What are our kids going to resent us for?

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
- Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse

I was alerted to the upcoming publication of Alison Bechdel's new book, Fun Home, at the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum's No Straight Lines exhibit, featuring queer cartoon artists. The book deals with Bechdel's relationship with her father, who turns out to be gay and closeted (though not especially well, if one buys into the theory that fastidiousness and a love for antiques is a telltale sign of gay-ness). I just finished reading it a few weeks ago, and was hoping to review it. Instead I'll just get down some thoughts about parenting.

But first some thoughts about Alison Bechdel, who is awesome.

If you didn't know about Alison Bechdel before, now is the time. Bechdel is the artist responsible for Dykes to Watch Out For's always funny, always politically astute, always spot-on observations of our queer lives.

There's a great photo of Bechdel in her garden from her blog. Wearing Crocs no less!

Okay. On to the subject of parenting.

It seems to me that there is a lot of focus on what makes kids gay (genes! wombs! quantum swerving!), how to tell if kids are going to grow up gay, and how fucked up gay kids are. Not that such information is bad or unimportant (actually I do think that the "what causes it" information is pretty irrelevant, but whatever), but I do wish people would focus on how to make queer kids' lives better, specifically, how to be a good parent to LGBT kids.

The article I discussed in my previous post about how parents and schools are accomodating gender-variant kids is a good one. I'd like to see publication/discussion of studies comparing, for example, mental health statistics for LGBT teens in families that vote progressively, or teens raised in homophobic religions as opposed to those not. Sure it's important to have nation-wide information about gay teens and suicide, but I'd also like to see some reports and articles making it absolutely clear that it's not being queer that makes us crazy. To coin a phrase, IT'S THE HOMOPHOBIA, STUPID.

On a more positive note, I have to give a big shout out to my Mama, who has been giving interviews to journalists and writers in Singapore about her experience as a proud mother of two queer sons. The press attention is because she was recently featured in a new book that came out about LGBT people in Singapore (full disclosure: I used to go to school with the author, and also we were in the Drama Club together. That's right. Drama Club.). She's also started a support/discussion group called Safe and Accepting Families for Everyone (SAFE), and they're having their first meeting very soon (or perhaps have already had it).

All this while being a full time professor at the National University. I don't know where she finds the energy.

My father also has been quite supportive, if not quite as community-organisey. He told me that he put in place a policy at his firm of non-harrassment and non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (I think it was in response to some offhand homophobic or heterosexist comment by one of his colleagues). He also once told me that if I were transgender, he would support me (I hadn't made any noises about being trans, but perhaps it's my femmeyness?).

So I count myself pretty lucky now, as far as nuclear family goes. My parents have really shown themselves to be very supportive, loving and open to understanding*. On the sexual orientation issue, anyway. Body image is another matter (for another blog, perhaps).

*There have been some recent reported insensitive remarks about lack of grandchildren on my father's part, but there's reason to believe they were uttered in anger and inconsiderately. Not to excuse them, but improvement is a process.

It wasn't always such smooth sailing though.

When I was younger, my father had made some pretty careless homophobic statements around us, and there was a general sense that it was something he disapproved of. My mother didn't really address the topic at all. My school, of course, was also completely silent on the issue, except for a segment in health education where we learned that along with drug users, homosexuals were a high-risk group for STDs, especially HIV/AIDS (why this was the case didn't really get explained - the implication was that it was because they were unethical in some way). This was accompanied by pictures of cold sores and other visible symptoms of STDs like syphilis and gonorrhoea (though interestingly, I don't think we ever saw photographs of people with AIDS, or even body parts of people with AIDS).

Much more prevalent than outright homophobia, of course, was heterosexism. Talk of what kind of wife I should have, when and whether to have children, and how many, whether it would be appropriate to marry someone of a different race. This is how hegemony operates. It doesn't even see itself as operating without your consent. Hell, YOU don't even see it as operating without your consent. Consent is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We are heterosexual.

I came of age in the very homosocial environment of a single-sex school. Most kids in my social circle weren't publicly dating or having sex with anyone, same sex or not. The peer pressure wasn't as great as it seems to be in the U.S. to prove one's heterosexuality. It was assumed, and that was that. Of course some of us fooled around with each other, but the tabloid agony aunts assured me it was a phase and - being 13 going on 14 - willingly I believed.

It was when I was 14 going on 15 and the feelings still didn't stop that I realized I was in trouble. Hey, a year is a long time in a young person's life.

Also I started reading books on LGBT politics and history at the local Borders, and got a name for what I was. And you know how us philosophy types* are - give us a category, any category, and we'll cling on to it for dear life. Suddenly those cravings to be physically pressed up against track athletes and TV personalities stopped being dirty, weird thoughts, and became something far grander - an IDENTITY.

*I realized I wanted to be a philosopher when I was about 9, rolling marbles back and forth in the grooved metal rail of our sliding glass doors, recalling "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and thinking, troubled, to myself - Yes, what if life really is but a dream? Note: If I become a major figure of anything (other than derision) I want this episode to go in my biography as the epiphanic moment.

Not only did I get an identity from those books, I also got a whole new field of knowledge, legitimized by the publishing industry, that I was sure my parents didn't have. I also got some first hand cultural knowledge by meeting other gay teenagers and youth at gatherings organized over the infant internet. I got "adopted" by older brothers and sisters. I discussed such gay literary luminaries as Robert Rodi (my tastes then were embarrassingly low-brow, melodramatic and right wing - Sullivan, Bawer, Rodi, Monette, although I did read and enjoy Edmund White as well). I didn't get laid though - still too nervous about that.

Suddenly my parents were fallible. Suddenly I saw they had these ideas that weren't just annoying-because-I-agreed (like the idea that I should be getting good grades), but actually WRONG. Mistaken. Illogical. Immoral. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It was a terrible, wonderful realization. Here were these two intellectual demigods - PhDs, professor and attorney, graduates of prestigious American and English universities - and they didn't seem to know the first thing about LGBT history or culture, or even the fact that men cruised each other in certain malls, and that their children were creating a new language of sexuality (largely influenced by U.S. and English discourses, but with some syncretic elements, of course).

I recently realized, my parents would have been in the U.S. (Massachusetts) for college in 1969 - the year of the Stonewall riots in New York. Weird. I wonder if they heard about it, or if anyone then in their lives understood the emotional significance the riots would take on for LGBT people (in the U.S. especially, but also anywhere that U.S. culture makes its presence felt, which is, well - everywhere)

I can't help wondering what events the next generation won't be able to believe that most of their parents missed out on or didn't realize the significance of. Perhaps the Seattle demonstrations (in 1999, the year that I first came to the U.S. for college), or the leftist leaders getting elected in South America and Europe again, in part as a reaction against the horror/disaster of neoliberalism.