| Monday, November 29, 2004 |
 | 'It sounds like she was raised by lesbian wolves in a lesbian wolf cave.'
It really annoys me that Semagic represents anchor tags with a capital "a". I'm not sure why. This is an interesting article, via , about the scion of a lesbian couple.
Brief note - "scion" is from the Old French "ciun" - a twig or offshoot. It's a word I frequently misuse, as I just did then. Strictly, a scion in terms of human heredity is the descendant of a noble or storied lineage, whereas what is significant about the subject of the article is the specific circumstance of her conception. I'm using "scion" here instinctively, as the nearest English equivalent of the Ancient Greek ernos, also meaning "twig" or "offshoot". Apologies for any inconvenience caused - it's a habit.
It's strange to think of the division between being raised in a gay or lesbian household and being raised by lesbians or gay men (or, indeed, lesbian wolves) - the aging of technology that means we now have adult children produced entirely without the unpleasant intervention of heterosexuality cropping up is strange in the same way that doctors in M*A*S*H apparently never perform CPR is strange, or that there are people walking around after surgeries that a decade ago were performed largely out of curiosity. From my (somewhat self-interested) perspective, anything that demonstrates that the family unit and the man-woman-kids unit need not be the same thing is a good thing. However, this:
When Ry spent her semester abroad in Dublin, she felt homesick for New York. She didn't care much for Dublin, but one night in particular stands out as the worst. She and her boyfriend at the time went to a gay bar that struck her as the only place she wanted to be that night, a place that promised to feel familiar in a certain way. It was a rainy night, and she and her boyfriend stood in line watching the gay men around them get in, while they did not. When Ry made a move towards the door, the doorman blocked her from entering. Ry got it - that they didn't get it, didn't get her.
confuses me. I imagine "they" (the doorman? The habitués of the club? The people of Dublin? Lazy "they" there) got her perfectly well, according to the requirements of "their" job. They got the fact that, notwithstanding feelings of estrangement from heterosociety, she wanted to go into a gay bar with her boyfriend. Given that every other bar in the vicinity was specifically designed for couples that looked straight, and that the presence of such a straight-looking couple would have been a brick through the window of the atmosphere of the gay bar, I'm not sure she gets special pleading there.
Of course, there's a lot more to safe space than that, and there's nothing like being excluded to validate feelings of exclusion, but I don't think it's as easy as "doorman bad, lady good". Some lives, you're just not going to fit in. Ry herself seems to have dealt with that - it's a shame the article goes for such a melodramatic response to what is, in effect, the tension between enjoying gay-friendly space and straight-friendly relationships, which is not, I would suggest, an unduly freakish situation.
1 Comments:
I've been in that bar. The straight couples start fistfights.
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