Blogging for LGBT Families: Elbowing at the Boundaries

June 1, Blogging for LGBT Families Day in the blogosphere. Swept up in the recent Prop 8 stir, I’ve not been feeling so hopeful and didn’t know what to write. So I figured, why not a good ole reflection on why it is that I write in the first place.

Truly, I write/blog for my son. This amazing boy. He’s soulful, playful, imaginative — really, his own person.

He’s also a purple-lover, a dress-wearer, and, in his own words, most proud to be “someone who breaks stereotypes.”

So I write for him for many reasons. But they are equally tied up in the fact that he’s growing up in a queer family. Not that that makes him who he is, but it shapes his day-to-day experiences.

There’s a deeper level to my commitment, though, to blogging for Q and blogging as a member of the LGBT community and a queer family. And it has to do with work that’s both for the community of humanity at large, but also the queer community. Because as embracing and wonderful and inclusive as this community is, there’s still room for growth. There’s room to elbow our boundaries and expand them a bit. My boy is at work on that, enrobed so often in pink, purple, and sparkles. He confounds even many queer folks that he encounters, and in so doing helps to make evident the ways that even within a community that fights for acceptance we can still take our own level of acceptance a step further.

It’s for that expansion, for the larger embracing of identity within our community, for young and old alike, that I really blog. Because I know that will make Q’s life, whatever path it should take, a whole lot more comfortable. And I know that the change and expansion of notions — around gender identity, youth identity, just basically what folks “should do” with their lives — will make life a whole lot better for a whole lot of folks. So that’s why I’m here. And I feel so thankful to be on this journey with so many others.

Thanks, once again, to Mombian for organizing this celebratory day.