On My Kids Configuring My Heterosexual(ish) Privilege

I’ve felt this over the years, at various levels of intensity, but it must be said:  Kids make me more legitimate in this culture’s eyes.  This Cincinnati conservative world.   I can feel myself tense as I say the word “partner,”  though I do say it, over and over again, refusing to closet myself.  I don’t know how anyone does it, frankly—I mean, I do know why and can feel why they do it, at least in part—but there’s so much of my life that is bound up with Susan’s life.  How would I refuse to talk about so much of it to my work colleagues?  How do I refuse to say “my partner” to the secretary at the doctor’s office, even though I could care less about her and her relationship to gay rights?  How can I not say to the nurse “my partner was sick for a while, and then Rylie, and now I think Dylan might have the sinus infection too?”  I am gearing myself up to say “wife” now that Rylie said it referring to Susan on my behalf.  I want to say that for the kids, also for legitimacy reasons.  But it’s more likely to elicit a reaction of confusion, I fear, and possible homophobia.  Also in front of the kids.

If I say “partner” with kids in tow, or if I say “my partner” while discussing my kids, I can feel the pull of legitimacy they bring to any occasion. Kids puts us on the heterosexual, normative map.  It’s true.   And that is a reassuring feeling, whether I want it to be or not.  Judith Halberstam talks about and celebrates queers living out a prolonged adolescence in her work, mainly because of the lack of children.  I therefore must become less queer, and more adult, for having had the kids, in the cultural view.  I don’t mind the “more adult” part, having never been into all the bars and dancing that is supposedly part of a prolonged adolescence.  And I am fifty years old, dammit, surely an adult.  But the less queer?  I don’t like the binary opposition that makes me less queer.  And yet, and yet, what I want to talk about today is the relief it sometimes brings me.  I walked into the garage of the hospital today, after we watched Susan give her talk at her Point of Care Scholar graduation, and they’d given our car a ticket because they thought an employee—Susan—had parked in visitor parking.  I had to talk to three people about it—it was a $75 ticket—and it solved nothing in the end.  However, I had kids in tow as I said the words “my partner works here” or I mentioned my kids somehow as I talked on the phone.  The little snail trail of legitimacy…two little girls.  No nothing wrong with them.  They dress very femininely, they are obedient or seem well mannered for the most part, are acceptably cute.  They are like carrying an American flag around everywhere, for a Muslim:  I belong, I may seem as if a part of me doesn’t, but I do belong.  And it works.  The family configuration registers on people’s faces. 

That increasing legitimacy makes me feel like Cherrie Moraga does when she says she will use her white skin privilege, again and again, if it helps get her and her lover out of bad situations.  On the other hand I also have long hair now, and I shave my legs.  It used to be I had a more dykely hairdo.  But there’s the guilt as well, for passing.  And fury, at how rigid people’s expectations are. 

The thing is, I feel this I notice this every day I am out in the world with the kids, or even am on the phone making an appointment for one of them.  That is an empowering—no not empowering—but legitimizing, a soothing of the ego, a reassurance that I won’t have to fight one more time—it’s shitty, really isn’t it?  Think how often the kids legitimize me without me even being aware of it.  It separates me from all those ‘adolescent’ gay folk, those rebellious fuck-you queers.  And it feels good.  Even as I hate the whole dichotomy, and part of me hates being mistaken for straight, especially by people I suspect and hope are gay.  Lee Edelman, queer theorist extraordinaire, argues to the extreme, in essence:  around the dichotomy, the binary opposition, of gay vs. straight:  Well if straight means having kids and gay is its opposite, then gays should be anti-child, be pro-death, to strengthen the dichotomy and alter the valuation of it, to value our side of it.  Which is of course absurd, and offensive, but at least it’s powerful, and it’s a direct attack on this invisible—and false—legitimacy I gain just by having children.

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