Your hands are shaking from the coldness of relatives…
You stomach aches from avoiding dinner’s canabalism…
You have waded in pools of familial blood and found it thinner than water and running fast away from your heart…
You are the last leaf in winter, hanging to the tree. You are trembling in the winds of life you cannot avoid, but are forced to weather through until they break you.
You cannot change your family tree. You cannot change anything. Only be changed.
And yet when you found yourself in that downward spiral to the earth you realized it was not the end.
The ice of your father. The howls of your mother. The torrential clawing of grandparents and sibblings. None could break you.
Only set you free.
And I will not tell you winter will not come again… After spring is another fall.
But I will remind you that after fall is another spring.
And one day you will be warm with the love of chosen family. You will be somewhere you chose to be. With people you chose to let change you.
One day you will not be a leaf ever falling through external forces. You will be a person.
Beyond metaphor.
Beyond poetry dressing pain.
Beyond your tree.
Free to roam and move against the breeze and enjoy allseasons.
Do not feel guilt if this coming year does not deliver what last year’s could not. Your love is not an infinite distance or time away.
Ancestry is a concept that at first seems bound within a heterosexist framework. Ancestry—when understood within the confines of limited heterocentrist viewpoint—is thought to exist only within the realm of blood relation, stemming from the proliferation of the ideal family unit across time and space as parents produce children, who become adults that in turn find heterosexual partners and produce children. This is what is understood when we speak of ancestry.
But what of Queer Ancestry? What of the kinships that are formed by those whose families have rejected them? What of those families who’s bond to one another is not blood but instead a shared commitment to protect, support, and uplift one another? Where, in the traditional family ideal, is there room for queer understandings of love and family? Our families are not connected by some shared DNA, they are connected by a shared spirit of resistance, of a common will to life that drives us to reject the hegemonic in search of a more authentic sense of self-actualization.
Many of our Queer Ancestors’ names have been lost to time, erased by the hegemonic power of heterohistory. Although their names may be lost, their stories can still empower and embolden us. By sharing their stories we carry their essence with us; they lend us their strength and their courage, their passion and their pain. Take strength from your Queer Ancestors. Allow them to empower you. Allow them to lend you their spirit, and they will lift you to new heights.
A'lyia shares his story of how things got better - from struggling with her identity, to finding the one thing that mattered most: queer community to lean on and learn from. ️
Family is a delicate subject. Even the word’s very definition is one that deserves care and nuance because it is more multivocal than singular, more subjective than objective. A sociological definition of family is a unit of people living in close proximity who have a sense of intimacy or closeness among them. Notice that this most basic definition doesn’t indicate what technical relationships…
