Editor’s Note
When I was about eight years old, my mothers underwent a legal process by which my biological mother adopted my brother, and his biological mother adopted me. Although they had raised us since birth; although we had lived in the same home our entire lives; although our neighbors, communities, friends and classmates knew us to be a family, the process of second-parent adoption was a necessary measure to ensure the rights of my lesbian mothers as parents, should anything happen to them. Standing before the court, I learned the injustice of a State which recognizes certain relationships while deeming others unviable. At the same time, I grew up surrounded by queer elders who were proof of a thriving, joyful, resistant otherwise. Queer people who made families in all kinds of formations, despite whatever the State allowed.
This anthology is an unfinished map of queer possibility. Its lands are peopled with gay best friends and past selves, an abundance of gay parents, trans self-making with lovers and kin, cross-national comrades, missed chances, marriages, proposals, ash, old wardrobes. Its borders are porous. I couldn’t have predicted the places and directions these queer and trans writers would take us in their defining and redefining of family, which is exactly what I had hoped for.
I also couldn’t have predicted the immense grief running through many of these pieces, though maybe I should have. These writers remind us that loss is a central experience of queer life: loss of birth family and relationships, of friends and lovers to disease and violence, loss of our past selves. Perhaps especially in a time of climate crisis and state-sponsored genocide, these artists insist that we remember the dead. Indeed, the contributors to this anthology teach us to hold the dead close, to make kin with ghosts. And so these poems and stories, essays and photographs are not marked by absences but filled with the presence of the living and the dead, the animal and the human, in elegy and praise and fierce imagining of the bonds that makes us.
Table of Contents
What’s inside “On Queer Family”? Editor-in-Chief Isaiah Yonah Back-Gaal describes each piece that is in their anthology.
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- Raised on the stories of the friends her parents lost to the AIDS epidemic, Hannah Firestone grew up familiar with apocalypse and survival. In this urgent, deeply tender essay, Firestone returns to these stories for what they might teach us about care, community, inheritance, and love as we face new crises of our own.
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- Trans, epistolary, elegiac, Allen Means’ poems touch the natural world, theorizing a queerness and transness that bring the world and all its bodies closer.
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- Annie Virginia’s poems are multidirectional, lingering, precise yet playful. Virginia allows the ghosts in, elegizing while imaging what might have been, and what queer futures are yet to come.
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- In the sterility of the waiting room as caretaker and witness to their partner’s top surgery, nawa conjures a mythic world of oceans, volcanoes, and phoenixes, bending time and space to reach their lover. Contending with the forces that condemn trans bodies, nawa’s cross-genre piece is a ferocious paean to trans life and queer world-making.
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- Through photographs of queer Chinese organizers, friends, and partners, adorned with handwritten notes, huiyin zhou’s breathtaking work insists upon a politics of intimacy, of encounter, of self-definition.
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- Multilingual, ecstatic, and utterly singular, Danielle Cowan’s poem sings gratitude for the objects that helped make her, while roaring towards a queer future of her own design.
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- Suspended in midair, Gionni Ponce’s narrator frets about the linguistic divide between her and her girlfriend’s family, and considers the borders of language, sexuality, nationhood, and place that separate and connect them. Wry, fierce, and deeply felt, Ponce’s story builds a rich world over the course of an airplane ride, and leaves the reader hungry for more.
"On Queer Family," call for submission
This is the call for submissions, which is what the published contributors submitted work toward:
Queer people have always defined family on our own terms. From the legendary houses of Harlem’s ball scene to lesbian separatist communes, queer people imagine, reimagine, and materialize new ways of living and living together. For this anthology, I want to honor the intentional, loving, resilient, subaltern, oppositional families that queer people create: your drag mothers and trans siblings, your co-ops and polycules, your queer entanglements with nature and non-human kin, your chosen lineages across time and space. In all its manifold forms, queer family is a project of world making, of fashioning loving communities and liberated selves through desire and mutual exchange. As Joss Lake writes, “Well, isn’t queer adulthood, if one is lucky, having the impossible childhood of your desires?” What are your impossible queer dreams? What does kinship look like beyond the ties enshrined by the State? What is the role of the family in our collective liberation? This is an invitation for models of care that help us imagine beyond the violence of the present.
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