Straight is to gay as Family is to no family

The 1980s was a decade in which the contested nature of the concept of family and the unequal
power relations that structure the conflict were much in evidence. Families We Choose weighs
in as an important contribution to current debates about family and family values. Kath Weston,
an anthropologist, demonstrates the contours and meanings of lesbian and gay families in San
Francisco in the 1980s. Description and analysis are based on participant-observation in that
community's social and political life and data gathered from lengthy interviews with 40 women
and 40 men of various racial and ethnic backgrounds, most in their twenties and thirties. What
we get from these 80 stories is a lively and respectful sense of the lives of her subjects as they
think about and create their relationships, engage in ritual and celebration, care for children, and
negotiate and renegotiate connections with biological family. Her investment in time and effort to
come up with the revolutionary book clearly challenges the family-centric heteronormative that
prevailed incessantly.

The context in which Kath Weston's research as a social anthropologist took place laid great
emphasis on 'family' as a unitary object, emerging from the ideas of kinship (be it blood relations
or marriage), which is considered one of the basic social institutions by sociologists. Everyone is
said to subscribe to such forms of kinship relations and a universally accepted definition of
family, which is often concrete and not so flexible. From the very beginning, the two notions that
have time and again fueled the contention that "gay and lesbian identity" is a class apart from
the ambit of the family are that firstly, both gay men and lesbian women cannot physically
procreate, thus cannot have children, nor could they establish and sustain long-lasting
relationships. Secondly, they are believed to exit the sphere and ambit of adoptive and blood kin
once they accept their sexual identities.

Another major issue addressed by Weston is how the people who identify as gay and lesbian
are more often than not being 'reduced to the status of their sexual identities, and further to sex
alone.' This was clearly implied by Blanche Cook when stated that "the assumption that gay
people do not love and do not work". While sex between two heterosexual individuals brings
forth the opportunity for the creation of kinship ties, engaging in a homosexual sexual
relationship not only reduces the possibility of them ever creating a kinship tie, but also
assumes that their life will be one of loneliness, one that will exist apart from the rest of the
humanity. This finds its origins in the close ties between kinship and procreation. More recently,
however, anthropologists have begun to reconsider the status of kinship as an analytic concept
and a topic for inquiry. What would happen if observers ceased privileging genealogy as a
sacrosanct or objective construct, approaching biogenetic ties instead as a characteristically
Western way of ordering and granting significance to social relations. By reworking familiar
symbolic materials in the context of nonprocreative relationships, lesbians and gay men in the
United States have formulated a critique of kinship that contests assumptions about the bearing
of biology, genetics, and heterosexual intercourse on the meaning of family in their own culture.
What gay kinship ideologies challenge is not the concept of procreation that informs kinship in
the United States, but the belief that procreation alone constitutes kinship, and that
"nonbiological" ties must be patterned after a biological model (like adoption) or forfeit any claim
to kinship status. What gay kinship ideologies challenge is not the concept of procreation that
informs kinship in the United States, but the belief that procreation alone constitutes kinship,
and that "nonbiological" ties must be patterned after a biological model (like adoption) or forfeit
any claim to kinship status. very notion of gay families asserts that people who claim
nonprocreative sexual identities and pursue nonprocreative relationships can lay claim to family
ties of their own without necessary recourse to marriage, childbearing, or childrearing.7 By
defining these chosen families in opposition to the biological ties believed to constitute a straight
family, lesbians and gay men began to renegotiate the meaning and practice of kinship from
within the very societies that had nurtured the concept.

The government primarily witnessed a surge in the 'gay' identity and the emergence of absolute
numbers of gay men and lesbians in the 70's and 80's, which was also linked to the growing
movements of the seemingly healthy against the ones who fell prey to sexually transmitted
diseases. What Weston also points out, was the increase in the number of anti-gay legislative
campaigns that had the full support of the state- that wished to save the holier-than-thou notion
of 'family' and to ultimately save it from the clutches of 'anti-ethical' forces. Their sole aim was to
"preserve the family". On matters related to familial ties of gays and lesbians, Weston also
highlighted the plight of a majority of queer people who had to witness sudden alienation from
family and its consequences on relationships with close blood relatives, as well as friends and
coworkers. For eg. A gay doctor was advised during his residency to discourage other gay
people from becoming his patients, lest his waiting room become filled with homosexuals. "It'll
scare away the families," warned his supervisor (Lazere 1986). In San Francisco, gay
community organizations set up special telephone hotlines during the holidays to serve as
resources for lesbians and gay men battling feelings of loneliness or depression Many gay
people considered the "holiday blues" a more acute problem for themselves than for
heterosexuals because disclosure of a lesbian or gay identity so often disrupted relations with
straight relatives. The feeling was so widespread that, in Diane Kunin's words, "[gay] people
have to make some really excruciating choices that other people are not faced with." Because
contexts such as holidays evoked a more inclusive level of the opposition between two types of
family, they seldom elicited the positive sense of choice and creativity associated with gay
families. Instead, individuals too often found themselves faced with the unwelcome dilemma of
making an either/or decision when they would have preferred to choose both.

People who associated adopting a lesbian or gay identity with giving up family did so, looking
back and forward across the life cycle, in the dual sense of dreading rejection by the families in
which they had grown up. They had reached adulthood and hadn't planned to get married or
start a family. Even if they were few in number, there were nonetheless some who had thought
"going getting married in order to "have a family" or being "straight". Well-meaning supporters of
lesbian and gay identity may assert that gays are not inherently "anti-family," perpetuating the
stereotype of heterosexual identity as having exclusive access to kinship. According to Charles
Silverstein (1977), lesbians and gay men may place greater value on maintaining family ties
than heterosexuals do because gay people do not marry and raise children. The author's
affirmation that gays and lesbians are capable of fostering long-lasting kinship ties reinforces
the implication that they cannot establish "families of their own," presumably because kinship is
unshakeably rooted in heterosexual alliance and procreation. Discourse on gay families, on the
other hand, cuts across the politically charged duo of "pro-family" and "anti-family." This places
gay men and lesbian women in an inherently antagonistic relation to kinship solely on the basis
of their nonreproductive sexualities.

Talking about gay liberation, earlier there was great emphasis on looking for alternatives to the
traditional 'family' that was prevalent in society, but now they were insistent branching the wide
spectrum of kinship, and adding the 'legitimate gay family' to its ambit. Gay or chosen families
might incorporate friends, lovers, or children, in any combination. Organized through ideologies
of love, choice, and creation, gay families have been defined through contrast with what many
gay men and lesbians in the Bay Area called "straight," "biological," or "blood" families. If the
families we choose were the families lesbians and gay men created for themselves, straight
families represented the families in which most had grown to adulthood. In any relational
definition, the juxtaposition of two terms gives meaning to both. Just as light would not be
meaningful without some notion of darkness, so gay or chosen families cannot be understood
apart from the families lesbians and gay men call "biological," "blood," or "straight." Like others
in their society, most gay people in the Bay Area considered biology a matter of "natural fact."
When they applied the terms "blood" and "biology" to kinship, however, they tended to depict
families more consistently organized by procreation, more rigidly grounded in genealogy, and
more uniform in their conceptualization than anthropologists know most families to be. For many
lesbians and gay men, blood family represented not some naturally given unit that provided a
base for all forms of kinship, but rather a procreative principle that organized only one possible
type of kinship. In their descriptions, they situated gay families at the opposite end of a spectrum
of determination, subject to no constraints beyond logic of "free" choice that ordered
membership. To the extent that gay men and lesbians mapped "biology" and "choice" onto
identities already opposed to one another (straight and gay, respectively), they polarized these
two types of family along with an axis of sexual identity.

Lesbians and gay men, originally relegated to the status of people without family, later lay claim
to a distinctive type of family characterized as families we choose or create. While dominant
cultural representations have asserted that straight is to gay as family is to no family at a certain
point in history gay people began to contend that straight is to gay as blood family is to chosen
families. In families we choose, the agency conveyed by "we" emphasizes each person's part in
constructing gay families, just as the absence of agency in the term "biological family" reinforces
the sense blood as an immutable fact over which individuals exert little control. Likewise, the
collective subject of families we choose invokes a collective identity-who are "we" if not gay men
and lesbians? In order to identify the "we" associated with the speaker's "I," a listener must first
recognize the correspondence between the opposition of blood to choice and the relation of
straight to gay.

Having said that, Kath Weston's intensive research, and her ability to mesh opinions of a large
group of similar (yet so diverse), all the while contradicting certain long standing (and mostly
outdated) opinions on kinship and family, have been nothing short of revolutionary. Gone are
the days when accepting a lesbian or homosexual identity implied loss of kinship. The symbolic
groundwork for gay families was laid during a period when coming out to relatives was
institutionalized, making it possible to claim a sexual identity that is not linked to procreation,
face the possibility of rejection by blood or adoptive relations, and still envision establishing
one's own family. After a long time, gays and lesbians have laid systematically laid claim to
families of their own. They have learnt how to re-organize relationships.

Name- Preesha Choudhary

Department- English (Hons,)