From the Editor: We keep coming back to ‘family’

Family is one of those cover story concepts we return to again and again. We, like all magazines, consciously avoid repeating content, in our case charting out general cover story topics long before they’re actually written and printed, to help make sure we keep it varied and cover “everything” we should (if that were possible). But there are so many different aspects to “family,” and so many different ways to interpret what it means or talk about it, it’s never long before you’ll see it appear again. We could create an LGBT magazine that’s completely devoted, in every story, to family — and even then we’d never run out of content.

The first place our lives as LGBT people intersect with “family” is when we come out — figuring out how to have those often-difficult conversations to relatives who had different expectations for us. Figuring out whether we want to have the conversations in the first place. Figuring out how the relationships continue after they know, and in some cases figuring out how to rebuild our lives when those relationships with parents or siblings break down because of who we are.

In a better world, hopefully one that’s someday coming, when people have no assumptions or prejudices about how their kids might identify or whom their kids might love, how will those conversations go? Will they even have to happen at all? This issue’s cover story might have clues: it features two young adults who were raised by lesbian and gay parents and eventually realized they, too, were lesbian or gay. Having LGBT parents who completely understood what being LGBT means, they did avoid some challenges brought with coming out, but they still required some exploring, and time, to figure it all out with their families. It turns out that’s just part of life, whether or not we’re LGBT.

After we come out, we think about “families” of our own — finding a partner, a husband or wife, starting our own household that looks like the one we one we grew up in (or maybe doesn’t look like the one we grew up in). And, maybe, raising children of our own. A lot of us who are yet-childless are full of questions about that one: what’s it like growing up with two moms or two dads? Would our kids feel like they missed out on something? Would they be bullied? If they are, would they resent us? A simpler question: what words could our kids use to tell “mom” and “mom” apart? This cover story definitely answers those.

“Family” has also been a word used as a political tool against us — as a narrow and limiting sense of “family values” that our very existence challenges. But the idea of “family” is so universally human, found in different forms in every society and culture on Earth, that it’s not something we can allow to be taken from us. Family is ours as much as anyone’s, and we will stand our ground.

“Family” is also an affectionate term we use when someone else is lesbian or gay. This is getting to the part I love most about LGBT people and families — we really expand what it means, and in doing that, I think we make “family” even more relevant to everyone.

Our families are the people we love most, whomever they are — blood relations, romantic partners (sometimes more than one partner), step-parents or siblings, adopted children, pets, sometimes roommates or close friends and coworkers, and sometimes we broaden it out to include our whole community, or our whole world, as our family. There’s an amazing and beautiful amount of variety in the ways people in the LGBT community interpret family, and in who we consider part of our families. And in that way of looking at things is a wisdom I think we can offer the entire world.