Chosen Family: Seeing Others As You Aren't
In this world, there's a whole lotta hate going on. What happens when we choose to give unconditional love to those who are not our genetic family members?
CT: Family trauma, sexuality/identity, belonging
Last week, I wrote about visiting my Louisiana family - the ones who created my physical being and raised me, the ones who nurtured me in my formative years and initiated the creation of an identity. What is funny is that my family, as much as they love me, sees me as the different one. While my family history and environmental factors were similar to what my parents experienced, many of our similarities ended when I turned 18 and became a first-generation college student.
In my first semester at Louisiana State, I came out as lesbian (since redefined identity for myself as queer). This was not exactly a popular declaration in my family, in that anyone else had publicly done so. Knowing that there wasn’t many people in my family in which to discuss the politics of queer identity, I turned toward the community I eventually found at Louisiana State - the weirdos who inhabited the concrete benches in front of Prescott Hall.
Those concrete benches are no longer there, but twenty years ago, at any time, so many different people would be found there with whom I became close and fast friends - the queer kids who belonged to Spectrum Alliance, the LGBTQ+ campus student organization, the kids who volunteered at the campus women’s center, the kids in our favorite punk band, the studio art kids who had the haircuts I envied and discussed philosophers like Diderot and Hume like it was their fucking job, the emo kids clad in black and metal, and kids who always had their nose in a book and interrupted just long enough to be invited to a free dinner by one of the other denizens of the benches. I belonged to the first and last categories but I knew all of those kids, at least casually, and met some of the people whom I still, to this day, admire from a distance. Sitting on those benches was an education that I still hold close to my heart because I learned about growing up there. I witnessed others’ pain and joy, but they were neither pains nor joys I was privileged to experience. Though I could hold a conversation with anyone, I was shy and withdrawn when it came to more ballsy participation… which is probably still a personality trait that I have today.
Anyway, I met one of my chosen family members as a result of those benches. A girl named April, who worked for the Women’s Center and was a straight ally to Spectrum, invited me to her birthday party at The Chimes, a popular Baton Rouge restaurant at the north Highland Road campus gates of LSU. I sat at a table where I knew a few folks, like Tom and Corey, a couple of kids who worked at Splash, the local gay bar, and Raether, whom I still have a platonic crush on because they had all the guts and grit I wish I had to go out into the world and kick in the balls. But I was seated next to a young man who was charming, funny, sarcastic as hell, and knew how to tell a story. Enter Johnny.
Maybe that is what having chosen family is about. It is about seeing people that are different than us and truly realizing that we are so similar that we aren’t different where it really matters.
That night, Johnny and I talked most of the night, eventually learning more about each other and exchanging numbers because the conversation was far from done. We had both grown up in Cajun families where the self-reliance philosophy was one that may have been taken far too seriously, we were both oldest children in our households, we both came out immediately after we enrolled in college, and we were both first-generation college students. Our intersections were amazing with those points alone, and we soon learned that we just enjoyed each other’s company so much. It was nice to meet someone who understood exactly where I was coming from, as well as to be able to offer solace and an ear to someone who had similar experiences and could both vent and laugh with him.
Some families cannot get past the idea of their child living in direct contrast of a dogmatic code, and offer their biological children a most devastating choice: either fall in line with the code everyone else follows or be ostracized from the family.
The chosen family piece came quicker than I expected. Johnny was dating someone, a Cyprus national who had come to LSU on a Fulbright scholarship, and had been living with him. This kid (Johnny’s boyfriend was 19 and graduating with his BA - goddamn brilliant he was/is) had to go back to Cyprus and wait for his next visa to kick in, which would bring him to a small private university in Pennsylvania. The relationship was not only ending, but Johnny was about to be homeless; he needed time to earn some funds so he could put a deposit, first, and last on an apartment, or find someone who would let him share rent on a two-bedroom (a different kind of unicorn to find someone with an empty bedroom who would actually let it). If Johnny had two months’ time to work, sock it all away, and live super-cheap, he could take over and live just fine. So, I invited him to live with me for a couple of months.1 This happened in May; we had met in April, but I had trust that we would be okay. We got along well, even though he learned that I hadn’t quite mastered the whole apartment maintenance/picking up after yourself thing yet, and he taught me quickly that I had some of my own growing up to do.
This relationship has endured the test of time and our shared loves and interests have evolved. We are both married to people who are somewhat foreign to the Cajun cultural dialogue. We both constantly text each other during LSU football games, cringing every time we go into the fourth quarter with Alabama, behind, and wanting to strangle Nick Saban for abandoning the Tigers for the NFL2. We send each other snarky memes, recipes that impress us, and keep each other in the loop for major events in our lives. I was his “best person” at his wedding in 2016. Last January, when my sweet infant niece passed away, he rescued me in the midst of the worst snowstorm (and the only known blizzard warning ever issued) South Louisiana had seen in a century, helping me find an airport that would get me back to Cincinnati. He’s one of about five people I would drop everything for and fly to help out at a moment’s notice that isn’t part of my known family unit.
Or is he? What makes family? There are a lot of people that would argue that family is what they make it, as the family you are assigned at birth is not always the family that values your existence or wants to keep you around because of your differences. When doing a little light research around this concept, I was surprised that the first hit on Tha Google was the result of a study done by the National Institutes of Health. The study was a culmination of how people defined (and redefined) the concept of “chosen family” within the LGBTQ+ community and which sub-concepts helped to define (and re-define) the concept of family for, what the study named “gay refugees”3
What the study revealed to me, at least tangentially, was nothing new: the idea of chosen family is an inherently queer concept that is borne out of people seeking refuge and community in others because they have been rejected from the family they were assigned at birth. The rejection was for not fitting into traditional societal or religious norms of sexuality and gender - paired with an inability or lack of desire to efficiently hide or sequester such as a part of their personality. Some families cannot get past the idea of their child living in direct contrast of a dogmatic code, and offer their biological children a most devastating choice: either fall in line with the code everyone else follows or be ostracized the family.
I was lucky - damn lucky. I was raised in a fairly staunch Roman Catholic environment, yet any ire I incurred was a result of my omission of the truth. I didn’t tell my parents straight away4, and this was a cardinal sin in either my mother’s or my father’s house: I was told by both, separately, that we don’t lie and we don’t keep secrets - at least about the shit that matters. Outside of this, any pressure I felt was not about the gender of the people I dated, but which women I actually brought home to meet them. There weren’t many - not that I was Madame Wild About Town or anything - but there were fewer that I felt would even qualify for needing to meet my parents because I felt that they would be a part of my life for a very long time. By the time I introduced my family to my wife, Anissa, I knew in my soul there would be no other women I desired to bring in front of them. They had to choose her, too.
Chosen family are the ones that pick you because of you: your personality, your quirky foibles, your bullshit, your irritating habits… but at the end of the day, they love you with all they have. They look at the above stuff as more important than the traditionally religious or dogmatic concept of what a man or a woman is supposed to be, supposed to do, is supposed to inhabit as a role in society, but especially inhabit as a role in the family. There are a few people other than Johnny that I consider to be chosen family, such as my childhood besties Beth, Lacey, and Jill, my work wife/concert wife turned soul sister Erin, and my wife’s two best friends Julie B and Julie R5.
Julie R recently visited my home with her entire squad: her wife Stephanie and her three teenage children in tow, including her 16-year-old, Elise6. I remember the day Julie and Stephanie got the call to get Elise: she was a Baby Moses case, and Julie and Stephanie had been working through the adoption process through the state of Texas. On the day Michael Jackson died, a beautiful and healthy baby girl was born and surrendered to the authorities. A dream came true and a family was born. Not only did Elise become the lucky daughter of two phenomenal women, but Anissa and I became “aunties” - now all three of Julie and Stephanie’s children call my wife “Auntie A.”7 After visiting us this summer, Elise asked if she could get some time to visit by herself after her mom and siblings left, just with the aunties and her “cousin”, my son. She was with us for five additional days before flying back to Houston together.
Being an adoptive mother and a teacher of all things social studies and history, Julie felt a responsibility to understand the background of her children a little bit better as they grew older. Why? All of her children are black. Three black kids scored two of the whitest women on earth to be their parents. It was a pivot at first, for sure, but Stephanie learned how to cut a fade and make locs, and Julie rallied to pilot the first African-American History high school course ever offered at the campus where she teaches. Admittedly, Anissa and I have had more of a learning curve to learn about the kids’ backgrounds just because we don’t live that reality everyday, but that learning curve became sharp and pointed when Elise asked us to take her to the National Underground Railroad Museum and Freedom Center while visiting Cincinnati.
The entire third floor of the museum, which is where visitors are asked to start, is a history of slavery in the Americas, as well as its sanctioned evolution under the United States government. To call it sobering is an understatement. Within one room, Elise and I stared at a sculpture made of chains and broken shackles that spiraled into the ceiling. It wasn’t lost on me that I was staring at the history of Elise’s likely ancestors, wondering why people are so terrible to look at the color of someone’s skin and decide that such a difference is enough to consider someone, an entire class of someones, as sub-human. I wish I could unsee some of what I saw at the Freedom Center, but glad I could learn it because I need to understand that division to be a better person… not just for the sake of virtue signaling, but to put the empathy that I have to real and meaningful work.
Maybe that is what having chosen family is about. It is about seeing people that are different than us and truly realizing that we are so similar that we aren’t different where it really matters. If we are really lucky, we get the opportunity to choose other people to be our family and be even luckier and more grateful to have the family that we are assigned. We are all worth the love and acceptance that a family gives.
At the end of Elise’s visit, I flew with her to Houston so she could return to her mamas, who missed her terribly and greeted her with a new family dog. They brought me to another member of my chosen family, Erin (the work wife/concert wife from days of yester-yore) so we could engage in best friend shenanigans. Most of what Erin and I did for a weekend was “engage in hot goss” or watch movies and Wimbledon, either finding pithy quotes to embed in our dialogue or laugh at the impossible protocols assigned to the British Royal interactions. There was no demand beyond being in each other’s presence because family doesn’t demand the impossible. It understands that there are occasional roles to play, and that you play such roles to respond to need. If we need companionship, family offers solace. If you are hungry, family feeds you the food you want most. If we hurt, family heals. And, God willing, if we need a moment of levity, family sends you the inappropriate joke that makes you laugh in the middle of a silent work meeting.
My family knows the assignment. I hope yours does, too.
As always, thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this, please share and encourage others to subscribe, even for free.
Until next week,
JVB
Now Mom, if you are reading this, I didn’t buy groceries for two months. Johnny more than paid for his stay. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. Please don’t be mad. Love you.
You may not remember this… Nick Saban briefly left college football to try his hand at coaching the pros, where he spent a singular season with the Miami Dolphins. Saban’s season with the Dolphins was so abysmal that he was fired… and Alabama, an intense LSU conference rival, picked him up with the quickness. Every LSU Tiger alum from that era condemned him as long as he coached, especially when he brought the Crimson Tide into Death Valley and beat our boys. His retirement was a godsend to the LSU Football program, but now I have to endure him every game day on ESPN. Sigh.
I really don’t know how to feel about the word choice here. However, I also understand that I am operating under immense privilege, as I am not seeking refuge from much. Maybe idiocy… but that’s a boat as full as the Titanic. I digress…
Poor choice of words, but here we are. ::shrug::
Yep. Both of my wife’s best friends are both named Julie. To put them in the same room or discuss them in the same conversation is hella confusing. Julie B passed away on Christmas Day 2023 - a heartbreak I will write about in time. We still talk about her so much because her spirit is still alive and influencing people in real time - legendary shit. That is what kind of stuff I see in my chosen people: legends walking earth for their own reasons, their own ways of being superheroes.
Not her name. Not here for identifying minor children. Not now, not ever. I told y’all in the first post: shit here is mostly true.
Not exactly sure why, but I am just Janis to most of my nieces and nephews. “Auntie J” just didn’t catch on. Oh well. Better than what they could call me, I suppose…