex couples, what marriage equality offers is yet another financial mechanism for shielding their assets from taxes and preserving their private wealth.Thus, for Christopher Street’s clients, the question of whether to marry can become an issue of when to marry. Younger couples might delay marriage to continue enjoying income-tax

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savings, but older couples might want to prioritize their estate-planning needs. For example, Hatch’s own decision to marry her partner stemmed, in part, from the fact that they were aging:They were not pleased about paying thousands of dollars more in annual income tax, but were more appalled by the idea of owing estate taxes when one of them died (Cloud, 2013). Within the world of financial planning, marriage feels less like a romantic activity and instead reveals itself as a legal and economic strategy. In public interviews, Hatch often mentions the cost–benefit analyses her clients perform before walking down the aisle. But she is also careful to clarify that love always wins (Arden, 2014; Hobbs, 2014; Skinner, 2014). The desire to be married, she claims, inevitably trumps all other concerns. Estimating that 80–90 percent of her clients have married (Hobbs, 2014), with the bulk of them now enduring a higher tax burden (Cloud, 2013), Hatch explains that lesbians and gay men understand that equality is not free and that “this is the price [they] pay for those other rights [they’re] going to get” (Skinner, 2014). This sudden willingness to pay additional income tax does not, however, mark a break from the tax-avoiding practices I’ve described above. According to Hatch, her clients find taxes bearable only when they experience a direct personal gain in exchange for their payment to the government.To borrow Lisa Duggan’s wording, Hatch and her clients adopt a consumer model of citizenship: They proceed as if they are “consumers of government, expecting the best return for the price paid in taxes” (2003, p. 38). In other words, they don’t think of taxation as a way for citizens to pool their money to fund public goods and services; instead, they approach the process as an individualized exchange in which they pay the government for legal protections and social legitimation. In sum, at the heart of most celebratory takes on the legalization of same-sex marriage is what Katherine Franke describes as an “anti-tax ethos” (Franke, 2015, p. 235)—an ethos that suppresses any sense of collective responsibility for things such as education, healthcare, or a more robust system of social services.This mindset stands in stark contrast to the politics of resistance and redistribution that characterized the gay liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Duggan and other queer studies scholars have documented (e.g., Eng, 2010; Hanhardt, 2013; Puar, 2007; Reddy, 2011), a shift has taken place within LGBT activism over the past few decades. We have witnessed a transformation away from a broad-based movement in which lesbians and gay men worked with other marginalized groups to challenge capitalist culture and repressive state policies. The mainstream LGBT rights movement today is a much narrower, identity-based project that tries to prove that LGBT-identified people are respectable consumer-citizens who deserve access to marriage and other mainstream institutions. Hatch’s advocacy work and Christopher Street’s advisory services help us see how assimilatory LGBT projects break from the economic-justice focus of earlier activist efforts. In other words, we can begin to understand that, when LGBT rights advocates say their communities deserve “financial security,” they are not necessarily critiquing the injustices of capitalism as a racist, exploitative system. The goal is not a more equitable distribution of money and other resources. Rather, they are calling for legal rights and consumer

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services that would help LGBT families manage their personal wealth—rarely pausing to ask how such changes would help people without any wealth to manage, or whether it is even possible to make the global economy fairer and more inclusive. Consider, for a moment, the name of Hatch’s firm. Located in New York City’s Greenwich Village, Christopher Street is often thought of as the birthplace of gay liberation. It was on this street that the Stonewall riots, led by street youth, gender-variant folks, and other poor queers (many of whom were of color), took place in 1969.What is lost when this iconic street name is extracted from its historical and political context and used to brand a financial services company as LGBT-friendly? This first section of my chapter illustrates that the firm’s appropriation of Christopher Street symbolizes the depoliticization of LGBT culture. By asking for legal recognition and financial protections, LGBT rights advocates offer a “demobilized gay constituency” uninterested in contesting the capitalist nation-state or challenging the idea that we should all be personally responsible for our own economic wellbeing (Duggan, 2003, p. 50). From this perspective, the tax-evading practices of the gay elite can be understood as indicative of larger shifts taking place within LGBT politics and US political culture. The use of marriage and other financial mechanisms to amass personal wealth both fuels and is fueled by the sense that there is a scarcity of resources and that individual families must do everything they can to protect themselves. This perpetual feeling of insecurity, coupled with a belief in personal responsibility, serves as the US government’s justification for cutting and constricting social-welfare programs.

Same-sex marriage promotion In the wake of the Windsor and Obergefell decisions, it was not just wealthy same-sex couples who wondered whether marriage made financial sense for them. For poor and/or disabled LGBT-identified people who rely on the dwindling welfare state to survive, the sudden availability of marriage was a cause not for immediate celebration, but instead for much caution and calculation. In 2013, when the federal government started recognizing state-level same-sex marriages, several major US-based LGBT rights organizations published a “fact sheet series” entitled “After DOMA: What It Means for You.”5 These documents provided same-sex couples in which at least one partner was a US citizen guidance on navigating a new legal landscape. The series included information on income taxes, spousal benefits from employers, and immigration policies and processes. Additionally, the fact sheets addressed the effects of the ruling on accessing Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Supplemental Security Income for the Aged, Blind, and Disabled (SSI). Each of these latter documents cautioned same-sex couples against getting married without fully understanding how marriage would affect the government’s assessment of their family income and whether this might impact their eligibility for these safety-net programs. For many (if not most) couples, the fact sheets explained, being married is not beneficial for Medicaid, TANF, or SSI purposes. People relying on these programs were advised to consult an attorney, if possible, before deciding to marry.

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In contrast to some of the claims made by the freedom-to-marry movement, marriage equality does not automatically translate into economic stability for all LGBT-identified individuals. Discussions about same-sex marriage look different if we center the needs of couples living near or below the poverty line. For starters, this reframing debunks the notion that marriage is a universally beneficial and desirable way of life. Moreover, such an approach allows us to see how the US government stands to gain from marriage equality. While the Supreme Court rulings are often celebrated as a sign of social progress and a marker of the federal government’s expanding generosity and inclusivity, a closer look suggests that the legalization of same-sex marriage serves the economic interests of the nation-state. In this section, I tackle a single question: How might marriage equality help the state privatize the cost of social welfare and, in turn, reduce government expenditures? Although the US government justified the passage of DOMA by claiming that same-sex marriage would drain precious resources (Defense of Marriage Act of 1996), a report by the US Congressional Budget Office (2004) concluded that same-sex marriage would not cost the state any additional money. In fact, the Bush-era report found that recognizing same-sex marriages would, on net, likely “improve the budget’s bottom line to a small extent.” It is true that requiring the government to give benefits to same-sex partners would increase spending for Social Security and for the Federal Employees Health Benefits programs. That said, same-sex marriage would simultaneously reduce costs linked to SSI, Medicaid, and Medicare. According to the CBO report, marriage would render many recipients of public assistance ineligible once their spouse’s income figured into eligibility determinations. Not unlike the “marriage penalty” built into the US tax code, these social welfare programs penalize people for getting married by offering spouses fewer benefits than they would receive as two single adults. Despite the perception of gay men as predominantly white and wealthy, LGBT poverty is a serious issue (DeFilippis, 2016).The majority of LGBT people are poor or working class, people of color, and/or female, and are struggling “to get a job or hold onto one [and] to pay their rent and care for themselves and the people they love” (Hollibaugh & Weiss, 2015, p. 18). Recent census data reveals that same-sex couples raising children are twice as likely as their straight counterparts to report incomes near the poverty threshold (Gates, 2013) and are significantly more likely to receive public assistance (Badgett, Durso, & Schneebaum, 2013). Under President Barack Obama, HHS began to acknowledge—albeit in limited ways—this widespread problem. In addition to framing the Affordable Care Act as a way of addressing the healthcare needs of disadvantaged LGBT communities, HHS’s Administration for Children and Families (ACF) was also working to improve its services to better meet the needs of low-income LGBT populations, with a specific focus on LGBT people of color and transgender women in particular.6 In the context of this chapter, what interests me most is what happened after the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage: The Obama administration identified poor LGBT communities as potential targets for federally funded programs to promote marital family norms.

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For the past two decades, marriage promotion efforts have played a vital role in the reorganization of US social-welfare programs.Thanks to President Bill Clinton’s inclusion of marriage-promotion funding within the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 and President George W. Bush’s subsequent expansion of grants programs for “healthy marriage” and “responsible fatherhood” initiatives, federal money has been made readily available for developing relationship education programs. Many of these programs were designed to encourage marriage and discourage divorce among low-income populations. Underlying these efforts was a belief that poor people—specifically poor women of color, and especially single black mothers—are to blame for their financial situations because they lack “family values” and fail to create “stable” homes. According to these racist and (hetero)sexist logics, marriage is the obvious solution to the problem of poverty: If women would just marry the fathers of their children, then their husbands could support them, and they could form proper nuclear families. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act even opened by asserting that marriage is “the foundation of a successful society” and that “promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to successful child rearing and the well-being of children.” In doing so, the Act tried to pass itself off as a law designed to strengthen families. What it actually did was drastically decrease the availability of support for families living in the United States. Specifically, the law replaced the federally administered Aid to Families and Dependent Children (AFDC) program—which guaranteed cash assistance to anyone eligible—with the TANF block-grant system—which provides states with limited funds for welfare programs while simultaneously enforcing harsher eligibility standards and work requirements. Despite cutting support for struggling families, the Act was celebrated by its proponents as a pro-family initiative. Supporters pointed to the law’s marriage-promotion provisions as evidence of how reform efforts would repair a welfare system that had historically discouraged marriage and worked against family preservation by denying benefits to two-parent households and disqualifying women who were living with different-sex partners. In practice, however, welfare reform has sent conflicting messages about marriage. On the one hand, TANF-funded programs encourage marriage and, in some states, have even offered cash bonuses to women who marry the fathers of their children. On the other, as explained above, the new system discourages marriage by lowering benefits for recipients who marry their partners. Officially, such policies are based on the belief that marriage automatically improves a person’s economic situation and thus reduces their financial need. Unofficially, the “marriage penalty” can be understood as another way the US government privatizes the work of social welfare. While privatization often refers to the state’s growing reliance on private contractors to administer programs previously handled by government offices, the term can also describe the state’s efforts to make private citizens take on the costs of education, healthcare, and other basic social services. In the case of welfare reform, the state’s seemingly contradictory practices—promoting and penalizing marriage—serve a privatizing function. The government tries to save money by

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offloading the financial burden of caring for poor women and children onto individual men. From this perspective, we get a clearer sense of what marriage promotion programs do. To maximize the cost savings of welfare reform, the state needs to instill in low-income couples an appreciation for marriage so powerful that it will override concerns about the economic disadvantages of tying the knot. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, just four months after the Obergefell decision, the federal government began to develop plans for promoting same-sex marriage. In October 2015, ACF hired an outside research firm to “provide an assessment of the current state of the healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) practice field” and to “identify and promote promising approaches for serving same-sex couples and lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals—whether adult or youth—who may become involved in same-sex relationships” (Office of Planning, Research & Evaluation, 2015). In June 2016, the agency posted a story about its efforts to support healthy marriages and relationships for LGBT populations on its “Family Room” blog. ACF introduced the initiative by explaining that LGBT parents and same-sex couples face “stressors,” such as “higher rates of poverty” and “poorer health outcomes,” that “undermine their efforts to build strong, nurturing families” (Chamberlain, 2016). This initial framing of the project suggests, at first, that HHS was acknowledging the negative impact homophobia and financial insecurity can have on romantic and familial relationships. In its entirety, however, the blog post pitches LGBT-inclusive HMRE programs as advancing ACF’s mission to “support all vulnerable children and families to achieve health, wellbeing, and economic selfsufficiency” (Chamberlain, 2016; emphasis in original). In doing so, HHS admits that it was looking to update its privatizing strategies by presenting marriage as a cure (or at least a treatment) for LGBT poverty. For the past two decades, anti-racist feminist scholars and activists have pushed back against welfare reform (see, e.g., Albelda & Withorn, 2002; Mink, 1998; Roberts, 1997; Smith, 2007).7 In addition to calling for the restoration and expansion of programs that provide people with material resources and immediate relief, they have challenged the faulty assumptions on which marriage-promotion initiatives are based. Specifically, critics point to research on the structural factors creating economic insecurities in the United States—namely, a substandard public education system, the absence of living wage employment opportunities, the adoption of increasingly punitive immigration policies, the lack of affordable housing and healthcare options, and the pervasiveness of institutionalized racism, ableism, and (hetero)sexism. How, they ask, will getting married solve any of these problems? When two poor people get married, aren’t they still poor? Additionally, these critics have questioned the ethics of welfare reform. Isn’t it cruel to cut funding from cashassistance programs that provide direct help to struggling families and instead spend that money on developing relationship-education programs for which there is currently no social scientific evidence indicating effectiveness in combating poverty?8 As far as the critics are concerned, HMRE initiatives are not poverty-alleviation programs, as they address neither systemic injustices nor the pressing needs of individual families.

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President Obama attempted to address some of the critiques of his predecessors’ marriage-promotion efforts. His administration tried to emphasize the importance of “healthy” relationships and long-term partnerships (rather than focusing solely on marital relations), but marriage-promotion proponents fought hard to keep marriage rhetorically central to relationship education initiatives (Heath, 2012, pp. 192–3). The two-parent marital family has remained the national ideal. Given the Obama administration’s investment in broadening the scope of relationship education, it is unsurprising that, after the legalization of marriage, HHS started working on how to fold same-sex relationships into its HMRE programming. Such efforts likely upset a good portion of the right-wing marriage-promotion movement— lest we forget, the welfare reformers who blamed single mothers for failing to marry were also the most vociferous opponents of same-sex couples seeking to marry (Cahill, 2005; Smith, 2001). Then again, other marriage-promotion enthusiasts have since revised their positions on marriage equality and have expressed appreciation for the freedom-to-marry movement’s advancement of a pro-marriage agenda.9 As such, HHS’s seemingly progressive recognition of LGBT families within HMRE programming is actually best understood as a continuation of morally and fiscally conservative marriage-promotion policies. The effects of President Donald Trump’s administration on the future of samesex marriage promotion remain to be seen. For queer scholars and activists looking to build broader and more transformative movements, however, our task has never been clearer.We must continue to push back against the state’s privatizing initiatives while also devising strategies for providing immediate relief to the people enduring the greatest structural inequalities. This kind of work must prioritize supporting community-based survival networks and mass mobilizations led by poor families, undocumented immigrants, people who are or have been incarcerated, and other highly vulnerable populations. At the same time, it can also be useful to put direct pressure on administrative governing bodies and to make specific policy-oriented demands. Heeding Dean Spade’s call for a rethinking of the role that law reform might play within queer and trans politics, we will want to question the mainstream LGBT movement’s obsession with securing marriage rights and other formal “pronouncement[s] of equality” (Spade, 2011, p. 28). Instead, we will want to pay attention to the subtler ways in which public policies determine “who lives, for how long, and under what conditions” (ibid., p. 26).What steps can we take to make sure more people have access to more resources? In my forthcoming book, Familiar Perversions: The Racial, Sexual, and Economic Politics of LGBT Families, I analyze the US government’s use of the marital family ideal—an ideal that has, in many ways, been expanded to include same-sex couples— to determine which families are deserving of support and how this support should be distributed. My project joins LGBT and queer family advocates in resisting the marriage-centrism of US public policy and demanding, instead, a “flexible set of economic benefits” for “diverse kinds of partnerships, households, kinship relationships, and families” (Beyond Same-Sex Marriage, 2006, reprinted in full in Chapter 9 of this volume). Rather than defining familial relations by blood ties and legal contracts,

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what if it no longer mattered whether two people were married or if a child legally belonged to the adult(s) raising them? What if we were allowed to determine who counted as our family based on who we love, who we care for, and who cares for us? With this kind of definition of family in place, eligibility for tax subsidies and public-assistance programs would be determined not by whether someone is married but by the size of their family and, in the case of safety net programs, their specific needs.10 What my scholarly work tries to provide is an analytical framework through which we can understand the beliefs and assumptions guiding LGBT politics and family policies today. In this chapter, I have shown how the political visions driving Christopher Street’s advisory practices and HHS’s marriage-promotion initiatives are tied to a very narrow understanding of what it means to be a family and what it looks like to fight for social change. As we reach for a more just future, I am most inspired by queer and trans organizers working in solidarity with racially and economically marginalized communities to push for the reorganization of public policies around a much broader definition of family. Let’s fight for queer economic justice by working together to secure material support for the wide array of intimate connections and familial formations that make possible our collective survival.

Notes 1 This essay is a revised and condensed version of Chapter 4, “Vitality: the family business of health promotion and wealth management,” from my book Familiar Perversions: The Racial, Sexual, and Economic Politics of LGBT Families. 2 In this chapter, I use the word “queer” in two different ways. On occasion, as in this sentence, I use the term to signal activist projects and sexual identities that do not fit within the parameters of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender. More often, I use the term to describe a political and theoretical approach that analyzes the intersections of gender and sexual norms with capitalist structures, racial and ethnic hierarchies, and dominant standards of health and dis/ability. A queer approach also challenges the dominant belief that marriage, monogamy, and the nuclear family represent the most normal, desirable, and respectable way of life. 3 The “Refuse to Lie” campaign was spearheaded by Nadine Smith of Equality Florida and Kate Kendall of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. For more information, see Smith (2012). 4 I should clarify that, technically speaking, Windsor was no longer a widow when she died in September 2017. In October 2016, she married her new partner, Judith Kasen, a vice president at Wells Fargo Advisors (Bernstein, 2016). It seems somewhat fitting that Windsor ended up with a wife presumably immersed in the business of estate planning. 5 Archived on the Family Equality Council’s website at www.familyequality.org/get_ informed/advocacy/after_doma. The Council worked with the following organizations to produce these documents: the American Civil Liberties Union, Center for American Progress, Family Equality Council, Freedom to Marry, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, Human Rights Campaign, Immigration Equality, Lambda Legal, National Center for Lesbian Rights, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (now known as the National LGBTQ Task Force), and OutServe-SLDN. 6 See chapter 4 of my forthcoming book (Montegary, 2018) for an expanded analysis of the Obama administration’s LGBT health-promotion efforts. 7 Several scholars have focused specifically on the failure of marriage promotion programs to address the underlying factors contributing to poverty (e.g., Coontz & Folbre, 2002; Hardisty, 2008b; Heath, 2012).

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8 For a detailed critique of the Right’s use of questionable social science research to justify marriage promotion efforts, see Hardisty (2008a). For more on the 2010 governmentfunded study that found state-sponsored marriage promotion programs to be ineffective, see Heath (2012, pp. 189–91). 9 See, for example, Blankenhorn’s (2012) op-ed, “How My View on Gay Marriage Changed” in the New York Times. Blankenhorn, a well-known leader of the marriagepromotion movement and the founder of the Institute for American Values, explains his decision to stop “fighting gay marriage” and to start “help[ing] build new coalitions bringing together gays who want to strengthen marriage with straight people who want to do the same.” 10 Notably, the definitions of family used by public housing programs and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program) are much broader and include provisions to recognize relationships between two or more people who live together and share resources. LGBT family advocates have identified these programs as providing alternative models for organizing the distribution of public assistance benefits (Movement Advancement Project, Family Equality Council, & Center for American Progress, 2011).

References Albelda, R. & Withorn, A. (Eds.). (2002). Lost ground: Welfare reform, poverty, and beyond. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Arden, D. (2014, May 30). Advisers bolster same-sex estate, tax planning. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873244126045785149726222 48526 Badgett, M.V. L., Durso, L. E. & Schneebaum, A. (2013, June). New patterns of poverty in the lesbian, gay, and bisexual community. Los Angeles, CA: The Williams Institute. Retrieved from www. williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/LGB-Poverty-Update-Jun-2013.pdf Bernstein, J. (2016, September 30). The remarriage of Edie Windsor, a gay marriage pioneer. The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/fashion/weddings/ edie-windsor-lgbt-activist-marriage.html Beyond Same-Sex Marriage. (2006, July 26). Beyond same-sex marriage: A new strategic vision for all our families and relationships. Reprinted in full in chapter 9 of this volume. Blackman, A. (2005, September 18). Family finances: For unmarried partners, planning is key. Wall Street Journal, 3. Blankenhorn, D. (2012, June 22). How my view on gay marriage changed. The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2012/06/23/opinion/how-my-view-on-gaymarriage-changed.html Cahill, S. (2005).Welfare moms and the two grooms:The concurrent promotion and restriction of marriage in U.S. public policy. Sexualities, 8(2), 169–87. Chamberlain, S. (2016, June 16). Supporting healthy marriage and relationships for LGBT populations. The Family Room Blog. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Administration for Children & Families. Retrieved from www.acf.hhs.gov/blog/2016/06/ supporting-healthy-marriage-and-relationships-for-lgbt-populations Cloud, J. (2013, September 26). My big gay tax return. Bloomberg Businessweek. Retrieved from www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-09-26/gay-couples-tax-returns-to-refilejointly-or-not Coontz, S. & Folbre, N. (2002, March 21). Marriage, poverty, and public policy. The American Prospect. Retrieved from www.prospect.org/article/marriage-poverty-and-public-policy Defense of Marriage Act of 1996. 1 U.S.C. §7 and 28 U.S.C. §1738C (1996). Bill text. Retrieved from www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CRPT-104hrpt664/html/CRPT-104hrpt664.htm

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DeFilippis, J. N. (2016). “What about the rest of us?” An overview of LGBT poverty issues and a call to action. Journal of Progressive Human Services, 27(3), 143–74. Duggan, L. (2003). The twilight of equality? Neoliberalism, cultural politics, and the attack on democracy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Eng, D. L. (2010). The feeling of kinship: Queer liberalism and the racialization of intimacy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Franke, K. (2015). Wedlocked: The perils of marriage equality. New York, NY: New York University Press. Garmhausen, S. (2010, October 25). Advisor spotlight: How a former JPMorgan bond saleswoman transformed an iconic advisory into a business. RIABiz. Retrieved from www. riabiz.com/a/2989001/advisor-spotlight-how-a-former-jpmorgan-bond-saleswomantransformed-an-iconic-advisory-into-a-business Gates, G. J. (2013, February). LGBT parenting in the United States. Los Angeles, CA: The Williams Institute. Retrieved from www.williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/ uploads/LGBT-Parenting.pdf Hampton, D. (2012, April 29). Christopher Street Financial’s president becomes the “talk of the town.” RIABiz. Retrieved from www.riabiz.com/a/12924117/christopher-streetfinancials-president-becomes-the-talk-of-the-town Hanhardt, C. B. (2013). Safe space: Gay neighborhood history and the politics of violence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hardisty, J. (2008a). Marriage as a cure for poverty? Social science through a “family values” lens. Political Research Associates & the Women of Color Resource Center. Retrieved from www.publiceye.org/jeans_report/marriage-promotion-part-2.pdf Hardisty, J. (2008b). Pushed to the altar:The right wing roots of marriage promotion. Policy Research Associates & the Women of Color Resource Center. Retrieved from www.jeanhardisty. com/writing/articles-chapters-and-reports/pushed-to-the-altar-the-right-wing-rootsof-marriage-promotion Heath, M. (2012). One marriage under god: The campaign to promote marriage in America. New York, NY: New York University Press. Hobbs, J. (2014, March 28). Should we or shouldn’t we? Instinct. Retrieved from www. instinctmagazine.com/article/should-we-or-shouldn%E2%80%99t-we Hollibaugh, A. & Weiss, M. (2015). Queer precarity and the myth of gay affluence. New Labor Forum, 24(3), 18–27. Mink, G. (1998). Welfare’s end. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Montegary, L. (2018). Familiar perversions:The racial, sexual, and economic politics of LGBT families. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Movement Advancement Project, Family Equality Council, & Center for American Progress. (2011, October). All children matter: How legal and social inequalities hurt LGBT families. Retrieved from www.lgbtmap.org/policy-and-issue-analysis/all-children-matterfull-report Office of Planning, Research & Evaluation. (2015). Same-sex relationships: Updates to healthy marriage and relationship programming (SUHMRE), 2015–17. Retrieved from www. acf.hhs.gov/opre/same-sex-relationships-updates-to-healthy-marriage-and-relationshipeducation-programming-suhmre-2015-2016 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA). U.S. Pub.L. 104–93. Pinsker, B. (2015, June 26). Same-sex couples face the music: First comes love, then taxes. Reuters. Retrieved from www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-gaymarriage-estate/samesex-couples-face-the-music-first-comes-love-then-taxes-idUSKBN0P62K520150626 Puar, J. K. (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Quittner, J. (2010, April 26–28). Wealth matters. The Advocate, 30–31. Reddy, C. (2011). Freedom with violence: Race, sexuality, and the U.S. state. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Roberts, D. (1997). Killing the black body: Race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. New York, NY:Vintage Books. Skinner, L. (2014, June 30). As gay rights expand, so does the need for advice. Investment News, 4. Smith, A. M. (2001).The politicization of marriage in contemporary American public policy: The Defense of Marriage Act and the Personal Responsibility Act. Citizenship Studies, 5(3), 303–20. Smith, A. M. (2007). Welfare reform and sexual regulation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Smith, N. (2012, February 7). Gay married couples are refusing to lie. The Huffington Post. Retrieved from www.huffingtonpost.com/nadine-smith/gay-couples-taxes-refuse-tolie_b_1254807.html Spade, D. (2011). Normal life: Administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of the law. Brooklyn, NY: South End Press. US Congressional Budget Office. (2004, June 21). The potential budgetary impact of recognizing same-sex marriages. Retrieved from www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/108th-congress2003-2004/reports/06-21-samesexmarriage.pdf Wiedeman, R. (2012, April 23). Tax day. The New Yorker. Retrieved from www.newyorker. com/magazine/2012/04/23/tax-day

3 “WHAT MAKES OUR CONFLICTS QUEER?” An interview with Rachel Epstein Rachel Epstein and Michael W. Yarbrough

Editors’ introduction: To close this Part’s examination of the material dynamics of queer families after marriage, this chapter explores the theme of relational conflict. At the “After Marriage” conference, queer parenting activist, educator, and researcher Rachel Epstein presented an early look at some research she has been doing on conflict in queer/trans-led families, especially families with children.This chapter presents an interview with Epstein about that research and some of her other work over the years.The conversation touches on several themes in queer/trans family conflicts: the role of deeply held ideas about biology, the enduring influence of shame, the legal system’s lack of understanding of complex queer family structures, and the role of formal and informal agreements in helping queer families manage conflict. As a whole, Epstein’s work and research highlight the challenges queer families continue to face even as laws become more progressive, and the need for queer communities to explore the kinds of conflicts that emerge in our families. To get started, could you talk a little bit about the different kinds of work that you’ve done over the years? RACHEL EPSTEIN: Well, my daughter was conceived in 1991 with the assistance of a sperm bank and a fertility clinic and I became a queer parent myself in 1992. And then, in 1997, I was approached by the midwife who caught my daughter when she was born. She asked if I would develop and facilitate a course with her for lesbian/bi/queer women who are considering parenthood. So we started Dykes Planning Tykes (DPT). And DPT later spawned a series of other queer and trans parenting courses—for gay, bi, queer men; for trans men who were thinking about getting pregnant; and so on. And then, in 2001, I was hired as coordinator of a program called the LGBTQ Parenting Network, where we did all kinds of things related to LGBTQ+ parenting. We developed resources for people who wanted to become parents, and MICHAEL YARBROUGH:

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for those who were already parenting. We held social and recreational events and discussion forums. There was also a large research component. We partnered quite frequently with Dr Lori Ross and her Re:searching for LGBTQ Health team, now located at the University of Toronto. For example, we did a research project looking at the barriers faced by LGBTQ people in relation to adoption systems, and another similar project on LGBTQ+ people and fertility clinics. We did research on what is happening with our kids in schools. A few years ago Jake Pyne did a research placement with us and held some focus groups for trans parents. Out of that came the Trans Family Law Project, coordinated by Dana Baitz, because we realized there are some particular and urgent issues that trans people face in relation to separations and custody and access in family law. So it was sort of a cycle where we would do research, and the research always involved community people, and then we would translate the research into usable resources for our communities: for example, a booklet on adoption or a theatre and video project on Assisted Human Reproduction services.1 I did a lot of training with professionals of all kinds: childcare workers, teachers, nurses, doctors, midwives, social workers. I am also a mediator and over the years I’ve worked in various contexts, including with LGBTQ+ people and communities. So I would often find myself sitting with people who were either in the process of planning to have children or who were in conflict of one kind or another. I should also mention that in 2009 I edited a book which was an attempt to move the conversation about queer/trans parenting beyond us having to constantly prove that we’re just “the same” and just “as good” as cisgender heterosexual families.2 That book was an attempt to provide a space for queer and trans parents to tell other stories about their lives. I think that makes a good transition into the main thing we want to talk about today: the research that you’ve been doing about conflict within LGBTQ+ families. So that research grows out of your education and mediation work in the past? For sure. For many, many years, I taught the Dykes Planning Tykes course. People come into that course with the desire to bring children into their lives, full of hope and optimism and excitement and fear. We would always encourage people who weren’t in couples to come, but many of the people who took our courses came in couples. Nobody imagines at that moment, when they are thinking about becoming parents, that they might break up, because they’re full of love and they’re doing this exciting thing together. But those of us who taught the courses observed that many of the people who take the courses end up not being together in the same way, however many years later.We would try and bring this up, suggesting, “Some of you may not be together.” But at that moment, when people are excited about having children, they’re not thinking about conflict, and they’re not thinking about breakups, and they’re not thinking about what might happen and how they might handle it. So I became interested in exploring this. What kinds of conflicts are people finding themselves in? And what is it that makes our conflicts queer? I’m

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interested in the particular configurations of our families, and the particular kinds of conflicts that we might experience. For example, conflicts between biological and non-biological parents. It’s true in our families that usually there’s one or more people who are parenting kids they’re not biologically connected to. So, when conflict happens, or when relationships break down, how do these deeply held, sometimes unconscious beliefs about the significance of biology manifest? I was also interested in conflicts with donors, particularly with sperm donors. What kinds of conflicts are sperm donors and parents getting into and how are they resolving them? And I was interested in multiparent families, people who are not necessarily in sexual or romantic relationships, but families where two people, three people, or four people are coming together to parent. What kinds of conflicts are happening there? So can you describe how you’ve been doing the research? I should start off by saying that I am not an “expert” on these issues. I don’t want to position myself as an expert. I have just begun doing this research, which has really just been about talking to people. So anything I have to say today is simply based on thoughts I’ve had while listening to people speak about their conflicts and/or their work with people in conflict. I wanted to begin this research by getting a bit of an overview, so I decided to talk to family lawyers, mediators, and psychotherapists who work with queer and trans clients. So that was where I started. I did ten interviews with lawyers, mediators, and therapists. And then I started talking to regular queer and trans folk about their experiences. I’m still doing interviews, because I decided I would interview anyone who was interested because there hasn’t been a lot of work done in this area, and I really wanted to get as broad of a spectrum of experiences as I could. The other thing that’s happened through this research is that I got reinterested in the early LGBTQ+ custody cases, from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, even into the 1990s. The cases where, for the most part, people either avoided courts because of the hostile climate and the fear of losing their children, or they actually did lose custody of their children. I thought, “I have to look at some of this history, because it’s not that long ago that lesbians and gay men were losing their kids pretty regularly, and trans people today remain vulnerable to losing custody of their children.” I decided to try and track down the people who were involved in those cases, many of whom may not be around that much longer. So I have also started to interview people who were involved in early custody cases, and some of them were also involved with the Lesbian Mothers’ Defense Fund, both here in Toronto and in Vancouver. Epstein sees this history as still shaping the way LGBTQ+ family conflicts play out today. I think there are a number of things that we’re haunted by in LGBTQ+ family conflicts and family building. And one of them is that history—the

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history of both being prevented from having children and of having children taken away from us. The residue of that history is fear. People have a fear of losing their children. Even if we’re very blessed, as we are in Canada, to have very progressive family law, people still carry these fears. For example, we interviewed a woman in the context of our fertility clinic research where she and her partner were doing what is sometimes called reciprocal IVF—taking the egg from one person, fertilizing it, and implanting it in the uterus of the other person. In this case, the woman who was providing the eggs was asked at the last minute to sign a form relinquishing her parental rights, even though she was an intended parent. The fertility clinic was treating her as if she was an egg donor. Earlier, she had articulated a fear that “someone was going to take her baby away,” and then she goes to the fertility clinic and they actually asked her to sign a form that, in effect, is taking her baby away. In the end she refused to sign the form, and they allowed the procedure to go ahead. But there are these institutional procedures that, in effect, undermine our legitimacy as parents. And, in some ways, our fears are still founded.3 I also think we’re haunted by the specter of the conventional nuclear family that, as an institution, continues to be profoundly operative. Even though the most recent Canadian census (and likely the US one too) tells us that most families don’t actually match that conventional model, we continue to be haunted by a narrow image of family that consists of mom and dad and their biologically and genetically connected children. In your research, what kinds of things are you seeing people have conflict over? I think we could start with biology. Issues related to biology come up a lot in conflict, particularly for queer women in couples who are parenting together. One of the lawyers I spoke to said that it used to be, in many cases, that if each woman in a couple had given birth to a baby, when they separated each woman would take “her” child and they would go their separate ways. I think these dynamics have changed over time. Now, no matter who gives birth to children, people much more think about the children as their children. However, while for many people biology is not a contentious issue, we are seeing many instances, way more than I would wish for, of a biological parent using the biological connection to gain legitimacy or power—arguing along the lines that they are the primary parent, that the child is more bonded with them, that they’ve been spending more time with the child, and that therefore that should continue. In some sense, arguing that they are the “real” parent. I think we need to address the frequency with which this is happening in our communities. At times of disappointment, sadness, and hurt, people sometimes use whatever is at their disposal as a means to get what they want, without necessarily considering the consequences to all those involved, particularly the children. Non-biological parents also describe complicated feelings and responses. The insecurity borne from their legal and social vulnerability and the desire to be recognized as full and legitimate parents can sometimes surface as resentment

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or jealousy towards a co-parent, or as the need for recognition or validation from the child, or feelings of not being good enough. All of these complexities, in both non-biological and biological parents, can get exacerbated when people are in conflict. And of course all of this relates to how parenthood is legally defined, which has changed over time. It used to be that parenthood was grounded in biology and genetics. And then things moved to a definition grounded in function. It’s about what you do—if you behave like a parent, you are a parent. If you function as a parent, you are a parent. That was very helpful, I think, initially for non-biological parents. But this functional definition of parenting was also used against non-biological parents. Because then a biological parent might go to court and say, “Well, no, she was never a parent. I did all the work. I did all the work of getting pregnant. I did all the work of childcare.” Now the move in family law, certainly here in Canada, is toward intention. When this child was conceived, what was the intention of the people who were going to be its parents? Here in Ontario, we have a new family law called the All Families Are Equal Act. This is a very interesting piece of legislation in several ways. First, it degenders the language of parenting.You no longer have to be a “mother” or a “father.”You can choose whether you want to be “Mother,” “Father,” or “Parent.” This can be very helpful for trans people, and for others who don’t fit in those gendered boxes. Second, the new law makes it possible for intention to define the parenting relationship, no matter the biological relationship. So, for example, even if you have sexual intercourse with someone, the law distinguishes between the intention to be a donor and the intention to be a parent. And finally, this legislation allows up to four people to register as a child’s parents. So it creates room for multi-parent families. I see. So biology is one of the big things you see people having conflict over, and it is really linked to this big question of who counts as a parent.What other kinds of patterns do you see emerging in your interviews, for example in the ways people experience or understand conflict? Shame is one thing that keeps coming up when people talk about their conflicts, in lots of different ways. We have children in a cultural context that says that LGBTQ+ people shouldn’t have children, that we won’t make good parents, that it’s really bad for our children to be growing up in our families. Because of all that, there’s been this pressure on us to present a picture of, “Everything is great in our families. We are all happy families.” Our slogan is “Love Makes a Family.” Embedded in that is the notion that biology doesn’t matter, and that everything is good. So when things go wrong, or when people are in painful conflicts, I think it can be hard to admit or talk about. Here we are convincing everyone that this is a great thing that we’re doing, and now we’re having trouble. Lots of people spoke about feeling shame that things weren’t working out quite as they had envisioned. And then there are additional undercurrents of shame where people feel ashamed of the feelings that they’re having. So for example, a biological parent

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is feeling that she’s more legitimate as a parent, or that the child is more bonded to her, or she should get more rights or more time with the child in a shared parenting or co-parenting agreement. She feels those things, but she doesn’t feel that she can voice them because “Love Makes a Family,” so she shouldn’t be “pulling rank” as a biological parent. Another example is a trans woman who is transitioning and feeling a lot of shame and guilt, thinking,“What is the impact on my family? What is the impact on my children?” And as a result of that shame, she might under-negotiate with lawyers or in mediation. She may feel pressured to sign a separation agreement that says things like “I will never go to my child’s school” or “I will never attend my child’s extracurricular activities,” things that she shouldn’t be agreeing to. People I interviewed also talked about the role that community plays in their conflicts. Because we are sometimes alienated, or worse, from our families of origin, many queer and trans people embrace the concept of “chosen family”—people who are hugely significant in our lives but are not necessarily our families of origin. Community plays a very, very important role in many of our lives. Sometimes, of course, community can be a huge source of support, bolstering people when they’re going through difficult times. But sometimes community plays a more negative role—friends take sides in a conflict or one person in a separating couple is shamed or ostracized because they were perceived as the one who was somehow in the wrong. So sometimes, in addition to being in a conflict, people feel isolated from the communities who might otherwise be providing them with support. Also, due to the relative smallness and overlapping nature of queer communities, people have to cope with their inability to avoid the people with whom they are in conflict. Running into exes at Pride has become a cliché, but we all know how difficult it can be! And it can be even harder when you have to be “big” for the children. Finally, pretty much everybody—mediators and lawyers particularly— spoke about the law.They emphasized that the law lacks nuance when it comes to LGBTQ+ families. So family court is not necessarily where you want to be working out your family conflicts, because a family court is likely not going to understand these complexities, the undercurrents, the ways that we make family, the creativity that sometimes goes into the creation of our families. And so the more that you can work out your conflicts outside of that system, I think people would generally agree, that’s good. One way to reduce the chance of going to court is to work out agreements at the outset of a parenting relationship. RE:

Queer family lawyers say they are writing more and more agreements for families outside the norm—for poly families, for multi-parent families, for people who want to live together but not parent together, or people who want to parent together but not live together.There’s this huge range of families that queer and trans people, and probably others as well, are creating. Current family

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law, while it is evolving, still doesn’t really work for families outside the box, so lawyers are having to write agreements that reflect various parenting arrangements. What is going to happen if this family configuration breaks down? How are we going to deal with the division of property? How are we going to deal with parenting together? I would certainly say to people that it’s good to do an agreement. Not necessarily because it’s enforceable in court, but because it gets you to think about all these issues, and to sit down and talk with each other. And if at some point you do end up in court, at least it indicates what your intention was when you went into this. Do you have a sense of what kinds of things they’re putting into these agreements? It could be anything. It depends what you’re planning to do together. It would be a different agreement if someone was planning to be a fairly uninvolved donor versus a co-parenting agreement. But it could include everything from decision-making about names, about schools, about health care, all the decisions that have to get made around a child. It could include involvement of families of origin. In a multi-parent family, there could be a lot of grandparents, so how does that all work? A lot of it, I think, is about time. Who and what configurations of people get time with the child? What happens in the summers? What happens over significant holidays? And there is lots of stuff about money. As marriage has become legal for same-sex couples, some lawyers are seeing couples come in to draw up agreements to avoid some of the consequences of marriage. The lawyers also say that a lot of people feel quite resentful of having been pulled into this system of regulation called marriage. All of a sudden we are subject to all the rules and regulations of marriage. And so some people are going out of their way to write agreements that counter that. For example, one lawyer said that she meets quite a few lesbian couples who want to opt out of the financial arrangements that come with marriage. Even if one person is much more financially resourced than the other, the one who doesn’t have much money might say, “I don’t want your money,” and the other one says, “I don’t want her to have my money.” So there is sometimes this sense of “we are independent” when it comes to finances and wanting to figure out a way to opt out of what the law assumes to be a financially interdependent relationship. The other thing shaping this is that here in Canada, being married and being common-law are not that different. If you’ve been living with someone for a period of time, even if you choose not to get married, you are going to be subject to many of the same financial obligations as if you are married. There are some property and asset implications that are different, but your obligations in terms of spousal support and child support are very similar whether you are common-law or married. So we’re all kind of getting pulled into these systems—sometimes reluctantly, and sometimes I presume people are welcoming it. It’s difficult to remain unregulated. I think some of us look

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back nostalgically sometimes to our outsider status, where the laws just didn’t really apply to us. And now they do. One of the lawyers talked about this. She said that she especially sees younger people, who really get that it’s after two years of living together that all of these rights and responsibilities kick in, forming what they call “beta” marriages or relationships. What that means is that if you don’t want to be impacted by those legal rights and responsibilities, you kind of call it off before you hit the two-year mark. So it’s like a bit of a trial period. And some people are trying to write agreements, almost like a prenuptial agreement, that state how they want to work their finances, how they want to work their property division. If you agree, you can do anything. But if you don’t, then the law is going to intervene and say, “This is what your rights and responsibilities are.” When children are involved, a key feature of Canadian law that shapes how negotiations like these play out is that, legally, parenting rights are separate from marriage. Parenting rights are not tied to marriage in Canada, and I think that’s quite different in the States. At least in some parts of the US, people really needed marriage in order to be recognized as parents, and that was not the case for us. So as queer parenting activists, we did not have to enter into the struggle for same-sex marriage, although certainly some of us had opinions about it. Lots of people, for example Martha Fineman,4 talk about separating parenting from partnering, and I think that’s the way to go. A romantic and/or sexual relationship is different from a relationship of dependence, like parenting. Ideally, these two things should be seen as separate and distinct in terms of benefits and rights and all of that. I think queer communities in Canada are quite fortunate in that marriage rights and parenting rights are separate. It would be even better if we could extend this so that benefits, in general, were based on relations of dependence, not on the status of your adult, sexual/romantic relationships. Both conflicts and agreements can blend material struggles with emotional issues. This contributes to the complexities of queer (and other) families, to which the legal system has difficulty responding. The lawyers are the ones who see and deal with high-conflict cases, so that becomes their reference point. Mediators are more the ones who are talking about emotional undercurrents.Their role is neither a therapist nor a lawyer, but they’re kind of walking a line between those two things—trying to deal with people’s emotions and feelings, and also trying to move them through a process where they come to some agreements, which are really legal agreements. So they’re the ones who are more aware of the nuance and the complexities of what’s going on with people in various situations. The lawyers tend to be more concerned about the law and how it applies here. And lawyers are also often acting on behalf of a client, so they’re trying

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to do as well by their client as they can. Whereas a mediator is hired by both people, and so they’re doing that complex thing of holding both people’s positions and interests and feelings and vulnerabilities at the same time. Often lawyers are very grateful to mediators, because they agree that court is not the place to find an in-depth understanding of queer and trans families, and they share the hope that many of these cases can be settled out of court. I was particularly struck by one mediator, probably because I agree with her, who spoke about the need to surface the emotional undercurrents that circulate, often in an unexpressed way, in most conflicts—so that they can be acknowledged and worked through more consciously. We changed the family law, which is a fabulous thing, and that does go a certain way to changing attitudes. But it doesn’t go far enough. Another mediator I interviewed spoke about the complexities of queer kinship networks— someone’s family might include an ex or two or three, various partners, new children, other chosen family. It’s all fine when it works, but then when someone gets upset by something and they take it into the family law context, some things can confuse the judge. Things like, for example, an ex being at the birth of their ex’s child with a new partner. It might make sense to the people involved but the judge says, “What the hell? Boundary! Why are you there? The birth of your ex’s child?” [laughing] Courts kind of get it if you’re a couple that fits into the model they’re familiar with, but once you go beyond that and you’re dealing with the webs of intimacies that make up our families, they don’t necessarily get that, and they’re not necessarily going to be helpful to you in terms of figuring out how to work things out. I recently was asked to mediate a case for a family that included seven parents. It wasn’t necessarily a queer thing. They were all living together and had various relationships with each other. And they were parenting, I believe, three children. One of the adults wanted to leave the household, and they were working out both the finances and the parenting arrangements. Can you imagine if these people went to a family court? What would the court do with that? They would immediately ask, “Who are the biological parents of the children? Who’s married to whom?” and then they would go from there. As opposed to “These are seven people who have established a familial relationship, and they want to work it out given the parameters of what they’ve established.” Right, right. So these challenges with the courts are a good transition to my last prepared question, which is: Based on your research but also your decades of experience working in this field, what do you think is most needed to help create an environment where queer families can manage conflict healthily and productively? Well, I don’t pretend to have the answer to that question. But I think some of what people are saying is, “We need resources.” Most people talked about the heterosexist nature of most resources out there. If you go online, if you look for books or pamphlets or resources that talk about family conflict, there’s very, very little that addresses LGBTQ+ families. And similarly, there are not enough mediators, there are not enough lawyers, there are not enough family judges

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who really understand with more nuance what our families look like and the range of family configurations that exist in our communities and what some of those dynamics might be. So a place to start is by us telling our stories—really beginning to talk about what our conflicts look like, how we experience them, how we work them out, what has worked for us, and what hasn’t worked. And out of that could come some resources that are queer and trans-focused, that recognize our particular issues and family configurations, and where we sit in relation to the law. And then, I think we need skills, just like anybody who’s dealing with conflict. Most people are not taught how to deal with conflict well. Of course strategies and approaches to conflict differ across culture, class, and geography, and various approaches work better than others, depending on context. I think we need to think about the skills we need to develop in order to negotiate through conflict in a way that’s going to be the least harmful both to ourselves and to our children. And I guess we need to think through some of those community issues. As communities, how do we respond to people when they’re in conflict in a way that’s helpful? I think that’s a very important point.We often talk about our queer communities, rightly, as one of the proud things about our heritage as queer people, that we create these flexible kinship communities. And I think that it is beautiful and wonderful. But there are downsides to it. Yeah. Again, we’ve had to develop these defensive narratives that are always about positivity, right? It’s all great, our relationships are great, our kids are great, our chosen families are great—“Love Makes a Family.” And it’s beautiful, but it’s also like—we’ve decreed it, and therefore it shall be so. We ignore what might be difficult. Let me read you something that I wrote, because I’ve been thinking through my own story in this. My co-parent and I broke up when my daughter was ten. And then for ten years after that, we lived across the street from each other. She was in a new relationship almost immediately, and I’ve been in various relationships over the years. There are these assumptions about how it’s all supposed to just work and be beautiful, right? Because love makes a family. But sometimes I think we ignore what’s hard. Like what was really hard about living across the street from my ex, or about her starting another relationship very quickly after we broke up. And just yesterday my ex was recounting to me the challenges of watching candles flicker in my window from across the street. So recently, reflecting on these interviews and this project and my own life, I wrote: We’re disdainful of the biological parent who pulls rank, the sperm donor who changed his mind and wants more, the ex who speaks poorly about the other, especially in front of the children. We’re supposed to share our friends, share a community, show up at the same events as our ex, see them with their new lovers, their new partners, see their new

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partners with our children, give the sperm donor access on weekends. Share, share, share. I’m the biggest supporter of queer families. I value and nurture those trying to make space for family beyond the nuclear. I support multiparent families, family with known sperm donors, surrogacy, adoption, poly families, the many ways to bring and have children in one’s life. But in order to do this, we have to talk about the hard stuff. For example, in the move away from biology as the indicator of parenting, we sidestep our attachments to concepts and words and meanings. Most cultures privilege biological connection, and we’ve grown up in these cultures. It does not mean nothing to carry a child and to give birth. What meaning do we give to this and is this meaning created by culture, by discourse, by history? This is just to say that it can be hard. To say, yes, we can agree that love makes a family. We have to defend the ways that we make family, and we’re right in doing that. But that doesn’t discount that we are impacted by how family gets culturally constructed, how biology and parenthood get constructed, how motherhood and fatherhood get constructed. So of course we’re going to have contradictory and complex feelings, and it’s going to be challenging sometimes to negotiate through the ways that we make family. For me, it’s important that we acknowledge these difficult emotions, feelings and thoughts. Once we acknowledge and understand our own responses and reactions, we are in a much better place to make more informed and awake decisions about how we approach the situations of conflict we find ourselves in.

Notes 1 2 3 4

See the website of the LGBTQ Parenting Network: www.lgbtqpn.ca Who’s your daddy? And other writings on queer parenting. Toronto: Sumach Press. For similar examples on this topic from Moreira’s research in Madrid, see Chapter 1 of this volume. See, e.g., Fineman, M. (1995). The neutered mother, the sexual family, and other twentieth century tragedies. New York: Routledge.

PART II

Is marriage normalizing LGBTQ relationships?

4 FROM PUBLIC DEBATE TO PRIVATE DECISION The normalization of marriage among critical LGBQ people Abigail Ocobock

Editors’ introduction: The previous section explored the material consequences of marriage for same-sex couples, and showed how these consequences often reflect particular ideas about what a “normal” family looks like. This section asks whether these and other forces are pushing LGBTQ people toward these normative family models as same-sex marriage becomes legal. In this chapter, Abigail Ocobock opens the debate about this possible “normalization” of LGBTQ relationships through her extensive interview research among LGBQ people in Massachusetts, which in 2004 became the first state in the US to recognize same-sex marriage. Focusing on interviewees who once criticized marriage, Ocobock finds that many began to suppress, soften, or discard their critiques after it became legal. Ocobock interprets her data to suggest that same-sex marriage is increasingly seen not as a matter for public debate but instead as a private decision, and that one consequence of this shift is that critical perspectives on it are expressed less frequently. Her research thus suggests that some degree of normalization is happening in this context, and raises questions about how conceptions of marriage as an individual choice might actually contribute to such normalization. The fight for legal marriage rights raised a number of concerns among LGBQ scholars and activists about the future of LGBQ culture and communities.1 Most of these concerns centered on the issue of normalization (Bernstein & Taylor, 2013). Normalization is the process through which an idea, social practice, or group becomes “normal.” This may mean that it becomes widely accepted; it may also mean that it becomes taken for granted and unquestioned. In the case of same-sex marriage, normalization might refer to the way in which marriage helps heterosexuals to see LGBQ people as normal. It also refers to heteronormative models of behavior (including, but not limited to, marriage, monogamy, and childrearing) coming to be seen as normal and desirable to LGBQ people. Normalization can therefore involve both changes in the way others perceive LGBQ people and

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changes in the way LGBQ people think or behave themselves. It is the latter form of normalization that critics of marriage within LGBQ communities were concerned about. They worried that same-sex marriage signaled a new “homonormativity” (Duggan, 2003) that would “establish the dominance of a heterosexual norm even within the lives of lesbians and gay men” (Kimport, 2014, p. 10), mark “the final assimilation of LGBT people into mainstream culture,” and “sound the death knell of LGBT/queer culture” (Bernstein & Taylor, 2013, pp. 13–14). Normalization did not start with marriage. Conservative gay advocates for marriage stressed that LGBQ people were already “virtually normal” (Sullivan, 1995) and wanted “to live ordinary middle class lives” (Bawer, 1993) before same-sex marriage became legal anywhere in the US. Queer critics of marriage also argued that the normalization of LGBQ people was well underway before the legalization of same-sex marriage.Warner (1999, p. 53) worried that by the end of the twentieth century, “Nearly everyone, it seems, wants to be normal.” Clearly, gaining legal marriage rights was not necessary for LGBQ people to desire and enact a heteronormative lifestyle.Yet marriage also played a catalyzing role in this process—and it is the way in which marriage contributes to normalization (rather than simply reflects it) that is the focus of this chapter. From an organizational perspective, there is broad scholarly consensus that the marriage equality movement “strategically embraced sameness” to win marriage rights, marking a historical shift in emphasis away from a collective identity based on difference, societal transformation, and sexual liberation, and toward emphasizing similarities to the heterosexual majority (Ghaziani, Taylor, & Stone, 2016, pp. 176–7).Yet we do not yet know how and why normalization processes occur on the ground between LGBQ individuals who are not involved in formal LGBT organizations, and after marriage rights are secured. More than a decade since same-sex marriage first became legal in the United States, very little is known about how LGBQ people enact and experience it (Moore & Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, 2013). Some early studies asked LGBQ people to speculate about the possible impact of marriage on their relationships (Lannutti, 2007; Shulman, Gotta, & Green, 2012) but subsequent research has been slow to emerge. Most of what there is explores the impact of marriage on couple relationships (Green, 2010; Kimport, 2014; Lannutti, 2007; Richman, 2013; Schecter et al., 2008) or extended families (Ocobock, 2013), but has not broadened its focus to examine its social impact within LGBQ communities. Drawing on interview research with 116 married and unmarried LGBQ individuals, this study offers some of the first systematic data on the impact of legal marriage on LGBQ culture and communities. I focus on evidence of one particular type of normalization: the ways in which marriage contributes to the de-politicization and privatization of LGBQ identities and communities (Bernstein & Taylor, 2013, p. 22). Queer theorist Lisa Duggan—a prominent critic of same-sex marriage—feared that with marriage, LGBQ communities would come to be defined by a “politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them,” resulting in a “demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture” (2003, p. 179). She predicted that, because marriage is a “kind of political sedative”

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that serves to mute critiques of heteronormativity, there would be no “ongoing engagement with contentious, cantankerous queer politics” (p. 189). Instead, LGBQ people would retreat into the private sphere and “go home and cook dinner, forever” (p. 62). I investigate this by exploring how marriage diminished debate and critique within LGBQ communities. I focus on a subset of my sample who were critical of marriage as an institution and explore the processes through which marriage suppressed and softened their views. The only prior empirical research on this issue showed that the marriage movement initially had the effect of opening up new public spaces for critical debates about same-sex relationships and marriage (Bernstein & Burke, 2013). However, we do not know what happened after marriage rights were won. Did marriage lead to a more de-politicized gay culture? Did once critical and politically engaged LGBQ people maintain or abandon their critiques? Did they continue to express or repress them within LGBQ communities? Eight years after marriage became legal in Massachusetts, my participants described de-politicized communities in which public critiques of marriage were rarely heard and debates over marriage had largely dwindled. I show how marriage had the effect of both suppressing and softening critical perspectives in LGBQ communities, and examine three normalizing mechanisms through which this occurred: etiquette, emotion, and emulation. My findings also highlight how LGBQ people draw on widely shared cultural scripts about the meaning of contemporary American marriage—as symbolizing personal choice, love, and achievement—and the ways in which these contribute to de-politicization.

Method The findings in this chapter are based on in-depth interview data collected from 116 individuals in married and unmarried same-sex relationships in Massachusetts in 2012–13. Massachusetts was the first state in the United States to make same-sex marriage legal in 2004. This research site therefore offers the longest possible view on the normalizing impact of marriage. I advertised the study as being about “how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people have experienced gaining the right to legally marry and how it impacts their lives.” Recruitment materials made clear that I was looking for married and unmarried participants and that it did not matter what their views on marriage were. The only criterion for participation was that they had lived with a same-gender partner in Massachusetts for at least a year. Participants found out about the study in a number of ways. Some saw flyers posted at LGBQ-friendly venues, such as coffee shops, bars, or community centers. Some received emails about the study from organizations that agreed to help me advertise it to their members. These included social movement, religious, and leisure organizations, such as MassEquality, the Metropolitan Community Church, and LGBQ-specific book clubs and baseball leagues. Most often, as the study progressed, participants found out via “snowballing” techniques (Weiss, 1994) and word of mouth. Although I advertised via one

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marriage organization, only a few participants had been actively involved in the marriage equality movement. Interviews lasted from forty-five minutes to three hours, but averaged an hour and a half. They took place wherever participants felt most comfortable talking, including participants’ homes, offices, coffee shops, restaurants, bars, and parks. All interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using NVivo, a qualitative data analysis software program. Of the 116 people who took part in the study, sixty-six were women and fifty were men. Of these, seventy were legally married and forty-six were in unmarried relationships. Relationship durations ranged from one to thirty-two years, with a mean of ten years. Age ranged from twenty-three to sixty-nine years, with a mean of forty-one. A little over a third of participants (36 percent) had children—23 percent with their current partner and 13 percent from a previous relationship. Participants were predominantly White (84 percent identified as White only), highly educated (92 percent had a bachelor’s degree or higher), and lived in urban areas (53 percent described where they lived as an “urban area/city” and a further 33 percent described it as a “large town or city suburb”). Of the sample, ninety-two identified as gay or lesbian, ten as bisexual, and thirteen as queer. It is important to keep in mind that the experiences of this sample—highly educated, predominantly White, cisgender, and coupled—do not speak to the experiences of all LGBQ people.

Findings Diminishing debate Most participants perceived debates over marriage within LGBQ communities as a thing of the past. They suggested that public debates over marriage had largely taken place before the right to legally marry had been won, but afterwards had quickly diminished. For example, Patrick, a fifty-year-old married man, told me, “There was certainly a lot of debate in the gay community about how it’s buying into a heterosexual institution, and why should we do it? You still hear it occasionally but I wouldn’t say it’s real common now.” Similarly, Josh, a forty-year old married man, remembered: There was so much talk early on. I remember going back to New York like three years after we had gay marriage here [in Massachusetts], and so many people were like, yeah, but we’re not going to be like straight people, and we shouldn’t have gay marriage. Because a lot of people were still like, “What the heck? We don’t want that. Why would we do this stuff?” And you rarely hear that now. All that went away. Comments like these make clear that at one time critiques of marriage were widespread and publicly articulated in LGBQ communities. Yet, because it was so rarely encountered any more, many of my participants had come to perceive such critique as “radical” and “peripheral.” For instance, Tamryn, a twenty-nine-year-old

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married woman, stated: “There are still little pockets of radical queers but the mainstream LGBT community is heading in another direction—toward white picket fences, 2.3 kids and SUVs, or at least a Prius! Marriage has played a big part in that.” Like most participants, Patrick, Josh, and Tamryn were not especially concerned that debates over marriage had dwindled. They regarded them as mostly “irrelevant” now that marriage rights had been won. However, a few participants expressed great concern over this issue. Ruby, a thirty-three-year-old unmarried woman who had been dating her partner for eight years, spent a good portion of her interview worrying about it. She commented: I’ve been surprised about how it’s become so normative. Like where is that critique? I’m not hearing those queer voices that used to be so loud in my ears that were like “Why are you capitulating to this hetero institution?” I’m not really hearing it here anymore . . . Everybody just seems so pleased about it [getting married]! That’s the thing I keep coming back to, like a friend was showing off her diamond ring, and I’m like, “Really?! We’re taking the whole kit and caboodle, we’re not even critiquing the diamonds anymore?! What?!” [sounding exasperated].2 Ruby “worried that marriage thwarts a more complex, critical conversation about what kind of structures for families are permissible” and felt frustrated and confused about why this had happened within her social network. My data helps to illuminate some of the normalizing processes through which this occurred.

Respecting personal choice and private decisions One way in which gaining the right to legally marry suppressed critical conversations was by making LGBQ people feel the need to be outwardly supportive of their friends and acquaintances who were getting married. It became less appropriate to be critical when the debate was no longer a theoretical, abstract one, and one’s friends were choosing marriage in their own relationships. People who might be inclined to criticize the institution of marriage theoretically now risked implying a lack of support for people’s personal relationship decisions if they did so. I found evidence of this from two perspectives. From one side, people said that despite knowing people with a wide range of views on the subject, no one had questioned or critiqued their decision to marry. Tom, a fifty-seven-year-old married man, had been actively involved in LGBQ community organizations for many years and knew a broad range of LGBQ people. When I asked him about critiques of marriage in the community, he said: Here’s what I can tell you—we know a lot of gay men and we know a lot of lesbians, and regardless of what they may think of marriage for themselves they all came to our wedding [laughs]. And nobody said “Marriage, that’s a bad thing, and we shouldn’t be having that.” Nobody said “Man, this is all

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patriarchal and screwed up” . . . I think most people feel that, even if I don’t want to do it myself, it’s good that other people can do it. Although others may have disagreed with his decision to marry, Tom intuitively perceived that they also valued his personal choice and respected his ability to make such an important decision. Similarly, Hannah, a thirty-nine-year-old married woman, said she was aware that some people “feel like we are assimilating” by getting married, but when I asked her if anyone had been openly critical of her decision to marry, she said: “No. Nobody gave us grief over it. I mean ’cause I think if they’re friends of yours people just want to be supportive of you, you know they don’t wanna necessarily be critical.” Once marriage had become legal and people were choosing it in their relationships, social etiquette and a respect for personal choice required the muting of one’s critiques. Marriage was no longer something people felt they had a right to comment on. Rather than a topic for public debate, whether one got married or not was now a private decision to be socially respected. From the other side, participants who were themselves critical of marriage suggested that they felt unable to criticize the relationship choices other people made. Art, a forty-four-year-old man, legally married his partner of six years in 2004. He had “been involved one way or the other in organizing around relationship recognition since the early 1990s” but did not think LGBQ people should be required to conform to heteronormative relationship practices just because they had married. He and his spouse lived on a commune and had an open marriage. When he first came out in the 1980s he had felt “rescued by lesbian feminism” and had found it “hugely liberating” to have been “embraced by a deeply leftist feminist community.” But now, watching the feminists he had known for so long get married and cave in to what he saw as patriarchal marriage practices, he felt exasperated: Listening to lesbians call one another “my wife” makes my head spin. Ugh. I’ve heard some lesbian feminists who I would never have thought would do that do it! People who I’ve known for years, who all of a sudden [said] “This is my wife,” and I’m thinking, “Whaaat?!” He went on to say: “Now of course I honor the language they choose to use and I’m not going to get a copy of The Female Eunuch and whack them over the heads with it, or say ‘Simone de Beauvoir is spinning in her grave now!’” His language of having to “honor” their choices implies he felt that to do otherwise would have been socially inappropriate. Art did not state that he felt social pressure to mute his critiques; rather, he seemed to take it for granted that he should.To understand this, it is important to note that this normalizing mechanism is anchored in the strong value that Americans place on individualized motives for behavior (Bellah et al., 1985) and a widespread cultural understanding of contemporary marriage as a private relationship and personal choice (Cherlin, 2009). Respecting marriage as an individual, personal choice necessitated suppressing one’s public critiques of it as a social institution. In these cases, having the right to legally marry did not change

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critical people’s views on marriage as an institution, but it did mute them. However, as I show next, having the right to marry also softened some critical people’s views.

Feeling the love and experiencing the emotionality of marriage Participants also told me that it was hard to remain as critical of marriage once they saw how happy other people were made by the ability to get legally married. Even if they remained theoretically critical of marriage as an institution, they could not help but notice and share in the happiness it appeared to offer their friends and acquaintances. In this way, it was not only the case that people withheld their criticisms of marriage—they also had an emotional response that softened their feelings toward it. Whatever participants thought about marriage as a social institution, they also believed that the same-sex couples they knew were motivated to marry out of love, and that the weddings they attended symbolized the highest level of love and commitment between partners (Cherlin, 2009; Yodanis & Lauer, 2017). Indeed, the marriage equality movement strategically tapped into this shared belief to win public support for same-sex marriage (Ghaziani, Taylor, & Stone, 2016, p. 174). Love was also the basis on which marriage rights were won, with Justice Kennedy arguing to the Supreme Court that “[n]o union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideal of love” (Obergefell, 2015) and President Obama tweeting “Love Wins!” It is not surprising that even those who were critical of marriage got swept up in these pervasive romantic beliefs and discourses (Swidler, 2001), nor that they celebrated with and for their friends who could finally marry the people they loved. My findings point to a shift in focus that occurred among critical LGBQ people, away from thinking about marriage as a public, social institution and toward viewing and experiencing it as a love-based commitment between individuals they cared about. Jamie, a twenty-nine-year-old married woman, tapped into this idea when she said: “I know some lesbians in the community feel like they don’t want to do something so heteronormative but, whatever people think about marriage, I think there’s a point at which most folks are just like ‘you found someone that you love and who loves you—mazel tov!’” Participants often told me that they had been unprepared for the emotional responses they would experience when same-sex marriage became a legal reality.Ann, a fifty-four-year-old married woman, described how she and her “hardcore activist friends” had “turned into water fountains” when they attended their first same-sex wedding—even those among them “who had spent years arguing that they did not want it [to be the focus of the LGBTQ movement].” She explained: “I guess being ready for it intellectually is not the same as being ready for it emotionally.” To further illustrate how emotional responses to marriage softened critical perspectives, I focus here on two participants who were among the most critical in my sample: Ruby and Becky. Ruby told me that when marriage first became legal,

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seeing her friends get married had made her feel “frustrated.” She saw marriage as “a very conventional decision” and felt like her friends were “giving up on this dream that we’d been creating of a world where we didn’t need those kinds of rules and structures.” But she admitted that her “feelings on marriage were shifting,” and attributed this in large part to seeing how happy marriage had made people she knew. She explained: I see my gay friends who’ve gotten married and I see how meaningful it is for them and that has had a big impact on me for sure because they are so happy to have this possibility. I do think that living in Massachusetts and having more friends who are getting married is having an effect on me. I’m trying to expand, I’m trying to be more open, to allow more room for my friends and colleagues and so on who are really made happy by this institution [laughs]. Becky, a thirty-seven-year-old unmarried woman, appeared to be going through a similar process. Initially, seeing how happy marriage made other people caused her to be “unhappy”: I’m surrounded by people who are choosing to get married and I think it’s evidence of how successfully certain kinds of lesbians have just been so thoroughly normalized. AO: What kinds of lesbians? BECKY: People in families. You know, like committed lesbian relationships. It’s just so white, middle class, two people with kids. But I see marriage as this pretty insidious thing. And the worst thing is that this makes a population of people who decades ago were much more likely to be able to analyze the family as somewhat oppressive happier. Sort of like the opiate of the masses. It’s like throwing people enough of a bone that they’re happy with what they’ve got, but what they’ve got still sucks and that makes me unhappy. BECKY:

Becky was upset that her peers were so easily accepting of what she regarded as only a shallow or false kind of happiness. However, even she later amended her perspective, stating: “Although I wish people would organize their lives differently, this is what they want to do and of course it is sort of heartwarming, and I’m happy for people that they get to do this thing they seem to really want to do.” Here it does not seem to be the case that Becky felt social pressure to be happy for other people; rather, she could not help but find it somewhat moving. Just as Ann had, Becky made sense of her shifting feelings toward marriage by distinguishing between the “intellectual” and “emotional” forces influencing them. Their critiques of marriage had come from an intellectual standpoint—from careful consideration of the drawbacks and limitations of the institution of marriage for LGBQ people. Yet they had not taken into account what was now a reality—for better or for worse, being able to get legally married made a lot of LGBQ people

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in love very happy.This resulted in a disconnect between their intellectual critiques of marriage and their personal observations and experiences of it. Becky captured this perfectly when she said: There’s part of me that intellectually didn’t care about marriage and had contempt toward it. But at the same time, there was a more emotional reaction that like I was happy. Like of course these news stories about these eighty-year-old women who had been together for decades and could finally get married affected me. Even though the more critical part of me is like “ugh” [laughs] there is also part of me that is able to be moved and is moved, whether I like it or not. And, I think all that has kind of canceled out to a sort of general ambivalence about marriage. Becky’s comment that she was emotionally affected whether she liked it or not also highlights how participants conceptualized emotions as something they could not control, and as sufficiently powerful to soften their critiques of marriage.

Reimagining personal relationship possibilities It was not only the case that once-critical LGBQ people suppressed and softened their views toward other people marrying; they also became more desiring of marriage for themselves. After marriage became legal in Massachusetts in 2004, suddenly same-sex marriage seemed to be everywhere—people were seeing their friends and acquaintances get married in person and watching strangers get married on TV. With so much marriage “in the air,” as one participant put it, thinking about getting married was almost unavoidable. For instance, Tony, a sixty-nineyear-old man, had initially been critical of the movement for same-sex marriage because he thought that LGBQ people should not rely on a government that had been so unsupportive of their relationships in the past. Tony lost his same-sex partner of eighteen years and many friends and acquaintances during the AIDS crisis, and he had felt abandoned by a government unwilling to take action to support the LGBQ community. He had “found solace in a gay erotic massage community,” which he was still regularly involved in. Yet in 2011, Tony legally married his partner of three years. When I asked him what had changed his mind, the only explanation he could offer was that he had been influenced by seeing so many of his friends do it. He described the weddings of his friends, and all the people he knew who had got married, and then simply stated: “I suppose once it all started, I thought, well, maybe it could apply to me?” Tony’s wedding would not be considered “normal” by most—many of the people who attended were from his erotic massage community, and the ceremony involved several “alternative spiritual rituals.” Yet by getting legally married he was still participating in a government-supported institution of which he had once been very critical—and he did not seem particularly aware of, or worried about, how easily his views had changed.

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Not only did LGBQ people encounter more and more same-sex marriages; they also found themselves engaging in more conversations about marriage with heterosexuals. For Meghan, a thirty-one-year-old woman who was engaged to her partner of three years, it was heterosexual peer influence that had most shifted her thinking. She told me that once same-sex marriage became legal, heterosexual people also started to talk to LGBQ people about weddings and marriage in a way they had not done before. Marriage talk became a ubiquitous part of her social interaction and she could not help but be influenced by it: Being in Massachusetts definitely people are so used to the idea of same-sex couples marrying, and everyone talks to you about getting married. Like we play kickball with all these people telling us all about their weddings and getting free stuff through the bachelorette party. And then all of a sudden it was like I started thinking “How do I have more of these things?” [laughs] “Who’s gonna throw me one of these?” Meghan was making fun of herself when she said this, but she also more seriously told me she had really struggled to accept how easily her views had changed. She said: I started to really struggle with the idea that I wanted more than just a happy committed relationship [quiet and thoughtful]. I wanted that marriage thing which I had been dead set against. I tend to stray from the norm. I’m rebellious. I didn’t want to get married ’cause that’s what’s expected, that’s what you’re supposed to do in life as you grow up, go to school, you meet someone, you get married and you have children and then you work the rest of your life. Ugh, shoot me in the head, that’s boring! So it was a struggle for me ’cause I had been so vocally, “I’m never doing this, this is bullshit, what the hell,” you know? So then I was like, “Oh crap, I want to marry her.” And I really had to process like “what do I do with this feeling” and “what is it that makes me want to? Why the hell do I want this stupid ring on my finger and what does that represent?” Among the things that marriage represented to participants were social status and prestige. As Cherlin (2009) explains, although the practical importance of marriage has declined, its symbolic importance has increased, and marriage today symbolizes a “Super Relationship” and the “ultimate merit badge” (pp. 139–40).When Meghan described wanting something “more than just a happy, committed relationship,” she implicitly referred to this cultural understanding of marriage. Before legal marriage was possible, a happy committed relationship had been enough. Now something more was achievable. Another thing that marriage represented for participants was an opportunity to gain greater certainty and ease in their personal relationships. Most perceived marriage as offering a straightforward means of gaining commitment, social legitimacy, and financial and legal resources, as well as a clearer model for how to organize their

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relationships. Without the option to legally marry, they had successfully fashioned their own, alternative relationship forms and practices, but these had required work and imagination. Rachel, a thirty-year-old married woman, explained: I think that [when I came out] in college we sort of romanticized the kind of kickass, we’re queer, we’re just not part of this thing, we’re doing this smash the state, totally different thing, and it was very freeing. Making your own society and making your own families was much more self-directed and much less kind of falling in line and doing what’s kind of expected. But I think that marriage makes it possible to have something more expected, that you can settle down. Actually, I was just talking to one of my lesbian friends from college and we were sort of talking about “yeah, you know, forging your own path is exhausting!” [laughs] I asked Rachel what exactly was exhausting about the way she had approached her relationships before she had access to marriage, and she replied: Well, if you’re making your own path, then you’re making a lot of decisions and you’re spending a lot of your energy thinking, “Well, what am I to you? What are the rules of what I am to you? And how do I express that to other people?” Without marriage, there were no clear rules or models for how to conceptualize a relationship, what relationship practices to follow, and how to get others to see the relationship for what it was. For her, this was “freeing” in some ways and allowed for creativity, but it was also “exhausting.” Being able to marry and follow marital norms offered some LGBQ people greater certainty about what to expect from their relationships, how to behave in them, and how to get other people to take them seriously. At the same time, as more and more LGBQ people got married, alternative relationship forms became less visible, leaving LGBQ people who wanted to practice them feeling more uncertain and alone in their desire to organize their relationships outside of a heteronormative marriage model. When Ruby had lived in Philadelphia she had felt part of a community “full of activism and progressive thinking” and surrounded by people with “variously structured households and families.” She had been committed to raising a child with a best friend instead of a romantic partner. However, since moving to Massachusetts in 2010 she had found herself in a “much less queer world.” She told me: “Being in Massachusetts I’m now swimming through a whole different set of social norms. Everyone is doing this very expected dyadic relationship thing and I don’t have any real role models of other arrangements around anymore.” As a result, she felt much more alone in her desire to create an alternative family and had started to think it was unrealistic. Much to her surprise, she was also starting to “think about marriage with positive feelings.” She admitted: “I’m embarrassed to feel so influenced by what’s around me.” Part of her felt she had to “take responsibility” for creating her own life as she

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wanted to; another part felt less inclined or excited about doing it alone and without community support.

Discussion As marriage-rights advocates have spent so much time emphasizing, many of the LGBQ people who took part in my study already lived “normal” lives and had very ordinary-looking relationships before they gained the right to legally marry. Many had already had commitment ceremonies or were in long-term, marriage-like relationships, were monogamous, called each other “wife” or “husband” (at least in private), had children, focused on domestic and family life, lived in the suburbs, and were not much involved in LGBQ community life or activism. They wanted what everyone else had but were excluded from the legal rights and social recognition that marriage afforded heterosexuals. However, my findings make clear that legal marriage is more than simply a response to the pre-existing realities of LGBQ people’s lives; it also has a normalizing impact on them. By focusing on LGBQ people who were once critical of marriage, this chapter addresses the concern among queer theorists that marriage would de-politicize and privatize LGBQ identities and communities (Bernstein & Taylor, 2013; Duggan, 2003), and underscores the scope and power of marriage as a normalizing institution to impact even those who imagined themselves beyond its influence. Focusing on this group also helps to shed light on the flipside of normalization—as one social practice becomes normalized, others become de-normalized and de-legitimated. In this case, the normalization of marriage among LGBQ people involved, or perhaps even required, making alternative viewpoints less valid and visible. In analyzing my data, I uncovered three broad mechanisms through which marriage operated to de-politicize LGBQ communities. First, an “etiquette” mechanism worked by making public critiques of marriage seem more like personal criticisms of friends and acquaintances and therefore less socially appropriate. Second, an “emotion” mechanism shifted the focus of once-critical LGBQ people away from intellectual, theoretical views on marriage as a social institution and toward their emotional, experiential reactions to it as a lived reality. Lastly, an “emulation” mechanism contributed to de-politicization by enabling LGBQ people to imagine new possibilities for their own personal relationships, and by offering easier, clearer, and more prestigious models for behavior. In each of these mechanisms, I highlighted the ways in which LGBQ people subscribed to widely shared cultural scripts about the meaning of contemporary marriage and the ways these contributed to de-politicization. As Green (2010) points out: Contemporary lesbians and gay men are dually socialized in the dialectic of a dominant meaning-constitutive tradition that valorizes (heterosexual) marriage and kinship, on the one hand, and a queer-meaning constitutive meaning tradition that promotes sexual freedom and nontraditional gender relations on the other.

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Dominant (heterosexual) cultural scripts about marriage—as symbolizing personal choice, love, and achievement—emphasize the private, individualized nature of marriage and make it harder to see (or at least stay focused on) how it also operates as a constraining social institution (see also Yodanis & Lauer, 2017). Although I analytically distinguished the mechanisms through which marriage normalizes and de-politicizes LGBQ people, they likely work in tandem. If those with critical views about marriage and heteronormativity feel less able to share them at a time when so many others in the LGBQ community are publicly displaying and discussing their marriages, and LGBQ people are influenced by what they see and hear around them (as everybody is), then it is no wonder that even the most critical of LGBQ people will begin to change their views about marriage. Nonetheless, my findings also underscore variety in the particular normalizing mechanisms experienced by LGBQ people. Some participants appeared to be impacted by all three, while others only discussed one or two. For some, normalization suppressed their ability to express their views but did not soften those views, so that they experienced change only at the level of social behavior. For others, however, normalization also involved softening their views on marriage, so that both their views and their behaviors changed. My findings also reveal variation in the ease with which people experienced normalization, with some people appearing to have little problem with, or even awareness of, abandoning their critiques and shifting their views, while others really struggled to make sense of their changing feelings and desires. There are no doubt groups of committed activists who continue to express critique and inspire debate among others within LGBQ communities. Some LGBQ people may also be challenging heteronormativity, and heteronormative marital practices, in private, through the kinds of dyadic relationship practices in which they engage (Green, 2010; Kimport, 2014). Yet, focusing on the social impact of marriage makes clear that public challenges to heteronormativity became less common and harder to sustain after same-sex marriage became legal. If LGBQ individuals who were once likely to openly and publicly engage in critiques of heteronormativity are less able or inclined to do so (whatever they may feel or practice in private), then the normalizing impulse of marriage will have a profound impact on the character of LGBQ culture and communities.

Notes 1 2

As none of my participants identified as transgender, I refer to “LGBQ” people and communities throughout the study. Ruby is likely referring to controversies over “conflict” or “blood” diamonds, that is, diamonds sold to fund armed conflict and civil war in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sierra Leone. She may also be referring more generally to the use of child labor in the diamond industry in India and Africa.

References Bellah, R.N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W.M., Swidler, A., & Tipton, S.M. (1985). Habits of the heart: Individualism and commitment in American life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Bawer, B. (1993). A place at the table: The gay individual in American society. New York, NY: Poseidon Press. Bernstein, M. & Burke, M. C. (2013). Normalization, queer discourse, and the marriage equality movement in Vermont. In M. Bernstein & V. Taylor (Eds.), The marrying kind? Debating same-sex marriage within the lesbian and gay movement (pp. 319–43). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bernstein, M. & Taylor,V. (2013). Marital discord: Understanding the contested place of marriage in the lesbian and gay movement. In M. Bernstein & V. Taylor (Eds.), The marrying kind? Debating same-sex marriage within the lesbian and gay movement (pp. 1–35). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Cherlin, A. J. (2009). The marriage-go-round:The state of marriage and the family in America today. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf . Duggan, L. (2003). The twilight of equality? Neoliberalism, cultural politics, and the attack on democracy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Ghaziani, A., Taylor,V. & Stone, A. (2016). Cycles of sameness and difference in LGBT social movements. Annual Review of Sociology, 42, 165–83. Green, A. I. (2010). Queer unions: Same-sex spouses marrying tradition and innovation. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 35(3), 399–436. Kimport, K. (2014). Queering marriage: Challenging family formation in the United States. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Lannutti, P. J. (2007). The influence of same-sex marriage on the understanding of same-sex relationships. Journal of Homosexuality, 53(3), 135–51. Moore, M. R. & Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, M. (2013). LGBT sexuality and families at the start of the twenty-first century. Annual Review of Sociology, 39, 491–507. Obergefell. (2015). Obergefell v. Hodges. 576 U.S. __. Retrieved from www.supremecourt. gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf Ocobock, A. (2013). The power and limits of marriage: Married gay men’s family relationships. Journal of Marriage and Family, 75(1), 191–205. Richman, K. (2013). License to wed: What legal marriage means to same-sex couples. New York, NY: New York University Press. Schecter, E., Tracy, A. J., Page, K.V. & Luong, G. (2008). Shall we marry? Legal marriage as a commitment event in same-sex relationships. Journal of Homosexuality, 54(4), 400–22. Shulman, J. L., Gotta, G. & Green, R.-J. (2012). Will marriage matter? Effects of marriage anticipated by same-sex couples. Journal of Family Issues, 33(2), 158–81. Sullivan, A. (1995). Virtually normal: An argument about homosexuality. London: Picador. Swidler, A. (2001). Talk of love: How culture matters. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Warner, M. (1999). The trouble with normal. New York, NY: Free Press. Weiss, R. S. (1994). Learning from strangers: The art and method of qualitative interview studies. New York, NY: Free Press. Yodanis, C., & Lauer, S. (2017). Multiculturalism in interethnic intimate relationships. Families, Relationships and Societies, 6(1), 125–40.

5 REFLECTIONS ON MARRIAGE EQUALITY AS A VEHICLE FOR LGBTQ POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION Mignon Moore

Editors’ introduction: In this chapter, sociologist Mignon Moore extends her remarks from the closing plenary of the “After Marriage” conference to offer a different take on the normalization debate. Reflecting on her research on African American LGBT populations and on her family’s experiences as a Black, married, lesbian couple with children who move across different social spaces in New York City, Moore argues that the marriage equality movement has been a “vehicle” that has helped many LGBTQ people of color talk with their families and communities about their full lives. She also suggests that some of the relationship norms that queer critics have seen as heteronormative are better understood as expressions of race and class privilege. Moore emphasizes the importance of context in shaping the norms that surround marriage, and argues that in some contexts normalization can itself be radical. Thank you for inviting me to be part of this conference and part of the plenary panel. In listening to some of the remarks made here today, I am aware that there are at least some in this room, participating in this conversation, who are critical of marriage and the access to legal marriage as one platform for reducing the stigma associated with same-sex desire. Some, like the legal scholar Katherine Franke (2015), have questioned the kinds of freedom and the kinds of equality that the capacity to marry mobilizes. Others see this movement as mainstream and not particularly radical or revolutionary. I address these postulations by examining the experiences of African American LGBTQ people and intraracial relationships among Blacks as they relate to the marriage-equality campaign. I will begin by letting you know that I was an active participant in the marriageequality movement. In 2012, my wife and I were invited to have photos from our wedding in Los Cabos, Mexico, featured in Evan Wolfson’s Freedom to Marry campaign. Cathy Renna, the principal of Target Hue, a public interest/PR communications firm, organized the press release of my first book, Invisible Families: Gay

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Identities, Relationships and Motherhood among Black Women (Moore, 2011), and introduced us to the campaign. From there, photos of us embraced in a kiss were part of a Time magazine cover story on the shifting public opinion on marriage between lesbian and gay couples (Von Drehle, 2013), and we were interviewed by and featured on the cover of Black Enterprise, a magazine that is a primary business and investing resource for Black communities, as part of a story about the economic inequalities experienced by same-sex unmarried couples compared to different-sex couples who could legally marry (Brown, 2013). Participating in those and other news stories, exposing our sexual minority status to the public, permitting our intimacy to be photographed, and allowing ourselves to be quoted about our love and our struggles as a same-sex couple—not just to the larger world but to our racial communities—felt to us like a very radical act. So I approach these questions both as a scholar who has been researching African American LGBTQ families and identities over the past thirteen years, and as an individual who has been engaged in political activities surrounding my own liberation and the liberation of all Black people and LGBTQ people. In my work (Moore, 2010a, 2010b) I have come to understand the marriage-equality movement as a vehicle through which people, and particularly people of color, could begin to talk about LGBTQ issues with their family members and individuals in their racial and ethnic and cultural communities. Because it was such a prominent feature of the political landscape at the start of the twenty-first century, it offered that entryway. And as the movement unfolded, we began to see conversations and debates happening in barbershops, in beauty salons, across the tables at coffee shops, and over Thanksgiving dinner. Queer folks were no longer just bringing their partner home and having everyone around the table know this was their partner but failing to acknowledge the true nature of their relationship. The discourse around Proposition 8 and marriage equality gave people an opening,1 and those who took that opening, who initiated or responded to discussions about marriage equality by directly stating their own stake in that legislation or by linking themselves and their sexuality to that movement, felt as though they were engaged in radical and transformative acts. It exposed a vulnerability: talking to people in your socially conservative ethnic and cultural communities, asking them to acknowledge your LGBTQ identity and to incorporate it into who you are and your sense of self. So it was not, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!”—which I guess dates me, because that slogan was relevant way back in the 1980s and 1990s. It wasn’t that kind of debate for the Black and Brown LBTQ people I met doing this work in their Black and Latino/a, and even Iranian and Korean, neighborhoods. It was, “We are your family, we are part of you, and we want you to accept all of these different parts of us.” That being said, I acknowledge that the passage of marriage equality did not directly help every member of the LGBTQ community. For some people it had no relevance for their lives; for others it had a different political connotation than how they understood themselves and what they wanted for themselves. But for people

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who did want to marry, who wanted to have their relationships acknowledged by the state, it offered something important for their sense of self and for the way they wanted to live and be in the world. My critique of marriage equality as a platform for LGBTQ social justice is that the issue overshadowed everything else, leaving out other concerns that were and remain critically important for other parts of the community. And now that marriage has been won, different concerns that may not have been directly relevant to the lives of the most advantaged sexual minorities are not being as vociferously supported by LGBTQ organizations. Many Black LGBTQ leaders who criticize the movement say marriage equality cannot be the only story queer activists bring to disenfranchised communities. LGBTQ leaders have to also show that they care about and realize the importance of other issues those communities are fighting for, what political observer Jasmyne Cannick calls the “bread and butter” issues of Black communities: poverty, unemployment, racial profiling, inferior grocery stores, inadequate services. In thinking about what communities of color can do to support LGBTQ people within their racial and culture groups, I provide the example of an experience I had in Los Angeles around 2008 while conducting research in Leimert Park, then a predominantly Black middle-class neighborhood where I also lived. Some of the residents were trying to bring an afterschool science program in the community. They approached adults at various social events in the neighborhood, asking folks to sign a petition in support of this endeavor. At the time I had no children, but I said, “Okay, yes. I am going to join forces with this group to help them secure a science program because it is important to the community. It has no direct or personal relevance to me, but I will still support it. In turn, I want you to acknowledge this thing called marriage equality that is important to me, as a Black person in this community who is also a lesbian.” And so, if I am going to support your science center, then I want you to support the issues that are important to me, because that is what it means to be part of a community. If something affects one of us, it affects all of us. And so that is how I came to relate marriage equality to people in AfricanAmerican communities.This reasoning has resonance with other groups. I was thinking about work by the sociologist Katie Acosta. Her first book, Amigas y Amantes: Sexually Nonconforming Latinas Negotiate Family (Acosta, 2013), is a study of lesbian, bisexual, and queer Latina women. Her work supports the idea of marriage among same-sex couples as a response to stigma. It emphasizes the importance of social context when understanding how marriage equality is understood and experienced. If you are discussing marriage in a larger cultural setting that is traditional and religious and centered on this relationship only being legitimate when it takes place between a woman and a man, and where it is perceived as a “natural” step for respectable women, the idea of marriage between two women who want to publicly acknowledge this relationship as real and legitimate becomes a particularly noteworthy and adversarial position to take. Acosta does a wonderful job of incorporating the ways culture and religion influence how sexual minorities experience and enact same-sex desire within the confines of their ethnic communities.

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Heteronormativity and the intersections of race, class, and sexuality Many argue that the current gay and lesbian civil rights campaign has suggested that in order for us to gain rights as full citizens, we must adopt elements of heteronormativity. I am defining heteronormativity to mean the institutions, practices, and norms within society that maintain heterosexuality, gender binaries, and power differentials. It is part of a series of terms that explain how individuals are socially coerced into, and rewarded for, participating in “normative heterosexual practices,” which include things like getting married and reproducing biological children. It is reinforced through behaviors that have been (in my mind incorrectly) defined as middle-class expressions of heterosexuality, such as buying a house together, opening a bank account with a partner, and accessing spousal benefits or insurance through employment (Rumens, 2016). Some queer theorists believe that the acceptance of LGBTQ people as full citizens requires that we “adopt the cultural norms of the idealized American citizen—productivity, selflessness, responsibility, sexual restraint and the restraint of homosexuality in particular” (Russell, 2008, p. 101). Queer theory scholars have identified these norms as “constituting the cultural structure of the heterosexual family,” thus labeling them “heteronormativity.”They argue that the movement for marriage rights has been refocused from outward rebellion to aspirations toward assimilation, stability, and acceptance in mainstream society. Russell contrasts this with LGBTQ people who are maintaining a politics of nonconformity, referring to them as individuals who “do not choose to sacrifice their desires for citizenship” (p. 102). Although I have been in lesbian relationships for more than twenty-five years, until recently I never viewed myself as an active participant in the LGBTQ movement. I never saw myself as outside of the mainstream, and I have not seen myself as trying to assimilate into “dominant” norms. My norms have always been my own. My interest in rebelling against establishments has been about removing barriers that block my access and other people’s access to equal opportunity— barriers constructed around inequities based in race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status. I reject the binary formulation of heterosexism that positions certain behaviors as homosexual or heterosexual. So in my quest for marriage equality I never saw myself as acquiescing to heteronormativity, and as I live daily as an out Black lesbian woman, I am trying to create a full experience for myself that allows me to gain access to the things I want. I wanted my same-sex partner to have the same legal rights as a different-sex partner might receive, and I wanted us to have and raise children together in a way that freed my children from any secondary status or citizenship because of our sexual orientation. I did not want the law to restrict me from having those things, so I challenged the law. Now, I struggle with how to move around in institutions and structures built for heterosexuals and heterosexually married families. This is a challenge that relates to my sexuality and race; therefore, in my mind it is part of the continued struggle for equality that LGBTQ movements should incorporate into their agenda. Two institutions

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where this struggle plays out for me are the religious practice I am trying to carve out for my children and the school systems my family must navigate for my daughter and son. I was raised in the Apostolic Holiness faith, a particularly conservative form of Black Pentecostalism. I am sure it rejects homosexuality and same-sex relationships as falling outside of God’s will. My grandparents were among the earliest members of the church I grew up in, and my uncle is the current pastor.When I moved back to New York in 2015, I arrived with a wife and two young children. One of the main reasons I returned to New York was to offer my children the chance to bond with their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Since the church is the center of my extended family’s social life and also a place that has always felt like home to me, I regularly (meaning once every other month or so) bring my children to the church I was raised in. When I go to church, my wife also comes along. She is left of center in her gender presentation, and dresses in men’s clothes. Although my church requires that women specifically not wear “clothes pertaining to a man,” my wife arrives wearing men’s pants, shoes, shirts, and sometimes blazers (never a tie, however). The four of us enter, sit on a pew near the front, and in varying ways participate in the worship service. Our children sing in the children’s choir and I stand with the congregation and sing along with the hymns or speak aloud when the church collectively reads a Bible passage. After service, people I have known for close to forty years come over and embrace us. I am sure a few may be biting their tongues to keep from saying something that might be offensive. But they hold back any negative opinions about my sexuality (though they will chide me, as they would any other parent, for not bringing the children to church more regularly!). While scholars may theorize our church participation as an attempt to conform to societal standards of heterosexuality, our presence and involvement is in no way experienced by us as an attempt to conform. I am sure the parishioners do not see us as conforming. When I sit in the pew and a visiting minister gives a sermon, I hold my breath waiting to hear something homophobic. We have been attending for almost three years and I have not heard anything homophobic. I believe the visible participation of our little LGBT-parent family in this storefront Holiness church in Queens, New York, is radical, even revolutionary behavior. Every time I walk through those doors, I am making myself vulnerable while I silently bring my full self to the altar. Those who say this is conformist have not experienced this type of participation in conservative institutions. The assumption of heteronormativity connects economic success and the building of committed relationships as attempts to affirm heterosexuality, but I do not give over these freedoms to any group based on their sexual orientation. I do link some of these experiences to the privileges economically advantaged people, and upper middle-class Whites in particular, are able to procure. I see these issues playing out in particular ways for my family as we navigate the world of elite private education in Manhattan. My children currently attend a nursery school that is a feeder to schools who are part of the New York State Association of Independent

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Schools. As a sociologist who studies racial inequality, I am acutely aware of the disadvantages African American boys and girls face in the public school system (Ferguson, 2000; Morris, 2016). The New York City public school system is one of the most segregated in the country, and I can see the unequal resources allocated according to the racial composition of schools even within my own Upper West Side school district. When my wife and I have discussed our interest in pursuing private schooling for our children, the response from many of our White and Black middle-class peers has been varied, though most have tended to be suspicious. For example, my (White, heterosexual, male) accountant said with incredulity: “What’s wrong with the public school system? I went to public school. Why is it not good enough for your children?” His response, in my mind, was not based in my sexual orientation, but in the belief that my little Black children attending an elite independent school is disruptive of the racial order. When my wife and I tour and interview for private kindergartens, we walk in the room with our brown faces, wearing professional styles of dress that are consistent with our different gender presentations.While our behaviors are consistent with middle-class linguistic styles, education, and forms of dress, we consistently feel particularly visible because of our constellation of race, sexuality, and gender presentation. At one elite school, the African American admissions officer spoke plainly. When we asked about the racial and ethnic diversity of the school she replied, “We obviously are not where we should be. As you know, these schools were not created for us. They were created for wealthy, White, heterosexual families to protect their children from others who are not those things.” We see our attempts to gain equal access to institutions that have been overwhelmingly reserved for White elites not as attempts to conform, but as rebellious behavior. And while race is the primary disruption, our presence crosses multiple boundaries, including race, class, and sexual orientation. That feels radical to us. And we persist. I do not see my efforts to gain access as a replacement of my Black lesbian identity—and all that has meant historically—with a staid, conformist, Black heteronormativity. I see myself as actively combining what it means to be a married Black lesbian with children, with what it means to be a Black woman who worships God, who is trying to achieve economic freedom and have well-adjusted children who do not see themselves as limited by race or by having two moms. So I would say that the contexts in which the quest for and aftereffects of marriage equality are occurring should be emphasized in discussions about the meaning of this movement for LGBTQ people. I also want to posit the idea that “normalization” can in itself be radical, depending again on the context. As a person from a racial community whose people have been stereotyped as failing to live up to their responsibilities and not conforming to the expectations of “mainstream” society, the idea of having a same-sex marriage and having that relationship publicly acknowledged is experienced by many as revolutionary. Specific communities stand in complex and often unequal relation to broader societies, and this adds further nuance to how we think about concepts like “normalization” and “radical.”

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Note 1

Proposition 8 was an initiative on the November 2008 ballot in California to overturn the California Supreme Court’s ruling that same-sex couples had the right to marry under the California state constitution.

References Acosta, K. (2013). Amigas y amantes: Sexually nonconforming Latinas negotiate family. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Brown, C. M. (2013, April 5). Marriage and financial inequality: Why gay & lesbian couples pay more. Black Enterprise Magazine. Retrieved from www.blackenterprise.com/money/ why-gay-lesbian-couples-pay-more-marriage-inequality-laws/. Ferguson, A. A. (2000). Bad boys: Public schools in the making of Black masculinity. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Franke, K. (2015). Wedlocked: The perils of marriage equality. New York, NY: New York University Press. Moore, M. R. (2010a). Articulating a politics of (multiple) identities: Sexuality and inclusion in Black community life. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 7(2), 1–20. Moore, M. R. (2010b). Black and gay in L.A.: The relationships Black lesbians and gay men have with their racial and religious communities. In D. Hunt & A. Ramon (Eds.), Black Los Angeles: American dreams and racial realities (pp. 188–212). New York, NY: New York University Press. Moore, M. R. (2011). Invisible families: Gay identities, relationships and motherhood among Black women. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Morris, M. W. (2016). Pushout: The criminalization of Black girls in schools. New York, NY: The New Press. Rumens, N. (2016). Heteronormativity. In A. Goldberg (Ed.), The SAGE encyclopedia of LGBTQ studies (Vol. 2, pp. 492–501). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Russell,T. (2008).The color of discipline: Civil rights and Black sexuality. American Quarterly, 60(1), 101–28. Von Drehle, D. (2013, April 8). How gay marriage won. Time, 101, 16.

6 SIMULTANEOUS ASSIMILATION AND INNOVATION IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF QUEER FAMILIES Married same-sex couples in Cape Town, South Africa Lwando Scott

Editors’ introduction: This chapter continues the debate on normalization through Lwando Scott’s research in Cape Town, South Africa, where same-sex marriage has been legally recognized since 2006. Colonized first by the Dutch and then the British, and then ruled by the white settler minority for much of the twentieth century, South Africa’s history is fundamentally shaped by centuries of racial domination. Beneath this domination, however, there has long churned a diverse mix of cultures, and the democratic transition in 1994 ushered in a legal framework that—at least officially—opened more space for this diversity to flourish. This includes marriage law, which has been expanded not only to same-sex couples but also to marriages under indigenous systems of African customary law, which colonial and apartheid law largely did not recognize. Even still, the domination of the past continues to hang over the present, and as Scott discusses in this chapter, this is also true for patriarchal norms of gender and sexuality. This mix of legal progress and social prejudice wraps South African queer people in what Scott calls a “sense of doubleness” in relation to family norms. Scott argues that the married queer couples he interviews often do assimilate to conventional family roles—but that by doing so, they also disrupt these norms at the same time. This is especially true in their relationship to children, where norms around gender, biology, and other matters are especially strong. Scott thus rejects any opposition between assimilation and disruption, seeing the two processes as necessarily intertwined. [M]any people have the idea that they should get married because that’s what they see on TV or what people tell them to do . . . So there is a part of me that thinks it [same-sex marriage] is mimicking what straight people do, but at the end of the day I think that for the most part gays just want to fit in. We don’t want to feel like there’s something wrong with us when we walk down

DAVID:

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the street. We just want people to look at us as they would everybody else. And I think with that there’s no harm in being like straight people in that regard . . . Well I personally, I just want to be seen as everybody else. I want to have my uniqueness, I want people to know that I am gay, I like being gay, I love being gay, it’s who, it’s a large part of who I am . . . I wouldn’t want that to change, I wouldn’t want that to fizzle out into any other straight person you know.1 David is coloured2 and in an interracial relationship with Adam, who is white. They are a newlywed, young, upwardly mobile couple living in the southern suburbs of Cape Town. David struggled with acceptance from his family, particularly his father, when he came out, while Adam had a relatively smooth coming-out process. In the interview excerpt above, David expresses same-sex couples’ simultaneous desire to assimilate and innovate when marrying. For David, seeing straight people marry on TV is not a good reason to marry. A “part” of him thinks that same-sex couples who marry are mimicking heterosexuals. Yet while David sees himself as beyond society’s pressure to marry, he also doesn’t want to be viewed as abnormal when he “walks down the street.” David stresses that “there’s no harm in being like straight people,” in other words being seen as “normal,” and even says that he himself “personally just want[s] to be seen like everybody else.” At the same time, David also wants to retain his “uniqueness.” “I love being gay,” he declares, poignantly stressing that “I don’t want to fizzle out into any other straight person.” Here I interpret David to fear the loss of his queerness through same-sex marriage. There exists a tension for David between wanting access to the privileges enjoyed by married heterosexuals and also wanting to retain a queer “uniqueness” rather than “fizzling out”—in other words, assimilating—into a “straight person.” To fizzle out means to disappear, vanish, or dissolve, a strikingly apt metaphor for the fear of losing one’s queerness. In this excerpt David is engaged in the assimilation vs. radicalization debate about same-sex marriage that has been central to many queer communities in recent decades (see, e.g., Sullivan, 1996; Warner, 2000). Here David embodies this debate—a sort of push and pull—between wanting “to be like everybody else” and also wanting to retain “uniqueness.” There is a sense of doubleness, a noneeither-or state of being, almost a balancing act that David is doing between assimilation and retaining uniqueness. Unlike the clear positions of Sullivan (1996) advocating for marriage and Warner (2000) cautioning against it, David desires both strategies. In this chapter, I use the theories of Deleuze & Guattari (1980/1987) to argue that the same-sex couples I study are simultaneously assimilating and innovating as they create families. I argue that even as same-sex couples use normative pillars to create their families, they subvert the norm. In many instances same-sex couples do not intend to subvert the norm; indeed, they describe their families as “normal” and “just like other families.” However, because same-sex families are not the norm in South Africa, their public existence intrinsically challenges the norm. Although the

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subversion is unintentional, it is subversion nonetheless. In fact, what is striking in the couples I study is that the more they try to mimic dominant family structures, the more subversive they are. A key site where the forces of assimilation and innovation become visible is where same-sex parents negotiate their roles—particularly gender roles—in relation to their children. Most South Africans, including same-sex couples, have internalized dominant ideas about family roles built on gender stereotypes, and these dominant ideas affect same-sex couples’ constructions of family. The family template to which same-sex couples aspire is partly based on the families they know, families they come from, located within the heavily patriarchal context of South Africa. But in the process of adopting these templates, subversion takes place. Precisely because gendered family roles in South Africa are so rigid and well defined, two partners in a gay male couple can unironically adopt the role of “mother” and “father,” respectively, to an adopted daughter. They step into these roles easily. But the moment they do so, mimicking the dominant model of the gendered heterosexual family, they also subvert essentialized ideas about gender roles: a biological man becomes a “mother.”

Thinking with the rhizome In this chapter I employ concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980/1987) both as tools of analysis and as a way of understanding the construction of queer families. These concepts center on the idea of the rhizome, which the authors describe as a root that has no clear beginning and no clear ending but instead constantly exists as an “in between” state that is ever developing. Like most roots, a rhizome is messy and sprawling, with no clear direction. Rhizomes enable us to rethink the concept of “norms,” including constructions of family. Deleuze and Guattari’s theories embody an affinity to infinity, to openendedness, to unlimited ways of being, fashioned by our experiences as we move in the world. Following their logic, I would propose that conceptions of family are infinite, that there will be constructions of family in the future that we have not imagined yet. Closely related to the concept of the rhizome are the concepts of “multiplicities,” “lines of flight,” and “becomings.” “Lines of flight” move away from existing forms, combining to assemble “multiplicities” that, because they combine multiple lines of flight coming from different directions, then become “becomings.” Becomings are thus a by-product (multiplicities) of interaction of different stimuli (lines of flight) in the course of experience. Becomings are ever evolving, involved in a process of perpetual transformation, revealed through experience over time. Becomings are where the rhizome connects to infinite possibilities.This chapter uses the rhizome to think about the construction of queer families undertaken by married couples, who form multiplicities by enacting lines of flight from existing family forms, unleashing new becomings. Queer lives are marked by contradictions in South Africa, where same-sex marriage is legalized (The Civil Union Act No. 17 of 2006, 2006) but where there is

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also a high incidence of homophobic violence (Mkhize et al., 2010). The city of Cape Town is marketed as the “pink” city on the African continent, yet same-sex couples experience hostility there (Tucker, 2009). Stemming from these complexities, married same-sex couples seem to inhabit contradictory selves that require a rhizomatic analysis. The examples in this chapter show how couples undertake rhizomatic movements, and embody Heiner’s (2003, p. 43) assertion that “the power of the homosexual consists in the potential he/she bears to constitute affections and relationships that exceed the framework of possibility drawn by contemporary institutions.”

Same-sex marriage and cultural diversity in South Africa Same-sex marriage in South Africa exists against a history of extreme cultural and legal diversity, including around marriage and family.The various cultural groups in South Africa, which include many different communities with roots in Africa, Asia, Europe, and more, have all set out their own rules and regulations concerning family formation (Afolayan, 2004). Since the end of apartheid in 1994, the sometimes incompatible cultural and legal systems in South Africa’s history have led to the creation of multiple different pieces of legislation to regulate intimate relationships. In South Africa, marriage today is regulated by the Marriage Act for most heterosexual marriages, the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act for traditional African marriages taking place mostly in rural areas, and the Civil Union Act for both queer and straight couples. A Muslim Marriages Bill is also sluggishly making its way through parliament (Bakker, 2008). Whichever bill one uses to marry, the legal rights and responsibilities are largely the same. This multiplicity of Marriage Acts in post-apartheid South Africa is radically different from the time before democracy. During colonial times and then apartheid, marriage laws were based on a European, Judeo-Christian model and limited to heterosexual couples marrying in church or in court, while a hodgepodge of different laws regulated intimate relationships under other cultural and religious systems. Central to the regulation of intimate relationships, particularly under apartheid, was the restrictive antimiscegenation law (Sherman & Steyn, 2009). Across these different eras of regulation, the most visible family formation has historically been the heterosexual family, but within that frame the heterosexual family has never really had a stable definition within the South African context. Similarly, Afolayan (2004) argues that marriage in South Africa is the “key institution around which the entire social structure revolves” (p. 181) and Therborn (2004) argues that marriage in general is “a socio-sexual institution” that forms “part of the wider institutional complex of the family” (p. 131), but at the same time, marriage has never had a stable definition within the South African context. So the government’s extension of marriage to same-sex couples, and same-sex couples’ constructions of family through marriage, are really both evidence of the continuing porousness and evolution of the notion of family in this context.

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Indeed, what constitutes a family is constantly evolving everywhere, and that now often includes same-sex families (Berkowitz, 2007; Halberstam, 2005; Stacey, 2006). Aware of these changes, in Queer Family Values, Lehr (1999) wrote: [B]y highlighting the contradictory roles that queer people create when we enter families, we can perhaps identify some of the challenges that queer families pose for dominant understandings of family: How do we understand lesbian non-biological mothers who live with a child’s biological mother? Are lesbian partners mothers or fathers in those relationships? Can a lesbian be a father? Similarly, how do we understand the roles played by two male parents? Are they fathers, mothers, or some of each? . . . If a child has three or more parents, how do we identify them? (p. 103) The questions posed by Lehr signify that the landscape of family politics has changed, and the definition of family with it. Lehr’s questions build on Weston’s (1991/1997) groundbreaking work on gay and lesbian kinship aptly titled Families We Choose. Weston emphasized understanding the family in plural, as in “families.” In this chapter I continue this trajectory of seeing multiplicities in the constructions of queer families in Cape Town, South Africa. The narratives presented here are drawn from interviews conducted as part of a bigger project on same-sex marriage in greater Cape Town. The interviews were conducted between 2014 and 2015 with twenty diverse same-sex couples. All of the couples were interviewed in a joint interview as couples. Some individual partners were also interviewed individually. In this chapter I focus especially on couples within the research who spoke explicitly about family construction, often involving children. After the interviews were conducted, they were transcribed and then analyzed. Riessman (1993) and Kvale (1996) note that transcription is a form of analysis, and to this end the interviews, the transcription, and the research writing were all conducted by myself. After transcription, the data was submitted to the six-phase thematic analysis described in Braun & Clarke (2012). This chapter presents part of the results.

“Always being under construction”: becoming queer families As same-sex couples enter into marriage, it is important to keep in mind Biblarz and Savci’s (2010, p. 491) critical perspective that “the family [is] partly a state institution through which the boundaries and meanings of citizenship and belonging are defined and [also] an arena that is simultaneously constituted by and constitutive of symbols and meanings that circulate around gender, culture, sexuality, socialization, and the self.”With this in mind, I engage the state-endorsed concept of family, and the families that the state endorses, with a healthy dose of skepticism. At the same time, in the modern era the very idea of family is in flux—not just for same-sex couples but for many heterosexual couples as well, as we all try to

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navigate modern relationships (Giddens, 1992). It is wise to remember Stacey & Davenport’s (2002, p. 356) assertion that we live in an era in which “the postmodern family represents no new normal family structure, but instead an irreversible condition of family diversity, choice, flux, and contest. The sequence and packaging of romance, courtship, love, marriage, sex, conception, gestation, parenthood, and death are no longer predictable.” Same-sex couples who marry and construct families do so by stretching the existing boundaries of family, disrupting normative ideas. Some same-sex couples are similar to heterosexual families, but they are not the same; their mere existence undermines heteronormative definitions of family. The following examples showcase how same-sex couples use familiar concepts of family while simultaneously innovating new lines of flight. Couple interview with Chris and Kurt: Our married life is, I would say it’s exactly the same like any other marriage. I was this morning while he was at work still, I was actually thinking, I’m doing the normal things a housewife does, cooking and cleaning.

KURT:

Individual interview with Kurt: The house belongs to both me and my husband; both in our names and you know it’s a normal function, if I must say so. I do everything that needs to be done which is cleaning, cooking, the normal thing that your mother ought to do [nervous laughter]. But then also he does the same thing, you know, if I would, we would speak about, “Please do this for me, please do that for me, please do this for me.” So the living arrangements is, he will look after the child from half past four till I get home at about quarter past five. And then there’s certain roles that we both play, to a certain extent you tend to forget that you are gay, it’s so part of the normal day-to-day, I can’t explain it to you, it’s like that.

KURT:

Chris and Kurt are a Christian, coloured gay couple with an adopted daughter, who live outside of Cape Town. Kurt’s narrative reminded me of Stacey & Davenport’s (2002, p. 358) argument that “[c]ontemporary queer family agendas necessarily house elements of liberation and accommodation, political success and co-option, hand in hand.” For Stacey and Davenport the politics are not either/or, but contain both assimilation and disruption. The gays and lesbians constructing families in the form of marriage, children, and a conventional domestic life are stabilizing the notion of family, in a way. However, the notion of who can be a family also stretches, and wider family configurations are recognized by the state. So these couples stabilize family while simultaneously innovating it. In both the couple and the individual interviews, Kurt specifically sees himself as the “mother,” doing “housewife” duties such as “cleaning and cooking.” The couple also shares how their adopted daughter calls Kurt “mommy,” while the husband is “daddy.” So Kurt is a gay man adopting the traditionally female role in the family.Yet although Kurt takes on the mothering role, he is a mother who is not a

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woman, so he disrupts our idea that only women can mother. As a man doing the caring work often associated with women, he is not simply mimicking heteronormative parenting norms (see Hequembourg, 2007 for a similar analysis of lesbian mothers). Rather, Kurt is stretching the category of mother. He embodies Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987, p. 275) notion of “becoming-woman.” Deleuze and Guattari describe “women” as an open and fluid category, recalling de Beauvoir’s (1949/2011) assertion that one becomes a woman and presaging Butler’s (1990) later expansion of this notion with her concept of gender as the repetition of certain stylized acts that become gendered norms. Through Kurt’s mothering, Kurt and his husband use recognized family figures like “mother” and “father” in a way that respects and upholds gendered domesticity, and simultaneously—and almost inadvertently—disrupts ideas of mothering and wifehood. What we see here is that societal notions of family become more fluid, but they do not disintegrate. Cracks open to let in some aspects of difference, while institutional definitions and functions remain stable. Similarly, in the following interview with Ruth and Tamar, Ruth speaks of the new conception of family she has had to take up since she married her wife, who has two children from a previous heterosexual marriage. She speaks of her new role as something that is neither mother nor father. Couple interview with Ruth and Tamar: And you know constructing, always being under construction and maintenance with regards to how we navigate, how we are family together you know. Redefining family in the context of marriage. In our case where Tamar has a boy and a girl . . . I was very clear in the wedding ceremony that I am not their mother or their father, but I’ll be their friend. So that’s a new way of being family, so you don’t need a mother and a father to be family. So what is family? And I suppose that is something that we still work on, it’s never a closed entity, it’s always flexible and fluid in its making. And I suppose for me it’s still navigating these relationships not being a mother, not being a father, you know, yeah I think it becomes a bit complicated.

RUTH:

Ruth and Tamar are an interracial Christian lesbian couple, white and coloured respectively. Tamar is divorced, with two children from a previous heterosexual marriage. The children reside with Ruth and Tamar and occasionally spend time with their father. In this excerpt Ruth is actively thinking about the notion of family, asking rhetorically, “What is family?” She speaks directly to Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of becoming when she talks of “always being under construction.” “It’s never a closed entity,” she says. “It’s always flexible” and “fluid in its making.” In the language of Deleuze and Guattari, this constant construction can be read as the constant mutation, the “lines of flight” that her family is engulfed in to form “multiplicities.”

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While we can read Ruth as revolutionary in her constant construction, at the same time she still emphasizes that she is not biologically related to the children. Because of her non-biological relatedness, which does not fit prevailing social norms of parenthood, she comes up with a new way to relate to the children of her wife, saying, “I’ll be their friend.” But this forces another line of flight. Ruth will be their “friend,” but she is also an adult in the household, where she will probably administer discipline and chores and chauffeur the kids around, like a parent. So the idea of “friend” takes on a different meaning in this context, where friendship is not peer-to-peer, but more hierarchical. Although two women or two men raising children are a different kind of family (Lehr, 1999), we must also admit that two same-sex adults raising a child are similarly shaped to two heterosexuals raising a child. Studies have shown that some same-sex couples use a model of family that is familiar in society (Shapiro, Peterson, & Stewart, 2009; Solomon, Rothblum, & Balsam, 2004; Stacey & Biblarz, 2001).These couples are certainly groundbreaking in many ways, but in other ways they stabilize the notion of family as a household with children headed by two adults. The couples are groundbreaking but, within particular parameters, designed around the heterosexual family. If we consider Deleuze and Guattari’s logic, the queer family is a line of flight from the heterosexual family, while other elements help create the queer family in its different permutations. The consequences are that the queer family is a new form that contains parts of the old form. It follows from this that other, new multiplicities can be formed from these same-sex families. The same-sex, twoheaded family contains the seeds of other kinds of family. As suggested by Ruth, queer families are constantly under construction; in this, then, we can say that queer families are in a constant state of becoming.

“Because they didn’t come out of her punani”: biologism in the construction of queer families Whether it is two men managing “mothering” in adoption, or two women figuring out a relationship with the partner’s children from a previous marriage, same-sex couples are forced to rethink and reconceptualize categories once thought stable. Using the logic of Deleuze and Guattari, I see the process of same-sex couples constructing family as a rhizomatic. It is messy, it is unstable, and the choices that same-sex couples make as they construct queer families have unpredictable consequences. Rhizomatic thinking allows us to understand that people are often not in total control of the outcomes of their lives, as different stimuli interact and create unexpected outcomes. The following example of Belinda and Anna showcases the usefulness of this idea for understanding the construction of queer families. Couple interview with Anna and Belinda: [A]nd here we are, you know, paying huge amounts of alimony and still having to stand up in a room and go, “Actually, she is the mother.”

BELINDA:

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Because they didn’t come out of her, you know, punani, and she didn’t actually supply the sperm from her body, so there’s a question about it. And you know, I always say to people that she is the mother of intent, when they were in a relationship and they were committed, they decided as two women that . . . they were going to have children together. Anna was the intended other parent, you can’t suddenly take that away because you are no longer married to that person, and you don’t like the fact that now you actually have to spend the rest of your life tied to them. ANNA: It’s a mindset thing, people. BELINDA: It’s a mindset and people often . . . ANNA: And ironically changing some, my ex-partner’s mind, she is a gay woman and she is just as biased as a straight man . . .When it suits people to assume a certain kind of prerequisites about a lesbian woman and an ex-married couple or a parent, and it suits them to assume it, then they will assume it, but the moment that they start to get a little bit iffy or complicated then it’s straight back to those extremes. Then all the flexibility, and the acknowledgement all goes out the window and suddenly you know, I’ve got an ex-wife who is treating me [with] the same degree of animosity as a fucking Midwest cowboy, which is hilarious, but anyway. Belinda and Anna are a married white lesbian couple living a middle-class life in the southern suburbs of Cape Town. Anna was previously married to another woman, and she had two children with her ex-wife. Anna and her ex-wife share custody of the children, who spend part of the week with Belinda and Anna and part of the week with Anna’s ex-wife. Anna’s ex-wife is the biological mother of the children. Upon their divorce, the ex-wife shut Anna out of the children’s lives, and there was a court battle for Anna’s rights as the other mother.The sperm donor had never been part of the family, having relinquished his rights as the father; however, upon the divorce, the ex-wife contacted the sperm donor to re-establish ties with the children. This rightly upsets Anna, because these are her children, and she had long continued to financially provide for them. Here we have a queer couple that decides to have a queer family, by which I mean using unconventional methods that downplay the central importance of biological kin. But when the couple divorces, Anna’s ex-wife reverts back to biological kinship.This biological determinism upsets Anna because she is being treated with “the same degree of animosity as a fucking Midwest cowboy.” She calls this “hilarious,” signaling the contradiction of the ex-wife’s reversion to the biological kinship model when they had agreed to be a queer family. The “Midwest cowboy” comparison signals the ex-wife’s reliance on traditional conceptions of family; it denotes her regression. Belinda, Anna’s current wife, is equally upset. This queer family is a rhizomatic family, in that it is not neat. It is not contained, but rather multiple.The family Anna and her ex-wife created was a line of flight from the traditional family. Anna’s subsequent marriage to Belinda further complicated the

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already queer family, creating yet another line of flight from what Anna and her ex-wife had created.Then the ex-wife introduced the children to the sperm donor, mobilizing the normative weight of biological ties. Since rhizomes are not contained and can move in whatever direction, connecting the children to the sperm donor can be seen as another line of flight, this time regressing to notions of the traditional family. So within this example we see all kinds of multiple movements in these lines of flight. We see lines of flight from the traditional family, we see lines of flight from traditional ways of conceiving children, and we see lines of flight from an already queer family to another queer family. We also see lines of flight from the queer family back to the more traditional family, or at least an attempt to do so.The narrative of Belinda and Anna exemplifies how queer people bounce back and forth, negotiating the center and the margins. Deleuze and Guattari help us see the instability of the categories we’ve created to denote “family.” Through their logic we see the fragmentation and fragility of categories as queer families move between traditional and innovative family forms. In the story of Belinda and Anna, we see a same-sex couple disrupting dominant forms of power, but we also see evidence of dominant ways being entrenched. Hequembourg (2007, p. 54) would argue that the relations that these samesex couples are engaged in “are entirely constituted by power, and can never be outside of power.” The following example of Andiswa negotiating with her family demonstrates some of the ways same-sex couples negotiate power within their families. The conversation was mostly in Xhosa, so I have translated it during transcription. Couple interview with Paula and Andiswa I am the oldest at home [that is, the home where she grew up]. And I told my mother, if you don’t want, if you have a problem with me being married, then you shouldn’t have a problem with me coming in and out of the house with different women. And then the young girls at the house are looking up to me even though I am gay, and I used to see that when I change partners, they don’t appreciate that. Even though they don’t like that I am gay, they feel that it’s okay she is like this [gay] but she should have one partner. So if they don’t want me to marry Paula, then I will bring different women in the house.

ANDISWA:

The vignette is about a conversation Andiswa had with her mother about her desire to marry Paula. Paula and Andiswa are a black lesbian couple, and they are Christian, with a history of heavy involvement in their respective churches. In this extract Andiswa threatens her mother with “coming in and out of the house with different women,” or beginning to sleep around.This threat is striking because it strategically uses respectability politics ( Joshi, 2012) to bargain for marriage. She threatens to be promiscuous without hiding it from the family and community. The threat is palpable because Andiswa knows that in this context of rigid gender policing and fierce Christian values, being a “slutty” woman might be even worse than being a

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lesbian. Andiswa is metaphorically waving her finger and saying, “It could be worse; instead, just let me be in a same-sex marriage.” Andiswa’s threat is built on a strong patriarchal narrative that women who sleep around deserve shame and punishment (Tanenbaum, 2000; Motsei, 2007; Gqola, 2015). The threat is compounded by Andiswa’s role-model status as an older sister looked up to by her siblings. Because of society’s negative stereotypes, it is expected that no one will look up to her, so the fact that Andiswa’s siblings do is a victory. Her gayness can be forgiven if she performs it in a way that respects heterosexual-style monogamy. This partly represents the power of same-sex marriage. It pledges monogamy, or something like it, for those who are nervous about gay sexuality, and more precisely gay promiscuity. The power of Andiswa’s threat relies on the dichotomy between what Warner (2000) termed “the good gay,” who is the marrying kind, and “the bad queer,” who does not respect monogamy and other heteronormative values. What we see here is Andiswa negotiating with power. She is bargaining with the center. Andiswa understands the power of respectability in her context, and she uses it to gain what she desires. What Andiswa demonstrates is that married same-sex couples are not outside systems of power. Rather, they have to negotiate with dominant systems of power. Andiswa bargains with the center using the center’s rules to get what she wants. In the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, this example demonstrates the rhizomatic entanglements of same-sex couples as they construct their own families while navigating rigid gender systems and other dominant societal forces. They are at once assimilating and innovating.

Conclusion The contradictory roles played by queer people as they construct their families (Lehr, 1999) are a product of the rapid success of sexuality movements.Yarbrough (2014, p. 14) attributes the success of sexuality movements to their ability to draw from “dominant systems of kinship” while at the same time challenging these systems. The narratives above demonstrate that queer families in Cape Town are at once stabilizing and destabilizing notions of family. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome helps us see how these same-sex couples are in a constant state of becoming. I argue that queer families are in a multiplication process in which they are always morphing into something new, and that the contradictions contained within queer families are part of the instability of becomings. As queer families construct themselves, they collide with different stimuli that force them to mutate. They destabilize ideas of who can be a mother, and they force us to develop a new language to describe families and family practices. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic perspective suggests that it is experience that shapes us, and in this sense family forms will continue to morph into something new. In this logic there will be future family formations we haven’t envisioned yet, because as people interact and society evolves, different ways of relating appear. In this there is always a potential for new formations, a potential for new becomings.

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Notes 1 2

The names of the research participants have been changed to protect their identities. “Coloured” is a racial term created in apartheid to refer to people who are of mixed-race origin. Coloured people trace their ancestry from indigenous Africans, Europeans, and also South Asians. It is a term with which many people with mixed-race ancestry in South Africa identify today.

References Afolayan, F. (2004). Culture and customs of South Africa. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. Bakker, P. (2008). Towards recognition of diversity: Muslim marriages in South Africa. International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities & Nations, 8(5), 1–10. de Beauvoir, S. (1949/2011). The second sex (C. Borde & S. Malovany-Chevalier, Trans.). New York, NY:Vintage Books. Berkowitz, D. (2007). A sociohistorical analysis of gay men’s procreative consciousness. Journal of GLBT Family Studies, 3(2–3), 157–90. Biblarz, T. & Savci, E. (2010). Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families. Journal of Marriage and Family, 72(3), 480–97. Braun, V. & Clarke, V. (2012). Thematic analysis. In H. M. Cooper (Ed.), APA handbook of research methods in psychology. Research designs: Quantitative, qualitative, neuropsychological, and biological (Vol. 2, pp. 57–71). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. NewYork, NY: Routledge. The Civil Union Act No. 17 of 2006. Republic of South Africa. Government Gazette, pp. 1–12 (2006). Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1980/1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Giddens, A. (1992). The transformation of intimacy: Sexuality, love, and eroticism in modern societies. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Gqola, P. (2015). Rape. Auckland Park, South Africa: MFBooks Joburg. Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place. New York, NY: New York University Press. Heiner, B. (2003). The passions of Michel Foucault. Differences, 14(1), 22–52. Hequembourg, A. (2007). Lesbian motherhood: Stories of becoming. New York, NY: Routledge. Joshi,Y. (2012). Respectable queerness. Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 43(1), 1–45. Kvale, S. (1996). InterViews: An introduction to qualitative research interviewing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Lehr,V. (1999). Queer family values. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Mkhize, N., Bennett, J., Reddy,V. & Moletsane, R. (2010). The country we want to live in: Hate crimes and homophobia in the lives of black lesbian South Africans. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Motsei, M. (2007). The kanga and the kangaroo court. Sunnyside: Jacana. Riessman, C. (1993). Narrative analysis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Shapiro, D., Peterson, C. & Stewart, A. (2009). Legal and social contexts and mental health among lesbian and heterosexual mothers. Journal of Family Psychology, 23(2), 255–62. Sherman, R. & Steyn, M. (2009). E-race-ing the line: South African interracial relationships yesterday and today. In M. Steyn & M. Van Zyl (Eds.), The prize and the price: Shaping sexualities in South Africa (pp. 55–81). Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council. Solomon, S., Rothblum, E. & Balsam, K. (2004). Pioneers in partnership: Lesbian and gay male couples in civil unions compared with those not in civil unions and married heterosexual siblings. Journal of Family Psychology, 18(2), 275–86.

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Stacey, J. (2006). Gay parenthood and the decline of paternity as we knew it. Sexualities, 9(1), 27–55. Stacey, J. & Biblarz, T. (2001). (How) Does the sexual orientation of parents matter? American Sociological Review, 66(2), 159–83. Stacey, J. & Davenport, E. (2002). Queer families quack back. In D. Richardson & S. Seidman (Eds.), Handbook of lesbian and gay studies (pp. 355–74). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Sullivan, A. (1996). Virtually normal. New York:Vintage Books. Tanenbaum, L. (2000). Slut! Growing up female with a bad reputation. New York: Harper Perennial. Therborn, G. (2004). Between sex and power. London: Routledge. Tucker, A. (2009). Queer visibilities: Space, identity, and interaction in Cape Town. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Warner, M. (2000). The trouble with normal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weston, K. (1991/1997). Families we choose: Lesbians, gays, kinship (2nd ed.). New York: Columbia University Press. Yarbrough, M. W. (2014, June). Put asunder, joined in marriage: LGBT identities and families of origin in post-apartheid South Africa. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Law & Society Association, Minneapolis, MN.

7 FROM HOMONORMATIVITY TO POLYNORMATIVITY Representing consensual non-monogamy Lital Pascar

Editors’ introduction: This chapter expands the debate about same-sex marriage and normalization by looking at another relationship form: consensual non-monogamy. Communications scholar Lital Pascar analyzes contemporary media representations of non-monogamy, primarily in the US, to trace how they compare to representations of same-sex relationships that circulated during the samesex marriage debate. Pascar discusses some of the negative stereotypes associated with nonmonogamy in the US and shows how sympathetic media portrayals have attempted to distance consensual non-monogamy from those stereotypes. At the same time, some people within non-monogamous communities have criticized these “polynormative” representations because of their exclusions, much as queer thinkers criticized homonormativity. Pascar thus sees some dynamics around normativity in non-monogamous communities that are similar to those seen in same-sex marriage debates—but this time with the same-sex marriage debates themselves serving as both an inspiration and a cautionary tale. In this way, the chapter serves as a bridge between this Part’s focus on normalization and the next Part’s focus on other relationship forms beyond same-sex marriage itself. On June 26, 2015, the United States Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage. In his dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that the legalization of samesex marriage opened the gate to further changes to marriage—including allowing the possibility of plural marriages. Roberts commented (Obergefell, 2015): One immediate question invited by the majority’s position is whether States may retain the definition of marriage as a union of two people . . . Although the majority randomly inserts the adjective “two” in various places, it offers no reason at all why the two-person element of the core definition of marriage may be preserved while the man-woman element may not. Indeed, from the standpoint of history and tradition, a leap from opposite-sex

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marriage to same-sex marriage is much greater than one from a two-person union to plural unions, which have deep roots in some cultures around the world. If the majority is willing to take the big leap, it is hard to see how it can say no to the shorter one. The connection between gay and plural marriage is in no way new, as the two have been discussed together on many occasions. It has often been made by social conservatives, many of whom, like Justice Roberts, insist that same-sex marriages would inevitably lead to polygamy. Advocates of gay marriage, meanwhile, have tended to deny this connection, fearing it could stymie the movement’s progress (Baude, 2015). Some have suggested that prospects for legalizing plural marriage are small to non-existent, insisting that legalizing same-sex marriage would not lead to legalizing polygamy. In these distancing efforts, some speakers related to plural marriage as a negative, threatening possibility. This rhetoric can be explained through the concept of homonormativity. Scholar Lisa Duggan developed this concept to describe and criticize a particular form of LGBT politics that suggests LGBT people deserve rights because they resemble everyone else. In this politics, less normative images of LGBT individuals and relationships are usually not presented, since activists assume they will harm the LGBT community’s image. Therefore, since plural marriage was seen as non-normative, activists for same-sex marriage preferred to distance themselves from it. Duggan criticizes homonormative strategies, suggesting that they lead to inequality within LGBT communities, as those closest to mimicking heteronormative standards of gender identity and sexuality come to be seen as the ones most worthy of receiving rights and respect, while those who do not or cannot meet these standards are often seen as a threat to the LGBT community’s rights (Duggan, 2003). Similar critiques by other queer writers have called for a more inclusive and intersectional discourse, emphasizing diversity among LGBTQ people, and a more nuanced understanding of LGBTQ lives.1 Although conservatives compared gay and plural marriage as a way of criticizing gay marriage, a genuine public debate has emerged about plural marriage as the next possible horizon for marriage equality. Writers in various publications have argued for and against the legalization of plural marriage and discussed its legal likelihood. For instance, the Washington Post asked, “Is polygamy next in the marriage debate?” (Bailey, 2015); the New York Times similarly wondered “Is polygamy next?” (Baude, 2015); and the Chicago Tribune raised the question “From gay marriage to polygamy?” (Chapman, 2015). The most centrally interested parties in these discussions are non-monogamous individuals. One group comprises polygamous families, which in the US are usually relationships between a man and multiple wives (for instance, plural marriages in some fundamentalist Mormon communities). A second group includes people in consensually non-monogamous (CNM) relationships. CNM relationships are defined as gender-egalitarian relationships in which, unlike in polygamy, both men

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and women can have multiple sexual and/or intimate relationships simultaneously, with the knowledge and consent of all participants (Sheff & Tesene, 2015). Common examples of CNM are polyamory, swinging, and open relationships. It is important to note that different CNM people and groups understand CNM relationships and individuals differently. Some practice CNM as an individual life preference, while others see it as a political life choice aimed at challenging the privileged status of coupledom. CNM practitioners also differ around the importance of legalizing plural marriage: For some it is a crucial next step, while others do not see it as very important, or as feasible in the near future. The heterogeneity of CNM practitioners means that different CNM individuals and groups have varying views on what CNM means, what CNM practitioners should aspire to, and what the right strategies are for achieving these aims. I suggest that the diversity of aims and strategies used in CNM discussions is both similar to and in some cases directly influenced by the discussion surrounding homonormative strategies. This chapter examines how the connection between same-sex marriage and plural marriage is being played out in the rhetoric used in relation to CNM, showing that some of these speakers shape their ideas about the goals and politics of CNM based on the politics of homonormativity and of samesex marriage, while others rely on the political model of the queer critique of homonormativity.2 These dynamics, I suggest, are also shaped by the public image of non-monogamy in the United States. In what follows, I first interpret the rhetoric used to legitimize CNM relationships with mainstream audiences, examining how CNM people are portrayed in articles in major publications online. I show that legitimation efforts attempt to distance CNM practitioners and practices from the negative stereotypes of non-monogamy circulating in US popular culture. I suggest that because of the different stereotypes applied to non-monogamous as compared to LGBT people, CNM normalization efforts both resemble and diverge from homonormative strategies. I go on to examine the rhetoric used by a smaller group of CNM advocates to oppose or critique CNM normalization efforts. Looking at blogs mostly aimed at CNM readers, I analyze how their critiques resemble critiques of homonormativity in the same-sex marriage debate. Ultimately, both activists working toward a normalization of CNM and activists criticizing these efforts engage with the public image of non-monogamy and are inspired by discussions surrounding homonormative strategies.

Non-monogamy in popular culture When images of non-monogamy arise in US popular culture, they often fall into one of three tropes, or images: the cheater, the polygamist, or the swinger. Each trope has different characteristics. The cheating-spouse trope portrays one partner as having sexual and/or intimate relationships behind their partner’s back. Cheaters are usually portrayed as dishonest, selfish, greedy, and irresponsible. The polygamist trope describes a man with multiple wives. In the Western imagination, this image is usually connected either to the image of the sheik, adding a

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layer of racialization, or to the fundamentalist Mormon. Western societies tend to understand polygamous relationships as unbalanced in relation to gender, as abusive, and as pre-modern or backward. The third trope is the swinger, relating to the swinging movement that was popular in the 1960s–1970s and subsequently lost its popularity (Rubin, 2001). Contemporary representations often depict swingers as outdated, sleazy, and sexually aggressive. All three tropes have negative, even amoral, undertones: they are usually represented as threatening or ridiculous, and are connected to regression, violence, gender inequality, sleaziness, and dishonesty. In general, monogamous relationships are believed to have high benefits at the individual, family, and societal levels, and monogamous individuals are seen as happier, more sexually satisfied, and better citizens. In contrast, non-monogamous relationships are negatively stigmatized (Conley et al., 2012) and are often seen as unintelligible, perverse, impossible, or a threat to monogamous relationships (Schippers, 2016). The negative image of non-monogamy is evident in people’s responses to articles and videos about CNM relationships. Many responses condemn such relationships as anti-Christian, promiscuous, and immoral. The CNM people presented are seen as selfish, as mentally unstable, or as having “intimacy problems,” and CNM relationships are sometimes seen as not “true love.” These contemporary images echo a history. Since the nineteenth century, scientific and governmental claims have suggested that the heterosexual, nuclear family is the natural and optimal way to organize social relations, arguing that it encourages stability and civility. Monogamy has been seen as civilized, moral, desirable, and benevolent toward women, while non-monogamy has been seen as uncivilized, undesirable, immoral, and harmful to women (Willey, 2006).Throughout these discussions, non-monogamy has been racialized as non-white, while monogamy has gone unmarked, often portrayed as “race-neutral.” Throughout US history, popular ideas about non-monogamy have been tightly connected to race. Ferguson (2004) writes that in the US, Black people’s bodily difference was framed as a sign of a pathological non-heteronormativity thought to be inherent to Black bodies and culture. Americans widely believed that Black people had excessive sexual appetites, which led them to multiple forms of sexual non-normativity, such as interracial and same-sex desires (Somerville, 2012). In the twentieth century, these ideas were used to explain the economic and social gap between the Black community and other groups (Ferguson, 2004). An important document in this discussion was a report titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, published in 1965 by Assistant Secretary of Labor (and future New York Senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The Moynihan Report, as it has become popularly known, located the reason for Black social disadvantage in Black family structures, suggesting that because during slavery enslaved men had been unable to support their wives and children as a result of forced submission to white owners, Black families since before the Civil War had “reversed [the] roles of husband and wife” (quoted in Jenkins, 2007, p. 9). In this way, the report framed Black people’s family formations as pathological, understanding their difference

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from the nuclear family model as harmful to society, the state, and Black people themselves ( Jenkins, 2007; Ferguson, 2004). Such claims also connected non-whiteness to non-heteronormative families, pathology, and a lack of cultural, social, and economic success (Ferguson, 2004). Angela Willey suggests that contemporary discourses about non-monogamy continue to be racialized, both within and outside the US context (Willey, 2006). For instance, polygamy is often portrayed as a non-white institution enforced on helpless women of color, who wish to be liberated by white feminists. Such narratives construct monogamy as modern, progressive, and more benevolent toward women, associating these characteristics with white people and cultures.These narratives also assume a linear progression in which all of humanity moves from nonmonogamy toward an enlightened, modern, and monogamous future. Meanwhile, racialized associations also appear in the narratives of some supporters of nonmonogamy, whose claims about non-monogamy’s “naturalness” often present as supporting evidence images of racialized Others, as “some idealized notion of a simple, pure, and sexually uninhibited primitivism” (Willey, 2006, p. 541). Popular narratives about non-monogamy are also gendered. Many discussions about non-monogamy assume that women have less interest in non-monogamy, and less to gain from it. This is connected to a wider portrayal of women as less sexual than men, and as “naturally” monogamous. As a result of these assumptions, non-monogamous relationships are often imagined as an unbalanced power dynamic, in which sexually greedy and selfish men take advantage of “naïve” and “subservient” women. When CNM relationships are discussed, it is often assumed that the relationship was initiated, and is mostly enjoyed, by men; women are often seen as the “losers” in the deal. Fittingly, people commenting online on articles and videos about CNM often respond in gendered ways: in relationships with multiple women and one man, the women are read as weak and submissive; in a relationship with multiple men and one woman, the woman is read as promiscuous and the men are effeminized. These dynamics can be exemplified through the public discussion about the open marriage of actress, comedian, and Academy Award winner Mo’Nique Angela Hicks. In an interview with TrueExclusives (Silent, 2015), the interviewer asked Mo’Nique what she thinks about couples “giving each other a pass to cheat.” In response, Mo’Nique commented: when you say “a pass to cheat” . . . see when you’re with your best friend and you say to your best friend “I’m having these feelings about this person, sexually and I wanna share it with you” . . . when you’re best friends, you can have those open and honest conversations. Often times people cheat because of something they’re not getting. But when you have open and honest dialogue and you say we’re just human beings and all these people on the face of the earth, do you think my eyes won’t ever say “he’s fine” or “she’s attractive.” Now if you wanna go further with it, let’s be honest enough to have those conversations.

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Mo’Nique later suggested that non-monogamy was part of African Black history, and that it was only when Black people were taken to the Americas that they adopted the idea of ownership. “I was owned before,” she said; “I do not want to be owned anymore.” In connecting monogamy to slavery and ownership of (Black) bodies, Mo’Nique made sense of her relationship choices using a positive framing of the racializations of non-monogamy discussed earlier. This statement was read differently by US Weekly, which three days later published a summary of some of the points Mo’Nique made in the interview, titled “Mo’Nique Gives Her Husband Sidney Hicks a ‘Pass’ to Cheat, Doesn’t Want to Be ‘Owned’” (McRady, 2015). While in her interview Mo’Nique rejected the idea of an open marriage as a “pass to cheat,” the title insists on that definition, specifically attaching the descriptor “pass to cheat” to her marriage. The title also suggests an unbalanced gender dynamic: Rather than a relationship where both partners have multiple connections, it assumes that Mo’Nique is not interested in having relations with others. The article continues this assumption, stating that “[t]he stand-up comedian did not reveal whether Hicks had slept with other people during their marriage,” with no similar comment about Mo’Nique. The title’s second part boils down Mo’Nique’s complex reasoning into a simple unwillingness to be “owned,” emptying her narrative of its meaning. Its use of quotation marks can even be read as a sign of ridicule. In summary, non-monogamy tends to be negatively portrayed in American popular culture, often connected to immorality, promiscuity, and pre-modernity. These narratives are often racialized and gendered. In the next part, I discuss the efforts made by some CNM people to normalize non-monogamy and legitimize plural marriage. As I show, much of this work is aimed to combat, or replace, nonmonogamy’s negative image in popular culture.

Normalization of CNM While activists fighting for same-sex marriage tended to deny its connection to plural marriage, CNM activists fighting for the legalization of plural marriage have often been quick to connect the two. This difference is easily understood: The gay marriage movement was, and still is, much more popular and accepted by the American public. As a result, the association between same-sex marriage and plural marriage, while potentially harmful for the gay movement, can be useful to the fight for plural marriage. Thus, the rhetoric of the fight for legalization of gay marriage, as well as its success, has been used by activists for plural marriage as an inspiration, a model, and a point of reference. This use is most evident in two common rhetorical strategies: (1) drawing parallels between CNM and LGBT individuals, and (2) presenting CNM people as normative. The first rhetorical strategy creates an analogy between CNM and LGBT lives, using comparable narratives and justifications. In some cases, CNM people create parallels between the LGBT community’s struggles and those of CNM communities. For instance, as mentioned earlier, many online texts understood the fight for

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legitimation and equal rights for CNM people as connected to the LGBT struggle. Following the high court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage, many activists for CNM discuss the legalization of plural marriage as the obvious next step for legal marriage equality, suggesting that those interested in human rights should be concerned with the rights of CNM people. In other cases, the comparison focuses on individuals’ lived experiences, suggesting that the lack of social acceptance offered to CNM individuals affects them in similar ways to LGBTQ people. For instance, the trope of the closet often appears in the life narratives of CNM people, and the terminology of “coming out of the closet” is often used to describe the act of revealing one’s CNM lifestyle to others. In one example, in a Slate post titled “Why I’m still in the polyamorous closet” (Carey, 2013), the writer states: I have to live with the knowledge that somebody I love thinks that if her mother knew what was going on in her life—that she has a second partner to love and support her . . . it would at least create awkwardness and difficulty, and perhaps even lead to shaming and rejection. The narrative of the CNM closet, similar to that of the LGBT closet, suggests that social misconceptions and prejudice lead some CNM people to hide their CNM practices, which they often see as their “true self.” Similarly, their portrayal of the results of “coming out” echoes narratives of the gay closet: hostility, judgment, and estrangement from family and friends, and the possibility of discrimination in employment, housing, or child custody. Another point of similarity emerges around the stories CNM people tell about the origin of their CNM identities. In some cases, CNM is introduced as a form of innate sexual identity: something someone is, rather than something someone does. This notion is sometimes strengthened by a “born this way” narrative, in which the tendency to love more than one person, or an inability to understand monogamy, are described as starting at a very early age (for instance, in elementary school). A BBC.com article titled “Polyamorous relationships may be the future of love” presented interviews with law scholars and psychologists suggesting that polyamory should be considered a sexual orientation. One law researcher was quoted as commenting: “They [poly activists] tell you they have an innate sense that they are wired this way. That this is a natural way of being for them” (Hogenboom, 2016). This claim frames CNM as “not a choice,” a framing then used to support the claim that CNM people should receive anti-discrimination protections under law. A similar and common line of argument discusses CNM as somehow “natural” or inherent not only to particular individuals, but to all human beings. In such narratives, monogamy is often portrayed as a result of a specific historical moment (such as the introduction of Christianity), or a cultural need (such as attempts to control women’s reproduction and verify newborns’ fatherhood). For example, the BBC article quoted above used research results and interviews with scholars to show that monogamy is not very common in “societies around the world” or in

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“the animal kingdom” (Hogenboom, 2016), supporting the claim that monogamy is not “natural” or “normal” in human beings. Through such arguments, non-monogamy is no longer framed as a choice, but rather as “natural” or “inherent”—either to some individuals (who were “born this way”) or possibly even to all of humanity (since monogamy is “not natural”). The second rhetorical strategy also builds on similarity, but instead of similarity to LGBT people, it suggests that CNM people are similar to “everyone.” Activists working toward a legalization of plural marriage and normalization of CNM tend to tell the kind of stories they assume will make the most sense to their readers and lead them to support CNM individuals’ causes. These texts attempt to highlight the similarities between CNM people and the texts’ (presumably) heterosexual, monogamous, and normative readers, presenting CNM as something normal, or something normal people do. The people presented as practicing CNM in these articles are usually ablebodied, heteronormative (feminine-presenting women and masculine-presenting men), cisgender (in contrast to trans and genderqueer people), and somewhat conventionally attractive. The CNM people usually presented are part of a couple, rather than being single or part of other formations (such as a triad). In some cases, white-collar occupations and higher-class statuses are highlighted, for instance by mentioning that a CNM person is a “scientific researcher” or works in Silicon Valley (e.g., Segall, 2015). This is similar to a homonormative strategy, suggesting that because these individuals and practices are as close as possible to the monogamous norm, they deserve parallel rights and social acceptance (Schippers, 2016). Many CNM representations in mainstream spaces include similar stories about who the people who practice CNM are and what their relationships look like. Many articles about CNM seem to assume that the wider population either does not know about CNM, or holds prejudice about what CNM is and who CNM people are.These texts aim to educate the wider population about CNM by presenting the personal stories of CNM people. Such texts are efforts by CNM people to exert control over CNM’s public image, shaping it into an image that most readers can understand, respect, and perhaps even like. One example of this genre is BuzzFeed’s video “Ask a Polyamorous Person” (BuzzFeed, 2014), currently the most viewed YouTube video on polyamory. This short, fast-moving video presents polyamorous people answering BuzzFeed fans’ questions, translating their CNM life for a presumably heteronormative and monogamous audience, and offering short, snappy explanations using every-day terms.The people presented are all young, passing-as-white, cool, and attractive. As in homonormative strategies, the CNM practitioners presented tend to be gender-conforming and able-bodied, and have normative occupations. At the same time, CNM normalization efforts differ from same-sex efforts in some aspects, because the negative stereotypes from which advocates want to distance themselves are somewhat different for LGBT and for CNM individuals. In the struggle to legitimize same-sex relationships, the primary Other, or the negative “not normal” image, is the masculine woman, the feminine man, or the non-passing trans person.

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In contrast, CNM needs to establish its difference primarily from the images of the cheater, the polygamist, and the swinger. This means that the rhetoric establishing normativity demands a different approach for CNM than for LGBT activists. A central negative trope about non-monogamy connects it to sexual greediness, or to abnormal sexual appetites. For instance, people discussing polygamous marriage will often crack jokes about the man’s sexual appetite and stamina, since they assume he regularly has sex with multiple women. In another example, swingers are often presented as sex-obsessed individuals preying on others for sexual pleasure. The connection between non-monogamy and abnormal sexual appetites or promiscuity is not unique; it is true of most non-normative sexualities, including LGBTQ individuals, people who practice BDSM, and so on. CNM people distance themselves from these negative images by presenting their relationships as intimate, loving, and longlasting, rather than short-term or hypersexual. CNM relationships are often framed in relation to love and intimacy through the choice to only present long-term relationships. For instance, an article published in US News following the same-sex marriage ruling included an interview with a polyamorous woman that mentioned that “she’s been with her husband, with whom she lives, for 10 years, has been with another male partner for 31 years and a third man for 12 years” (Nelson, 2015). The choice to present long-term CNM relationships helps to establish their stability and contradict the idea that they are based on fleeting sexual attraction. A similar point is made when a text focuses on a polyamorous household or chosen family that includes children and multiple parents. The non-biological parents are often presented as an important and stable part of the child’s life—an additional source of support. For instance, an article on ABC News.com presented a polyamorous triad in which two women had recently given birth to babies from the same father (Boudreau, Millman, & James, 2015).The interviewees claimed that the triad was constructed in order to create “a strong family unit,” and when discussing childrearing one mother stated, “I can double breastfeed while Melinda is making food and Jon is cleaning the house,” and the other commented: “There is always one of us that is able to be present with the children.” Similarly to the emphasis on long-term CNM relationships, these narratives validate CNM relationships as “real,” stable, and love-based. This rhetoric also constructs CNM as a potential source of support for procreation and childrearing, both highly normative and socially rewarded life choices. Thus, CNM rhetoric, similar to homonormative rhetoric, focuses on presentations of long-term relationships and “families” in order to establish CNM relationships as based on love, rather than promiscuous. However, homonormative narratives equate the relationships of straight people and LGBT people by claiming that they are the same, that “love is love”; assumptions about monogamy are not challenged, only norms regarding the partners’ gender or sex. In contrast, CNM faces the challenge of presenting non-monogamy as not promiscuous. Contemporary representations of CNM tend to approach this problem by suggesting that you can love more than one person. These discussions focus mostly on

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polyamory, whose name literally means “plural loves,” and are often narrated as a story of “falling in love” with more than one person. The CNM relationships most frequently presented are intimate, long-term, and established on respect and love, and CNM interviewees often highlight the role of intimacy and play down the role of sexual relations in their relationships. Many times CNM is framed as not intended for those who are only interested in multiple sexual partners. One typical article states: “In poly relationships people aren’t simply after a romp in the dark, but they make emotional and loving commitments to each other, taking in the good and the bad” (Hogenboom, 2016). In addition, at times non-monogamy will be presented as not fitting everyone, since it demands a lot of hard emotional work in order to succeed, working against social constructions that associate non-monogamy with competition between partners and jealousy. Such rhetoric therefore distances nonmonogamy from promiscuity by framing it as “loving” multiple partners, and definitely not just having sex with multiple partners. In addition to framing CNM relationships as based on love and intimacy, most stories about CNM tend to highlight these relationships as based on what CNM practitioners commonly conceive as an “ethical” code of conduct. For example, in the BuzzFeed video mentioned earlier, the participants find it important to highlight polyamory’s difference from cheating and polygamy, basing the difference on principles of communication, honesty, and consent. One participant explains, “It is ok to be non-monogamous as long as you do it in an ethical way that does not betray anyone.” In the interview quoted earlier, Mo’Nique made a similar comment, rejecting the description of her relationships as a “pass to cheat.”Thus, CNM relationships are usually presented as conditioned on all of the participants’ consent to be in such a relationship, and based on respect, fairness, honesty, and open communication. Through these principles, CNM is presented as inherently different from the negative forms of non-monogamy, which are often connected to dishonesty, selfishness, and problematic ethics. As previously discussed, another negative image associated with non-monogamy is its assumed connection to gender inequality. CNM people therefore tend to highlight their distance from polygamy, presenting CNM as an egalitarian relationship form in which all participants can have multiple partners. This point is illustrated by foregrounding CNM women’s independence and agency. For example, when Rolling Stone published a two-part article about millennials’ new approaches to sex and intimacy, opening with a CNM relationship (Morris, 2014), the couple’s non-monogamous relationship was described as led by the woman: [W]hen Ryan moved to New York and began living with Leah a year and a half later, he assumed they would transition immediately into monogamy. “I thought,‘All right, the long-distance shenanigans are over now, we’re moving in together, and it’s time to have a real go at this,’” he says, taking a sip of his beer. He was therefore surprised when the first thing Leah gave him after the move was a book called The Ethical Slut, considered to be a primer on how to handle a non-monogamous relationship.

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Texts on CNM individuals and relationships often highlight that these relationships are something women are actively interested in, and have a lot to gain from.Women are interviewed more often than men, and are often presented as the initiators of CNM relationships, as actively seeking multiple relationships, and as being responsible for their own sexuality. This helps to present CNM relationships not only as egalitarian but even, in some cases, as feminist. Similarly, in contrast to the racialized images traditionally associated with nonmonogamy, the CNM people presented in media tend to be overwhelmingly white. In other cases (such as the Rolling Stone article discussed above), the CNM practitioners interviewed wished to remain anonymous, and therefore were not described or photographed. As CNM practitioners go unmarked, they are most likely imagined as white by most readers. These representations almost never mention the presence of people of color (POC) in polyamorous communities, or the specific problems encountered by polyamorous POC. When non-monogamous POC are presented, their relationships are usually not understood as CNM. Much more often, such narratives become attached to words with a negative or amoral tone— such as when Mo’Nique’s open relationship was discussed as a “pass to cheat,” or when a Black triad’s relationship was described as “pimping” (Demise, 2014). Thus, against negative tropes about non-monogamy, speakers for CNM attempt to normalize it and present it in ways the general public will view positively. In order to achieve this goal, they present CNM as ethical, as stable, as established on the basis of love and intimacy rather than sex, and as egalitarian. In addition, current representations of CNM overwhelmingly highlight white practitioners.These tactics are summarized in Table 7.1. These efforts can create distance between CNM and the negative tropes of non-monogamy, and thus construct a more TABLE 7.1

Stereotypes of non-monogamy and polynormative responses

Non-monogamy stereotypes

Polynormative strategies respond by presenting CNM as . . .

Immoral/dishonest

-

Sexually and emotionally greedy/resulting from “intimacy problems”/sleazy Harmful toward women Backward/outdated

Racialized as non-white

-

Consensual Ethical Based on communication, honesty, and consent Based on love and intimacy rather than sex Leading to long-term relationships and/or families

Led by women Allowing women agency More progressive than monogamy The next evolutional step More “natural” than monogamy Practiced predominantly by white individuals Equally accessible to everyone (not discussing the challenges facing non-white CNM) - Much better than other forms and stereotypes of non-monogamy

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positive image of CNM, which encourages sympathy from mainstream monogamous audiences. In the next section of the chapter, I show how the rhetorical strategies used to normalize CNM and advance plural marriages are criticized by other members of CNM communities who are inspired by the queer critique of homonormativity.

Critiques of polynormativity Some academic writers have suggested that mainstream discourses about polyamory tend to serve the needs of a privileged few rather than show solidarity with other oppressed groups (Noel, 2006), and that these discourses deflect attention from social divisions and different forms of inequality (Klesse, 2014). Others suggest that the normative model of CNM is constructed at the expense of other CNM relationships. Serena Petrella argues that the efforts to legitimize polyamory have resulted in the creation of rules for the “good poly,” which have the potential to operate as a kind of repressive informal law (Petrella, 2007). This normative image can, for instance, mark short-term or mostly sexual CNM relationships as less positive or desirable, or further marginalize the CNM relationships of POC. In a post on her blog Sex Geek, Andrea Zanin suggested that the media tends to present polyamorous relationships and practitioners that follow a set of norms, which she uses the word “polynormativity” to describe (Zanin, 2013). Polynormative images often present polyamory as: (1) starting with an existing couple that opens up their relationship; (2) involving a hierarchy elevating one “primary” partner over other “secondary” partners; (3) maintained through a long list of relationship rules; and (4) practiced by young, white, attractive, and (mostly) heterosexual individuals. Zanin claims that “the form of poly that’s getting by far the most airtime is the one that’s as similar to traditional monogamy as possible, because that’s the least threatening to the dominant social order.” Thus, the word “polynormativity” serves here as a variation on the idea of “homonormativity,” similarly criticizing a minority group’s struggle for normalization as a way to achieve recognition and rights from the majority, suggesting that the effort to present a more normative and respectable image reiterates heteronormative and monogamous assumptions. Zanin’s post encouraged a conversation within some online CNM communities. Several writers have suggested further analysis of polynormative representations of CNM. In general, these writings seem to share a few similarities, claiming that polynormative representations of polyamory are inherently different from the ways in which they practice CNM, and that non-normative polyamory can potentially allow for more possibilities, rather than the strict regimen of rules prescribed in polynormative representations.These writers also see non-normative polyamory as having a liberatory and subversive potential, critiquing the privileged position of monogamous couples and the tendency to hierarchize romantic partners above all other relationships. In contrast to non-normative polyamory’s potential to change societal relationship norms, dominant polyamory was seen as maintaining monogamous assumptions. A few of the writers also called on their communities to create

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a more inclusive and intersectional discourse that takes into account the role power relations play within CNM relationships and the ways in which different intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class affect individuals’ ability to practice CNM. Similarly to the queer critique of homonormativity, writers who critique polynormativity aim to address the prices paid when people with a marginalized identity attempt to present themselves in more normative ways. Both sets of critics argue that attempts at normalization limit the span of possibilities the category is able to contain, neutralizing at least some of the category’s ability to critique or subvert social norms. Both critiques see normalizing strategies as further marginalizing less privileged community members, whose specific challenges go unrecognized, and who often are not seen as legitimate group members. Also as with homonormativity and its critics, polynormative strategies focus on the mainstream press while the critique of polynormativity appears primarily in smaller venues, speaking to the CNM community itself. As we saw earlier, activists for the normalization of CNM attempt to reach wide and mainstream audiences, and are often presented in major outlets such as Huffington Post, BBC, and CNN. In contrast, critics of polynormativity tend to occupy a less central place, writing in blogs aimed at least partially at readership from CNM communities (such as Sex Geek, The Stranger, and Polyamory Weekly). As a result, they are circulated and discussed on a much smaller scale. For instance, Zanin’s blog post, which started the discussion on polynormativity, is often referenced by other writers, is the top result in a Google search about “polynormativity,” and has received 320 comments in the four years since it was posted; in contrast, a recently published article about open marriage in the New York Times Magazine received 1,600 comments in the first week following its publication. In this sense, critiques of polynormativity seem to take the form of an intra-community discourse, interested less in communicating with heteronormative outsiders and more in conducting a conversation within the CNM community about aims and strategies.

Conclusion This chapter has shown that different people and groups use the connection between gay marriage and plural marriage in varying ways and for divergent aims: While activists for LGBT rights see this connection as problematic, something they can only lose from, both those who oppose same-sex marriage and those interested in non-monogamy see the analogy as a possible tool supporting their argument. Meanwhile, activists for gay and plural marriage both use normalizing strategies, suggesting that marginalized groups deserve equal access to rights and social acceptance based on their similarity to “normal” (that is, heterosexual and monogamous) people. The same logic, however, leads to somewhat different results: Unlike LGBT people, popularized negative tropes of non-monogamy connect it to non-whiteness, gender inequality, promiscuity, regression, and unethical conduct. As a result, CNM activists shaping their public image are at the same time inspired by homonormative strategies and led to use them in different ways, as seen in the earlier discussion of

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some of the ways in which critiques of CNM normalization (“polynormativity”) have been inspired by queer critiques, and have at least to some extent recreated the queer community’s dynamic. A review of the lessons learned by the homonormativity discourse suggests that rather than focusing on CNM’s advantages in relation to monogamy and its differences from other forms of non-monogamy, discussions about CNM can encourage us to rethink the reasoning behind the basis of negative non-monogamy tropes and examine the ways such discourses recreate problematic divisions and assumptions that differently affect specific intersections of identity (such as women in polygamous families or CNM people of color). Thus, rather than constructing a hierarchy between different relationship forms, discussions about CNM can strive for inclusion and encourage us to honestly assess our personal intimacy needs and respect those of others.

Notes 1

2

While the term LGBT stands for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people, the addition of Q adds the category “queer.” The phrase queer is used as an umbrella term for all the identities and practices which do not fit exactly into one of these categories and instead have a fluid relation to gender and/or sexuality, for example genderqueer, asexual, pansexual, and others. In contrast to homonormative strategies, which defer to a normative presentation of LGBT individuals, queer politics aims to celebrate and be inclusive of difference, diversity, and non-normativity. While polygamists are part of the broader group of plural marriage advocates, I do not discuss them in this analysis, and instead focus solely on CNM strategies and discourses.

References Bailey, S. M. (2015, July 10). Is polygamy next in the marriage debate? The Washington Post. Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/07/10/hereswhy-people-are-arguing-over-whether-polygamy-is-the-next-gay-marriage-debate/? utm_term=.2e55a63383c1 Baude, W. (2015, July 21). Is polygamy next? The New York Times. Retrieved from www. nytimes.com/2015/07/21/opinion/is-polygamy-next.html Boudreau, A., Millman, J., & James, C. (2015, July 23). Two moms, one dad, two babies make one big happy polyamorous family. ABC News.com. Retrieved from www.abcnews. go.com/Lifestyle/moms-dad-babies-make-big-happy-polyamorous-family/story?id= 31184051 BuzzFeed. (2014). Ask a polyamorous person. BuzzFeed Video. Retrieved from www.youtube. com/watch?v=-o1gsI3e0u4 Carey, M. (2013, September 5). Why I’m still in the polyamorous closet. Slate. Retrieved from www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2013/09/05/why_i_m_still_in_the_polyamory_closet.html Chapman, S. (2015, July 1). From gay marriage to polygamy? Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman/ct-polygamy-gay-marriage-supremecourt-perspec-0702-20150701-column.html Conley,T. D, Moors, A. C., Mastick, J. L., & Ziegler, A. (2012).The fewer the merrier? Stigma surrounding consensually non-monogamous romantic relationships. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 13(1), 1–30.

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Demise, K. (2014, April 28). Photo of polygamous Black couple goes viral. asKKissy. Retrieved from www.askkissy.com/2014/04/28/photo-of-polygamous-black-couplegoes-viral Duggan, L. (2003). The twilight of equality? Neoliberalism, cultural politics, and the attack on democracy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Ferguson, R. A. (2004). Aberrations in Black: Toward a queer of color critique. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hogenboom, M. (2016, June 23). Polyamorous relationships might be the future of love. BBC. com. Retrieved from www.bbc.com/future/story/20160623-polyamorous-relationshipsmay-be-the-future-of-love Jenkins, C. M. (2007). Private lives, proper relations: Regulating Black intimacy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Klesse, C. (2014).“Loving more than one”: On the discourse of polyamory. In A. G. Jonasdottir & A. Ferguson (Eds.), Love: A question for feminism in the twenty-first century (pp. 63–77). New York, NY: Routledge. McRady, R. (2015, November 19). Mo’Nique gives her husband Sidney Hicks a “pass” to cheat, doesn’t want to be “owned.” US Weekly. Retrieved from www.usmagazine.com/ entertainment/news/monique-gives-her-husband-a-pass-to-cheat-w157994 Morris, A. (2014, March 31). Tales from the millennials’ sexual revolution. Rolling Stone. Retrieved from www.rollingstone.com/feature/millennial-sexual-revolution-relationshipsmarriage#ixzz4bQcAeyMw Nelson, S. (2015, June 29). Polyamorous rights advocates see marriage equality coming for them. US News. Retrieved from www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/06/29/polyamorous-rights-advocates-see-marriage-equality-coming-for-them Noel, M. (2006). Progressive polyamory: Considering issues of diversity. Sexualities, 9(5), 602–20. Obergefell. (2015). Obergefell v. Hodges. 576 U.S. ___. Petrella, S. (2007). Ethical sluts and closet polyamorists: Dissident eroticism, abject subjects and the normative cycle in self-help books on free love. In N. Rumens & A. CervantesCarson (Eds.), Sexual politics of desire and belonging (pp. 161–71). New York, NY: Rodopi. Rubin, R. (2001). Whatever happened to swingers, group marriages and communities? Journal of Family Issues, 22(6), 711–26. Schippers, M. (2016). Beyond monogamy: Polyamory and the future of polyqueer sexualities. New York, NY: New York University Press. Segall, L. (2015, January 28). I have a fiancé, a boyfriend, and two lovers. CNN.com. Retrieved from www.money.cnn.com/2015/01/25/technology/polyamory-silicon-valley/ Sheff , E. & Tesene, M. M. (2015). Consensual non-monogamies in industrialized nations. In J. DeLamater & R. F. Plante (Eds.), Handbook of the sociology of sexualities (pp. 223–41). New York, NY: Springer. Silent. (2015, November 17). Interview: @moworldwide talks stand up comedy, weight loss, the secret to a successful marriage, reality TV & more! TrueExclusive.com. Retrieved from www.trueexclusives.com/2015/11/17/interview-moworldwide-talks-stand-up-comedyweight-loss-the-secret-to-a-successful-marriage-reality-tv-more/ Somerville, S. B. (2012). Queering the color line. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Willey, A. (2006). “Christian nations”, “polygamic races” and women’s rights:Toward a genealogy of non/monogamy and whiteness. Sexualities, 9(5), 530–46. Zanin, A. (2013, January 24). The problem with polynormativity. Sex Geek. Retrieved from www.sexgeek.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/theproblemwithpolynormativity

PART III

The present and future of relational diversity

8 THE BEYOND SAME-SEX MARRIAGE STATEMENT TEN YEARS LATER1 Featuring Terry Boggis, Debanuj DasGupta, Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis, Lisa Duggan, Amber L. Hollibaugh, Nancy Polikoff, and Ignacio G. Rivera

Editors’ introduction: In 2006, approximately two dozen thinkers and activists drafted a statement entitled Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families & Relationships. At that point marriage was firmly entrenched as the top priority of the mainstream lesbian and gay movement in the United States. Massachusetts had been marrying same-sex couples for two years, but virtually every other battle over same-sex marriage had been lost. Meanwhile, the George W. Bush administration was both advocating a federal constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage and promoting heterosexual marriage to people on public assistance as a supposed tool for curing poverty. In this context, the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage drafters called for a broader relationship policy agenda focused on helping all people in all forms of unrecognized and unsupported caring relationships, not just those same-sex couples who wished to marry. The drafters’ critiques of marriage varied, but they shared a common conviction that caring takes many forms, and that all deserved support. They were concerned that the overwhelming focus on marriage was channeling massive resources toward one goal while neglecting many other issues facing queer people and families.2 The statement was released in July 2006 with signatures from about 250 prominent public intellectuals, including Cornel West, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Judith Butler. Although the drafters didn’t have the capacity to do sustained organizing around the statement, it nonetheless became extremely influential among critical LGBTQ activists and scholars, and it stands as a key statement of critical queer family politics from that time. To launch this final section’s exploration of the impact of legal same-sex marriage on queer families and relationships beyond same-sex marriage itself, the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement is reprinted in full below, followed by a transcribed excerpt from a conversation at the 2016 “After Marriage” conference among some of the statement’s original drafters. ---

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Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families & Relationships3 We, the undersigned—lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and allied activists, scholars, educators, writers, artists, lawyers, journalists, and community organizers—seek to offer friends and colleagues everywhere a new vision for securing governmental and private institutional recognition of diverse kinds of partnerships, households, kinship relationships and families. In so doing, we hope to move beyond the narrow confines of marriage politics as they exist in the United States today. We seek access to a flexible set of economic benefits and options regardless of sexual orientation, race, gender/gender identity, class, or citizenship status. We reflect and honor the diverse ways in which people find and practice love, form relationships, create communities and networks of caring and support, establish households, bring families into being, and build innovative structures to support and sustain community. In offering this vision, we declare ourselves to be part of an interdependent, global community. We stand with people of every racial, gender and sexual identity, in the United States and throughout the world, who are working day-to-day—often in harsh political and economic circumstances—to resist the structural violence of poverty, racism, misogyny, war, and repression, and to build an unshakeable foundation of social and economic justice for all, from which authentic peace and recognition of global human rights can at long last emerge.

Why the LGBT Movement Needs a New Strategic Vision Household & Family Diversity is Already the Norm The struggle for same-sex marriage rights is only one part of a larger effort to strengthen the security and stability of diverse households and families. LGBT communities have ample reason to recognize that families and relationships know no borders and will never slot narrowly into a single existing template. All families, relationships, and households struggling for stability and economic security will be helped by separating basic forms of legal and economic recognition from the requirement of marital and conjugal relationship. U.S. Census findings tell us that a majority of people, whatever their sexual and gender identities, do not live in traditional nuclear families. Recognizing the diverse households that already are the norm in this country is simply a matter of expanding upon the various forms of legal recognition that already are available. The LGBT movement has played an instrumental role in creating and advocating for domestic partnerships, second-parent adoptions, reciprocal beneficiary arrangements, joint tenancy/home-ownership contracts, health care proxies, powers of attorney, and other mechanisms that help provide stability and security for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and heterosexual individuals and families. During the height of the AIDS epidemic, our communities formed support systems and constructed new kinds of families and

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partnerships in the face of devastating crisis and heartbreak. Both our communities and our HIV organizations recognized, respected, and fought for the rights of nontraditionally constructed families and non-conventional partnerships. Moreover, the transgender and bisexual movements, so often historically left behind or left out by the larger lesbian and gay movement, have powerfully challenged legal constructions of relationship and fought for social, legal, and economic recognition of partnerships, households, and families, which include members who shatter the narrow confines of gender conformity. To have our government define as “legitimate families” only those households with couples in conjugal relationships does a tremendous disservice to the many other ways in which people actually construct their families, kinship networks, households, and relationships. For example, who among us seriously will argue that the following kinds of households are less socially, economically, and spiritually worthy? • • • • • • • • • •

Senior citizens living together, serving as each other’s caregivers, partners, and/ or constructed families Adult children living with and caring for their parents Grandparents and other family members raising their children’s (and/or a relative’s) children Committed, loving households in which there is more than one conjugal partner Blended families Single parent households Extended families (especially in particular immigrant populations) living under one roof, whose members care for one another Queer couples who decide to jointly create and raise a child with another queer person or couple, in two households Close friends and siblings who live together in long-term, committed, nonconjugal relationships, serving as each other’s primary support and caregivers Care-giving and partnership relationships that have been developed to provide support systems to those living with HIV/AIDS

Marriage is not the only worthy form of family or relationship, and it should not be legally and economically privileged above all others. While we honor those for whom marriage is the most meaningful personal—for some, also a deeply spiritual— choice, we believe that many other kinds of kinship relationships, households, and families must also be accorded recognition.

An Increasing Number of Households & Families Face Economic Stress Our strategies must speak not only to the fears, but also the hopes, of millions of people in this country—LGBT people and others—who are justifiably afraid and anxious about their own economic futures. Poverty and economic hardship are widespread and increasing. Corporate greed, draconian tax cuts and breaks for the wealthy, and the increasing shift of public

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funds from human needs into militarism, policing, and prison construction are producing ever-greater wealth and income gaps between the rich and the poor, in this country and throughout the world. In the United States, more and more individuals and families (disproportionately people of color and single-parent families headed by women) are experiencing the violence of poverty. Millions of people are without health care, decent housing, or enough to eat. We believe an LGBT vision for the future ought to accurately reflect what is happening throughout this country. People are forming unique unions and relationships that allow them to survive and create the communities and partnerships that mirror their circumstances, needs, and hopes. While many in the LGBT community call for legal recognition of same-sex marriage, many others—heterosexual and/or LGBT—are shaping for themselves the relationships, unions, and informal kinship systems that validate and support their daily lives, the lives they are actually living, regardless of what direction the current ideological winds might be blowing.

The Right’s “Marriage Movement” Is Much Broader than Same-Sex Marriage LGBT movement strategies must be sufficiently prophetic, visionary, creative, and practical to counter the Right’s powerful and effective use of “wedge” politics—the strategic marketing of fear and resentment that pits one group against another. Right-wing strategists do not merely oppose same-sex marriage as a stand-alone issue. The entire legal framework of civil rights for all people is under assault by the Right, coded not only in terms of sexuality, but also in terms of race, gender, class, and citizenship status. The Right’s anti-LGBT position is only a small part of a much broader conservative agenda of coercive, patriarchal marriage promotion that plays out in any number of civic arenas in a variety of ways—all of which disproportionately impact poor, immigrant, and people-of-color communities.The purpose is not only to enforce narrow, heterosexist definitions of marriage and coerce conformity, but also to slash to the bone governmental funding for a wide array of family programs, including childcare, healthcare and reproductive services, and nutrition, and transfer responsibility for financial survival to families themselves. Moreover, as we all know, the Right has successfully embedded “stealth” language into many anti-LGBT marriage amendments and initiatives, creating a framework for dismantling domestic partner benefit plans and other forms of household recognition (for queers and heterosexual people alike). Movement resources are drained by defensive struggles to address the Right’s issue-by-issue assaults. Our strategies must engage these issues head-on, for the long term, from a position of vision and strength.

“Yes!” to Caring Civil Society and “No!” to the Right’s Push for Privatization Winning marriage equality in order to access our partners’ benefits makes little sense if the benefits that we seek are being shredded.

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At the same time same-sex marriage advocates promote marriage equality as a way for same-sex couples and their families to secure Social Security survivor and other marriage-related benefits, the Right has mounted a long-term strategic battle to dismantle all public service and benefit programs and civic values that were established beginning in the 1930s, initially as a response to widening poverty and the Great Depression.The push to privatize Social Security and many other human needs benefits, programs, and resources that serve as lifelines for many, married or not, is at the center of this attack. In fact, all but the most privileged households and families are in jeopardy as a result of a wholesale right-wing assault on funding for human needs, including Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, HIV-AIDS research and treatment, public education, affordable housing, and more. This bad news is further complicated by a segment of LGBT movement strategy that focuses on same-sex marriage as a stand-alone issue. Should this strategy succeed, many individuals and households in LGBT communities will be unable to access benefits and support opportunities that they need because those benefits will only be available through marriage, if they remain available at all. Many transgender, gender queer, and other gender-nonconforming people will be especially vulnerable, as will seniors. For example, an estimated 70-80% of LGBT elders live as single people, yet they need many of the health care, disability, and survivorship benefits now provided through partnerships only when the partners are legally married. Rather than focus on same-sex marriage rights as the only strategy, we believe the LGBT movement should reinforce the idea that marriage should be one of many avenues through which households, families, partners, and kinship relationships can gain access to the support of a caring civil society.

The Longing for Community and Connectedness We believe LGBT movement strategies must not only democratize recognition and benefits but also speak to the widespread hunger for authentic and just community. So many people in our society and throughout the world long for a sense of caring community and connectedness, and for the ability to have a decent standard of living and pursue meaningful lives free from the threat of violence and intimidation. We seek to create a movement that addresses this longing. So many of us long for communities in which there is systemic affirmation, valuing, and nurturing of difference, and in which conformity to a narrow and restricting vision is never demanded as the price of admission to caring civil society. Our vision is the creation of communities in which we are encouraged to explore the widest range of non-exploitive, non-abusive possibilities in love, gender, desire and sex—and in the creation of new forms of constructed families without fear that this searching will potentially forfeit for us our right to be honored and valued within our communities and in the wider world. Many of us, too, across all identities, yearn for an end to repressive attempts to control our personal lives. For LGBT and queer communities, this longing has special significance.

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We who have signed this statement believe it is essential to work for the creation of public arenas and spaces in which we are free to embrace all of who we are, repudiate the right-wing demonizing of LGBT sexuality and assaults upon queer culture, openly engage issues of desire and longing, and affirm, in the context of caring community, the complexities and richness of gender and sexual diversity. However we choose to live, there must be a legitimate place for us.

The Principles at the Heart of Our Vision We, the undersigned, suggest that strategies rooted in the following principles are urgently needed: • •

• • • •

• •

Recognition and respect for our chosen relationships, in their many forms Legal recognition for a wide range of relationships, households, and families, and for the children in all of those households and families, including same-sex marriage, domestic partner benefits, second-parent adoptions, and others The means to care for one another and those we love The separation of benefits and recognition from marital status, citizenship status, and the requirement that “legitimate” relationships be conjugal Separation of church and state in all matters, including regulation and recognition of relationships, households, and families Access for all to vital government support programs, including but not limited to: affordable and adequate health care, affordable housing, a secure and enhanced Social Security system, genuine disaster recovery assistance, welfare for the poor Freedom from a narrow definition of our sexual lives and gender choices, identities, and expression Recognition of interdependence as a civic principle and practical affirmation of the importance of joining with others (who may or may not be LGBT) who also face opposition to their household and family compositions, including old people, immigrant communities, single parents, battered women, prisoners and former prisoners, people with disabilities, and poor people

We must ensure that our strategies do not help create or strengthen the legal framework for gutting domestic partnerships (LGBT and heterosexual) for those who prefer this or another option to marriage, reciprocal beneficiary agreements, and more. LGBT movement strategies must never secure privilege for some while at the same time foreclosing options for many. Our strategies should expand the current terms of debate, not reinforce them.

A Winnable Strategy No movement thrives without the critical capacity to imagine what is possible. Our call for an inclusive new civic commitment to the recognition and wellbeing of diverse households and families is neither utopian nor unrealistic. To those

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who argue that marriage equality must take strategic precedence over the need for relationship recognition for other kinds of partnerships, households, and families, we note that same-sex marriage (or close approximations thereof) were approved in Canada and other countries only after civic commitments to universal or widely available healthcare and other such benefits. In addition, in the United States, a strategy that links same-sex partner rights with a broader vision is beginning to influence some statewide campaigns to defeat same-sex marriage initiatives.

A Vision for All Our Families and Relationships is Already Inspiring Positive Change We offer a few examples of the ways in which an inclusive vision, such as we propose, can promote practical, progressive change and open up new opportunities for strategic bridge-building.

Canada Canada has taken significant steps in recent years toward legally recognizing the equal value of the ways in which people construct their families and relationships that fulfill critical social functions (such as parenting, assumption of economic support, provision of support for aging and infirm persons, and more). •

•

In the 1990s, two constitutional cases heard by that country’s Supreme Court extended specific rights and responsibilities of marriage to both opposite-sex and same-sex couples. Canada’s federal Modernization of Benefits and Obligations Act (2000) then virtually erased the legal distinction between marital and non-marital conjugal relationships. In 2001, in consideration of its mandate to “consider measures that will make the legal system more efficient, economical, accessible, and just,” the Law Commission of Canada released a report, Beyond Conjugality, calling for fundamental revisions in the law to honor and support all caring and interdependent personal adult relationships, regardless of whether or not the relationships are conjugal in nature.

Arizona The Arizona Together Coalition (www.aztogether.org) is currently running a broad, multi-constituency campaign that emphasizes how the proposed constitutional amendment to “protect marriage” will affect not just same-sex couples but also seniors, survivors of domestic violence, unmarried heterosexual couples, adopted children and the business community. The Arizona Coalition highlights the probability that the amendment will eliminate domestic partnership recognition, by both government and businesses. They also point out that DOMA4 supporters are the same forces that wanted to keep cohabitation a crime. As a result of the

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Coalition’s efforts, support for the constitutional amendment declined sharply in polls (from 49% to 33%) in the course of a few months (May 2005 – September 2005). Accordingly, should the amendment make it onto the November 2006 ballot, Arizona is poised to become the first state to reject a state anti-gay constitutional marriage amendment in the voting booth.5 We suggest that the LGBT movement pay close attention to the way that activists in Arizona frame their campaign to be about protecting a variety of different family arrangements.

South Carolina The South Carolina Equality Coalition (www.scequality.org) is fighting a proposed constitutional amendment with an organizing effort emphasizing “Fairness for All Families.” This coalition is not only focused on LGBT-headed families, but is also intentionally building relationships with a broad multi-constituency base of immigrant communities, elders, survivors of domestic violence, unmarried heterosexual couples, adopted children, families of prisoners, and more. As we write this statement, the Coalition’s efforts to work in this broader way are being further strengthened by emphasis on the message that “Families have no borders. We all belong.”

Utah In September 2005, Salt Lake City Mayor Ross Anderson signed an Executive Order enabling city employees to obtain health insurance benefits for their “domestic partners.” A few months later, trumping the executive order, the Salt Lake City Council enacted an ordinance allowing city employees to identify an “adult designee” who would be entitled to health insurance benefits in conjunction with the benefits provided to the employee. The requirements included living with the employee for more than a year, being at least 18 years old, and being economically dependent or interdependent. Benefits extend to children of the adult designee as well. While an employee’s same-sex or opposite-sex partner could qualify, this definition is broad enough to encompass many other household configurations. The ordinance has survived both a veto by the Mayor (who wanted to provide benefits only to “spousal like” relationships) and a lawsuit launched by anti-gay groups. The judge who ruled in the lawsuit wrote that “single employees may have relationships outside of marriage, whether motivated by family feeling, emotional attachment or practical considerations, which draw on their resources to provide the necessaries of life, including health care.”We advocate close attention to such efforts to provide material support for the widest possible range of household formations. We offer these four examples to show that there are ways of moving forward with a strategic vision that is broader than same-sex marriage, and encompassing of all our families and relationships. Different regions of our country will require different strategies, but we can, and must, keep central to our work the idea that all family forms must be protected—not just because it is the right thing to do, but also because it is the strategic and winnable way to move forward.

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A Bold, New Vision Will Speak to Many Who are Not Already With Us At a time when an ethos of narrow self-interest and exclusion of difference is ascendant, and when the Right asserts a scarcity of human rights and social and economic goods, this new vision holds long-term potential for creating powerful and vibrant new relationships, coalitions, and alliances across constituencies—communities of color, immigrant communities, LGBT and queer communities, senior citizens, singleparent families, the working poor, and more—hit hard by the greed and inhumanity of the Right’s economic and political agendas. At a time when the conservative movement is generating an agenda of fear, retrenchment, and opposition to the very idea of a caring society, we need to claim the deepest possibilities for interdependent social relationships and human expression. We must dare to dream the world that we need, the world that has room for us all, even as we also do the painstaking work of crafting the practical strategies that will address the realities of our daily lives. The LGBT movement has a history of being diligent and creative in protecting our families. Now, more than ever, is the time to continue to find new ways of defending all our families, and to fight to make same-sex marriage just one option on a menu of choices that people have about the way they construct their lives. We invite friends everywhere to join us in ensuring that there is room, recognition, and practical support for us all, as we dream together a new future where all people will truly be free. ---

Looking back ten years later Ten years after the original release of the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement, several of the original drafters gathered at the “After Marriage” conference to consider its legacy. Below is an excerpt from that conversation, led by Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis, one of the organizers of the conference and one of the drafters of the original statement. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length; all significant edits have been marked with ellipses and brackets. So the next question I have for everyone is, what do you think is still relevant ten years later? NANCY POLIKOFF: At the time that we were writing this, I was already working on my book Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage,6 and I had identified a lot of very creative forms of family and relationship recognition that were going on around the country . . . The ability, for example, to name one person with whom you have an interdependent relationship to be able to receive your employee partner benefits. [This person did] not necessarily [have to be] a . . . domestic partner or conjugal partner . . . The first domestic partnership benefits in the country were actually for unmarried different-sex couples, at a time when there was much more of a JOSEPH NICHOLAS DEFILIPPIS:

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cultural critique of marriage, so the idea was that you shouldn’t have to get married to cover your partner on your insurance. And then we got same-sex included, and then we got same-sex only. When it became same-sex only, it was clearly, “Well, you can’t marry, so we’ll give you benefits.” And so of course what we said at the time was, once we have same-sex marriage, these more creative forms are going to go away, and for the most part we were right. Not entirely: I work at a university that still allows domestic partner benefits, and that actually expanded them to include different-sex couples, after just being same-sex couples. So, there are some examples of workplaces that have left more of a set of options in place. But many of them have gone away. My particular . . . subarea of expertise within LGBT families is about parent– child relationships . . . As soon as there was marriage anywhere . . . we saw states . . . where if you were a married lesbian couple, your child [legally] had two mothers when the child . . . was born. [But on the other hand] if you were an unmarried [lesbian couple] the child had [only] one mother, unless the second mother adopted the child. If the relationship ended, that child had one parent, and that was it. So we saw marriage being a dividing line between what parent relationships mattered and what [ones] didn’t. In [some] states . . . we had obtained second-parent adoptions, [meaning] the right of a person who wasn’t married to a . . . usually biological parent, to adopt the child without terminating the legal parent’s parental rights. In states where we had [secured these rights] before marriage equality, we still have [them], although I still hear occasional stories about judges who think couples should get married before they do [the adoption], and then do a step-parent adoption. In states where we didn’t have it, we [still] don’t have it, and the gay rights movement, litigating marriage equality and litigating parenting rights in connection with that, gave up on claims about the right to second-parent adoption.They actually settled litigation that was challenging bans against secondparent adoption when same-sex couples were allowed to marry because [they thought] that solved the problem . . . The good news is that . . . there are occasionally court rulings that are really excellent. [For example,] in New York . . . in a situation where a gay man and a woman whose sexual orientation is unidentified in the public paperwork wanted to have a child together, and they were going to use insemination and have a biological child. They didn’t live together, but they were really good friends and they were going to raise the child jointly. She didn’t get pregnant, so they decided to adopt together and they did an international adoption, but it had to be done as a single parent. The woman did it. She came back home to New York and they raised the child for a couple years in two homes, exactly the way they intended to.The trial judge granted a second-parent adoption to that man . . . in this non-conjugal parental situation. The best news going forward . . . is that there is some model legislation that will be approved soon, and pieces of it have already been adopted in a small number of states, that do define “parent” in more expansive ways. That allow,

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for example, if a woman has a child using assisted conception, that if she’s doing it with someone else, whether that person is male, female, married, unmarried, conjugal partner or not, the two of them can plan the birth of that child as two parents. They can both be considered parents because they have the intent from the beginning that that use of assisted conception will result in them both being parents . . . TERRY BOGGIS: What fired my imagination on doing this beyond-marriage thinking . . . was around family diversity that I’d witnessed organically in my work . . . Seeing people left outside the system, including people like multiple-parent households, or more complex parenting arrangements like the ones that Nancy was alluding to. I’m not saying there weren’t two lesbians and two gay men, and they had kids . . . but families that were more complicated than that were way more [commonplace] than the exception to the rule . . . My son was born in ’88, so I started thinking about this in the ’80s . . . There were no legal protections, so people were understandably paranoid, and they wanted to define their families as just my girlfriend and I and this baby, and “Thanks for the sperm but . . . don’t ever come visit.” [But real,] lived experiences [helped] people realize that they could actually be more trusting, more relaxed, and they started centering the child’s best interest in some of the calculations . . . [They learned] what abundance multiple parents actually represent for children. People started creating families intentionally with multiple parents, and very commonly. And sort of defining access to children [either on] sort of a hierarchical scale, or sometimes very democratically. But the fact . . . that there was no law that accommodated these arrangements that were really quite brilliant, quite loving, quite democratic and expansive, was a real frustration for many people . . . In large part, that [situation] still exists. In fact I have . . . a friend who’s an immigration attorney here in New York, a lesbian, who said that, post-marriage decision, some of the cases she’s seeing in her practice are multiple-partner constellations where [one of the partners is] living outside the US [and the US partners are] seeking to bring a partner in as a conjugal partner of some kind. And how obviously that’s a huge stretch, and she’s [challenged] by what to do, but is willing to sort of grapple with it . . . And that’s exciting . . . So next steps, I suspect, will be a deeper understanding of what families look like, not just gay ones. There are all kinds of complex families, and I think we have seen that reflected in the work being done by certain advocates in DC around federal regulations that define households and families more expansively. There are becoming more generous definitions about what a family can be in law. So that’s been progress, and I think further education is going to be the next step. JND: I’m going to ask Lisa now to talk about what’s still relevant from a different perspective, about some of the economic issues. LISA DUGGAN: One of the things that we were really focused on in the Beyond Marriage statement and in the politics around it . . . were the real material needs and the actual relationships of people, both queer and other. Trying to point out the

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mismatch between those actual material needs and relationships . . . and a onesize-fits-all right to marriage . . . [For example, Salt Lake City] did something very creative . . . before marriage was passed there. They created something called an “adult designee,” which meant you can name anyone [to receive health insurance benefits if you are a city employee]. And one of the reasons they did that, was because there was a case that was high on their profile of a woman whose sister had cancer, and she had health benefits, and her sister did not, and so she was going everywhere arguing . . .“Why does [a sexual relationship], whether married or unmarried . . . define [access to] this economic benefit? My sister is economically dependent on me, so why can’t she get my healthcare benefits?” And that really motivated advocacy in Utah to go for adult designee, rather than [the narrower approach of] domestic partnership . . . So in order to illuminate this, the material basis for marriage and for critiques of marriage, we wanted to lay out . . . the way that marriage is embedded in larger structures, and in larger histories, of property relations and empire. And the classic example is of course North America. Europeans came to North America and one of the first things they did in imposing European empire was to push, to coerce native populations into a version of Christian marriage. That is a central goal of empire, and the success of empire has to do with breaking up communal lands, making individual plots, [creating] property ownership, producing a certain kind of family for ownership and reproduction and inheritance purposes. And the imposition of marriage is part of that project . . . And then in the contemporary situation . . . marriage has become a part of the project of privatization . . . as benefits are cut, both by the state and by employers. From Bush to Clinton, the motive behind marriage promotion in welfare reform in the 1990s was to push populations into private households where the social costs will be privatized . . . So we were making this critique trying to say that we need to understand . . . that marriage is embedded in these race and class relations of inequality.And it also has a history . . . of being imposed on populations who do not practice it, and of bringing . . . those populations into a set of property relations . . . that people . . . have been defying . . . It was extremely difficult because the emphasis on the individual right is a very powerful culture and political force . . . So . . . a central part of what we were doing was to try and embed marriage in larger political and economic structures, and to think about ways we can meet material needs more expansively and democratically by de-centering marriage and looking at ways to support— not necessarily through legal recognition—households as they actually existed, and to do some material redistribution for the benefit of populations who weren’t already at the top of the food chain. DEBANUJ DASGUPTA: So, to continue Lisa’s train of thought . . . If I go back to 1996, we’ve talked about welfare reform, but what also [happened in] 1996 were three pieces of legislation . . . under Clinton . . . [One was] the toughest immigration reform in the history of the United States, which actually saw the criminalization of immigrants under Clinton . . . What overlaps with welfare

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reform is that immigrants, while going through the immigration process, even as permanent residents, could not apply any more for public benefits because . . . you could not be a public charge since [being] economically productive is why you’ve been allowed into the nation-state . . .You couldn’t even do TANF or temporary food stamps,7 if you were going through these periods of poverty, situational poverty moments. So we see this expansion of limits for . . . benefits for immigrants, and it’s unhooked pretty much from any conjugal status. So from the get-go this idea of limiting benefits . . . is very much tied to immigration reform and welfare reform.The third piece, of course . . . was the Defense of Marriage Act. These three passed around the same time in 1996. In 1986, if I go back another decade, what was happening, was what we . . . remember as amnesty for many of the Latin American immigrants who were here . . . as undocumented. Now, in 2016, the whole conversation about amnesty is gone. It’s about criminalization of immigrants, deporting undocumented criminal immigrants, and militarization of the border . . . So in this context, any conversation about immigration, to follow Lisa, was always happening in terms of “personal responsibility,” post-1996. A “good” immigrant was supposed to be responsible for their economic conditions, even if you had a family sponsor. You can come into the US in two ways, through spouse or parents, and in order for the spouse or your parents to sponsor you, or blood relatives, you had to show that you had 70 percent more income than the poverty line in order to sponsor your family member. And in 1996 when immigration reform happened, Clinton issued this huge statement to all US citizens who were naturalized . . . to act responsibly when they were considering sponsoring other people. What this did was to separate foreignborn immigrants who had [been] naturalized from US citizens . . . So a conversation about partnership benefits at that moment, which was the only conversation at the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Task Force at that point . . . was very dangerous, because what it was doing was just highlighting . . . a certain class of people who . . . had the class privilege to sponsor their partners . . . [Returning to the present day in 2016, now the] Defense of Marriage Act has been removed in multiple phases . . . This allows now for US citizens and permanent residents to sponsor their [same-sex married] partners. But what it does is, it once again sets up a similar pattern of separating foreign-born US citizens who have access to class privilege, who can be “good” immigrants, from these “bad” immigrants, bad queer, bad transgender immigrants who are doing sex work, and are criminals, and “should” be criminalized . . . [I want to close by] giving a plug for so many of . . . the different transgender activists who are at this conference8 who are doing anti-detention work right now, with a broader vision for detention and prison abolition . . . [Finally,] I’d like to ask Amber and Ignacio to talk about sexual liberation, that lovely term that seems to be utterly missing from so many of our conversations.

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I think [for many of us, part of] our interest in writing this was the dismay that many of us felt about the idea of sexual liberation, the concepts that had really driven the early part of the queer movement to define the idea of being explicitly sexual people with each other outside of traditional relationships, heterosexual relationships. [That idea] had over the years disappeared, and was disappearing even more as the conversation was propelled toward marriage. Because people that were fighting for same-sex marriage had a very traditional idea of sexuality within that. They weren’t talking about polyamorous relationships, they weren’t talking about active sexual cultures. All conversation about a radical vision for sex became harder and harder to even consider, and some of us . . . felt strongly about writing this document . . . precisely because suddenly we were having conversations about marriage, not being promiscuous. [When I was] at the [National LGBTQ] Task Force, I remember a number of gay men saying to me that they were desperate to find a partner to marry, because the former queer movement had just promoted too much sexuality. And I thought, never in my entire life did I think I ever would be sitting talking to a gay man about how being promiscuous was a good thing and they were telling me that they wanted to get married . . . And so . . . I think some of the commitment we had to writing this statement was to try and talk about how the queer movement had begun with a very different understanding of the right to be sexual people, in many different ways and in many different identities, and that . . . was being reduced to a conversation about heterosexual monogamy . . . And we were also trying to talk about things like sex workers. Work that was not understood in the context of the morality of marriage, and the kind of things that were considered problematic if you were a part of it because it was against a more traditional image of what should happen to be a sexual person . . . That . . . desire was only within the heterosexual and monogamous model. And sex work was transgressive and never ever about labor, but always about questionable desire . . . I know I felt strongly that I wanted to defend a more radical idea of sexuality that I felt was completely culturally undercut in a conversation about marriage because of the really deep resonance of marriage politics to a conversation about desire. IGNACIO RIVERA:9 If anybody knows me, they know that I think about sex all the time. Sex is at the core of a lot of the work that I do, it’s right there. First I want to say . . . that I think that this paper [i.e. the statement] basically . . . was a part of creating a cultural shift in how we were thinking about things. Maybe people didn’t organize but people were sure talking about it. People continue to ask me about this paper, and . . . it gave permission for people who were thinking this to actually talk about it out loud, because they didn’t want to be the bad gays, right? So, they were like, oh shit, all these people are talking about this, and now I can talk about [it] . . . Everything that was written in that paper we’re still talking about now. It’s still relevant in a lot of ways. In particular, we are learning that nothing is ever AMBER L. HOLLIBAUGH:

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a cookie-cutter model. Even as I think about my own gender identity, as a two-spirit, gender-fluid person, how does this pertain to me, like same-sex marriage and how my sex and relationships and how I form family is viewed. It does not connect to anything that same-sex marriage has tried to craft . . . From the beginning I’ve talked about my future vision of what my family is, and living with my queer and trans people of color who are kinky and disabled. That’s my chosen family network . . . How am I going to survive in my sixties and seventies, as a person who has for the most part of my life been a performance artist, a sex worker, and not a part of any kind of job that I’ll have a pension or something? I think about this all the time . . . I’m not thinking about marriage, I’m thinking about my constructed family unit. And also, my loverships or my partnerships, for lack of a better way of talking about them, because I am a poly-kinky person, and I have very different relationships . . . And when I think about how . . . sex was the conversation about gays before, because gays were having sex for pleasure.“That’s bad . . . Sex should only be for procreation.” Which is absolute bullshit, because also we have condoms and birth control pills. Because people want to have sex, because it feels good. That conversation . . . was about, “This is why being gay is bad because it’s only focused on desire.This horrible, horrible thing.” And then . . .“Because of the . . . sexual relationships that gays have, they shouldn’t be able to adopt, because that doesn’t connect with children . . .” Also, this idea that, if . . . you’re not connected in any way sexually, then you cannot have this family unit, [for example] sisters or cousins, or exes. How do you create those families that make sense to you? And then also talking about sex work . . . thinking sex work isn’t work, it’s bad, you’re a bad person, a bad parent. But sex work was the one and only way that I was able to continue to be an independent parent, because I didn’t want to get married, I didn’t want to have somebody try to take care of me. It was the way that I was able to sustain my life as a performance artist, as an independent parent, and to parent the way I chose to parent. And then also, it completely excludes polyamorous, non-monogamous, experimenting, all types of different families, it just completely excludes [them]. So it’s still very relevant because [marriage] is so single-issue. It is not intersectional in any way, it doesn’t really talk about all different types of people that this affects . . . How . . . the hell do we survive this, without talking about how government needs to legitimize us? We didn’t need the government to legitimize us, and we certainly don’t need them right now. So we need to continue this conversation.

Notes 1

Thank you to Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis for facilitating access to the text of the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage Statement, to Aida Garcia for transcribing the panel excerpted in this chapter, and to Rafael de la Dehesa and the panelists for reading earlier drafts of the chapter. All footnotes in this chapter have been added by the editors to clarify and extend the original texts.

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For more on this critique, see the other two volumes in the After Marriage Equality collection, Queer Activism After Marriage Equality and The Unfinished Queer Agenda After Marriage Equality. Individuals involved in drafting the original statement included all the panelists who appear later in this chapter, along with Katherine Acey, Kenyon Farrow, Ellen Gurzinsky, Loraine Hutchins, Surina Khan, Richard Kim, Kerry Lobel,Ana Oliveira, Cori Schmanke Parrish, Suzanne Pharr, Achebe Betty Powell, Kendall Thomas, Kay Whitlock, and Beth Zemsky. “DOMA” stands for “Defense of Marriage Act.” The federal DOMA was signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996, prohibiting any federal recognition of same-sex marriage and stipulating that states without same-sex marriage rights would not be forced to recognize such marriages performed in other states. In the early 2000s, several states debated and enacted similar state-level policies. The “DOMA” acronym was often used to refer to these proposals, as in the Arizona case discussed here. This amendment was indeed defeated in the 2006 election. Polikoff, N. (2008) Beyond (straight and gay) marriage:Valuing all families under the law. Boston: Beacon Press. TANF: Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, the federal program in the US that provides limited cash assistance to some poor citizens. For chapters featuring these activists, see the other two books in the After Marriage Equality collection. For a fuller elaboration of Ignacio Rivera’s thoughts on this and related topics, see their interview in Chapter 9.

9 MAKING CONNECTIONS An interview with Ignacio G. Rivera Ignacio G. Rivera and Michael W. Yarbrough

Editors’ introduction: In the previous chapter, the drafters of the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement pushed us to think about the full range of different ways queer and other people arrange our relational lives. In this and subsequent chapters, we explore four specific examples of different lives on this range, viewed in part through the lens of how same-sex marriage has or has not shaped them. We begin by accepting Ignacio Rivera’s invitation at the end of the previous chapter to “continue the conversation,” by talking with Rivera about their life and work as a “BlackBoricua Taíno, trans, genderfluid or gender non-conforming activist, writer, and performance artist.” Polyamorous and kinky, Rivera shares in this interview their experiences of what they call “connections” beyond the marriage paradigm. To get started, could you just say a few words introducing us to your work? I know that’s not easy, given the amazing breadth of the work that you’ve done. IGNACIO RIVERA: So I am Ignacio Rivera, or my Taíno name is Hutiá Xeiti. And my work has really revolved around huge topics of sexuality, gender, race, and class. I have worked on issues of sexual liberation, comprehensive sex education, and welfare reform and how it relates to families and LGBT issues. I have worked in the school systems doing anti-bullying work around LGBT issues. Anti-violence work. Economic justice work. Right now, I am the founder and director of the Heal Project, which uses comprehensive sex education as a tool to ending child sexual abuse. And I do a lot of work within the kinky community and polyamorous community. I have been an out kinky and polyamorous person for almost twenty years now. I’m also a parent who identifies very strongly as a mother of a twenty-seven-year old daughter, and together we do an online talk show called Pure Love, talking about the importance of relationship-building, communication, and sex education as life skills. So there MICHAEL YARBROUGH:

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are many different projects, but they mostly fall under the guise of sexuality and gender with a class and race component. Since so much of your work really focuses on sexuality and sexual liberation, maybe that’s a good place for us to start. Could you talk about how you understand the concept of “sexual liberation”? The meaning of sexual liberation is very subjective, but I think one of the overarching things is that we should get to do what we want to do with our own bodies, that we should get to express and explore desire. That we get to experience our bodies—whether they’re trans bodies, fat bodies, disabled bodies, female bodies, feminine bodies—that we really get the right to navigate and love and use our bodies the way we want to make us happy. And that’s a constant life journey. For me, sexual liberation means that we understand the connections between sexuality and sexual pleasure and the political world. We understand that they’re not separate. Right now, we live in a situation where sexual liberation is a privilege of a few, and very hard to attain for others. So my work is focused on filling that big gap of that privilege, to minimize that privilege gap and have sexual liberation be a right rather than a privilege. What do you see as the main things that stand in the way of people being able to explore their bodies and their desire? There are so many things that hinder that. There are voices all around us every day telling us that our bodies are ugly or not right or that they don’t fit the framework. It might be your sexual orientation, it may be the color of your skin, the size of your body, the way your body works, even how much money you have. All of this affects some of us more than others, but it affects everyone in a negative way. I think we have outdated ideas of what relationships should look like, what love looks like, or even what connection looks like, if we eliminate “love” from the equation. So we are stuck in one way of doing things. I don’t think it’s a wrong way, but I think it’s just one way. And if we expand the ways in which we can live, experience, love, fuck, communicate, interact, lust, we really open up a new world of self-care, of self-love, of not hating ourselves for not being the cookiecutter model of what society tells us is right. I truly believe that if we expanded those ways of thinking that there would be probably a point in this world where the coming-out process would cease to exist, that we would just naturally ask people how they identify in their gender and their pronouns, for example. That we wouldn’t be afraid to love and desire and fantasize about people that we “shouldn’t” be desiring and fantasizing about. Now all of this just applies between consenting adults. I have to make that clear. But between consenting adults, there’s so many possibilities of how we can love and lust and be, and we just limit ourselves so much. You use this word “connect.” I’m wondering what that means to you. How do you understand what connection looks like? When we meet people, there are several specific ways that we think of them. It’s questions like, what work do you do? How much money do you make? Are

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you being productive? What validates you as a human? And this is a capitalist model of how to think of other people. And then a lot of times we meet people and we’re like, am I attracted to this person? How do I see myself connected to this person? Are we friends? Could this be a possible relationship? So we are instantly on a trajectory when we meet someone of how to get to that thing that we want.There’s something about that person that intrigues you, interests you—they’re smart, they’re funny, whatever the case may be, and even in that, it’s very limited. We want to hang out with the person because we want either to be friends or to be in a relationship. Then we also have a trajectory for what a relationship might look like. For example, OK, we can date for a certain amount of time, then after that it’s a little “serious.” I think even unconsciously we have this model in our brains, like what is an appropriate amount of time to do these things to get to this end goal of, say, a “serious” relationship. The way I’ve been existing for the past couple of years, I would say it’s always changed for me, and I don’t know how I’ll exist in the next couple of years, which is a beautiful thing. I just kind of see where things go, right? Where things flow, where things happen organically. I don’t have an agenda. And then sometimes I do. Sometimes that agenda is I want to have sex with a person, right? So how do I get to that place with that person? There’s a clear difference to me between I have lust for this person and I would like to have a relationship with this person. Connection can also mean I made a connection with someone in that moment. I’ll probably never see them again, but I’m enjoying these moments that I have with this person. I think connections are for minutes, or years, or lifelong. I don’t limit “connections” by time, because sometimes something that I’ve experienced with somebody for half an hour is so meaningful, and I’ll go back to that feeling. So it just varies, the way we interact with people. It depends also on the context in which we interact with people. Am I bumping into this person on the street, am I meeting them at a conference, or did I meet them at a job site? All of these things play into those kinds of connections. It’s interesting listening to you talk because you’re pointing to the fact that we already interact with people in a whole range of different ways, but there’s also this impulse to try to classify each of them. So we’re both kind of fluid, and we’re sort of fighting against that all at the same time. And you’re sort of suggesting, let’s just embrace the fluid. I would love it. Especially as a trans person who just in the past couple years started medically transitioning. For a long time I did not. I didn’t have top surgery. I didn’t take the testosterone. And I was OK with that, and that was the way I wanted to be. And for different reasons, later on in life, I’ve decided, OK, and I medically transitioned. So looking the way I do is very, very new to me, and sometimes I forget. Right now I pass as a gay man, but sometimes when guys are looking at me, I forget. I have to remind myself, how do guys interact?

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I can’t look back [at a straight guy on the street], you know? Because “het” guys don’t smile at each other, don’t talk on the streets, you know? So how is my connection being altered by my femininity right now, or that I’m wearing this particular outfit that doesn’t look very masculine? I’m attracted to so many people. I just want to be attracted to people. But that’s not a possibility in this world, really, because I really have to be careful around men because they get violent.They get very violent.They get very afraid of that. And I want to say they get afraid of that desire, because I do believe sometimes guys look at me and there is something there, but they freak out. I’ve read in some of your interviews where you talked about this, that you kind of feel like you’ve been sort of continuously in transition in relation to your gender. Could you maybe say a little bit more about that? I constantly say that I identify as transgender because I don’t see an endpoint to my transition. There’s never been that. My story was never that I was born in the wrong body. I do understand that that is many people’s stories, but it just wasn’t mine. I felt like I had the body that I had until I started to have this body. And I was happy with both. And I don’t know what’s going to happen later. I don’t think that I’m going to be taking testosterone for the rest of my life, so at some point that will stop and my body will change again. And I look forward to that. So to me, it’s constantly changing, and that also shifts who desires me and who I can talk with. I currently have a person. “My person,” that’s what I call her because, still, there’s no language really to describe the relationships that I’m in, so sometimes I have to use words that everybody else uses. So for other people, she’s my lover. She’s my person and we’ve been together for about fourteen years. And then, I have, for lack of a better terminology, a boyfriend, and we’ve been together for three years. And I have a girl, and this is a dom–sub dynamic, a service girl, and she’s been serving me for a year now. And in those three relationships, each person sees me as my fluid self, so I’m really happy about that. Because sometimes, I’m in relationships with people that only see a part of me, and I’m okay with that as a poly person. I’m glad that I get to navigate that. But if I was a monogamous person, with one person, there’s no way that I could do that. I could never just be half of myself. So that becomes very complicated for those people who are fluid and monogamous. How are you your full self every single time? So my gender has shifted through medical transition, through my name, through the words I use to identify myself, how I look in the world, how I express myself. I literally dress extremely femme sometimes and then very masculine other times. And in terms of how other people see me or want to desire me, sometimes seeing me feminine turns them off and only masculinity turns them on, or vice-versa. With my girl, I get to be my fluid self, but there’s definitely a lot of masculine energy. And I get to be my dominating self, which I love, because I’m not dominating to everybody in my life. So I get to do that with her, very consensually. And then, with my boyfriend, I get to be very

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femme but also very top-y as well, which is not something that you see together, right? You automatically think femme equals “bottom.” I identify as a switch but I definitely have more top-y energy, which is interesting when people don’t expect that when you’re femme-presenting. And then with my person, I am my fluid self but definitely more masculine-presenting with her. So it just shifts constantly. Some people say that gender fluidity is your own private thing if you want to just do that. And I’m like, well, not really. It’s not a private thing. It’s very much both private and public, because it’s about who you are in the world, where you are able to work, the relationships you have, your safety in the world. When I go places, I really have to sit down and think, “Can I be my femme self in this space? Will this be safe for me?” Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised because I think it’s not going to be safe, and I do it anyway and it’s a beautiful experience. Other times I am terrified that violence will be perpetrated against me. So, how do you see this kind of playing out for other people in relation to relationships? You talked about how for yourself being poly helps with this. For other people who aren’t poly, is this kind of fluidity possible for them? I’ve met folks who are like, “Yes, I’m fluid too, but my partner doesn’t like it when I dress like this or when I express this side of me.” And that’s not to demonize the partner, because sometimes people get in relationships and they’re like, “This is not what I signed up for,” right? Like, “I fell in love with a dyke, and now I have this.” And that’s their reality and their right to express that. So I think it is a little different when you’re already in a relationship and then there’s a shift, because then they either have to shift with you or the relationship ends, really. There’s no if, ands, or buts about it. It’s a difficult transition for everyone, but it’s possible—but then for some folks, it’s not. It’s always interesting when I meet someone for the first time, because most times, people take however they met you as the way that you are, period. So if they see you another time dressed a different way, or behaving in a different way, they are either confused or completely turned off. Again, I think it goes back to my privilege and platform. Most people know that I’m fluid, so when I go to different places and they see a different side of me, it’s not a shock. But other people don’t have that privilege, so how do they get treated? Because I hear people talking about it. They’re like, “Well, that person, the other day they were looking this way. Now they’re looking this way.” Even though we talk very openly, and the language is there about genderfluid, gender non-conforming, we still have a long way to go in understanding that, and how that actually looks in the real world. How does it look when we talk about gender non-conforming people in the workplace? How does it look when we talk about gender non-conforming people who are parents, who go to PTA meetings and stuff like that? Who go to the school to pick up their kid, and every time they’re looking a little different. How is that read by the people who work at the school? What does that look like? Does it look like

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insanity? Does it look like unfit parents? Does it look like confusion? And I think that also plays out in relationships, too. Imagine if people were able to just be. I keep on thinking of this wonderfully utopian world. Maybe some time in my daughters or maybe my grandchildren’s life, we would live in a world where people could truly talk openly and honestly, and celebrate sex and gender in a way that we don’t right now. Sex education wouldn’t even be called sex education because it would be so integrated into our everyday lives. How we talk to children about stuff would give them choices, from when they’re born, about what they wear, just breaking these things down. And even talking about the range of relationships that we could possibly have. Everything that I’m saying is the model in which I raise my daughter.When talking to her about sex it was basically open in this way. Most people say, “When you fall in love when you get older . . .”And for some people it’s, “When you get married . . .” And they push this idea of girls holding on to this precious thing, or they give it away, or they lose it. But for my daughter, I was like, “Sex feels fantastic when it is right and you want it. That’s pretty much it. It feels really fucking good when you want it and it’s with the right person or persons, and you could have it anytime you want.” And I said to her,“You’re young now. I would really rather you didn’t because there’s so much to learn, but that decision is ultimately up to you. And when you do it, I hope that you use these tools that I gave you. So, this is how you use a condom, this is a dental dam, this is that, this is that. And it could be with a man, a woman, a trans person, a gender non-conforming person.” Several years later, my daughter is in her early twenties. She calls me up and she’s like,“Mom, you’re the only person I could ask about this.” I was like, “Yeah?” She was like,“How do you negotiate a successful threesome?”And I sat with her and we had a really in-depth conversation about how she could negotiate a threesome. And I was like, “OK, do you know the people already? Are they in a committed relationship together or are you three individuals coming in on this?” So I asked her all these questions, I told her the pros and cons to all of it, and that was that. And then, later on, she told me that it happened, and it was great and wonderful, and she’d do it again. This is what life is. We’re human beings, and as human beings, we try to form connections in a variety of ways, right? And so I want her to have all the necessary tools so she can connect the way she desires.And I tell her,“Sometimes you’re going to do things and afterward, you’re going to be like, I should have never done that. But that’s your learning curve. OK, I did it. Next time I’ll do this differently.” But I want to live in a world where we’re actually talking about this every day. For me, that connects very strongly with the anti-violence movement, and working against child sexual abuse, because nothing would be in secret, nothing would be shameful, there wouldn’t be these mechanisms to hold over children because they would know. They would have all the information.

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“My parents told me about this, my grandma talked to me about this.” So I see sex and sexual liberation as so powerful, and really that’s something that goes way beyond the actual doing of sex. As we’re talking about your relationship to your daughter for a bit, earlier you talked about how you strongly identify as a mother, and how that stays consistent even as your gender identity continues to transform and shift. And I think many people would be interested to hear more about that, because the way we normally think of what a mother is wouldn’t necessarily fit with that notion. Can you say a little more? If I could do it all over again, I would want to be born as I was and be raised as a girl, and have those experiences, and still transition into being a fluid person. This was my journey and I would want it all over again. And so for me identifying as a mother does several things to me. One, it anchors me in that reality. That was me, I’ve experienced that. I held her. I was pregnant. I pushed her out. I had the morning sickness. I felt her in my belly. All of it was a beautiful, beautiful experience. And identifying as a mother really continues to connect me in that. And I’m not invisible because of it. Because as I look like a man, my experience being a girl and a woman is completely erased. And that experience is absolutely important to me. If today I identified as a man or trans man, for most people my identity as a girl would be something that they would never bring up or talk about, because most people would think that that is something I want to forget. That it was all a mistake. Of course, yes, that is some people’s experience, and I don’t want to take that away. This is just my experience. And I believe that my experience resonates with a lot of other people as well. So one of several ways I anchor myself and my experience as a girl and as a woman is identifying as a mother. And not changing my gender marker. Those two things are really important to me. So no matter what I look like, I’m not changing my gender marker. You mean on your IDs and that kind of stuff? Yeah. I won’t change my gender marker. And I kept my birth middle name too. That’s also anchoring for me. Motherhood, as I’ve experienced it, is something so beautiful and sacred. Being a feminist and just being connected to women, women in general, women in my family, my mother, my aunts, my cousins— women are the center. Even my spirituality is anchored in women, in femininities. So that is super important to me. When I came out as trans to my daughter, she asked me two questions. She said, “Are you happy?” And I said yes. And she said, “Do you want me to call you Dad?” And I said no. That was super clear to me. Dad doesn’t even feel right to me. Mom is a song in my ears. I love mother, mommy, mama, I love it all. So it’s always going to be that way for me. That’s beautiful. So the context for this conversation obviously is around samesex marriage becoming law, and the idea that marriage is a very narrow model for relationships and connecting. So now that that’s available to those people who are same-sex couples who might want it, how is that changing things for

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everyone, both for those people and for everyone else? And so I’m kind of curious how you see this now. Do you see room for fluid relationships, fluid genders opening up more, or do you think it’s closing down? So the way I’ve always felt about marriage is that, I just feel the government should have no say in this whatsoever. So just get rid of state-recognized marriage. Yeah. They should have no say in that. The idea that it was called “marriage equality” was just so problematic, because it doesn’t equalize shit [laughter]. It just felt like politician-speak, this term “marriage equality.” I wouldn’t look at it as an equalizer, absolutely not. I wouldn’t organize around it. Although I have talked to many other people who said, “I need this because of insurance. I need this because of immigration.” All right, but then the larger issue is that all of this fight for marriage really doesn’t help or address all the reasons why people would even fight for it, when they’re not even into it as much really. It’s just a tool, it’s a tool. So if people are using it as a tool, then why don’t we go to the underlying issues, right. So that’s where we fail.We fail to look at the underlying issues. I felt it was also a way to legitimize, and there’s a slippery slope of normalization that happens. We end up leaving a large segment of people behind. So that becomes very problematic. Where does the polyamorous community fit in? Where does the kinky community fit in? Where do the people in the dark areas fit in? So we’re not talking about these people. This is a Band-Aid, it’s not a holistic approach to many, many issues of immigration and family security when it comes to polyamorous people, trans people, adoption issues with queer people. It sounds like you see more of that holistic approach happening not in law but on the ground.That real people are actually doing things, whether it’s in kinky communities, poly communities, or other communities, they’re creating relationships and communities and cultures that work for them to support these broad range of relationships, even though the policy is only moving this one very specific way. Absolutely. And that’s been happening for the longest time. We have just been creating stuff for ourselves, and chosen family is a piece of that. This includes poly families, or some people call them poly tribes. So there’s a lot of ways in which we become very creative in how to support one another and have the family configurations that fit our needs and our desires. So when we have so much money, and resources, and time, and airspace going to marriage equality, it just really distorts the playing field for all of the other work that’s happening simultaneously that’s as important, if not more. If you could make one change in the world, what do you think is the thing that’s most needed in order to enable people to connect with each other in whatever way makes the most sense for them? That’s a good question. I constantly think of what queers have access to in terms of connection. Most of that is clubs, bars, and things, which is really

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becoming a big topic people are talking about these days, because a lot of things are shifting in terms of how we hang out and how we interact with one another. Many more queers are becoming sober. I’m one of them, and bar settings are just not the place anymore for a lot of people.When I think about the spaces that I want to go to where I can meet folks, I want to go to events or things that are for queer people, but then I want to be in other spaces, as well. I want to know that I’m not going to be harassed. I wish we queers had more access to bigger spaces, that we weren’t only in these small pockets of queerness. For instance, if I went to an event or saw an event, and they said, “This event is accessible. We have all-gender bathrooms. All are welcome,” I would be more inclined to go there and know that I could probably meet some open-minded folks there. In the interim, and I think this is happening already, because the economy is where it is and people don’t have a lot of money, there are a lot more people doing things in their homes. Just a lot more intimate gatherings. And I’m a fan of those. Just in their home, invite people, and tell people to invite people that you don’t know, bring them in. One of the things that I do, and I encourage others to do, is mentorship, because that also connects generations of people. So mentorship is a service that we should all do. It’s so important to learn from someone as well as teach them, also just be a safe haven for people and open doors that might be closed to them because you have that privilege. So I think that’s another way of connection and also service. For me, it’s funny how when I talk about things it’s kind of connected to Alcoholics Anonymous and the leather community, in that service is everything. That’s how we connect with our people, our communities—we do service. Whether that’s helping out an event, or fundraising for someone, or whatever the case may be. But mentorship, service, and more broadly accessible events. That’s great. Is there anything I haven’t asked that you think is important to talk about, or anything that you want to add? I would say this: I think a lot of times when people talk about polyamory, or kink, or the marriage issue, there’s this idea that somebody is anti-something. And I want to be clear, that I am, definitely, not anti-marriage at all. I’m not anti-monogamy. I’m not anti-non-kinky [laughter]. What I am for is a world where all of it exists. Where all of it is accessible and where we have choices because we have had so much information. For instance, I had taught my daughter everything about non-monogamy, polyamory, kink, all that stuff. And my daughter is clear, she is monogamous. She had a choice. She knew that they were choices and she totally respects and accepts my polyamory. She knows the people that I’m involved with, she knows that I’m kinky, all of these things. But she has that choice, and that’s the world I want to live in. That we’re not highlighting one way of being, that we actually accept and honor that there are so many different ways of loving, and desiring, and forming families. That it should all be accepted.

10 BEYOND THE SEX–LOVE–MARRIAGE ALIGNMENT Xinghun among queer people in mainland China1 Shuzhen Huang

Editors’ introduction: This chapter continues our exploration of queer relationships beyond same-sex marriage, through Shuzhen Huang’s research in China on a form of queer marriage that isn’t samesex: xinghun marriages, in which a lesbian marries a gay man. While some Chinese LGBT voices have criticized xinghun as a kind of assimilation, Huang instead argues that it actually opens space for queer Chinese people to combine their romantic lives with their obligations to their parents, both of which they consider important. Huang suggests that, by interweaving local Chinese and global LGBT understandings of family, xinghun breaks down what she calls the “sex–love–marriage” alignment underlying both. Marriage has been one of the most discussed topics among Chinese queer people in recent decades (Chen, 2009; Engebretsen, 2009; Kam, 2012; Rofel, 2007; Wang, 2014). However, same-sex marriage is not the primary focus for many Chinese queer people and LGBT activists (Hildebrandt, 2011; Fu & Zhang, 2013; Wei, 2010). Instead, a new marriage arrangement, xinghun (ᔶီ), in which a gay man and a lesbian woman marry, has become increasingly popular. Also referred to as “nominal marriage” (Choi & Luo, 2016), “cooperative marriage,” “contract marriage” (Engebretsen, 2009), “marriage for convenience,” “fake marriage,” and “marriage without sex,” xinghun is a heated topic among queer Chinese people today (Chen, 2009; Choi & Luo, 2016; Engebretsen, 2009; Fu & Zhang, 2013; Moreno-Tabarez et al., 2014;Wang, 2014). In this chapter, I describe the cultural and historical context that informs contemporary understandings of xinghun, investigate the impulses for xinghun, and explore why same-sex marriage is not considered a good solution for many Chinese queer people. Transnational LGBT discourses often assume that freedom for queer people requires leaving behind the model of the “traditional family” and opting for “modern”

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same-sex marriage (Blackwood, 2012). This narrative, however, creates a false dichotomy. It suggests that queer people must choose between two options—giving up one’s same-sex relationship to marry someone of a different sex, or continuing the same-sex relationship and turning away from one’s biogenetic family. In particular, the Euro-American discourse of homosexual identity and the paradigm of same-sex marriage prioritizes the latter as the “best way to be queer.”This discourse causes distress for Chinese queer people because, for historically and culturally specific reasons, there is a heavy emphasis on participating in heterosexual marriage as an important means of fulfilling one’s obligation to one’s biogenetic family. One way Chinese queers manage both the pursuit of their same-sex desires and the fulfillment of familial obligation is through xinghun. In what follows, I will show how the emergence of xinghun is an effort to harmonize familial obligations with queer desires. Specifically, I argue that xinghun has grown popular among Chinese queer people because it allows them to sustain same-sex romance while fulfilling their responsibilities to their families as good sons/daughters. There are some LGBT activists who criticize xinghun as a type of assimilation to heteronormativity. However, I argue that their criticism misreads xinghun relationships as simply mimicking heterosexual marriage, when in fact such relationships include important innovations that both draw on and transform existing kinship norms.As I will show in what follows, the empowering potential of xinghun lies in the fact that it breaks down the division separating same-sex desire from heteromarital relationships. In addition, the practices of xinghun challenge the sex–love–marriage alignment (that is, the assumption that marriage should be based on romantic love that in turn requires sexual desire) that is assumed in both heteronormativity and homonormativity. Xinghun demonstrates that one can practice sexual desire, romantic love, and marital arrangements with different people. In short, xinghun allows queer desires to thrive in an otherwise impossible space. To make these arguments, I first discuss the research methods employed in this study. Following that, I explain what xinghun is, and the historical and cultural context surrounding this phenomenon.

Method I use both qualitative methods and rhetorical criticism to investigate the impulses for xinghun,2 and consequently to answer the question: Why is same-sex marriage not considered a good solution for many Chinese queer people? My first source of data is in-depth interviews with Chinese queer people. In total, I interviewed thirteen Chinese queer people who self-identified as lesbian or gay. The main focus of the interviews was to talk about their experiences and understandings of marriage in mainland China. The other two sources of data are online discourses about queer marriage among Chinese queer people. Specifically, I analyzed online discourses on two websites: Chinagayles.com and the microblog A-Qiang Tongzhi. Chinagayles.com is China’s earliest and largest website dedicated to xinghun. Members of the website post personal advertisements to introduce themselves and to specify what they seek in a

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prospective xinghun partner. For the purpose of my study, I narrowed my texts to the first five pages of personal ads on three different dates (April 20, April 30, and May 10, 2015) using the website’s search engine, which resulted in 124 ads for analysis. The A-Qiang Tongzhi microblog was the other site that I examined. A-Qiang is one of the most vocal activists to criticize xinghun and to openly advocate for coming out. In his postings, he has often criticized xinghun for being “closeted”—the opposite of the image of the “out and proud” gay or lesbian advocated in transnational LGBT movements. By June 21, 2015, A-Qiang had made more than sixty posts about xinghun, many of which elicited heated debate. From among these posts and the commentary chains under them, I analyzed those that had elicited extensive interaction and debates (more than fifty comments). Ten original posts and related comment chains make up the third set of texts that were analyzed. When analyzing the data, I regard the truths shared by the writers and interviewees to be as valid as my knowledge as a researcher. That being said, I remain skeptical that my data represents “The Truth” about individuals or cultures.Therefore, in my analysis, I seek out and value my data as “personal truths,” while simultaneously treating the data as discourse that needs to be critically examined.

What is xinghun? Understanding the analysis that follows requires some background information about the historical origins of xinghun and homosexuality in China. In today’s China, the term xinghun almost exclusively means marriage between a lesbian woman and a gay man. The first xinghun in public view can be traced to the late 1990s, when identity-based homosexuality was becoming the dominant way of understanding same-sex desire in mainland China. According to Yang (2009), a gay man named Mr Jin who had lived in the West for years wrote to a famous queer magazine, Pengyou Tongxin [Friend Communication], in search of a lesbian who would be willing to form a xinghun with him. This became the first public record of xinghun in China. Given the nature of how xinghun came into public view, it may come as a surprise to some that xinghun was actually first practiced outside the Chinese LGBT community. According to Yuan Yuan, a queer filmmaker, an early form of xinghun was practiced by Chinese people who went online seeking individuals to participate in “a marriage without sex” (wuxing hunyin) as a coping strategy against the ideology of marriage. Many of these marriage seekers were, in fact, heterosexual women and men who refused to participate in a traditional marriage. In light of this historical context, xinghun may be described as a form of dissent against the institution of marriage even before it was taken up by queer Chinese people. Now that xinghun has been appropriated by queer people all over China, there are all kinds of cyber communities dedicated to marriage between a lesbian woman and a gay man. In addition, people of all orientations—heterosexual, asexual, or otherwise—are joining queer xinghun communities in order to find alternatives to hetero/sexual marriage (Sophia, 2015). It may thus be argued that through this trajectory, xinghun

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has shifted from a terrain opposing marriage to a site that resists the hegemony of both homonormativity and the marriage institution. Another element of xinghun that may be surprising to some is the heteromarital nature of xinghun. However, in Chinese history heteromarital relationships and same-sex romance have not been regarded as inherently incompatible (Cho, 2009; Engebretsen, 2008; Jones, 2007). In fact, Chinese queers rarely exhibit discomfort about participating in both heteromarital relationships and homosexual romance at the same time (Jones, 2007). The contradiction many Euro-Americans perceive in this is in fact primarily a product of how they imagine LGBT identity politics. To understand what I mean, look to the distinction D’Emilio (1983) draws between homosexual behavior and homosexual identity (p. 104). While same-sex practice has a long history in China, homosexuality as an identity is a new invention (Kong, 2011). According to Chou (2000), same-sex activities in China were historically portrayed in predominantly social terms (that is, as social roles, social relations, or style) rather than in sexual terms (pp. 22–3). Chinese culture recognizes the differences between same-sex and different-sex eroticism, but sexual desire “neither signals a master category of identity nor is it the constitutive [i.e. fundamental] principle of the self ” (Chou, 2000, p. 22). Homosexuality was thus conceived of not so much as an intrinsic characteristic of a particular group of people, but as a social practice that anyone could partake in (Chou, 2000, p. 22). From this perspective, the “contradiction” between a heterosexual marriage and a homosexual relationship is only imaginable when one presumes a Euro-American model of identity-based homosexuality. In contrast, for Chinese queer people, a heteromarital relationship with homosexual romance is in fact conceivable as “a possible outcome of a kinshipstructure society” (Kong, 2011, p. 153). Thus far, I have defined the contemporary meaning of xinghun, as well as discussed its historical roots and trajectory. However, the question remains: what moves Chinese queers to participate in xinghun?

Why xinghun? For decades, Chinese queers have had a major fear of becoming embroiled in what they call a “real heterosexual marriage.” Despite the historical precedent of homosexuality, many Chinese queers express difficulty maintaining a same-sex relationship in China because it is a society in which the expectation to marry someone of a different sex is profound and pervasive (Chen, 2009; Choi & Luo, 2016; Engebretsen, 2009; Guo, 2015; Wang, 2014). Once they are of the “proper marriage age,” Chinese queer people often feel pressure to cut themselves off from their queer relationships so as to commit to a heterosexual marriage. “This [queer] path is not going to work any more” is a popular phrase in my data. It is a saying used by Chinese queer people to describe the crisis that they face under the hegemony of marriage and highlights the pressing need Chinese queers feel to find a way to lead a livable queer life—one that embraces rather than excludes their desire to love.

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Love was a prominent theme in both the personal ads and the microblogs that I examined. Two types of love were frequently mentioned: family love, or more specifically love between parent and offspring, and romantic love, born out of same-sex desire. The personal ads contained a strong discourse about the family as a haven of love and care.The discourse on romantic, same-sex love, on the other hand, focused on crafting an authentic self and cultivating liberation. Both kinds of love were seen as indispensable, but they were also in conflict with each other. Adding to the incompatibility between the two types of love is the discourse from transnational LGBT movements that pits family against homosexuality, where family is viewed as “traditional” and “Chinese” whereas same-sex love is viewed as “modern.” In the face of these two contesting discourses and these two incompatible types of love, family love emerges as the core impulse for participating in xinghun. From my analysis of the personal ads and online discussion, maintaining a good relationship with one’s birth family is the primary reason for seeking xinghun. In fact, the advertiser’s relationship with their family was mentioned or implied in almost every personal ad that I analyzed. This is related to one’s marriage choices in two ways. First, xinghun is undertaken to satisfy one’s parents and to make one’s parents feel happy. Second, participating in xinghun fulfills one’s responsibilities as a “good daughter/son.” Many of the ads I analyzed explicitly stated that the advertiser’s participation in xinghun was being undertaken for their parents, not for themselves. More specifically, the language used in the ads stated that xinghun was an “answer” ( jiaodai) for their parents, who were described as loving, caring, and even self-sacrificing. Some of the personal ads I examined on Chinagayles.com concluded that xinghun “was not meaningful for tongzhi [gay men], but it was very meaningful for their parents,” because “many people do not live only for themselves; [they] live for the face of family. The only exception is when you do not have family around.” Statements such as these demonstrate that some Chinese queers are aware of their intersectional social locations, where family obligation and sexual freedom are seemingly incompatible. The tension between family obligation and sexual freedom is resolved by prioritizing family obligation over sexual freedom. Participating in xinghun allows one to marry someone of a different sex, thereby fulfilling the parental expectation for a heteromarital union. Xinghun is thus placed in a moralistic discourse and framed as a sacrifice for the family. In other words, xinghun is perceived by Chinese queers as justifiable because of this altruistic motivation. However, it must also be noted that familial responsibility and obligation in turn becomes a technique to regulate queer people to comply with heteronormativity. As mentioned above, the goal of xinghun is primarily to satisfy one’s parents. For example, in many of the personal ads I analyzed, gay men and lesbian women would advertise themselves as “the type that parents like” or as able to take good care of parents and satisfy their needs.This manner of prioritizing parental satisfaction over self-satisfaction suggests a hierarchy between parents and gay/lesbian adults. The happiness of one’s parents is considered more important than one’s own happiness. In fact, when some gay men and lesbian women say that they are looking

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for xinghun partners, what they are actually seeking is someone whom they imagine would meet their parents’ expectations rather than their own. In other words, the parents are the intended audience of xinghun, and it is the parents’ expectations, or one’s imagination of one’s parents’ expectations, that determine the criteria for what makes a good xinghun candidate. It is important at this point to highlight that Chinese queers do not perceive xinghun as an unfair or unwanted response to oppressive parental meddling in their marriage affairs. Instead, the personal ads I analyzed narrate the search for a xinghun partner as an act of parental loyalty. For example, Chinese queers often narrate their internalized need to satisfy their parents as related to a type of affection felt toward their parents. Rather than focus on their parents’ explicit control over them, Chinese queers report that they “want to” engage in xinghun even though it means compromising their sexual freedom. It may therefore be said that, through appealing to affection in the discourse of parental loyalty, gay and lesbian adults actually end up perpetuating the patriarchal family system. However, the situation is much more complex and nuanced than mere uncritical perpetuation of the patriarchal family system. In one personal ad I examined, a lesbian woman described the struggle between her desire to come out and her concern for her parents: The word has been on the tip of my tongue, but I end up swallowing them every time. Looking at my old parents, [I] really don’t want to hurt them, but I could not follow their way that is supposed to be “for your own good” neither. [I] wanna live my own life. [I] wanna control my own fate. This comment, in contrast to what is suggested above, shows that for some queer people, xinghun is in fact a way of taking back control of one’s life in a society where remaining unmarried is not a viable option. In short, through xinghun, Chinese queers are finding a way to fulfill their responsibility to their family. Marrying someone of a different sex who is also queer enables Chinese queers to be gay or lesbian without necessarily exiting the family kinship system. Participation in xinghun, however, is complicated. For example, procreation is a hot-button topic in the negotiation of xinghun. Some Chinese queers prefer using reproductive technologies rather than heterosexual intercourse to conceive; however, in contemporary mainland China, access to reproductive technologies is legally limited to married couples who can provide medical evidence of infertility. Therefore, queer people who would prefer to use reproductive technologies to conceive must first enter into a marriage that is legally recognized by the state—which in turn, again, means undertaking a heteromarital union such as xinghun. At this point, one may wonder why the biogenetic family is so heavily involved in private decisions such as one’s choices around marriage. In order to address this question, one needs to understand the complicated meaning of “private life” in China.

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Isn’t marriage a private issue? The double meaning of private life in China Yan (2003) describes a “dual transformation of private life” in Chinese society in recent decades, where “private” has come to mean both “the private family” and “the private lives of the individuals within the family” (pp. 15–16). During the Maoist era (1949–1976), the state was the primary agent of control over the private lives of individuals (Kam, 2012). It was not until the reform era (1978–present) that China witnessed a transformation of the private life in an effort to “modernize” (Kam, 2012;Yan, 2003). It was also during this time that the family as a social institution rose to become “a center of private life and a refuge” (Yan, 2003, p. 8). Coupled with shifting the center of “private life” from the state to the family was contestation over the family structure. During the period 1956–1980, according to Yan (2003), the conjugal husband–wife relationship gradually took center stage in the private lives of those within Chinese society. The family used to be the site of economic, social, and political exchange in Chinese society; it was now reconstructed as—to quote John D’Emilio’s (1983) description of a similar shift in the United States—“an affective unit, an institution that produced not goods but emotional satisfaction and happiness” (p. 103). This is what Yan (2003) calls “the triumph of conjugality” (p. 14). At the same time, Yan (2003) observes another private sphere to have emerged in the past few decades—the rise of personal lives within the family. This came about in response to the transnational discourse that foregrounds individualism and personal choice as hallmarks of modernity: While the horizontal conjugal tie replaced the vertical parent-son relationship as the central axis of family relations in both nuclear and stem households, parental authority and power further declined and the previously unprivileged members of the family—women and youth—began to acquire their own space and independence. For Chinese queer people, the rise of conjugality and the emergence of private lives within the family opened up a space for same-sex desire to contest the totality of patriarchal control. That being said, it is an overstatement to claim a linear triumph of conjugality over patriarchy. Instead of conjugality replacing patriarchy, it is more productive to view this change as a matter of different discourses and family structures coexisting and competing with each other.Their power dynamic changes over time, mediated by the state’s intervention. This complex interaction shapes both the desires of queer Chinese people and the constraints they face when pursuing those desires. The “double meaning of private life” (Yan, 2003, p. 18) in contemporary China means that family is still a primary agent in controlling the private life of individuals. This in turn speaks to the strong influence that family has over private matters such as one’s marriage. Chinese society is still, to a great extent, patriarchal. Social resources

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are greatly controlled by the older generation; the survival of the younger generation heavily depends on parental investment in areas such as education, employment, and housing. The father is the most authoritative figure in a family, and parents— the father and/or the mother who speaks as the father—are a crucial voice in marriage arrangements. The contextual factors described above are important for understanding why parents are almost always at the center of queer people’s lives and a key influence on their marriage choices. In addition, it is important to highlight that this societal structure is set against the backdrop of Euro-American discourses of identity politics that promote a model of same-sex marriage in which sexuality should be the center of private queer lives, and should be prioritized over family obligations. Surrounded by these conflicting discourses, xinghun suggests another path. It is a path within the private family, rather than outside of family. Xinghun reveals the ambiguous meaning of private life in Chinese society, where marriage is both personal and familial.

So, what does xinghun allow queer people to do? Another contextual factor that is important for understanding the phenomenon of xinghun is the two critical discourses that have gained popularity in recent years, in tandem with the popularization of xinghun. One popular discourse criticizes xinghun as evidence of sexual oppression in China. Simply put, the key thrust of the discourse is that Chinese queers in xinghun must be unhappy because they cannot be themselves (Moreno-Tabarez et al., 2014, p. 129). The other popular discourse criticizes xinghun for being complicit with heteronormativity, if not a perpetuation of it, and argues for a more transgressive politics that is completely self-determining. The underlying assumption of these two discourses is that Chinese-ness or Chinese culture “can never be more than a distraction” or “a distortion from the originary truths of gayness” (Rofel, 2007, p. 91). That is, these narratives suggest that in order to properly express their “free” modern sexuality, Chinese queers must move away from the constraints of the “traditional” family and instead move toward homosexual “nuclear” coupledom (Blackwood, 2012). Those who “fail” to recognize, display, and maintain this transgressive queer position are considered “trapped” in developmental time and “deferred” in the process of becoming modern citizens. Here, I follow Gopinath (2005) to critique how the above homonormative discourses contribute to racializing non-Euro-American societies.These two discourses position Chinese sexual cultures as “anterior [that is, preceding], premodern, and in need of Western political development” (Gopinath, 2005, p. 12). This is a colonial construction that is “less a reflection of progressive gender [or sexual] relations than of regressive race relations” (Haritaworn, Tauquir, & Erdem, 2008, p. 10). Therefore, rather than disavowing traditions and histories, I agree with Smith (2010, p. 49) that “it may be more politically efficacious to engage them critically” by investigating the conditions under which some traditional arrangements become appealing to queer people. Hence my question—what does xinghun allow queer people to do?

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1. Xinghun allows same-sex romance in a heteromarital relationship In one of the personal ads in my data, a gay man expresses his vision of xinghun: “And [I] have a selfish request, that you need to allow me to have him, to go dating with him occasionally, and this would not affect our family life for sure.” This quote epitomizes how xinghun is considered by Chinese queers to be a type of heteromarital relationship that allows same-sex romance to coexist. As discussed earlier, Chinese culture does not view same-sex romance as inherently incompatible with heteromarital union. Xinghun exemplifies how a heteromarital relationship does not necessarily exclude same-sex desires. In fact, as one of the ads in my data put it, xinghun “allows better opportunity to be with the loved one.” Further, by participating in xinghun, one can come out as a gay man or a lesbian woman and still be able to engage in a heteromarital relationship; one does not exclude the other. A gay man in my data had come out to his father and was seeking a lesbian on Chinagayles.com because of the social pressure faced by his parents, as well as to fulfill their wish that the family bloodline be continued. A mother posted a xinghun ad for her lesbian daughter stating that “the child does not want to hurt the parents, and the parents want their child to have a family and a kid when the time comes, so that she won’t be lonely when she is old.” These examples attest to the possibility that the familial discourse need not subsume one’s homosexual identity. In addition, coming out does not prevent queer people from fulfilling their family obligations. It is indeed possible to meet both these needs. Returning to the earlier point about the double meaning of private life in China, it may be argued that xinghun allows one to finally be free from the control of the patriarchal family, because it creates a marital union that has its own agency within the broader family. Granted, one’s birth family still plays a crucial role in one’s private life. However, the new conjugal husband–wife relationship in xinghun offers a powerful way for queer people to fight against the patriarchal structure.The process of getting married is a process of establishing a new family. By participating in a heteromarital union, Chinese queer people create a new horizontal family structure that serves as a central site for their private life. Xinghun, as the new agent of private life, creates a space that includes and shields queer desires from the control of the patriarchal family. My interviewee, Xiaoye, articulates these freedoms provided by xinghun. Xiaoye is a journalist who is now living in a cosmopolitan city in China. Before she was married, she had her own apartment and was financially secure. However, her parents continued to intervene in multiple aspects of her life, including how she dressed and how she spent her spare time. They also tried to control her private life and guide her toward marriage. Xiaoye said this in her interview with me: One good thing about marriage [xinghun] is the freedom in this aspect of life. [Parents] believe that your husband and you should have your independent family, so [they] respect you more, relatively . . . In fact, they do not think you

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are a full human being, but because you have a husband now, [you] separate from your original family. This is not the same thing as you yourself [being] independent [from your family]. But you gain relative freedom [in] such a way. Xiaoye’s explanation sheds light on how xinghun offers an effective way of evading the patriarchal surveillance of one’s biogenetic family, especially for lesbian women. Finally, there are some Chinese queer people who view marriage as something fundamentally instrumental, and seek xinghun unapologetically. A microblogger, for instance, defended xinghun on A-Qiang’s microblog with the words: “Worldlings, see through it [marriage], use it when you need it. Over 90% of heterosexual marriages are instrumental, and I don’t think same-sex marriage can get rid of instrumentality. True love only exists in affairs and your gay friends [same-sex lovers].” Such a comment, although offered sarcastically, shows how some Chinese queer people have gone beyond the sex–love–marriage alignment, and are taking up marriage as a useful tool to better the conditions of queer life.

2. Xinghun transforms the structure of marital relationships As just described, xinghun transforms the structure of marital unions by including a same-sex relationship in conjunction with a heteromarital partnership. As I discussed earlier, xinghun is not a heterosexual marriage replacing same-sex relationships; rather, in most cases, same-sex relationships are incorporated as an implicit part of the intimate union. It is for this reason that queer Chinese people do not always reject the xinghun of their same-sex partners. In fact, some Chinese queers are actively involved in and even initiate xinghun for their same-sex partners. A gay man posted a personal ad on Chinagayles.com, describing how his same-sex partner is supportive of his endeavors to find a xinghun partner: “It has been nine years with BF [boyfriend]. He found his xinghun partner two years ago, living a peaceful and happy life.With his encouragement, my belief gets stronger. [I] wish to find the right you here.” In another personal ad, the seeker’s same-sex partner was the initiator and primary gatekeeper of his xinghun search: “Looking for a xinghun partner for my partner. I fully support his xinghun.” Structurally, xinghun takes different forms, even though on the surface it looks like a typical heterosexual marriage—the bonding of a man and a woman, and the bonding of two families. Figures 10.1 and 10.2 visually illustrate two archetypal forms of xinghun.3 In these two figures, the basic unit of this model is the family (instead of individuals), bonded by marital relationship or blood. Other family members, including relatives, are potential participants in the decision-making around xinghun, as shown in dotted-cloud form in the figures. What is unique in xinghun is its implicit or shadow parts—the same-sex relationship(s) that are outside of, yet closely related to, the heteromarital relationships. This is an indispensable part of xinghun, a relationship that participants strive to maintain. It is different from the more common practice in China in which “gays and lesbians marry heterosexual partners without revealing their sexual orientation”

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Legend Man Woman Romantic Relationship Marital Relationship Parent–Child Relationship Other Family Members

FIGURE 10.1

Simple xinghun

Legend Man Woman Romantic Relationship Marital Relationship Parent–Child Relationship Other Family Members

FIGURE 10.2

“Ideal” xinghun

(Cho, 2009, p. 405). In fact, one of the key dynamics of xinghun is shared knowledge between a lesbian woman and a gay man about the queerness of the marriage partner. For example, it is not uncommon that a same-sex couple seeks another same-sex couple of a different sex to form two seemingly separate family units.This constitutes a special xinghun union that many same-sex couples hold up as the ideal form of xinghun. There were several examples of this in the xinghun ads I examined. For instance, a lesbian woman wrote in her ad: “My GF [girlfriend] is a T [butch]. Hope to find a stable couple to be with us.” When marriage becomes inevitable for queer people, a xinghun formed by two stable same-sex couples, as shown in Figure 10.2 above, becomes the simplest structure and involves less negotiation. My interviewee Zien gave a more concrete example of how xinghun transforms the heterosexual marriage structure. Zien’s xinghun family consists of four people,

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all of whom get along with each other. At the time of the interview, they were planning to conceive a child. The plan was that Zien’s xinghun wife would carry and deliver the baby, with Zien providing the sperm and his wife’s girlfriend providing the egg. “She said this is a connection,” Zien explained. “The four people in this xinghun live together and will take care of the kid, their ‘connection’.” Zien’s experience sheds light on how xinghun as a queer practice has the potential to transform the structure of a marital relationship and (re)define what a family looks like. Ironically, the state’s refusal to recognize same-sex relationships has established conditions in which queer Chinese people maintain both the heteromarital relationship and their same-sex relationship(s), which would otherwise have been criminalized as an offense of bigamy for straight people (Wang, 2014). That is, the unintelligibility of same-sex relationships in official discourse has in fact shielded Chinese queer people from state surveillance and the imposition of a narrowly defined monogamy. Even in the simplest form of xinghun, where the other same-sex partner is not involved in a heteromarital relationship, it is still more complicated than a typical heterosexual marriage, because it includes both heteromarital and same-sex relationships. In addition, the structure of xinghun is complicated because the “nodes” connecting one relationship to another in a xinghun network are not always stable. The numbers of nodes vary, and the same-sex relationships tend to be subject to less pressure from biogenetic families to stay together compared with a heterosexual marriage. In all its forms, therefore, xinghun opens up complex and fluid dynamics with transformative potential.

Conclusions There is a common misperception that xinghun is the opposite of same-sex marriage. Further, xinghun is condemned by some LGBT activists as betraying homosexual identity by being complicit in heterosexual marriage. In this essay, I argue that while there are obvious distinctions between xinghun and same-sex marriage, xinghun is much more nuanced than merely being the opposite of a legally recognized same-sex relationship. My study shows the ways that xinghun opens up opportunities for Chinese queer people to dis-identify (Muñoz, 1999) with heteronormative marriage arrangements and hegemonic queerness. Xinghun moves our thinking beyond the model of heterosexual marriage and beyond the paradigm of same-sex marriage. Instead of reading xinghun as insufficiently radical or transgressive, I tend to see it as a rich site of contestation and transformation. In addition, I argue that it is more meaningful to examine what xinghun allows queer people to do that would otherwise be difficult, if not totally impossible. Xinghun challenges, if not necessarily subverts, the heteronormative marriage institution by transforming its arrangements and structure. Xinghun does not exclude homosexual relationships (Engebretsen, 2009). Rather, xinghun emerges as a counter-marriage practice, and is often a conscious effort by queer people to maintain their queer relationships in a hostile environment. Xinghun offers an alternative way to create a queer space within a heteromarital relationship. The empowering potential

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of xinghun lies in the fact that it deconstructs the dichotomy between same-sex desires and heteromarital relationships, an assumption in the paradigm of samesex marriage that needs to be interrogated.The practices of xinghun have challenged the sex–love–marriage alignment that is implied in both heteronormativity and homonormativity and allowed queer desires to circulate in an otherwise exclusionary institution. As a queer form of marriage, xinghun allows Chinese queer people to sustain their same-sex relationships without exiting the kinship system. In the context of contemporary China, queer desires emerge and thrive “within the confines of the home and ‘the domestic,’ rather than a safe ‘elsewhere’” (Gopinath, 2005, p. 153). Xinghun, therefore, can be seen as a culturally specific resistance. Its queer potential does not lie in the “radicalness” of such resistance, but in what it allows queer people to do in a heteronormative, and increasingly homonormative (Duggan, 2003), environment.

Notes 1

2 3

There is more than one way to understand the term “China.” A common way to think about China is as a reference to the nation-state of the People’s Republic of China. Similarly, I use the term “China” to signify the nation-state of mainland China, and I use the term “Chinese” to signify Chinese-speaking cultural ties—”a mode of consciousness and a sense of belonging” (Liu, 2010, p. 314). That being said, while doing so, I am also aware that geographical borders and the nation-state should not be the final criteria that define what “China” and/or “Chinese” means. All textual and interview excerpts cited in this chapter were translated from Chinese to English by the chapter author. Figure 10.1 is developed using Fu and Zhang’s (2013) xinghun model. Compared with Fu and Zhang’s model, my model emphasizes that family is the agent (or unit) of xinghun, rather than queer individuals; the same-sex relationship is part of xinghun, rather than being external to it.

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Political Science, United Kingdom). Retrieved from www.login.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/ login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1556071890?accountid=4485 Engebretsen, E. L. (2009). Intimate practices, conjugal ideals: Affective ties and relationship strategies among lala (lesbian) women in contemporary Beijing. Sexuality Research & Social Policy, 6(3), 3–14. Fu, X., & Zhang, K. (2013). Zai yingxing “hun” yu zhidu hun de bianjie youzou: zhongguo nantongxinglian qunti de hunyin xingtai [Travel on the border of the implicit marriage and the institutional marriage: Analysis on the marriage models among Chinese gay population]. Journal of South China Normal University (Social Science Edition), 6, 22–30. Gopinath, G. (2005). Impossible desires: Queer desires and South Asian public cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Guo,Y. (2015, January 27). Cong xingshi chuantou hunyin de benzhi [Getting at the nature of marriage through formality]. Queer Lala Times. August 25, 2015. Retrieved from www. site.douban.com/211878/widget/notes/14898828/note/481859333/ Haritaworn, J., Tauquir, T., & Erdem, E. (2008). Gay imperialism: Gender and sexuality discourse in the “War on Terror.” In A. Kuntsman & E. Miyake (Eds.), Out of place: Interrogating silences in queerness/raciality (pp. 9–34). New York, NY: Raw Nerve Books. Hildebrandt,T. (2011). Same-sex marriage in China? The strategic promulgation of a progressive policy and its impact on LGBT activism. Review of International Studies, 37(3), 1313–33. Jones, R. H. (2007). Imagined comrades and imaginary protections. Journal of Homosexuality, 53(3), 83–115. Kam, L.Y. L. (2012). Shanghai lalas: Female tongzhi communities and politics in urban China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Kong, T. S. K. (2011). Chinese male homosexualities: Memba, tongzhi and golden boy. New York, NY: Routledge. Liu, P. (2010). Why does queer theory need China? Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 8(2), 291–320. Moreno-Tabarez, U., et al (2014). Queer politics in China: A conversation with “Western” activists working in Beijing. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Working, 1(3), 109–32. Muñoz, J. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rofel, L. (2007). Quality of desire: Imagining gay identity. In Desiring China: Experiments in neoliberalism, sexuality, and public culture (pp. 85–110). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith,A. (2010). Queer theory and native studies: The heteronormativity of settler colonialism. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 16(1–2), 42–68. Sophia (2015, February 11). “Xinghun,” xingshi yihuo benzhi? [“Xinghun,” formality or essence?]. Queer Lala Times. August 26, 2015. Retrieved from www.site.douban.com/ 211878/widget/notes/14898828/note/484477348/ Wang, Y. (2014). Hezuo hunyin chutan: nannv tongzhi de hunyin dongji yanjiu [Exploring contract marriage: A study of the motivation of marriage between a gay man and a lesbian woman]. China Youth Study, 11, 14–18. Wei,W. (2010). Quanneiren ruhe kandai tongxing hunyin?: Neihua de yixinglian zhengtongzhuyi dui “tongzhi” de yingxiang [Perception of same-sex marriage from within:The impact of internalized heteronormativity over Chinese tongzhi]. Journal of East China University of Science and Technology (Social Science Edition), 4, 35–45. Yan, Y. (2003). Private life under socialism: Love, intimacy, and family change in a Chinese village 1949–1999. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Yang, L. (2009). Perfection of Chinese style: Initial investigation of formal marriage. Master in the Department of Sociology, Hunan Normal University.

11 “ZONING IS A WAY OF SORTING PEOPLE” An interview with the Scarborough Family The Scarborough Family and Michael W. Yarbrough

Editors’ introduction: Love makes a family—indeed it always has. In 1999, I was pregnant with my first child. As two, soon-to-be mothers, my partner and I . . . believed it was paramount to find a home in Hartford where diversity reigned.1 This is how a resident of Hartford, Connecticut opened an op-ed to the local newspaper, the Courant, in November 2014, speaking from her personal experience about one of the fiercest family controversies of the day. Her topic wasn’t same-sex marriage, however, but instead a different, more local controversy: what to do about a family of eight adults and three children living together in a shared house on one of Hartford’s wealthiest streets. The street’s zoning laws prohibited more than two unrelated people from living together, and the writer wanted the city to enforce the law. Her op-ed continued: We found a perfect house to renovate on Scarborough Street, which is in a R-8 zone for single families and is currently the focus of a dispute because 11 people are living in a house on the street, in violation of city rules. These eleven people had moved onto Scarborough Street a few months earlier, pooling their resources to purchase a long-vacant mansion at a relative bargain several years after the 2008 financial crash.Veteran activists who had planned for years to live communally, the Scarborough Family, as they would come to be called, had established a smaller home years before on Warrenton Street, a more working-class neighborhood in the same general area. When they sought a larger home for the full group, the Scarborough Street area was their best—and really their only—option. But they didn’t anticipate the two-year legal and political battle that would follow.

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The battle was waged on a field of law far removed from family law per se, but which also operates to draw conceptual and physical boundaries around particular definitions of “family”: zoning. Under the zoning law on Scarborough Street, only people connected by blood, marriage, civil union, or adoption counted as “related.” The Scarborough Family argued that this definition was outdated, and that they were family in all the ways that mattered. Their neighbors disagreed, however. As the op-ed concluded: The Scarborough neighbors, and other west end residents, are not lobbying against families, rather they are requesting the city to do what is incumbent upon it—to uphold the current zoning laws. In this chapter, the Scarborough Family share their story in their own words, drawing from an interview I conducted with five of them in June 2017, as well as a presentation one member made at the “After Marriage” conference.The members of the family are (interview participants marked *): *Josh Blanchfield (married to Julia) Julia Rosenblatt (married to Josh) Tessa Rosenfield (child) Elijah Rosenfield (child) *Dave Rozza (married to Laura) *Laura Rozza (married to Dave) Joshua Pavano (adult son of Dave) Milo Rozza (child) Hannah Simms *Maureen Welch (married to Simon) *Simon DeSantis (married to Maureen) The chapter begins with the household’s formation and the move to Scarborough Street, and then explores their daily family life and how they came to see themselves as a family. From here the chapter transitions to the story of the zoning battle itself. The final sections consider the role of family norms in this story, first in relation to class and finally in relation to the queer politics that are the primary focus of this volume. Given this part’s focus on other non-conventional families after same-sex marriage, it’s important to note at the outset that same-sex marriage appears only in the story’s background, in a couple of small ways. First, two of the neighbor households opposing the Scarborough Family were themselves same-sex couples; these include the author of the op-ed above. Second, and more significantly, the family received broad public support rooted in a growing general respect for family diversity, a trend to which the same-sex marriage debate likely contributed. This support included encouraging words from the former leader of Love Makes a Family, the main organization behind the Connecticut same-sex marriage campaign. Same-sex marriage wasn’t a driving force in the Scarborough Family’s story, but in the years since Connecticut legalized it in 2009, it had become part of the relational landscape where this new family battle unfolded, operating mostly—but not at all exclusively—to boost the family’s support. And with that, we turn now to their story.

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Forming the household and moving to Scarborough Street So, some of you started thinking about wanting to live as a kind of intentional family at some point in the early 2000s, is that right? JOSH BLANCHFIELD: Yeah, we were all activists, and we worked together on lots of different things. But beyond that, the ultimate goal of living communally was always something we discussed. Beyond just our daily activism but living that. It was a much larger group, and we would meet fairly often and work through all sorts of different issues, envisioning what each of us thought communal life would look like. After a couple years we started to spin our wheels, and people sort of came and went. But that core group remained, and that’s who’s in this house. MY: The folks who sort of drifted away, were there different reasons for that, or . . .? DAVE ROZZA: A variety of reasons. I think the initial thing that happened was when we started getting into the nuts and bolts of buying a house. How do we find a building? Then how do we finance it? We kind of hit a roadblock at first because of the availability and the cost. JOSH: In Hartford there’s a type of building from the Industrial Revolution called a “perfect six.” There’s a central stairwell, and then one, two, three apartments on one side and one, two, three on the other. So did we want that, where we each have our own apartment but we collectively own the entire structure? Or did we instead want something like this house, where it’s one huge kitchen for a lot of people? Childraising was another big discussion, because it was always the idea that this would be multigenerational and we’d all be raising kids. But, once you’re in it like we are now, that big ideological stuff is so far away when it’s much more day-to-day, like dishes, and animals, and picking up after kids. And we also went through a death of a member of the collective, and that put all that kind of heady stuff in much more perspective. MY: Do I recall correctly that when Tate passed away, you were living somewhere else? That was before you moved here? JOSH: Yeah, we had a smaller version of this on the other side of town, on Warrenton Street. MY: So really the first execution of the vision was to move into that space. JOSH: And that dry run figured out the long-term stuff, like an ownership structure, which was really difficult ten years ago. For example, what if someone wants to leave? How do we handle day-to-day finances? So we were able to work through those issues, dealing with death, dealing with all that kind of stuff, in the smaller version and then sort of scale it up in this spot. DAVE: For me and my partner, we never wanted to have kids outside of a situation like this. But we did. It ended up happening, and then, three years down the line,Tate’s death brought it back that we’re losing all this time.We were in our early twenties when we first started talking about this, so now we’re in our late twenties, early thirties. It was like,“Wait, where’s the time going? Let’s get back to making this work.” MICHAEL YARBROUGH:

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Maureen, if the stuff I read is correct, you were living in California at some point? And then you moved back here in part to move into the house with the friends, the family that you knew before? MAUREEN WELCH: I did. There wasn’t anything on the ground yet. I had come back, because I grew up around here, and we were at someone’s birthday party, and they were saying, “We’ve started meeting and we’ve been talking about this.” And I was like, I want to do that! I’m jealous! And so, with my girlfriend at the time, that’s what we did. We slotted ourselves in with the Warrenton household because people were leaving. When I was first new to this house [on Scarborough Street], I had this really deep connection. I’m from Windsor, Connecticut, and my grandmother had this sprawling farmhouse, and it was rooms upon rooms upon rooms upon rooms. And when we came in here and I was on the second floor and entered into one of the rooms, there were more rooms in that room! Once I walked into that room, I was like, yes.Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Because when I was in high school, my daydream was, what friends can I get to live in my grandmother’s house? So this goes back. I deeply, deeply wanted this, and my partner [at the time] didn’t necessarily. She went along with it, and we ended up in Warrenton.

MY:

As mentioned by Josh and Dave above,Tate’s passing triggered a renewed effort to find a larger place where the full collective could live together. At the same time, as Josh described it: It was really important to us to stay in the city. But just the physicality of the space requirements are much more difficult in the city. So that was our biggest hurdle is, how do we stay in the city?

JOSH:

Their concerns were both practical and political. This is the second poorest city in the country. It’s over 80 percent renters. So it’s very likely that you are going to gentrify and throw working-class people out if you really all want to buy a building. So our options were extremely narrow, because that was a no-go right there. Displacing anyone was unacceptable.

JOSH:

They began with the smaller house on Warrenton Street, and then found the mansion on Scarborough Street. At the “After Marriage” conference, Dave spoke about buying the Scarborough Street home: So now, after the 2008 recession, prices are down everywhere. The only place that we could find a home big enough to fit all of us was in the wealthiest section of Hartford, where the homes are all mansions that would typically be in the $1 million to $3 million range, but we found a house that was around $500,000 or so. Then the price kept dropping every week, and finally it went down to about $450,000, and so we jumped at it. We put an offer in

DAVE:

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and it was accepted, and the way we did that was with two people on the mortgage, because that was the most we could have. So we took the two people with the best credit, and in the process of that we started drawing up a partnership agreement that would make us, all the adults, legal owners of the property. We had a real-estate lawyer draft that with us and we moved in.

Daily life at home Soon after they moved in, the conflict with their neighbors emerged. Before turning to that, however, it helps to begin with a look inside the Scarborough Family’s daily life, which revolves around a strong emphasis on sharing and communal living. Even just the sharing of food. When we’ve had roommates, we would buy our food and they would buy their food and sometimes ask, “Oh, can I have some of this?” But it’s always that question of, “This is yours, and this is mine, and can we share it?” Versus, “This is all of ours. This belongs to all of us.” It’s different, you know? JOSH: One of the things we came to an understanding [about] as a collective was, the one thing that we wanted to have was simply that you could have a room that you could close the door to. But everything else was totally communal in every single aspect. That was a really big collective understanding that, all I need is to have one room where I can close the door. Beyond that, I’m yours to the group. MY: Was there a process of reaching that understanding? JOSH: It took us years. MAUREEN: It’s constantly negotiated. DAVE: And it’s constantly changing, you’re adjusting to whatever your needs are at the time. LAURA: It’s little stuff. I will share everything. I will share my toothbrush. [laughing] I don’t, but I would. But when it comes down to my water bottle and my tea mug? I cannot share those things. MAUREEN: If you want it, she’ll move it. Simon has an aunt who lived in a communal household in the ’70s in Denmark where there was no personal property. Everything was completely shared, so everything had to be in a central room. Including clothing. That’s not this model. And there’s a lot of systems in place to manage these things. MY: Can you maybe talk through some of those systems? JOSH: Chore day. Once a month, the first Saturday. We have a wheel and it rotates, and you’re responsible for that task. MY: And is it only the adults on the board? JOSH: The eight adults. DAVE: And then there’s daily chores, daily things that have to happen.Trash needs to be taken out. Communal laundry, which would be washcloths, napkins, tablecloths, things like that. The banking and stuff like that, somebody’s got that. LAURA ROZZA:

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Then every two weeks on Monday is the house meeting of the eight adults. We start the meetings with personal check-ins on where we’re at, how things are going in our personal lives. And then we get into the. . . JOSH: Thank yous. LAURA: Yeah, we added thank yous. MY: OK, so there’s check-in and then there’s thank yous. DAVE: Yep. And then there’s “the warehouse,” which is basically the idea of, say Laura does something that bothers me. I don’t just keep that bottled in. I just say, “Yeah, this has been bothering me.” LAURA: It’s not so much I did something to you, it’s more,“Someone left something in the dishwasher that shouldn’t have gone in the dishwasher.” With one-onone conflicts we try to have a one-on-one conversation. It’s better to have that rather than bring it to a meeting when it’s interpersonal. But when it’s, “Hey, everyone remember to lock the door if you can.”You know, that kind of stuff. That’s more for meetings. MAUREEN: Because a lot of times it points to the need for changes in stuff that we’re already doing. So a warehouse item about food typically will have some kind of solution-oriented outcome. So I think it’s a way of saying, “I noticed something, something didn’t work for me, and we need to address it in some way.” LAURA: It’s almost always kitchen-related. MY: I would imagine, because that’s the most shared space where there’s the most at stake, right? JOSH: It’s also the most social. Besides nightly dinners, the kitchen is always hopping. MY: You eat dinner together typically? JOSH: Monday,Tuesday,Wednesday,Thursday night, all of us in that room [pointing to dining room] at 6:30. LAURA: And then Fridays we usually end up eating together. MAUREEN: I wish Hannah were here. Because Hannah’s perspective is different because she does not have a partner living in the house. And her perspective would be that there are definite couple-oriented groupings and activities, and she’s noticed after a couple years in the house that it’s different to be a part of this when you don’t have a partner living in the house. And her schedule’s different than ours. So we have these discussions about how to integrate into the house, how to feel part of the house when you’re working second shift all the time and you’re never home at night. That’s why the dinner has become really important. DAVE: I feel lucky, because not only do I have Laura that I can spend time with [but] I can hang out with Josh, I can hang out with Simon. We play Dungeons & Dragons together, occasionally we’re watching the same TV shows, and all that kind of stuff. I never feel that lack of companionship, and I feel bad for people who do. But at the same time, it’s also nice to have your own space to close the door and go away. SIMON DESANTIS: That is something that Maureen and I talked about, and then I talked about with everybody else very early on. Maureen asked me, “What

JOSH:

DAVE:

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would it take for you to live in a place like this?” And I said I would want to have my own room. So she and I have a bedroom, and then I have a little office room. I work a highly social job but I’m a very introverted, private person despite that, so I said, “I need a space where I can be on my own.” MY: So tell me about a typical day in the house. DAVE: We’re boring as hell. JOSH: Simon’s up every morning at 4:30 with the dog. And he has a whole morning routine. He then goes up to get dressed at around 6:15. I get up at 6:00, I wake up Tessa, who’s twelve. I get in the shower. Simon then gets in the shower after me. The three of us are in the kitchen. I take Tessa to the bus. Simon goes to work at school. LAURA: Then I come down. JOSH: Then the other Josh gets up and Laura gets up. And the three of us are in the kitchen. I leave for work at 7:45. LAURA: Then after that, Julia comes down with Elijah. . . JOSH: Who’s six. LAURA: And then Milo comes down—Milo’s ten—comes down at some point within all of that, so then it’s me and Julia in the kitchen. And then I come up [to the bedroom] and then Dave goes down. DAVE: I’m making lunches or breakfast. And so it works like that. MY: It’s clearly well organized. LAURA: But on days like, if Simon is home sick, the balance of the universe is off. He sets the routine. MAUREEN: Talk about the systems in place! Simon unloads the dishwasher. So if Simon doesn’t unload the dishwasher because he’s sick or whatever. . . LAURA: All bets are off. [laughing] DAVE: Dishes pile up in the sink. MY: Switching gears a little bit, could you talk a bit about how the children fit in? DAVE: The kids clearly know who their parents are, but there is that advantage of having other adults in the house that maybe have different opinions about certain things, or have different expertise and things like that. It’s just priceless. LAURA: While Milo obviously knows who his parents are, the kids also view each other as siblings . . . The other day, for “special persons” day at school, he couldn’t bring a parent, and my parents couldn’t come, and I said, “Oh, do you want to bring your other grandma,” and he said, “No, maybe Julia can come or someone from the house.” So it’s family in that way to them, too. It’s more like an aunt or something, I guess. MY: What about disciplining the kids, is that something that the parents only do or. . .? DAVE: I think they get that each adult will react differently to certain things. But there’s not a matter of punishing or coparenting in that kind of way. LAURA: We also don’t parent that way, typically. DAVE: It won’t be a matter of Maureen saying, “Milo, go to your room.”Those were discussions we had early on, going back ten years ago.

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The two boys fight, and that’s been tricky, so we’ve had a couple parenting check-ins. We should probably do it more often than we do. DAVE: Silly things. MAUREEN: You know, who’s holding the video-game controller. LAURA: For a while it was, “This is my spot on the couch.” DAVE: But how do you navigate that? How do you not favor one over the other, or how much do you let them sort it out by themselves?

LAURA:

Is this “family”? Dave, when you were talking about the time after Tate passed away, you used the word “family,” and wanting to reactivate that sense of family. So it sounds like the prior time is one where the word “family” did not necessarily apply as easily to how you were living? DAVE: Yeah. I mean, it’s an interesting concept, and even among ourselves, our view of the concept of family changed when this whole thing started with the city. People put that label on us, and then we were like, that actually makes sense. We didn’t necessarily use that term in the past, but that didn’t mean that’s not what it was. The word “family” has such strong meaning in this country. You know, that it means blood relation and that’s it. But clearly that’s not the case, and clearly there are other ways to express emotions and all those kind of feelings. JOSH: We had always been an affinity group. We were all direct-action activists, and that’s how we existed, as an affinity group that wanted to then live communally. So we didn’t have that “family” word at all at that time, but we were an affinity group. And everything that came with that in terms of going to actions and stuff like that, but also in our day-to-day activism. And so it definitely sort of evolved from that to where we are now. SIMON: I mean, I think in some ways the zoning fight had a real unifying effect on us, the adults at least. DAVE: Circle the wagons. SIMON: Yeah, exactly. It very quickly helped define “us” and “them,” as we were trying to figure out defining “us.” So in some ways it was good for our development as a group. It kept fights about the dishes in perspective. MAUREEN: I don’t actually remember us having a conversation where we formulated how we described ourselves. DAVE: I don’t know if it was the Courant [the local newspaper] or whoever it was, because it wasn’t our word that we used at first. MAUREEN: Was it in an email? I feel like the description we came up with in the email we sent the neighbors was pretty much what we kept using. Like, how we described who lived in the house.We were like,“two families plus one couple . . .” DAVE: You know, I think what it was, was the way that zoning describes what a family is, right? We were like, wait a second. We’re not renters. We’re not temporary. We’re not boarders. We own the house together. MY:

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We’re not employees.2 [laughing] DAVE: We cook meals and have dinner together. So yeah, how are we not a family? JOSH: We raise the kids together. SIMON: Except for the technicality of not all being blood-related, we fit everything else. MY: Given that your self-understanding as a family emerged in part out of the zoning conflict, did you ever have discussions about differences between how you think of yourselves amongst yourselves versus how you presented yourself publicly? JOSH: We kept it real, always. DAVE: Because for the better part of ten years, this is all we talked about with our families of origin, friends, other people who were not involved. Just talking about the idea that this is what we need to do. For economic reasons, for environmental reasons, just for mental health, the whole idea of nuclear family just seems so wrong. So for any of us to shy away from talking about it, that was never on our minds. I don’t think it crossed most of our minds that this would be at all controversial.Which is why when we sent this email to all the neighbors, we were very clear on what we were. We weren’t trying to say we’re a blood family. We weren’t trying to be sneaky.This is who we are, this is what we’re doing. LAURA: If anything we tried to phrase it in a way that would be less scary to them, though? Because we thought their gripe with us was that we were weird. DAVE: Or that we were a cult. That we were, you know, all these different things. MY: And so there was a sense of wanting to kind of distinguish yourself from those bad ideas they might have? DAVE: When people, when most people think of communes, I think the first thing that goes through their head is the Manson family. So they have this negative connotation. We have kids involved, too, so that’s where I always was. I’ve seen the horror stories that get kids taken away in situations, so there was a drive to push the message that “We are normal.”You know, whatever that means. “No one needs to get concerned. There’s no danger here.This is just a normal thing that people do.” If you look at the scale of human history, humans have lived together more than we have not. Just on NPR the other day they were having this whole story about why millennials are staying at home longer, and intergenerational living, and aging at home, and all these concepts that are all making more sense now because economic reasons are forcing people into the situation. By necessity, in this city there are people who are living the way we’ve been doing. It’s just that we’re choosing, I suppose. JOSH:

They weren’t the only ones to see this similarity. Much of their public support came from other Hartford residents who felt the Scarborough Street household fit their own definitions of “family.” Most often people come to us in support using the word “family.”You know, “Why can’t they leave your family alone?” And that’s how people frame it, in that language. We didn’t use that initially, but the broad support comes from

JOSH:

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the application of that to us. And that’s where the empathy comes from. Like they’re thinking, “What if they came after my family?” And especially in a poor city, in a brown city like Hartford, whoever’s in your home is who you love. And the vast majority of the arrangements in the city are like that. This evolving sense of themselves as a family corresponded to a growing sense of solidarity and trust. I would trust anyone in this house with our kid. LAURA: Oh yeah. With my life. DAVE: With anything, yeah.The bonds I feel here are way tighter than my family of origin. MAUREEN: And I think our accountability to each other is sky-high. DAVE: It’s intentional. LAURA: Yeah. And there’s something, it seems mundane, but there’s something so intangibly big about that, you know? DAVE:

The conflict on Scarborough Street While their sense of themselves as a family evolved out of many experiences, a key one was the zoning conflict that emerged after they moved to Scarborough Street. This section walks through that conflict. So, what were the initial stages of settling into the neighborhood like? We got a gift basket from these folks right here [gesturing next door]. SIMON: Yeah! We had high hopes and optimism. JOSH: It was quiet for the first six or eight weeks, right? DAVE: That’s about right. We were so focused on the act of moving in and how this big change is going to affect us. We weren’t thinking about the stupid zoning stuff. JOSH: The house is a project. The house had had a staff in the past for a reason, because it takes so many people to keep everything going. MY: So it sounds like your neighbors just assumed that the folks who were moving in here were fitting the model of family that they were familiar with on the street. And at some point they learned that those assumptions were not correct. JOSH: Once there was a daily routine of all our cars out front was when the questions started. MAUREEN: Oh they hate the cars! They don’t just dislike the cars. They hate the cars. SIMON: A neighbor across the street came over and said, “Hey, just so you know, people are calling each other about the cars. And I wanted to let you know.” I’m a car nut. So I had my little sports car parked on the lawn temporarily to have sorted that out. And then we were also parking in the street, and this is the one neighborhood in Hartford where you really can’t do that. MY:

JOSH:

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When they first approached you, was it just like, get your cars hidden? Or did you get the sense more that they were sort of fishing to figure out if there was an arrangement underneath the cars that they would not be happy with? SIMON: I don’t know. DAVE: I’m sure it was that. It definitely was seen more like a warning of, you know, we’re onto you. It didn’t seem necessarily like a friendly heads-up.After that, it was clear that, maybe we need to start reaching out to them to let them know that, we’re not scary people, and we’re not renters.That was kind of the beginning of it. MY:

They sent an email to the neighbors to introduce themselves. After that, larger complaints started happening. Rumors started flying around that we were a theater company, and that this was a temporary rooming home. And then that’s when we came out, like, “No, no, no, no! We’re this, we’re that. We work here. Some of us were born and raised here. We’re teachers, kids . . .”

DAVE:

This did not allay the neighbors’ concerns, however. Several neighbors began to organize to push the city to act.The city issued a cease-and-desist letter on October 29, 2014 ordering that the household remove the “additional families” and threatening to impose fines if they didn’t. Shortly after that, the family filed an appeal with the Hartford Zoning Board of Appeals. The teeth to [the cease-and-desist] was that they could charge us $100/day . . . DAVE: For each violation, for each person beyond the zoning rules . . . MAUREEN: They wouldn’t have needed to bring the police in. It could’ve financially ruined us. DAVE: Just by fines. And then eventually tax liens. And eventually just take the house. LAURA:

On February 17, 2015, the zoning board of appeals upheld the cease-and-desist order. In March 2015, the City of Hartford filed suit to enforce the order. But by this point the Scarborough Family were working with a veteran lawyer in local progressive movements named Peter Goselin. They filed their own suit in federal court in New Haven, Connecticut, alleging constitutional violations. The federal court declined to rule on the merits of the suit, asking the family to first show that they could not access justice through the Zoning Commission. Meanwhile, the fight had become a high-profile local news story. While their neighbor opponents were plugged into the political and economic elite of the city and state, the Scarborough Family enjoyed significant support from the broader Hartford public. As it happens, 2015 was a municipal election year, and the battle over the Scarborough Family became an issue in the mayoral campaign. So the other backdrop of this is that there was a mayoral campaign, and the mayor at the time lived right up on the street here. He is friends with all of them. He’s part of the elite.

DAVE:

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And these are his donors. And he came out hard swinging. So it was easy for his opponents to say, “This is ridiculous.” JOSH: The issue only became more and more politicized, to the point where the guy who eventually won, who’s in now, the Courant sat down with him and did a very long interview at the beginning of his term. And twice they asked him about us. To the point where they were like, “Answer the question, are you going to throw them out of their house?” That’s how big it became. LAURA: It came up at all the debates. MY: That must have been so weird. LAURA: It was surreal. DAVE: So, it’s weird on multiple levels. First, here we are, we have all this outpouring of support immediately. Because again, we’re not just people who moved to the city six months prior. We’ve got all these connections. So we have all that, and we’re feeling great. But then you have the actual city, who you’re thinking would never enforce this stuff, actually coming at you throwing its full weight behind it. Sending cease-and-desists. I mean, the stuff that happens in this city that absentee landlords are able to get away with and the city doesn’t bat an eye. And here they are coming at us, and we’re just like . . . MAUREEN: Hartford doesn’t move fast! JOSH: Except when you have the class backing.

LAURA: DAVE:

The incumbent mayor was defeated by a challenger who was more supportive of the Scarborough Family—and whose wife happened to be head of the Hartford Zoning Commission in her own right. In January 2016, the Commission voted to change the relevant zoning regulations, expanding the number of unrelated adults who could live together—but not enough to include the Scarborough Family. The issue remained in limbo until October 2016, when the city dropped its lawsuit to enforce the cease-anddesist order. However, there is nothing in current law preventing it from taking action against the family again in the future. So, over the course of 2015 this continues to kind of percolate and then it’s at the very beginning of 2016 when the Zoning Commission issues a new set of zoning rules that are more expansive but not actually expansive enough to include this family? DAVE: Right. JOSH: It erases the word “family.” MY: They replaced it with “the household unit”? DAVE: Which was basically our definition. That was another thing that we were working around at the time thinking, OK, how do we address the fears that it’ll be fraternity houses that move in, right? That’s not what we are, and here’s this “household” language that we can use to show that we don’t need the word “blood,” we don’t need adoption, we don’t need any of that. And so they used that language. MY:

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And then in addition to that it goes from allowing two to three unrelated people, right? So it increased by one. DAVE: Yeah, it goes from two to three. Having the household unit definition, that’s great and all, but it doesn’t help us. It still limits the number of “unrelated” people that can live together. MY: Right. So, in October of last year, independently of the zoning law changes, the city chose to withdraw its lawsuit against you. DAVE: Yeah. This is now, that was nine months into the new administration? We were getting frustrated because it was like, OK. . . MY: You expected that the new administration would be more supportive? LAURA: Everyone currently thinks everything’s OK. People are like,“It’s still going on?” DAVE: They thought that just by the act of this guy getting elected, that everything just went away. But we knew internally that it was still happening. We were racking up legal fees, we were doing all this stuff. So now we’re basically to the point they dropped the lawsuit. We’re decriminalized. MY: So was that a moment of relaxation? MW, DR AND JB: Yeah. LAURA: It was sort of anticlimactic. It happened at a point when everything was quiet anyway. And, you know, it didn’t change our day-to-day much. JOSH:

Earlier, Maureen had talked about how she couldn’t bring herself to unpack all her boxes when the zoning battle first started. Once the city withdrew the lawsuit, she finished unpacking. I’d started putting books away in a book room upstairs. And then this fight happened, and I stopped unpacking the books. There was a part of me that thought, we’re gonna be repacking. After they dropped the lawsuit, I unpacked the box. I was ready. I had a joyless response to it, though. Because when it came out, people were like, “yay,” and I was just like totally flat and joyless. There’s something about it that, I don’t know, even to this day . . .

MAUREEN:

Economic class and family norms Throughout the two-year zoning battle, the family’s neighbors insisted that they only wanted the city to enforce its zoning laws. However, these zoning laws were deeply shaped by a history of class and race exclusion, and the neighbors often used language laced with themes of class. In all their minds, they are the victims in this, right? And so, they’re struggling with thinking, “How come no one’s identifying with us? Why shouldn’t anyone see that we’re the victims here?” JOSH: “We’ve worked hard to get where we are.” DAVE: And it’s driving them nuts, so they dance around the underlying issues of all this. Publicly, they’re not going to come right out and say, “We only want this to be a street for rich people.” That’s what they’re thinking but they know enough that they can’t really say that, so they dance around it. DAVE:

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We had a guy say something along the lines of, “Zoning is a way of sorting people, and there’s a place for everyone in this city.” JOSH: “You guys can go and do this anywhere else. There’s a whole giant city for you to do this.” DAVE: Just two blocks over, you just cross one street here, and it’s totally fine and nobody cares. It’s just these two, three streets right around this neighborhood. LAURA: On Warrenton, you guys lived there how many years without anybody making a fuss? DAVE: Five years? MAUREEN: It’s like a mile away, less than, maybe. LAURA: Same neighborhood, generally, but not rich like this. DAVE: Their thinking here is that “we deserve a place for rich people. Why are you trying to take that away from us? We could live in Avon [a wealthy suburb outside of Hartford].We could live there. And we choose to live here.We fund the arts in this city.” Basically implying,“You need us. And we’re going to leave if you allow this kind of stuff to go on.” JOSH: And that we’re scaring other bourgeois people from coming to the city. MAUREEN: They’re almost treating it like a land trust, kind of a protected space. That this is the last area in the city. . . DAVE: The last classy neighborhood. We heard that, “the last classy neighborhood.” MAUREEN: They used the phrase “single family.” They’ll say—and I don’t know if this is true or not—but “the last single-family neighborhood left in the city, and we have to defend it and preserve it.” So the idea is that there’s something like a land trust. JOSH: It’s because this is a tiny physical area where there are the biggest land plots, the most expensive houses. The governor is right over there [pointing toward the governor’s house]. Zoning is literal, right? It’s these invisible walls, and they’re defending them. We heard through all this about their many fights to “defend the zone.” LAURA: And there’s a feeling that we cheated to get into this house. This neighbor next door, he said, “We worked hard for our homes.” MY: When they say you cheated, what was the cheating? LAURA: We’re not rich. We didn’t get rich first. MY: And so pooling resources, that’s the “cheating”? JOSH: We should’ve been able to do this on our single-family income to get to this spot. MAUREEN: There was a powerful moment when Dave and I were at a meeting of the West End Community Association. They talked to us about our arrangement, and nothing that we said seemed to register. How we lived and the beautiful stories about going into shared life together didn’t matter. But the room came silent when they said, “So what happens if or when people leave?” And Dave very kindly explained that all your equity stays in the house. If you move out, that’s your choice, but no one gets any money until the house is sold. And they stopped dead. And they said, “You mean,

SIMON:

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all your finances are tied together?” And that is what resonated. And the idea that you would do that with someone you were not married to was mindblowing. DAVE: If they actually tried to enforce the zoning language, only some of us could stay here. And then whoever else has to move and leave, they would have to pay [for] both where they’re living at and pay for here. And I think talking about that made it realer for some people, or more relatable.While other people were just like, “Well, we don’t care. You made that choice. Too bad. If you’re financially ruined and you all end up broke, you did that.You took that risk.You broke the law, that’s what you did.” JOSH: Another of the things they would say was, “I put $200,000 into this house. If I had known that this was going to happen I would never have done that.” They said that over and over again. They had this notion that once you buy into a neighborhood, it’s supposed to stay that way in perpetuity. And the material investment, they demand some sort of reciprocation from that. The neighbors’ own public statements sometimes pointed to a diversity they valued about the neighborhood, as in the op-ed that opened this chapter. I came across a lot of references to “diversity” in their public statements, and I wondered what that meant. From your perspective, what do you think they meant by that? MAUREEN: It’s an absurd claim on its surface. What they’re drawing from is they can point to different types of skin color and sexual diversity.The overall claim of “most diverse in the city” is probably not going to hold up very much, but they do have multiple representations. But we keep coming back to the class thing. Because it’s kind of like, if you have the currency to live here, that’s the most important part. I mean, we come from middle to middle-upper-class families. By no means would I say that we’re low-income.You can’t spit without hitting a master’s degree in this house. But it doesn’t matter. Even though we have middle-class jobs as teachers and mental-health professionals. It doesn’t matter, you know? MY:

What makes a queer family? The battle around the Scarborough Family turned on their violation of a particular set of family norms that had been institutionalized into law. Does this make their family queer? And how should we think about this question in a context where the status of same-sex couples was itself changing rapidly? MY:

One of the things that’s striking to me about your battle is that it’s happening primarily in 2015, which is exactly when the same-sex marriage case is pending before the United States Supreme Court. So these things were happening at the same time.Were you all thinking about these things as connected in any way?

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In conversations with close friends of mine who are academics becoming professors, studying queer theory a lot, I asked, “We’re getting a lot of support from poly families. Can you explain that to me?” Because I was missing the connection. I wasn’t seeing it. I was seeing that we’re a bunch of white people trying to live in a mansion. MAUREEN: And our relationships are somewhat traditionally defined within that. DAVE: So talking with them, they were like, “Well, yeah, this is huge for poly families. And you are the perfect people to test this.” JOSH: The people at the Woodhull Freedom Foundation explicitly said this over and over again.3 Especially with kids involved. Because that’s such a huge thing, right? Primarily the state’s concern is what’s going to happen with children. And what kind of arrangement will ensure children are taken care of and raised. And so we fit into an argument about that, especially when all of us are raising these three children together. So, that’s why Woodhull was saying, if the state is secure in the fact that you’re going to raise these children to adulthood, then it could open up for all sorts of arrangements. MAUREEN: It only really truly hit home for me a couple months ago, because we all had to go to the bank to switch somebody on a card. It was that mundane, right? And so to get Hannah on a debit card, we had to have people sign, and the bank employee had to call the main branch and figure out what he could do, and he said to us, “You guys are weird.” And I sat there and I thought to myself, “OK, this is why the poly families came out so strongly for us, because they’re as exhausted as we are with basic day-to-day crap. And I don’t think I had fully appreciated how much stuff is set up for two adults. JOSH: Beyond the state. The market. [laughing]

DAVE:

Earlier in the interview, Maureen and Simon had told me about their wedding in the backyard at the Scarborough Street house. I returned to that topic, connecting it to the queer and other critiques of marriage discussed elsewhere in this volume. This was something Simon had thought a lot about. I was like, “Maureen, how much more married could we be? Why do we have to have the state legitimize our relationship together? Can’t we just continually co-create it and all those great things?” MY: Where did that come from for you? SIMON: Well, I’d always been resistant to leading a normal life. And what could be more normal than buying a house and getting married? MY: And here you are! SIMON: And here I am, a married homeowner. I have a student, we have an independent study together, and we’re very close. And he’s really at the forefront of modern gender and identity politics. And when we were getting to know each other earlier this year I was describing my living arrangement to him, because he was very curious about it. And after I kind of went through everybody in the house, he was like, “That’s so depressingly heteronormative.” I was like, “I know it looks radical from the outside, but. . .” SIMON:

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Lamest commune ever! [laughing] When we started meeting all those years ago, I think my version of myself then would look aghast at how we live now. And you know, it has a lot to do with becoming a professional and leading a very professional bourgeois life. MY: It’s always one of the tensions in radical politics is that you’re trying to live a life that is gesturing towards a different kind of world, but in a world that’s not yet that world. SIMON: Right, right. So we have our feet a little bit in both worlds. We’re married, and we’re a bunch of boring heteros, but we’re also living in this house, and Maureen and I, mostly driven by me, decided not to have children. And part of that, though, is living with children. So we have them in our lives but not our own children. MY: You’ve mentioned that some of you identify as queer personally. Do you think of your family as a queer family? MAUREEN: I do. Tate got cancer and died within four months while we were all living there at Warrenton. Today’s the anniversary of his death. And to me, we were taking on the full function of what a family does, and managing the illness and the crisis as a family. And even though [Dave and Laura] weren’t living here, they were very much a part of that with us at the time. And there was never a moment where it was like, “Oh, this isn’t my issue, this isn’t my problem.” It was very “Yeah, this is what we do.” Blood had nothing to do with it, and marriage had nothing to do with it. And so it was kind of outside.There is something queer about how intimate we are with each other’s personal day-to-day lives. Josh, Julia, and I have lived together for eight years now. And I will be sitting in a chair in the kitchen, and they will be having a marital dispute around me, and I’m part of the furniture. And it’s the kind of thing where I don’t think anybody else would ever have that around a quote-unquote “not a family member.” I’m just there, eating my cereal. DAVE: As I understand queer politics and theory and stuff like that, yeah, I think we absolutely are. It’s anything that’s against the normal. It doesn’t have to be based on sex or anything like that, so I totally see it as that in some ways. But then there’s the other side, you know, there’s tons of people who do this without any kind of thought, any kind of academic or theoretical thought behind it. They do it because that’s just what you do. MAUREEN: It just emerges sort of organically out of need and desire and whatever. MY: Laura, you said that you don’t think of this as a queer family. LAURA: Only because I feel like it’s not mine to claim. MY: OK. And is that because you don’t personally identify as queer? LAURA: Yeah. MAUREEN: Whereas I do identify as queer. JOSH:

Their sense of connection to this broader need to support diverse families—queer or not—has led them to see their particular struggle as part of a broader one. Dave and Maureen spoke about the support they got from poly families.

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When you’re doing any kind of activism, you want to kind of make these connections. It was helpful to see it as a larger picture and not a fight to keep us in our house here. MAUREEN: As part of starting my own therapy private practice I’ve been meeting with other therapists, and I met with a woman who specializes in working with polyamorous families. So I was like, “Hey, let’s chat, because I’m part of this house, and we had a lot of poly support.” And she says, “I’ve known about your house. My clients were coming in, and saying ‘Look at this, look at this.’ It meant something to them that you were out there.” That really hit home to me. I’m thinking about the younger Maureens, because I would’ve seized upon this and I would’ve stored it away seeing that on the news or reading about it.

DAVE:

Laura echoed this idea. I feel really strongly that other people should do this. This is the way to live. This is great. And that’s to me a reason to have it out there and put up with all the media and attention and stuff. Because people should know that this is an awesome way to live. MAUREEN: It’s a viable option. LAURA: This is a viable option.You can do this. People can do this. DAVE: There should be no normal, right? There should be no right way, wrong way necessarily. We can all do this in different ways that make sense to us and, it doesn’t have to be your worst fears, it doesn’t have to be idyllic either. LAURA: In every aspect of life, it’s just better.You come home from a shitty day at work, and everyone’s like, “Hey!” It’s nice to feel loved like that. Even in hard moments, it’s still better than being alone, being out there on your own. I worked at a job for the town of East Hartford for a little while, and some people there were talking about how adult friendships are just really hard to maintain. And I felt so lucky! I don’t want for that at all. I feel like I’m embraced. It’s great. LAURA:

Notes 1 2 3

Skenderian, L. (2014, November 28). Finding the right place. Hartford Courant. Retrieved from www.courant.com/opinion/op-ed/hc-scarborough-street-controversy-1130-20141128story.html The zoning laws at the time they moved in permitted an unlimited number of domestic servants. The Woodhull Freedom Foundation is an organization working at the intersection of human rights and sexual rights. See Chapter 13 for a contribution from Woodhull Foundation president Ricci Levy.

12 QUEER STREET FAMILIES Place-making and community among LGBT youth of color in iconic gay neighborhoods Theodore Greene

Editors’ introduction: In this chapter, sociologist Theodore Greene presents the last of the volume’s four examples of queer families beyond same-sex marriage, drawing on his ethnographic research on conflicts around queer and trans youth of color who hang out in Chicago’s iconic LGBTQ neighborhood, Boystown. The youths come to Boystown seeking spaces where they can freely express their gendered and sexual selves, but the overwhelmingly commercial focus of most of the neighborhood’s institutions renders much of the neighborhood inaccessible to them. They respond by forming what Greene calls “queer street families” in which they hang out and care for each other in public spaces along the neighborhood’s main streets. Greene argues that queer street families are adapted from models of street-corner socializing familiar to the youths from the neighborhoods where they live. At the same time, family norms for the predominantly white, middle-class gays who live in Boystown are moving in the opposite direction, increasingly privatized behind the closed doors of their homonormative homes. Greene thus suggests that the racialized and classed conflict over the youths’ presence in Boystown also reflects a conflict between different ways of understanding family and kinship, which manifest in different ways of using the neighborhood’s spaces. By bridging the sociology of urban space and the sociology of family, Greene’s argument pushes us to think more broadly about how same-sex marriage can shape the space, both metaphorical and literal, available for different forms of queer caring. At 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 2, 2011, fifty local residents, mostly gay white men, convened at a 7-Eleven parking lot for a “positive loitering walk” through the streets of Boystown, Chicago’s iconic gay neighborhood on the city’s north side. Residents intended to raise awareness about the recent wave of violent crimes in the area, which had culminated in several violent fights during Chicago’s Pride festivities the preceding weekend. However, as they began dividing into groups, a group

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of thirty protesters confronted the “positive loiterers.” Composed largely of queer youth of color representing the local organization GenderJUST, the group shouted at the positive loiterers through megaphones, accusing local residents of policing queer youth out of the neighborhood by making their presence the scapegoat for the upsurge in crime. Despite the walk organizers’ efforts to respond peacefully to these allegations, the counter-protesters overwhelmed the positive loiterers with chants such as “We’re gonna beat back police attack.” Eventually losing their cool, the positive loiterers began yelling back at the counter-protesters. “Get the fuck out of my neighborhood,” one gay white man yelled back at the queer youth. The standoff eventually attracted a crowd of partygoers spilling out from the local gay bars.Whenever the positive loiterers attempted to create distance from the queer youth, the counter-protesters followed, provoking the loiterers into confrontation. Following a few minutes of cat-and-mouse, the positive loiterers managed to evade the counter-protesters long enough to organize themselves into groups and begin their walk. However, as the positive loiterers moved through the neighborhood, groups of black and brown youth followed, jeering at the walkers through megaphones. By the end of the night, organizers of the walk had come to believe that the queer youth had coopted and derailed their peaceful protest. Expressing their frustration to the Windy City Times, walk organizer Robert Sall accused the protesters of drawing unwanted, negative attention to the positive loiterers. “This clearly goes against everything we do on our walk,” Sall explained, “because we move through the neighborhood quietly and peacefully” (Sosin, 2011b). The counter-protesters understood the evening differently. To them, Boystown provided a safe haven for LGBT youth of color, who sometimes traveled for hours to escape the homophobia, transphobia, and violence experienced at the hands of family and peers in their local communities. However, as broader trends in greater acceptance for LGBT citizens attract queer youth to gay neighborhoods like Boystown, they often encounter hostility from local residents. Many endure racial profiling and criminalization (Rios, 2011) by business owners and the local police; others face sexual objectification and exploitation at the hands of local residents, many of whom publicly lash out against their presence in the neighborhood as a threat to community safety. Protesting provided queer youth an opportunity not only to defend their presence in the gayborhood, but also to demand recognition from local residents as legitimate stakeholders within the community. Janel Bailey, one of the representatives of GenderJUST, explained to the Windy City Times the youths’ shared investment in community safety. “We are the queer youth of color and allies and sex workers,” she stated. “We are also concerned with . . . safety and want to be included in this conversation and not necessarily made targets” (Sosin, 2011b). The stakes that mobilize LGBT youth to defend their presence in gay neighborhoods such as Boystown motivate this chapter. Even as recent scholarship on gay neighborhoods highlights their decline and disappearance in the “post-gay” era (Ghaziani, 2014), iconic gay neighborhoods have attracted queer youth of color seeking communities in which their sexual and gender identities are affirmed and supported. However, as queer youth of color are excluded from the sociocultural,

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political, and economic life of the gayborhood, many reproduce the street-corner culture traditionally associated with black and Latinx urban spaces to create queer versions of “street families,” that is, affective communities forged around “mutual support for and encouragement for an alternative lifestyle that appears highly attractive to many adolescents, regardless of family background” (Anderson, 1991, p. 375). Similar to the “chosen families” that LGBT adults have historically created in queer commercial, cultural, and political institutions (Weston, 1991), queer street families rely on their spatial practices in gay neighborhoods to create bonds of kinship, grounded in mutual support and obligation. Creating alternative safe spaces in and around key institutional anchors in gay neighborhoods, queer street families foster supportive environments of gender and sexual expression, protect each other from outside threats, manage internal conflicts, and defend their legitimate rights to participate as full members of the local community. More importantly, through their unique participation, queer street families affirm the symbolic value of gay neighborhoods in an era in which greater social, political, and legal recognition of same-sex marriage and “LGBT families” has called the salience of gay neighborhoods into question.

“Families we choose” in iconic gay neighborhoods1 Popular and academic scholars associate increasing social, political, and cultural acceptance of LGBT citizens, accelerated by the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage in the United States, with a concurrent decreasing need for iconic gay neighborhoods as anchors of safety and community (Brown, 2007; Collins & Drinkwater, 2017; Ghaziani, 2014; Jackson & Nargis, 2017; Kunerth, 2007; Leff, 2007; Spero, 2016). Arguments supporting the decline of iconic gay neighborhoods privilege the shifting residential, political, and sociocultural priorities of LGBT nuclear families, now legitimated through the successes of the contemporary LGBT rights movement. Evidence supporting both the residential “de-gaying” of iconic gay neighborhoods and the residential diffusion of LGBT residents throughout the United States is based only on counts of same-sex partners, rendering uncoupled LGBT residents invisible (Anacker & MorrowJones, 2005; Gates & Ost, 2004; Ghaziani, 2014; Spring, 2013). Scholars attribute the dwindling cultural institutions in gay neighborhoods (such as gay bars, bathhouses, bookstores) not only to the convenience and ubiquity of online dating apps such as Grindr (Kunerth, 2007; Smith, 2008; Sullivan, 2007; Usher & Morrison, 2010; Williams, 2007), but also to the growing desire for child-specific amenities in gay neighborhoods (such as good schools and safe parks), which aligns homonormative residents with their heterosexual counterparts in sanitizing the flamboyant, sexualized culture historically associated with iconic gay neighborhoods (Kyles, 2007; Orne, 2017). Taking these together, scholars center the lives of homonormative LGBT families to emphasize the successful integration of LGBT residents into mainstream communities, including small towns and suburban areas (Brekhus, 2003; Brown-Saracino, 2011).

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However, these studies divert attention from the diverse people and practices that work to protect queer spaces and places in cities, from single LGBT residents creating “chosen families” among friends (Weston, 1991) to economically displaced or priced-out populations with longstanding ties to community in gay neighborhoods. Many who participate in preserving gay neighborhoods are not necessarily residents of the community; rather, they couple a sense of shared identity with their participation in the cultural, social, and political life of a local area to legitimate themselves as community members, who act against perceived threats to their visions of authentic community. I refer to this form of non-residential community participation as vicarious citizenship (Greene, 2014).Vicarious citizens use a variety of spatial practices to situate themselves as legitimate stakeholders within gay neighborhoods, from openly displaying affection in public spaces to economically participating in gay bars, gay-identified restaurants, and bathhouses. Generally, vicarious citizens conform their cultural and spatial practices with those most associated with a local area’s “authentic” community. Queer youth of color constitute a unique class of vicarious citizens, however. Many of those who seek gay neighborhoods for community cannot easily access the institutions traditionally associated with community because much of what anchors the material culture in gay neighborhoods is age-restrictive and economically dependent on paying patrons. As a result, many queer youths create their own communities, combining street-corner practices from their own local communities with local LGBT cultural symbols and institutions to claim space within gay neighborhoods. Being on sidewalks and in public spaces in the gay neighborhood exposes youth to the area’s cultural and socio-political community through casual and peripheral contact with other LGBT-identified individuals, and this visibility attracts the participation of other queer youth of color in search of community and resources to support their sexual and gender identities. Through their spatial practices, queer youth of color produce a partially oppositional culture in gay neighborhoods that mirrors the “codes of the street” governing street families in inner cities (Anderson, 1994, 1999). Like “street families,” queer street families organize around “informal rules governing interpersonal behavior,” including by using violence to mediate internal conflicts and external threats. Consequently, queer street families mistrust police and institutional authority figures, who represent the interests of the dominant white society and demonstrate little concern for protecting the lives of people of color. Because their spatial practices can sometimes resemble the violent, illicit activities often associated with the iconic ghetto (Anderson, 2012), the presence of black and brown queer youth on street corners is often misrecognized by local residents as a threat to public safety, even as gay men sexually exploit and harass queer youth who participate in the area’s underground sexual economy. However, in contrast to the scholarly literature that relegates their presence in gay neighborhoods simply to “bearing witness” as “inheritors” of queer culture and community (Ghaziani, 2014, p. 178), queer street families also function as a creative force within iconic gay neighborhoods. As gay neighborhoods “de-gay” in the

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wake of broader social acceptance for (mostly white, middle-class, cisgender) gay people, queer youth of color reproduce a vibrant public culture that supports and facilitates their unique communities. Their visible street-corner culture in a traditionally “white space” (Anderson, 2015) not only produces conflict between local residents and the youths along racial and class lines, but also creates competing relational orders arising out of distinct spatial practices. While local residents create a relational order that plays out in private homes and quasi-public spaces (such as bars and gay institutions), queer youth of color perform collective, familial intimacy in public spaces, refashioning key institutional anchors and cultural codes to fight isolation, protect one another, and legitimate their presence and families in Boystown to those who dismiss them as interlopers.

Methods and site selection Despite its reputation as “the most studied city in the world” (Lloyd, 2010, p. 14), Chicago provides a valuable site for studying processes of queer youth place-making and community in iconic gay neighborhoods. Located in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, Boystown bears the distinction as the first municipally recognized gay neighborhood in the United States, commemorated in 1998 by the installation of twenty-two 23-foot-high, illuminated, rainbow-ringed pylons along Halsted Street, Boystown’s main street. Even as experts provide evidence of the decreasing LGBT population in Boystown and the diffusion of LGBT-headed households into neighborhoods throughout the city, including neighboring Andersonville and Rogers Park (Ghaziani, 2014; Perry & Vrie, 2017), Boystown still remains the cultural, commercial, and political heart of the LGBT community. Many bars and services are still located in Boystown, and it still hosts the annual Chicago Pride Parade, which in recent years has welcomed in excess of a million spectators (Baim, 2011; Miller, 2014; Orne, 2017). Between 2011 and 2016, I collected ethnographic and archival data in Boystown’s neighborhood. I recorded field notes from my daily and nightly rounds (Hunter, 2010; Logan & Molotch, 2007), as well as at local festivals, church services, and zoning board and community town meetings. I also spent considerable time observing interactions in gay institutions, such as bars, restaurants, community centers, and bookstores. Additionally, through a multipoint snowball sample, I interviewed a further twentyfive Chicago residents who represented a variety of gay and straight community actors living, working, and socializing in the Boystown area. Interviews focused on subjects’ gender, racial, and sexual identities, residential histories, and recreational and political involvement in the community; the qualities of places they most and least valued; and changes they had witnessed in iconic gay neighborhoods. Interviews varied in duration from thirty minutes to two hours, with most lasting at least an hour. Drawing on these data, I now turn to my results, beginning with the various socio-spatial practices in which queer youth engage not only to escape the persecution and homophobia they encounter in their own neighborhoods, but also to mitigate the exclusion they encounter by local residents in iconic gay neighborhoods.

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Making the strange familiar Many of the queer youth who seek refuge in Boystown are too young or lack the financial resources to gain access to gay commercial establishments. During the day, many queer youths take advantage of the free services and programming offered by either the Center on Halsted (the LGBT Community Center) or the Broadway Youth Center (a drop-in center run by the Howard Brown Health Center). However, once these establishments close for the evening (usually around 10 p.m.), most are left with few safe spaces in which to congregate. On Saturday nights, one can find a group of eight to ten youths hanging on a given street corner, laughing and gossiping loudly with one another. Many are homeless, turned out by their families because of their gender and sexual identities and, as a result, resorting to sex work as a means of survival. Those who wander the streets alone at night are often perceived as sex workers operating in the neighborhood’s underground sexual economy, and become vulnerable to sexual exploitation and physical violence— often at the hands of local residents in search of discreet sexual encounters. Those who travel to Boystown in groups tend to cluster on street corners around their hangout spots (such as outside the Center on Halsted) and along Halsted, Belmont, or Broadway Streets, where most of the gay institutions and markers are located. During the day, they walk down the street in pairs or small groups, making occasional stops at convenience stores or one of the neighborhood coffee shops. In appearance, they dress in the fashion of any typical teenager you might find hanging out on the south side of the city. Young men and masculine-presenting women wear white t-shirts with chains around their necks, baggy jeans exposing colorful boxer shorts, and backward baseball caps representing their favorite sports teams. The women typically wear midriff tops that often expose pierced navels, as well as tight cropped jeans and a variety of accessories, from large hoop earrings to colorful bracelets that jangle as they move. Some are out as early as 7.00 a.m., using particular street corners and parking lots as makeshift beauty shops, with trans women in groups of two and three using storefront windows to apply each other’s makeup. Throughout the day, queer youth often take advantage of bathrooms in coffee shops to clean up and fix their presentation for the streets. Destiny (nineteen, black, trans woman) lives as D’Andre on the south side of Chicago with her mother and two younger brothers. Fearful of the violence she might encounter if she revealed herself as Destiny in her neighborhood, she travels for an hour on public transportation to “run with her girls in Boystown.” As she transfers to the train toward the Addison stop, she slowly transforms into Destiny, using empty conductor’s booths on the train to change her clothes. Once she disembarks from the train in Boystown, she searches for the nearest bathroom to complete her transformation. “The first thing I do when I get into Boystown,” she explained, “is put my hair and makeup on.” For trans women like Destiny, Boystown provides an important physical boundary for safe experimentation with and expression of burgeoning sexual and gender identities.

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While indeed conspicuous, many of the cliques found along Halsted Street and Broadway tend to socialize among themselves, rarely interacting directly with other denizens conducting their daily or nightly rounds (Hunter, 2010; Logan & Molotch, 2007). Sometimes, groups interrupt their play in order to share the sidewalks with passersby. Once during my observation, a group of black teenagers were hanging out on the corner across from the Center on Halsted when two of the members— a tall, slender, effete black man and a short, heavy-set woman giving off a masculine presentation—started sparring in the street, to the cheers and laughter of their friends. As their “play-fighting” continued, a middle-aged, straight couple turned the corner. “Hey, hey,” one of the members signaled. The two fighters immediately halted and the group lined themselves along the side of the building to allow the couple and several other pedestrians to pass through. When the area was finally clear, the group resumed their play, and within seconds the woman had the man in a full-nelson hold. “I’m just playing! I’m just playing!” the young man shouted in submission, breathless from the combination of the hold and his incessant laughter. At times, these spatial practices can also prove disruptive to the more traditional production of daytime and nighttime space. Ken (thirty-four, Latino, gay) and Gabriel (thirty, Latino, gay) recalled a time when a group of black teens appropriated the street outside of Sidetrack, a popular gay bar on the Halsted Street strip, to play double-dutch, a very popular jump-rope game played in urban black neighborhoods. “We were hanging out near the windows overlooking the street,” Ken explained, “when, like out of nowhere, these kids were outside the entrance [of the bar] on the street double-dutching.” “They were double-dutching in the street,” Gabriel interrupted. “Oh yeah,” Ken responded. “They were in the street, because people were getting pissed that they couldn’t park there.” It was crazy! They were taking up two parking spaces, and then there were cars that were trying to park there, and people were screaming at them. And they kept on double-dutching, and all these people [on the street] stopped and were staring at them . . . and the cars were slowing down. I mean, it was like an incident, as it were. This reconstitution of public space is not unlike the use of street corners, sidewalks, and other public space by youth in predominantly black and Latinx neighborhoods (Gotham & Brumley, 2002; Jacobs, 1961;Venkatesh, 2000). Double-dutching in the street is likely common for the youths in the above example, yet because gay neighborhoods are typically imagined as adult spaces, this activity seemed incongruent with the expected cultural production of space on Halsted. Queer youth of color also take to the streets to protect the culture they have produced within the neighborhood. As in the example that introduced this chapter, queer youth sometimes draw from the code of the street in order to intimidate challengers. They may also mobilize in formal protest. Organizations such as GenderJUST, a multiracial, inter-generational grassroots organization based on Chicago’s south side, provide a formal forum for queer youth to defend their interests against

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local residents who unfairly scapegoat their presence in the neighborhood as a threat to local safety. In the fall of 2010, the organization protested against the Northalsted Business Alliance’s support for the profiling of young people of color in local-area businesses (Daniel-McCarter, 2012; Nair, 2010). When the tensions arising out of the “positive loitering” walk spilled over to a local community policing meeting, the youths held a press conference outside the building to express their concerns about being unfairly policed by the local community. Several youth, representing the organization in bright yellow shirts emblazoned with its name, shared experiences of racial profiling and harassment by local residents and the police. Describing his experience of being called the “n-word” by local residents, twentyone-year-old Southside resident Joshua McCool explained the difficulties that he and many like him faced in Boystown. “We have issues already on the south and west sides that we are dealing with as queer youth,” McCool told the crowd, encouraged by his friends. But when you go to this place that is supposed to be this gay-friendly place, you realize “Oh, I forgot. I’m of color. Now where do I go to?” Boystown is supposed to be the gay place for Chicago, but I always say that it seems to be more like white Boystown. Their visibility in the neighborhood also attracts queer youths who may participate in protests without affiliating themselves to GenderJUST. Although many of these practices seem inconsistent with more traditional forms of community place-making, queer youth of color make gay neighborhoods culturally and socio-politically meaningful to them, not only as forms of resistance (Shepard & Smithsimon, 2011), but as vital to the production and maintenance of community. As I highlight in the following section, public spaces also operate as sites where intimate relations among queer youth unfold. Queer street families not only mobilize to protect their stake in the local community, but also rely on one another to compensate for the sense of recognition and community that local LGBT residents and institutions have largely denied them.

The public nature of familial intimacies Like many of the queer youths I interviewed, Brooklyn (twenty-two, black, trans woman) met her crew quite by accident. One Saturday evening, Brooklyn was standing along Belmont when a man in a sports car drove up and propositioned her for sex. “Before I could even make up my mind about [going with] him,” she explained, “these girls just came up to the car and pulled me away.” After a heated exchange between the trans women and the man in the car, he drove away. “They warned me to stay away from him ’cause he was . . . the kind who would take advantage of a girl and not give them what he promised.” In hanging out with these women, Brooklyn learned of the safe corners and the right times for meeting “clients,” how to look out for the police who patrol the streets at night, and what to do if

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she saw one of the girls being harassed by local residents or the police. “When we are on these streets,” Brooklyn explained, “we got nobody but us. They may get on my nerves at times, but we always look out for our own.” Brooklyn’s story illuminates how the bonds of kinship between queer youth of color arise out of their spatial practices in Boystown. Given their experiences of hostility from local residents, business owners, and the police, queer youth of color express solidarity toward one another, especially when they are exposed to an external threat. Brooklyn had never met the women before their intervention; however, she quickly trusted their knowledge of navigating the street life in Boystown. Conversely, the trans women who came to her rescue had no investment in the outcome of Brooklyn’s interaction with the john; in a different context, if these women also participated in the sexual economy, they might have viewed Brooklyn as competition. Nevertheless, they felt a sense of obligation to use their knowledge of the street to protect one of their own from a potentially dangerous situation. “There are times when I just want to kill [my crew],” Javier (twenty-one, Latino, gay) explained. “However, when the chips are down, and my boys are in trouble, I got their back, and I know they got mine.We’re family, and family will go down for one another.” Because of the dearth of private spaces available to them, queer youths often perform intimate moments in public spaces. These activities range from expressing affection to one another to performing personal functions that usually take place within the private domain (such as trans women helping each other with their hair and makeup along storefronts). Even conflicts arising between them are mediated in public view, regardless of the time of day. One afternoon while sitting along the bar of a coffee shop in Boystown, I witnessed a young, slender Latino male approaching a tall, sinewy black man leaning up against the café window and playing with his cell phone. Snatching the phone out of the black man’s hands, the young Latino, who stood about a head shorter than his opponent, stood on his tiptoes and got in the black man’s face.“You got my man locked up?” the Latino accused.“What?” the black man asked back.“What the fuck you talking about?”“You got my man locked up!” the Latino reiterated before sucker-punching the black man in the face. The two men began fighting on the street corner, exchanging wild blows with each other as pedestrians stepped into the street to avoid them. A group of peers quickly rushed to the fighters and separated them, pulling the combatants in opposite directions along Belmont Street. Walking home a few hours later, I saw the group walking together along Halsted Street, laughing and speaking over each other loudly. The two fighters, their faces slightly bruised and bandaged, walked along the street with their arms around each other’s shoulders. The fact that the fight occurred during rush hour in plain sight of bystanders and without regard to their safety seemed of little consequence. For the youths in the neighborhood, such altercations provide one of a variety of ways in which these groups resolve conflicts among themselves. Similar to inner-city street families, even the most violent altercations have an organization among queer street families, as the rules under which queer street families operate are established and enforced internally.

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Like many families, queer street families can prove dysfunctional and combative; however, the fact that their issues play out in public magnifies the concerns of local residents and many adult participants within Boystown, who believe such fights confirm their worst fears about safety in neighborhoods. Many local residents have expressed concern over the youths’ use of space in the area, arguing that their presence in large numbers constitutes a potential threat to neighborhood safety (Barlow, 2011; Sosin, 2011a).While many local residents and business owners attempt to deflect accusations of racial profiling when articulating their concerns, others recognize how these concerns grow out of the persistent perception of iconic gay neighborhoods as middle-class, cisgender, male-dominated “white spaces” (Anderson, 2015).

Local responses to queer youth of color While I was working on my dissertation in a Boystown café one summer afternoon, a slender young black man in a t-shirt and cutoff jeans sashayed through the open doors. Surveying the nearly empty café for a second, he looked over at me and moved to my table at the corner of the shop. I had never met him before that moment; however, he approached and greeted me as if we had known each other for years. “Hey baby,” he said to me, kissing me on both cheeks. “Sorry I’m late, but you would not believe the crazy shit I just witnessed on that train. Total shitshow!” As I tried to understand what was happening, he gestured with his eyes toward the barista working at the register and mouthed,“Keep cool.” I glanced over to the barista, who glared at him while adding foam to a cappuccino for a customer standing at the bar. Realizing quickly that he might be kicked out of the coffee shop, I smiled and gestured with a thumbs-up that nothing was wrong, and he nodded and returned to his task. “Thanks,” the young man said in rather hushed tones. He removed his messenger bag, opened it, and began rifling through it, eventually pulling out a cell phone and charger. He connected the phone to the cord, reached under the table, unplugged my computer and plugged in his cell phone. “I won’t be in your hair for too long,” he explained, smirking. The young man and I chatted for over an hour. Sammy was a twenty-four-year-old gay male from the south side of Chicago who had lived on and off the streets of Boystown since his father kicked him out of his home six years ago for being gay. When he was not hanging out with his friends on Halsted, he sometimes liked to sit in neighborhood cafés and “chill,” playing on his cell phone or reading a magazine or book while his phone charged. Because he rarely purchased anything, he often tried not to draw attention to himself, which was why he had approached my table. “With you and your coffee,” he said, “I could sit here for hours and nobody will bother me. But if I sat at one of the tables over there, they would kick me out in a minute. Even if I buy a coffee here, I can’t stay too long ’cause they’ll think I’m like doing shit and gettin’ into trouble.” Even when Sammy acts in accordance with the culture of the coffee shop (that is, buying a coffee and drinking it at a table), his youth and appearance often seem to

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signal to workers and other customers that he is causing trouble.The youths’ loitering on street corners—especially at night—has made them easy targets for the community’s ire when the neighborhood experiences spikes in crime. Many local residents have voiced concern over the youths’ use of space in the area, arguing that their presence in large numbers constitutes a potential threat to neighborhood safety (Barlow, 2011; Sosin, 2011a). “Sometimes there are 50 kids,” a Boystown bar owner declared in a 2009 interview with the Chicago Tribune. “But it’s only a handful that doesn’t have the social skills regarding sidewalk etiquette, so [their presence] intimidates customers and residents” (Trice, 2009). In the summer of 2011, a wave of violent attacks in Boystown prompted the creation of a Facebook page dedicated to “Tak[ing] Back Boystown,” aimed at drawing attention to community concerns about crime and providing a venue for brainstorming “ideas and thoughts on how we can preserve what we have and go back to the safe fun neighborhood Boystown is known for” (Take Back Boystown, 2011). However, the page quickly devolved into a forum for local residents to vent their frustration over the presence of the queer youth of color. “Mobs of delinquent teens are destroying an area that many hardworking citizens have created,” one Facebook commenter observed (Demarest, 2011). Many attributed the blame to institutional anchors such as the Broadway Youth Center and the Center on Halsted, whose services attracted these populations to the area in the first place. “We need to take back Boystown,” wrote one poster.“The Center on Halsted and the Howard Brown Youth Center . . . both cater to the people who commit these crimes. Get rid of them and watch the crime go down and the property values go up.” Others took a more explicitly racial tone. “Boystown was built and created by gay whites with hard earned money years back to make Boystown the great neighborhood that it is today,” a responder posted. “Boystown was meant to be a happy place with arms full of hugs and love for all us gays who wanted a place to feel safe and have fun without the bullshit and crime. It’s sad that Boystown has been taken advantage of by these savage monkeys” (Take Back Boystown, 2011). For many local residents of Boystown, the street-corner practices of black and Latinx queer youth are not only disruptive to residents’ accomplishment of their daily and nightly rounds; in addition, their presence on the street and within neighborhood institutions such as the coffee shop does not comport with cultural practices commonly associated with everyday life and culture in gay neighborhoods. Warner (thirty-six, white, gay), a local Boystown resident, echoes the befuddlement of many local residents at the presence of the queer youth on street corners. “I can’t understand why these kids would want to spend their time standing around on corners, especially if they know that they are just in everybody’s way,” he explained. “You would think that they would and could find something better to do.”

Conclusion Few groups who converge in Boystown experience as many barriers to community integration as queer youth of color. Not only are they unable to claim membership

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in gay neighborhoods through traditional residential ties, but also, unlike many vicarious citizens who claim community in Boystown, often queer youths cannot access the economic and cultural anchors associated with the area’s gay community. Moreover, implicit images of iconic gay spaces such as Boystown as white spaces in the public imagination mark these youths as targets for hypercriminalization (Rios, 2011), as local residents dismiss the conspicuous presence of black and brown bodies on neighborhood street corners late at night as “deviant, risky, threatening, and criminal” (Rios, 2011, p. xiv). Despite the hostile reception they receive from local residents, many black and Latinx LGBT youth endure racial violence and potential violence in Boystown in order to live their lives out of the closet (Ghaziani, 2014; Greene, 2014). Queer youth of color appropriate and refashion gayborhood street corners and institutional anchors into sites that support and foster bonds of kinship between them. Queer street families represent a variation on the “chosen families” that have become less prominent in the wake of legal recognition of same-sex marriage, which privileges more homonormative models of family. These youths maintain a right to community in Boystown based on its reputation as a gay area, drawing on spatial practices familiar to them to foster community and make the area culturally resonant as a queer space. Ironically, the very factors that many local residents have associated with Boystown’s decline may actually contribute to its continued political and socio-cultural relevance. While political gains and increasing social acceptance have expanded the residential imagination of gays and lesbians beyond traditional gay neighborhoods, the participation of queer youth of color in gay neighborhoods reaffirms the enduring utility of iconic gay neighborhoods as cultural and political spaces that foster the safe exploration of queer gender and sexual expression.

Note 1

The section title plays on the title of Weston’s (1991) book Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. In titling this section, I hope to consider how homonormative families represent new forms of “chosen families” that have gained legitimacy at the expense of either the “chosen families” highlighted in Weston’s study or the queer street families introduced in this chapter.

References Anacker, K. B. & Morrow-Jones, H. A. (2005). Neighborhood factors associated with same-sex households in U.S. cities. Urban Geography, 26(5), 385–409. Anderson, E. (1991). Neighborhood effects on teenage pregnancy. In C. Jencks & P. E. Peterson (Eds.), The urban underclass (pp. 375–98). Washington, DC: Brookings Institute. Anderson, E. (1994). The code of the streets. Atlantic Monthly, 273, 80–94. Anderson, E. (1999). Code of the streets: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city. New York, NY: Norton. Anderson, E. (2012). The iconic ghetto. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 642, 8–24. Anderson, E. (2015). The white space. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 1(1), 10–21.

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Baim, T. (2011, June 26). A tale of two Prides: Crowd control a problem at Chicago’s pride parade. Windy City Times. Retrieved from www.windycitytimes.com/gay/lesbian/news/ ARTICLE.php?AID=32504 Barlow, G. (2011, July 13–19). Speakers clash on crime, race, age issue at Boystown CAPS meeting. Gay Chicago, 7. Brekhus, W. (2003). Peacocks, chameleons, and centaurs: Gay suburbia and the grammar of social identity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Brown, P. L. (2007, October 30). Gay enclaves face prospect of being passé. The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/us/30gay.html?mcubz=3 Brown-Saracino, J. (2011). From the lesbian ghetto to ambient community: The perceived costs and benefits of integration for community. Social Problems, 58(3), 361–88. Collins, A. & Drinkwater, S. (2017). Fifty shades of gay: Social and technological change, urban deconcentration and niche enterprise. Urban Studies, 54(3), 765–85. Daniel-McCarter, O. (2012). Us vs. them! Gays and the criminalization of queer youth of color in Chicago. Children’s Legal Rights Journal, 32(1), 5–17. Demarest, E. (2011, June 29). Boystown stabbing leads to racial controversy. Windy City Times, 14. Gates, G. J. & Ost, J. (2004, September–October). Getting us where we live. The Gay and Lesbian Review, 19–22. Ghaziani, A. (2014). There goes the gayborhood? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gotham, K. F. & Brumley, K. (2002). Using space: Agency and identity in a public-housing development. City & Community, 1(3), 267–89. Greene, T. (2014). Gay neighborhoods and the rights of the vicarious citizen. City & Community, 13(2), 99–118. Hunter, M. A. (2010). The nightly round: Space, social capital, and urban black nightlife. City & Community, 9(2), 165–86. Jackson, S. & Nargis, J. (2017, May 7). Making Chicago’s Boystown. WBEZ 91.5 Chicago. Retrieved from www.interactive.wbez.org/curiouscity/makingboystown/ Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of great American cities. New York, NY: Random House. Kunerth, J. (2007, September 16). For a number of gay bars, it’s last call. The Orlando Sentinel. Retrieved from www.articles.orlandosentinel.com/2007-09-16/new/gaybars_1_gay-bar-barsin-orlando-gay-nightclub Kyles, K. (2007, December 10). Boystown shifting as more families move in. Red Eye. Retrieved from www.articles.chicagotribune.com/2007-12-10/news/0712100253_1_gaymen-calendars-culture-clash Leff , L. (2007, March 12). Gay neighborhoods worry over identity. Associated Press. Retrieved from www.foxnews.com/wires/2007Mar12/0,4670,GayNeighborhood,00.html Lloyd, R. (2010). Neo-bohemia: Art and commerce in the postindustrial city (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Logan, J. R. & Molotch, H. (2007). Urban fortunes:The political economy of place (20th anniversary ed.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Miller, S. (2014, June 30). Alderman Tunnery open to moving Pride Parade downtown. CBS Chicago. Retrieved from www.chicago.cbslocal.com/2014/06/30/alderman-tunney-opento-moving-pride-parade-downtown/ Nair, Y. (2010, September 8). Gender JUST protests Northalsted Business Alliance. Windy City Times. Retrieved from www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/Gender-JUST-protestsNorthalsted-Business-Alliance/28323.html Orne, J. (2017). Boystown: Sex and community in Chicago. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Perry, G. & Vrie, K. (2017, June 7). Boystown:The state of the gayborhood in 2017. Time Out Chicago. Retrieved from www.timeout.com/chicago/lgbt/boystown-the-state-of-thegayborhood-in-2017

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Rios,V. M. (2011). Punished: Policing the lives of black and Latino boys. New York, NY: New York University Press. Shepard, B. & Smithsimon, G. (2011). The beach beneath the streets: Contesting New York City’s public spaces. Albany, NY: The State University of New York Press. Smith, S.V. (2008, April 25). Gay bars adjusting to a new reality. Marketplace. Retrieved from www.marketplace.org/topics/life/gay-bars-adjusting-new-reality Sosin, K. (2011a, July 13). Hundreds pack Boystown violence forum. Windy City Times, 8. Sosin, K. (2011b, July 6). Lakeview ‘loitering’ event turns into dramatic showdown with queer youth organizers. Windy City Times. Retrieved from www.windycitymediagroup. com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=32608 Spero, J. (2016, June 3). There goes the gayborhood: Why gay areas in cities may disappear. Financial Times. Retrieved from www.ft.com/content/c73b33aa-229c-11e6-9d4dc11776a5124d Spring, A. (2013). Declining segregation of same-sex partners: Evidence from census 2000 and 2010. Population Research and Policy Review, 32(5), 687–716. Sullivan, R. D. (2007, December 2). Last call: Why the gay bars of Boston are disappearing, and what it says about the future of city life. The Boston Globe, E1. Trice, D.T. (2009, November 30). Some Black youth feel more at home in Boystown, but get a chilly reception. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from www.articles.chicagotribune.com/ 2009-11-30/news/0911290242_1_gay-bars-same-sex-partner-youth Take Back Boystown (2011). About Take Back Boystown. Retrieved from www.facebook. com/pg/TakeBackBoystown/about/?ref=page_internal Usher, N. & Morrison, E. (2010).The demise of the gay enclave, communication infrastructure theory, and the transformation of gay public space. In C. Pullen & M. Cooper (Eds.), LGBT identity and online new media (pp. 271–87). New York, NY: Routledge. Venkatesh, S. (2000). American project: The rise and fall of a modern ghetto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weston, K. (1991). Families we choose: Lesbians, gays, kinship. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Williams, G. (2007, September 19). 10 businesses facing extinction in 10 years. Entrepreneur. Retrieved from www.entrepreneur.com/article/184288

13 FUTURE FRONTS IN THE FIGHT FOR FAMILY DIVERSITY A panel discussion1 Featuring Martha M. Ertman, Andy Izenson, Ricci Levy, James Lopata, Hugh Ryan, and Sarah Wright

Editors’ introduction: The previous chapters in this section have explored a few of the diverse forms that families and caring relationships can take, with a special focus on how they are changing as same-sex marriage spreads. On the one hand, same-sex marriage has sometimes been part of a broader opening of attitudes toward non-conventional families and relationships, and in some cases it has directly helped generate new, sometimes surprising ideas about different ways to structure caring relationships. On the other, same-sex marriage has also placed increased pressure on some non-conventional relationships, especially by incorporating some lesbian and gay people into normalization efforts aimed at structuring communities for the benefit of married, nuclear families. Across all the section’s chapters, it is clear that a broad range of caring relationships already exists, but that more work is needed to help these diverse relationships flourish. The spread of same-sex marriage holds important lessons about the possibilities and challenges such work will entail.This chapter concludes the volume by reflecting on some of these lessons, in the form of a transcribed excerpt from a key panel at the “After Marriage” conference. In this panel, several people involved in family diversity struggles in different ways—as activists, journalists, social workers, lawyers, academics, and members of non-conventional relationships themselves—share their thoughts about the resources that exist now to support such relationships, and about the legal and cultural changes needed to support them further. Collectively, the panelists place a special emphasis on the need for flexible legal and linguistic frameworks designed from the beginning to accommodate ongoing variation and change, rather than to define “family” around a specific template.The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length; all significant edits have been marked with ellipses and brackets. --We’re here to talk about what we’re loosely calling the family diversity movement. I’ve also heard some people over the

HUGH RYAN (WRITER AND CURATOR):

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course of this weekend referring to it as relational diversity. But really we’re asking, post-marriage, what can we talk about in terms of other kinds of family relationships and their relationship to US law, or single people and their relationship to benefits in the law? I want to start off by saying a little bit about myself . . . Although I myself have been in a relationship with two men for the last seven years—we live together, we actually own property together—I realized that I didn’t know a lot about what was happening in terms of legal rights and recognition for families like mine . . . [Together with three other people,] six of us have formed a community together.We purchased a building and in the course of doing this we went through all of these realizations, that it was really, really difficult to do as a group of six. Our attorney told us, “Don’t put everyone on the mortgage,” and we said, “Well, then some people are going to be totally unprotected if anything goes wrong.” And the lawyer said, “Yeah, but if you apply for a mortgage with six people you’re not going to get it.” For me I think a lot about relationships of care as being the most important part. The government has real standing to worry about whether or not I’m going to end up on the streets, whether or not I’m going to end up needing healthcare in an emergency room, whether or not I’m going to end up a ward of the state. There are a lot of ways you can prevent that from happening, and I can see the government’s standing in promoting relationships of care that prevent those things from happening. But when I think about a movement for polyamory, plural marriage, family diversity, I think a lot about other kinds of formal unions of care that we could be supporting in this country and that could be part of this conversation . . . I wanted [to organize] this panel to talk to some of the experts and the people who have been living these experiences, and so I’m going to turn it over now to one those folks, Sarah Wright. SARAH WRIGHT (BOARD CHAIR OF UNMARRIED EQUALITY AND SOCIAL WORKER):

I’m going to be talking mostly about marital status and what kind of concept that represents in social science research, what kind of measurement that is. For a long time now, when I’ve been filling out forms and being asked these questions, I never check off a marital-status box. I just cross the whole thing out and write none. I don’t know what you guys do, but I really feel like that question does not have a good objective, measurable, quantifiable set of responses for most of our lives, and I think that . . . we’re sort of closing ourselves off when we don’t talk about expanding that. Someone mentioned this morning that on the [US] census forms, there are ways that people can check off more than one box for . . . race, and probably some other categories, but the marital-status box just remains so fixed and so inflexible. I think we need to have a conversation about that. I also think, to someone’s earlier point this morning about the history of marriage, that the institution is extremely resilient. My colleagues at the Council on Contemporary Families, such as the marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, have really helped me to understand that. So I don’t think that marriage is in danger of going away. I’m not sure that any of us here in this room will

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live in a true post-marital society . . . But . . . I do think that we can continue to question marriage as a legal status. I think the real question is whether or not this is going to be a zero-sum game, where all the goodies are attached to an institution that some people have described as greedy, versus are there ways that . . . we can add some of those goodies to unmarried relationships. And I think that there’s definitely been some movement in that direction recently, and I think that we’ll continue to go in that direction. I think also that [traditional] family law, as someone said this morning, is lagging the way that contemporary families look and operate and live and move about in the world. I spend most of my time in healthcare, working primarily with older adults and their families, and in healthcare we really emphasize patient-centered care a lot, that’s important. But as a professional social worker, I feel that I’m often talking with colleagues, other providers, and patients themselves about how we need to talk about patient- and family-centered care and practice. Logistically, in healthcare when we’re having complex, difficult conversations about people’s bodies perhaps failing them at different points of the life cycle . . . I think that families and support systems are really so important to healing and to health [so we need to expand our definition of “family” beyond birth, marriage, and adoption]. MARTHA ERTMAN (PROFESSOR OF LAW, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND): As Sarah rightly said, law lags. That’s just what law does. It’s old-fashioned, and it’s our job to pull it up to date . . . As a law professor, I will talk a little bit about what law can do, focusing in particular on the fact that law is not an on/off switch. We talk about law as if it’s all or nothing [but it’s more of a spectrum]. At the nothing end you might be criminalized, while . . . in [the middle] it might be that you’re civilly banned, so you’re not going to end up with criminal penalties such as jail or a [monetary] fine, but they may just ignore you. And then on the far end, where we have an Obergefell, it comes with full legal recognition, social security benefits, and all that stuff [see Figure 13.1 for an illustration]. That’s a lot of space in between [a civil ban and full recognition]. I am an evangelical about contracts, and I am here to spread the good news that contracts, and mini-contracts that I call “deals,” can fill up this space. Some of these deals are ones that law doesn’t necessarily recognize. It might be that they’re too informal. Or it might be that it’s about something that the law says is against public policy. But most people honor their promises, and these promises mean something among us [in our own daily lives]. So, [if we look at] Hugh’s example of six people on the mortgage, it may well be that the bank says, “That’s too much of a risk, we don’t have a form with six openings for borrowers.” But what I’m

criminalized

full recognition

civil ban space for contracts/deals

FIGURE 13.1

Spectrum of relationship legality

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suggesting is that two of those people can go on the mortgage as borrowers, and then the other four can make a subcontract in the privacy of their own kitchen . . . And it probably will be legally binding, albeit in a patchwork way. So in the spirit of show and tell, I’m going to tell a little story about how I became an “us” with a gay guy. I found myself single at age thirty-eight, wanting a child. The woman I had been with for twelve years didn’t want a kid, so I left. I tried to figure out how to do it. So I called my old friend Victor from law school. Fifteen years before, we’d talked about having a baby together, in the late ’80s. So I called him up, told him, “I’m single now. Hey, so do you want to have a baby? Remember when we talked about it in law school?” And he said, “Uh, what do you have in mind?” And I told him a little bit about what I had mind, and he said let’s keep talking . . . Finally, this boy [is born], as my friend,Victor, is holding my hand. We’re both single at this point and we’re co-parenting . . . and the question is how do you get that in both legally and socially. I’m not going to talk about the legal part here, but I’ll talk about the social part where Walter,2 this baby, is about six months old, and we have a naming ceremony in the Unitarian church in Provincetown . . . Ertman then reads a selection from her book, Love’s Promises:3 As if to show off these accomplishments in the place where Victor accepted my offer and I finally conceived, we’re back in Provincetown pushing a stroller en route to the naming ceremony . . . [The ceremony is] a trick clarifying that Victor and I are an “us,” without slipping into the ill-fitting fiction that we’re a couple. The naming ceremony’s contract-like promises helped tailor the terms of our deal. Where some religions are creedal—requiring belief in, say, the divinity of Christ— Unitarianism is covenantal, defined by promises to dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in love, and to help one another . . . So the minister listed a series of promises from godparents, grandparents,Victor, and me, and finally our people in the pews, to formalize the “usness” of our arrangement within the larger “usness” of family and friends. Deal #1: The Godparents Walter is blessed, the minister says, by the care of his godparents’ friendship. She also reminds those dear friends that they helped Victor and me become the people we are, as well as helping Walter go from an idea to reality. When asked to pledge their support for us and to Walter, they replied in a ragged chorus, “We do.” Deal #2: The Grandparents I just about hold my breath when she turns to the grandparents, asking them to share their wisdom with Walter, and to support both him and us, and wonder if all four of our parents will really embrace our weirdo family. But they stick to the script, answering, “We do,” without hesitation.

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Deal #3: The Parents Then she turns to us . . . Like a narrator, the minister starts off by clarifying that we never pledged each other to one another in love, yet here we stand ready to pledge to raise Walter together in the loyalty, admiration, and trust of friendship. When we get to our lines—“We will”—we’re smiling as much at [Walter] squirming in Victor’s arms as the odd parallel between this and a marriage vow. Deal #4: The Congregation Finally the minister turns to the pews asking everyone whether they too will strive to love and cherish Walter and us, in times of struggle as well as gladness. As scripted in the order of service, fifty voices promise that they will, also pledging to build a community in which Walter “will grow old surrounded by beauty, embraced by love and cradled in the arms of peace.” So my argument is that these deals between godparents, grandparents, friends who are raising a baby, and our communities . . . signaled that Victor and I were an “us” but not a couple. Since then, we both have found somebody to fall in love with, and each of us have gotten married, so now poor Walter has three, four parents overlooking his homework and everything else. And thirteen years into it, we’re all getting along. I like to think that contracts, both formal and written, and a lot of informal deals like [in the naming ceremony], play a key role in defining what people give and get. It’s contracts, whether they’re legally binding or informal ones that are more socially binding, that fill this space [between civil bans and full legal recognition] and allow for the plurality that will keep marriage from being the only game. I think marriage will remain the most popular game, normatively, and maybe numerically, because by definition all the variety means there will be lots of other options . . . But contracts and deals are a more friendly way than many people realize to mechanize those connections, and to recognize all those [different] relationships [beyond marriage] and to protect people in them. RICCI LEVY (PRESIDENT, WOODHULL FREEDOM FOUNDATION): The Woodhull Freedom Foundation is a human rights organization, and we work at the intersection of sexual and human rights. Our mission is to affirm sexual freedom as a fundamental human right. A big part of sexual freedom is personal autonomy, and a big part of personal autonomy is the ability, the right to choose the relationships, the number of relationships, the pairings, the partners that populate your life . . . In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was ratified [as] a foundational document for the United Nations. Article 16 of that Declaration affirms our fundamental human right to form family. It’s a human right, and the United States agreed it’s a human right. In the time since, the various UN commissions have met and faced requests from other countries and from this country to define “family,” and they have consistently refused to

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define “family.” The latest comment . . . said that we have to recognize the diversity of family today and cannot limit it by trying to define it. In our vision of family [at the Woodhull Freedom Foundation], our vision of where we would like to go, rights do not accrue based on a relationship. Why should one relationship have 1,500 rights, and another not? Instead, if rights were to accrue to the individual, that would limit the government’s interest in regulating the families that we choose . . . Marriage is lovely for some people. For some people that are married, it’s not so lovely. Single is another option. Family is not necessarily a romantic gathering . . . Family could be a caretaker for a disabled person . . . [or] it could be two people that have been friends for all of their lives and who have raised their families, and they’ve decided to live together and to take responsibility for each other. That’s a form of family. One of the first things that we thought we would like to do [around this issue at the Woodhull Freedom Foundation] is address the loss of domestic partner registries, which is happening all across the country. That’s a contradiction for the ultimate goal of the project [to attach rights to the individual rather than to the relationship], but someone very wise . . . said, don’t sacrifice the good for the perfect. So [now we’re tracking the] domestic partner registries [that are disappearing]. Delta Airlines: gone. Universities: gone.Verizon gave notice to its employees [that domestic partnership benefits would end]. Pick a state, pick any state. In Florida, Miami-Dade County has phenomenal domestic partner registries, [but] the other counties are eliminating the domestic partner registries. So domestic partner registries are one issue, but the core [problem with them] is the word “couples.” So [what about] poly? . . . But if we’re talking [in more general] terms of “family,” then we’re not talking in [separate] terms of poly or single or married or cohabiting or households . . . That’s the kind of work that we’re doing, and that’s the way that we keep trying to look at the issue of married versus unmarried versus cohabiting. [Our goal is] to take it up above the different [specific] relationships and [to instead focus on the general] human right to family as each of us defines it. JAMES LOPATA (JOURNALIST AND LIFE COACH): I want to start, before I tell you exactly what I do, with a quote from . . . Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: “There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.”4 I earn my living as a journalist and as an executive and entrepreneurial life coach and consultant, and in 2004 I was covering marriage equality in Massachusetts for the New England LGBT press. And I remember on May 17 of that year, sitting at my computer typing up stories about the nation’s first legal marriages for same-sex couples, which were happening all over the place by the power vested in so many people in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts . . . Then, as a young journalist myself, I helped give voice to marriage-equality discourse in a very public way. But today in regards to my own possibility of marriage, in getting married, there is still silence. Marriage, the idea of settling down with one other person in a long-lasting, committed, legally

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recognized relationship, as it turns out, may be no more valid for me than being heterosexual was or is. Along with my journalism and my coaching, I have also been blessed with a meditation practice and a master’s degree studying theology, Buddhism in particular . . . Through meditation and Buddhism, I’ve discovered the profound value of silence in discourse. It is silence that allows inner voices and truths to be heard, and because of these silences I have less need for outside discourse to help me discern my own path forward. When I listen to the outside today, I hear discourses on partnership and couples and marriage, etc. But when I get silent I hear something different for me. My current—some would call him a partner; I joke that we are two single guys who hang out together. When we are apart, we tell people we’re single.When we’re together, we tell people we’re together. Confused? Or not . . . Today for me, as an executive and life coach, it is my mission and passion to help people I work with find who they are within themselves and help them to give voice to that. To help them create the silence so that they can hear themselves, cutting through the din from the outside to hear the freedom within. And it is in my continuing journalism vocation that I feel called to help make known these stories of freedom that may not conform to narratives currently active in the common discourse. It has been instructive for me to recognize, in my covering of the unfolding of marriage equality, that the first state in the country to legalize marriage for same-sex couples by vote and not through the courts was in a state where the leading equal marriage advocacy group didn’t have the word “equality” in it, or any similar term. It was not through [an organization with a name like] Mass Equality [in Massachusetts], an Empire State Pride Agenda [in New York], an Equality California, or a Human Rights Campaign that marriage equality won its first vote. It was in Connecticut . . . The organization that made the largest push for that change was called . . . Love Makes a Family. Not “equality,” not “fairness,” not “rights,” not “second- or first-class citizens.” In Connecticut, “love” first won. Maine learned from Connecticut’s lesson, as did everyone else. In Maine’s first public ballot initiative before Connecticut, Maine advocates pushed for “equality,” and they lost. In the second public-ballot initiative for equal marriage, after Connecticut’s victory, advocates ran an ad campaign with rural farm families welcoming home their lesbian daughters [who were] bringing their romantic partners with them. The ads made clear that these parents simply loved their children and were happy to see them in love and being loved. Consequently, Maine voters approved marriage equality . . . For me the lesson of marriage equality is not about laws, judges, or supreme courts, or legislators; it is about listening to the heart. It is about clearing the head and mind of all classifications. It begins in silences . . . that access the freedom of who we are and allow the freedom to be heard, tended to, cultivated, and lived out loud.

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I work in non-traditional family law. It’s a term that we all kind of hate but no one has figured out a better alternative to. What we mean by that is that we work with families that are not really understood by the law because they don’t look the way the law thinks a family should look, and that means a lot of different things. It means queer families, polyamorous families. It means families who are cohabiting because of being low-income. It means families who are in any respect not living [as] mom and dad, who are married, who are both cis, who are monogamous, who are living in a family unit in their own home with their biological children and nobody else. Any family other than that is how we understand our clients. So that job for me has two parts. One part is the direct representation part, actually working with these families . . . coming to us and saying how do we protect our families. And then [the other part is] advocacy . . . And so for the first part it’s kind of cool, because it’s only been in the last couple of years that the answer to that question has been anything other than hysterical laughter that slowly devolves into sobbing. But now what we’re doing is understanding [direct representation] as a two-part job. The first part of direct representation is about what Professor Ertman would describe as contracts and deals. It’s the intra-family stuff, helping the people who are members of the family as they understand it clarify and elucidate and effectuate their agreements, their autonomy, their work together within the bounds of the family. And then the other part of the work is looking at what’s necessary and possible to smooth the movement of that family unit through institutions that it has to interact with as it moves through the world: the state, hospitals, schools, the criminal justice systems, the court system. What interactions with those institutions do we anticipate, what are we worried about, and how can we smooth them to the extent possible? So those are the two sides of that work, the intra-family stuff and the dealing with the world stuff. And then the advocacy part of the work also has two parts. I do a lot of cultural competency training, mostly for other lawyers. And the cultural competency is basically saying, “So these people that you think are completely incomprehensible to you, who you think that you could [not] possibly share any motivations in common, and you have no idea how to serve them effectively or with care . . . their motivations are really not that different from yours.” Which leads into the second part of that advocacy, which is being loudly and obviously out and open about everything that I am in that work. And so going to places like the New York State Bar Association and saying, “Hi, we talk transgender people, we talk about queer, we talk about people living in non-traditional families.We don’t talk about polyamorous people as if they are aliens, and as if their legal needs don’t overlap at all with the legal needs of regular people. And as someone that is all of those things I’m here to tell you it’s not actually that different.” What do queer parents want? Stability in their parent–child relationships. They want to have their children not taken away. I’m pretty sure that’s the same thing straight parents want . . .

ANDY IZENSON (ATTORNEY):

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In doing that work, part of it for me is being very obnoxious and loud and fearless about what my family looks like and my life looks like. And [showing] the way that my family [is structured] as this sort of amorphous, complicatedly global, interconnected molecule of different types of mutual care and interdependences that are structured with intention and that . . . don’t have a hard boundary between how we understand our family and how we understand our community. That’s . . . particularly important in how my family composed of mostly transgender and gender non-conforming people understands itself . . . Because that experience and understanding of “family” for us cannot be disentangled from being trans, because it is an active resistance to living in a world that tells trans and gender non-conforming people that they are unworthy of love and that they don’t deserve to have a family. We have to love each other because nobody else is going to do it. So that’s part of how I understand family and it informs my work as well. After Obergefell happened, the complicated and weird and impossible-tonavigate patchwork of incompatible legal standards that was LGBTQ family law transformed into a different, complicated and weird patchwork of incompatible legal standards. And part of what that looked like was this big dissent that Justice Roberts did, where he said . . . “Scalia warned us about this, and here it is. Now the polyamorous people are next” . . . And so everybody was very alarmed. “Is it true, is polyamorous marriage next? Let’s ask the expert,” and they called me . . . And I said, “The legal logic is sound. The legal logic behind Obergefell was that parents in same-sex families and their children are disadvantaged by the lack of legal recognition of their relationships. And that is true for any people whose relationships are not legally recognized, including polyamorous people” . . . But I said, “I want to be clear, I also don’t care.” [To see what I mean,] in mediation we have this thing called the distinction between “positions” and “interest.” Your “position” in mediation is what you say you want . . . and your “interest” is why you want that, what’s motivating you, what’s underlying that desire . . . In divorce mediation, what that looks like is someone will say, “I want $100,000,” and you say, “OK, why?” And they’ll say . . .“Well, I need to leave the house where we are living together, and I want to feel secure in being able to put down a down payment on a new house so that I don’t have to rent, so that I can feel stable” . . . The position is “I want $100 grand,” and the interest is, “I want to feel stable in where I live.” So in this discourse the position is “We want marriage,” while the interests underlying it are things that make a lot of sense. They make sense for gay [couples], they make sense for polyamorous people, they make sense for all the rest of us, too. We want financial stability, we want to have access to things like immigration benefits, we want to have parenting rights, we want to have healthcare . . . So we think about this garden of rights and benefits that are associated with marriage, and, of course, no matter how carefully we try to get ourselves in the door, we’re going to be slamming the door in somebody else’s face behind us.

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So the work that I do is about trying to reach into the garden and take the things out of it and make them more widely available, through the intra-family work and through the work that is about easing the movement of the family through the institutions that it has to interact with. The medium of the work is human connections, and there are a lot of different ways that people can be connected to one another . . . And our job is to disentangle all of those ways. We’re talking about cohabitation, we’re talking about financial interdependence, we’re talking about sharing healthcare, we’re talking about sharing advance directives, we’re talking about romance, we’re talking about sexual intimacy, all of these different things. [Our job is] pulling them apart. And saying, “OK, so marriage [carries] the assumption that you want all of these things and you want them all with the same person, and that’s goofy. So let’s identify which of these things these clients actually want to have and with whom, and how do we effectuate those specifically and individually?” And sometimes it looks like contracts, sometimes it looks like filling out forms, sometimes it looks like making stuff up and hoping it works. But it’s about particularizing and unbundling all of the things that are currently stuck to the idea of marriage . . . There’s this housing law case in New York, it’s called Braschi v. Stahl . . . It was 1988,5 and there was this gay couple . . . One of them, I think he was in his late fifties or early sixties, and one of them was in his early twenties . . . They were living together in the older partner’s rent-stabilized apartment . . . Rent stabilization is really, really important in New York housing law . . . because if you have a rent-stabilized lease it means that your landlord can’t raise your rent, either at all or by more than a very small, certain amount every year. So it gives you a measure of safety because it means you know your rent is not going to get hiked up by 400 percent the next time you get a lease, so you’re not going to lose your housing all at once. So there are a lot of rules around rent-stabilized leases because they’re very, very valuable and very, very desirable . . .The older partner was on this rent-stabilized lease in the apartment. His younger partner lived with him, and they lived together in that apartment for . . . about ten years.They had a regular family life, they went grocery shopping together, they had bank accounts together, they cooked dinner together. It was just what you would think of a regular day-to-day family life. And then the older partner contracted HIV and . . . then he died . . . The other thing about rent stabilization is that it passes through family relationships. If you have a rent-stabilized lease your spouse can take it over, your child can take it over, but they want to limit who can take it over, because landlords don’t want to keep those rent-stabilized leases. And so the younger partner went to the landlord and said, “I’m his family, I count as family. I should get to stay on this lease. I don’t want to lose my home that I’ve lived in for ten years with my partner. I count.” And the landlord said, “Nope.” Remember, this is 1988 . . . years and years before same-sex marriage was even a twinkle in Joe Solmonese’s eye,6 and so the landlords were like, “You’re strange homosexuals, you have to get out.” And he sued about it, and the court

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came down with this unbelievably progressive and quite beautiful opinion about what “family” means. There was actually a bullet-pointed list of what factors, as far as this judge was concerned, meant that you count as family. Are there indicia of permanence and stability? Do you share daily family life? Do you share family tasks? Do you share finances? Are you . . . listed as each other’s power of attorney and healthcare proxy? Are you doing what you can to indicate that you are going to be practically and emotionally there for each other no matter what? That’s family. And so this judge came down and said, this is a family relationship, this counts . . . The judge basically said that legal recognition of family life should be based on . . . the reality of daily family life rather than on legal fictions like a marriage certificate or an adoption order. . . [This case] is not [binding] precedent because it was a lower court, and so it’s more a useful anecdote than a legal precedent. But . . . using Braschi is how the segment of my family that I currently live with got our apartment. There are six of us and we live, just like [the Scarborough Family], on a street that’s zoned single-family. So we went to the open house and we were talking to the landlord, and she said, “Well, you all seem super nice, but this street is zoned single-family . . .” So I sat her down in the living room and I was like, “All right, Braschi v. Stahl, 1989, here we go.” And so it’s great. I have this beautiful house, we have a little backyard, there’s a dog whose name is Ladypants. It’s wonderful. And also, we’ve been living there for three years and we are in violation of zoning law. Our lease is a lie, and the landlord knows that. She could kick us out at any time. It is a beautiful and loving and wonderful housing situation and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, and also it is inherently unstable because my family is not real as far as the law is concerned. Bullshit. So I think about the universe forking at Braschi. In the universe that we live in, everyone’s like, “That seems nice, but what if we got gay marriage instead,” and so we went in that direction . . . But I think about what that other fork of the universe would be, where they take in the precedent that was set in Braschi and advocate to say, “OK, we’ve got this idea of family being based on these indicia of permanence and stability and daily family life. As a legal concept, let’s run with that, let’s build policy and a movement around that.” And I think about what that world would like today, twenty-eight years later, and I conceptualize my job as pushing our universe a little bit closer to that point . . . I want to end by quoting Carol Queen because I do that in every talk I give. At the Woodhull Summit a couple of years ago, Carol Queen keynoted . . . She came out and she sort of banged her hand on the podium, and she said, “You know what’s wrong with this damn world? Ahistoricity.” That sentence has been bouncing around in my head ever since. Because if we conceptualize our jobs as [thinking that] this generation of activists has to heal the world singlehandedly without considering our heritage . . . without considering who the giants are whose shoulders we stand on, we can’t not fail . . .We have to [instead] conceptualize ourselves as a link in the chain. Our job is to stand shoulder to shoulder with those who came before us and those who come after us, and do our part in the work.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

Thank you to Hugh Ryan and Sarah Wright for organizing the panel on which this chapter is based, to Aida Garcia for transcribing the panel, and to the panelists for reading an earlier draft of this chapter. This is a pseudonym, after Walt Whitman. Ertman, Martha (2015). Love’s promises: How formal and informal contracts shape all kinds of families. Boston: Beacon Press. Foucault, M. (1990/1978). The history of sexuality, vol. 1 (R. Hurley,Trans.), p. 27. New York: Vintage. The ruling discussed here was issued in 1989, but the dispute began in 1988. From 2005 to 2012, Joe Solmonese was president of the Human Rights Campaign, the wealthiest national lesbian and gay rights organization in the United States. He was a major advocate of same-sex marriage rights.

INDEX

access: to bathrooms 135; to financial impacts of marriage 31–42, 114–15, 119–20; to healthcare 38, 115, 118, 184 African-American communities, same-sex marriage 75 agency 10–11 Aid to Families and Dependent Children (AFDC) 39 AIDS 112–13 A-Qiang Tongzhi 137–48 Arizona, relational diversity 117–18 assimilation vs. radicalization debate 81–2; see also normalization of relationships bathrooms, gender-neutral 135 Becker, Gary 5–6 Biographic-Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM) 19 biological/non-biological parents 48–51, 55–6, 87–9, 120–1 biologism 87–8 Black people: Boystown, Chicago 176, 178–9; intersectionality 76–8; non-monogamy 96–7; same-sex marriage 74, 75 bodies 128 Boggis, Terry 121 Boystown, Chicago 168–9, 170–9 Braschi v. Stahl 192 Broadway Youth Center, Chicago 173, 178 Canada: family law 49, 50, 52–3; relational diversity 117

Cape Town, South Africa, same-sex couples 80–90 care: care work 46–56, 80–90, 150–67; collective action and resistance as care 27; relational diversity and care 183–5, 189–92 Chicago, Boystown 168–9, 170–2 children see parenting China see xinghun marriage Chinagayles.com 137–48 Christopher Street Financial 32–7 citizenship, vicarious 171 civil registry offices 24–5 civil rights 76, 114 civil society, LGBTQ movement 114–15 class see social class Clinton administration 122–3 collectives 183; see also Scarborough Family colonialism, same-sex couples in Cape Town 80 communes 183; see also Scarborough Family community context: LGBTQ movement 115–16; queer street families 168–79; relational conflict 51 conflict: in queer families 46–56; Scarborough Family zoning laws 159–62 conjugality, Chinese xinghun marriage 142–3 connectedness 115–16 Connecticut see Scarborough Family ‘connections’ 127–35 consensually non-monogamous (CNM) relationships 94–5, 105–6;

Index

critiques of 104–5; normalization 98–104; popular culture 95–8 consumer-citizens, financial impacts of marriage 37–8 contract marriage (xinghun) 136–48 cooperative marriage (xinghun) 136–48 creativity 10–11 culture: polynormativity 95–8; same-sex couples in Cape Town, South Africa 83–4 Dasgupta, Debanuj 122–3 dating websites, xinghun marriage 137–48 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA): Arizona Together Coalition 117–18; financial impacts of marriage 33–4, 37, 38 Deleuze, G. 81–2, 86–7, 89, 90 de-politicization of gay culture 60–1, 70–1 desire: sex work 124; sexual liberation 125, 128; transgender 130; xinghun marriage 137, 139–40, 142, 148 discrimination: queer critiques of marriage 3–6; queer public sociology 21 diversity see family; relational diversity diversity in neighborhoods 164 Duggan, Lisa: material needs 121–2; polynormativity 94; queer critiques of marriage 3–4, 60–1 economic impacts of marriage 31–42, 114–15, 119–20 economic issues see financial issues emotionality of marriage 65–7, 70 Ertman, Martha 184–6 ethnic minorities see people of color fake marriage (xinghun) 136–48 family: Chinese queer people 137, 140–3; in public policy 41–2; queer critiques of marriage 2–6; same-sex couples in Cape Town, South Africa 82–90; see also parenting family diversity: Chinese xinghun marriage 144–7; impact of same-sex marriage 1–2, 182; legal context 183, 184–6, 189–92; LGBTQ movement 112–19; policy agenda 182–92; queer street families 168–79; and relational diversity 183; research agenda 8–11; same-sex couples in Cape Town, South Africa 83–5; Scarborough Family zoning laws 157–9, 162–7; see also relational diversity feminism: 133; gender roles 5–6; same-sex marriage 64

195

financial impacts of marriage 31–42, 114–15, 119–20 financial issues: LGBTQ movement 113–14; mortgage applications 154, 183, 184–5; poverty 38–40, 113–14; and welfare 38–40; zoning laws conflict, Scarborough Family 160–4 Franke, Katherine 73 freedom-to-marry movement 31, 34, 38, 41 friendship, collective action and resistance 27 gays: Boystown, Chicago 168–9, 178; financial impacts of marriage 32–7, 52; iconic neighborhoods 170–2; same-sex couples in Cape Town 85–6; same-sex marriage 3, 4; sexual liberation 124–5; xinghun marriage 138, 144–5 gender fluidity, Ignacio Rivera 130–5 gender identity: Boystown, Chicago 173; Ignacio Rivera 130–5 gender roles: marriage 5–6; polygamy 102–3; same-sex couples in Cape Town, South Africa 82, 85–6 GenderJUST 169, 174–5 global context: LGBTQ movement 117–18; relational diversity 1–2; xinghun marriage 136–7 Guattari, F. 81–2, 86–7, 89, 90 Halsted LGBT Community Center, Chicago 173, 174, 178 Hartford, Connecticut see Scarborough Family Hatch, Jennifer 32–7 health, impact of marriage 4–5 healthcare access 38, 115, 118, 184 Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) program 40–1 heteronormativity: collective action and resistance 25–6; intersectionality 76–8; normalization 59–60; same-sex marriage 65, 70–1; xinghun marriage 137, 143; see also normalization of relationships heterosexuality 76–8 historical context, Spain 19–20 HIV/AIDS 112–13 Hollibaugh, Amber L. 124 homonormativity: consensually non-monogamous (CNM) relationships 100–1; lesbian relationships in Madrid 18; and polynormativity 94–5; queer critiques of marriage 3;

196

Index

xinghun marriage 139, 143; see also normalization of relationships homophobia: lesbian relationships in Madrid 17–19, 21–5; World Pride 27 homosexuality in China 137–9; see also xinghun marriage homosexuals see gays; lesbians household formation: Scarborough Family 152–4; xinghun marriage 145–7 household labor, marriage 5–6 human rights 186–7 immigration reform 122–3 inequality: financial impacts of marriage 32; queer critiques of marriage 4–6 intersectionality 10, 76–8, 168–79 interviews: lesbian relationships in Madrid 17–19, 21–5; queer street families 172, 175–6; relational conflict 46–56; same-sex couples in Cape Town, South Africa 81, 85–90; same-sex marriage decisions 61–71; xinghun marriage 137–8, 144–5, 146–7; see also Scarborough Family INTIMATE project 19 Izenson, Andy 189 kinky communities 127, 135 Latinxs : Boystown, Chicago 174, 176–7, 178, 179; immigration reform 123; same-sex marriage 75 legal context: conflict in queer families 50, 51–5; family diversity 183, 184–6, 189–92; lesbian relationships in Madrid 17, 19–20; Obergefell case 35–6, 37, 40, 184, 190; polynormativity 93–4; same-sex couples in Cape Town, South Africa 82–3; same-sex marriage 1–2, 188; Windsor case 35–6, 37 legal pluralism 10 Lehr,V. 84 lesbian relationships in Madrid 17–19, 28; collective action and resistance 25–7; homo/transphobia as a form of slow violence 17–19, 21–5; research context 19; Spanish social and legal context 19–20 lesbians: biological/non-biological parents 84, 120; cultural context 75; financial impacts of marriage 32–7, 52; heteronormativity 76–8; same-sex couples in Cape Town 84, 85, 86, 88–90; same-sex marriage 3, 4, 64, 65, 66; xinghun marriage 138, 144–5 Levy, Ricci 186–8

LGBTQ marriage see same-sex marriage LGBTQ movement: Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement 111–12, 119–25; new strategic vision 112–19 Lopata, James 187–8 love: bodies 128; and conflict 47, 50–1, 55–6; consensually non-monogamous (CNM) relationships 101–2; emotionality of marriage 65–7, 70; financial benefits of marriage 33, 36; heteronormativity 25–6, 27; xinghun marriage 140 Madrid see lesbian relationships in Madrid mainstream norms 8–9; see also normalization of relationships marriage: financial impacts of marriage 31–42, 114–15, 119–20; post-marital society 183–4; queer critiques 2–6; symbolism 68–9; welfare 38–9, 122–3; welfare reform 39–41, 122; see also same-sex marriage; xinghun marriage marriage equality movement see freedom-to-marry movement marriage for convenience (xinghun) 136–48 Massachusetts, same-sex marriage decisions interviews 61–71 middle class: financial impacts of marriage 34, 37; intersectionality 78; same-sex marriage 66 migration see immigration reform modernity, Chinese xinghun marriage 142–3 Mo’Nique 97–8 mortgage applications 154, 183, 184–5 Nixon, Rob 18 nominal marriage (xinghun) 136–48 non-monogamy see consensually non-monogamous (CNM) relationships; polygamy non-traditional families see family diversity non-traditional relationships see relational diversity normalization of relationships: book overview 8, 9–10; racial context 78; relational diversity 134; same-sex couples in Cape Town, South Africa 80–90; same-sex marriage 7, 59–61; same-sex marriage decisions interviews 61–71; subversion 81–2; see also heteronormativity; homonormativity; polynormativity

Index

197

Obama administration: marriage promotion 41; poverty 38 Obergefell case 35–6, 37, 40, 184, 190

Queen, Carol 192 queer public sociology 21 queer street families 168–79

parenting: biological/non-biological 48–51, 55–6, 87–9, 120–1; Ignacio Rivera 132–3; lesbian relationships in Madrid 18, 23–4, 26–7; programs for queer families 46–7; relational conflict 47–56; relational diversity 120–1; xinghun marriage 140–3, 144 people of color : African-American communities 75; Boystown, Chicago 169–79; intersectionality 76–8; Latinxs 75, 123, 174, 176–7, 178, 179; non-monogamy 96–7, 102–3; same-sex couples in Cape Town, South Africa 81; same-sex marriage 74, 75; see also Black people personal choice, same-sex marriage 63–5, 67–9 personal responsibility 123 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act 39 place-making, queer street families 168–79 plural marriage 93–6, 97, 98 policy, family ideal 41–2 Polikoff, Nancy 119–21 political context: de-politicization of gay culture 60–1, 70–1; heteronormativity 76–8; same-sex marriage 73–5; see also de-politicization of gay culture poly families: legal marriage 190; mortgage applications 183, 184–5 polyamorous community 127, 134, 135 polygamy 93–6, 97, 98, 102–3, 190 polynormativity 93–5, 105–6; critiques of 104–5; normalization 98–104; popular culture 95–8; sexual liberation 124 popular culture, polynormativity 95–8; see also culture post-marital society 183–4 poverty: LGBTQ movement 113–14; and welfare 38–40 prenuptial agreements 51–3 Pride: Boystown, Chicago 168–9, 172; Madrid 27 private choice: Chinese xinghun marriage 142–3; same-sex marriage 63–5 privatization 114–15, 122 public debate, same-sex marriage 63–5 public space, Boystown, Chicago 174, 176

racial context: Boystown, Chicago 169–79; intersectionality 76–8; non-monogamy 96–7, 102–3; same-sex couples in Cape Town, South Africa 81; same-sex marriage 74, 75 radicalization vs. assimilation debate 81–2; see also normalization of relationships relational conflict see conflict relational diversity: Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families & Relationships 111–12, 119–25; book overview 6, 7–10; connections 127–35; and family diversity 183; family in South Africa 83–5; global context 1–2; LGBTQ movement 112–19; research agenda 8–11; Scarborough Family 151; sexual liberation 123–5; see also family diversity religion and same-sex couples 77, 89–90 rent stabilization case 191–2 resistance, lesbian relationships in Madrid 25–7 rhizome concept 82–3, 87–9 right-wing movements 114–15 Rivera, Ignacio 124–5, 127–35 Ryan, Hugh 182–3 same-sex marriage: book overview 6–11; conflict in queer families 51–3; couples in Cape Town, South Africa 80–90; emotionality 65–7; family diversity 1–2, 182; financial benefits 31–42, 114–15, 119–20; gays 3, 4; gender fluidity 134–5; lesbian relationships in Madrid 20, 23, 25; lesbians 3, 4, 64, 65, 66; normalization in queer communities 7, 59–71; overview of impacts 6–7; political context 73–5; symbolism 68–9 Scarborough Family: daily life 153–7; economic class 162–4; family, meaning of 157–9, 164–7; family norms 162–4; formation of household 152–4; zoning laws conflict 150–2, 159–62 sex education 132 sex work 124, 125 sexual liberation: bodies 128; gender identity 130–3; human rights 186–7; polynormativity 123–5; xinghun marriage 140 shame, relational conflict 50–1

198

Index

silence in discourse 188 slow violence: collective action and resistance 25–7; lesbian relationships in Madrid 17–19, 21–5 social class: diversity 164; intersectionality 76–8; middle class 34, 37, 66, 78; poverty rates 38; queer street families 168, 171–2; same-sex marriage 3–4, 60, 66; Scarborough Family zoning laws 150, 153, 161, 162–4 social context, same-sex marriage 67–9, 70–1 South Africa, same-sex couples 80–90 South Carolina, relational diversity 118 Spanish social and legal context 19–20; see also lesbian relationships in Madrid ‘straight mind’, lesbian relationships in Madrid 18, 21, 25, 28 street families 168–79 swinger stereotype 96 symbolism, marriage 68–9 taxation, financial impacts of marriage 32–7 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) 39–40 transgender identity: Boystown, Chicago 173, 175–6; Ignacio Rivera 130–5 transphobia, lesbian relationships in Madrid 17–19, 21–5 Trump administration 41

Universal Declaration of Human Rights 186–7 Utah, relational diversity 118 vicarious citizenship 171 violence, World Pride 27; see also conflict; slow violence welfare: material needs 121–2; and poverty 38–40; reform and marriage 38–9, 122–3 Weston, Kath 84 ‘white space’ 172, 177 Willey, Angela 97 Windsor case 35–6, 37 Wittig, Monique 25–6, 28 Woodhull Freedom Foundation 186–7 World Pride 27 Wright, Sarah 183–4 xinghun marriage 136–8, 147–8; Chinese sexual cultures 143–4; meaning and purpose of 138–41; private life 142–3; same-sex romance 144–5; structure 145–7 Yan,Y. 142 youth, queer street families 168–79 Zanin, Andrea 104–5 zoning laws: Braschi v. Stahl 192; Scarborough Family 150–2, 159–62