Same Sex Intimacies

Families of Choice and Other Life Experiments

Catherine Donovan, Brian Heaphy, Jeffrey Weeks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134576487
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Our families are increasingly a matter of choice, and the choices are widening all the time. This is particularly true of the non-heterosexual world, where the last ten years have seen a popular acceptance of same sex partnerships and, to a lesser extent, of same sex parenting.

Based on extensive interviews with people in a variety of non-traditional relationships, this fascinating new book argues that these developments in the non-heterosexual world are closely linked to wider changes in the meaning of family in society at large, and that each can cast light on the other.

Same Sex Intimacies gives vivid accounts of the different ways non-heterosexual people have been able to create meaningful intimate relationships for themselves, and highlights the role of individual agency and collective endeavour in forging these roles: as friends, partners, parents and as members of communities. This topical book will provide compelling reading for students of the family, sexuality and lesbian and gay studies.

1 Families of choice

The changing context of non-heterosexual relationships

The emergence of families of choice

In his book, entitled Our Families, Our Values: Snapshots of Queer Kinship, Robert Goss (1997:19) argues that everyone ‘has the right to create family forms that fits his or her needs to realize the human potential for love in non oppressive relationships’. It would be surprising indeed if everyone agreed that families could be ‘created’ so readily. But the fact that many non-heterosexual people are saying it, in ever proliferating stories of everyday life, signals a new development.

‘Family’ is a powerful and pervasive word in our culture, embracing a variety of social, cultural, economic and symbolic meanings; but traditionally it is seen as the very foundation of society. It is also a deeply ambiguous and contested term in the contemporary world, the subject of continual polemics, anxiety, and political concern about the ‘crisis of the family’. It is surely of great significance, therefore, that the term is now in common use among many, though by no means all, self-identified non-heterosexuals. Increasingly, it is being deployed to denote something broader than the traditional relationships based on lineage, alliance and marriage, referring instead to kin-like networks of relationships, based on friendship, and commitments ‘beyond blood’ (Wakeling and Bradstock 1995). Such networks might also incorporate selected blood relatives. They may or may not involve children. But whatever the particular patterns, they have a cultural and symbolic meaning for the people who participate or feel a sense of belonging in and through them. ‘Everyone has the right to define significant relationships and decide who matters and counts as family,’ continues Goss (1997:19). If this is the case, something is clearly afoot in the politics of the family, and in particular in the lives of those historically excluded from family life in most western cultures. We are witnessing the development and public affirmation of ‘families of choice’ (cf. Weston 1991).

New ways of thinking and talking about family are being absorbed into everyday life, as the following two quotations illustrate. The first is from Rachel, a black lesbian in her early thirties:

I think the friendships I have are family. I’m sure lots of people will say this, but, it’s very important to me because my family is not [important]—apart from my mother, who is kind of important—on the whole, my [chosen] family is all I’ve got. And my family are my friends. And I think you make your family—because I’ve never felt like I belonged anywhere. And it’s taken me a long time to realise that it comes from me. …It doesn’t matter where I go or who I am with, I’m not going to just suddenly be given a family, or a history, or an identity, or whatever. You don’t just get it on a plate. You have to create your own. So far as I am concerned, that’s how important friends are. (F02)

The second is from a white gay man, Luke, aged 36:

we [friends] call each other family—you know, they’re family I’m not sure whether that’s family in the sense of being gay [family]. …I have a blood family, but I have an extended family…my friends. (M04)

Comments such as these raise a number of interesting issues. First, the use of the term ‘family’ suggests a strongly perceived need to appropriate the sort of values and comforts that the family unit is supposed to embody, even if it regularly fails to do so: continuity over time, emotional and material support, ongoing commitment, and intense engagement. Many non-heterosexuals, particularly lesbians, dislike using the term ‘family’ because of its historic baggage and oppressive heterosexual connotations. Yet, even in the process of rejecting the term, some of its meaning is preserved. Juliet, a 39-year-old lesbian, remarks that:

Because I have kind of, at the moment anyway, fairly negative feelings about my biological family, it maybe is not something I would actually immediately apply to my friends and the people who are important to me. Having said that, you know, I think the way I think about those people is the way that… generally people would regard family. (F01)

For many others, friendship circles are spoken about as equivalent to the idealised family (and infinitely preferable to the real one). We can hear this in some characteristic comments on friends as family: ‘a feeling of belonging to a group of people who like me’ (Simon, a gay man, 32) ; ‘affection, love if you like— you share the good things, and you share the bad things, too’ (Dan, 71). These may not be everyone’s definition of the ideal family, nor are they anywhere near the legal definition of kin, but the words carry intense conviction among those who have chosen to organise their relationships around new forms of commitment.

The second point is that this usage illustrates a very important ethos that now pervades the non-heterosexual world: a sense of the freedom and agency which the concept of ‘created’ relationships brings (cf. Henriksson 1995). For one gay man, Paul, friends are ‘more important than family’. He goes on to say that:

I take my family [of origin] for granted, whereas my friendships are, to a degree, chosen, and therefore they are created. And I feel a greater responsibility to nourish them, whereas my family will always be there. (M21)

Paul’s words are echoed by a black lesbian in her late twenties, Malika:

In the last few years since I’ve come out, I’ve learnt that family can be anything you want it to be. So I create my own family, basically, and that’s been a difficult thing for me to get my head round, but I like it now. (F03)

This emphasis on creativity is crucial to understanding what is happening in terms of changing relationship patterns. It suggests a new self-confidence in the non-heterosexual world, and an awareness of new opportunities and spaces for choosing ways of being. However, running alongside this is a strong sense of the continuing hostility towards homosexuality in the wider world, despite the well-recognised changes which have opened up these new possibilities. Chosen families provide the ‘life-line’ that the biological family, it is believed, should provide, but often cannot or will not for its sexually different offspring. For a young lesbian, Jo, aged 22, her family of origin is ‘homophobic’. Chosen relationships, based on friendship, on the other hand, are ‘supportive, and understand in a way that your family should and often doesn’t. And because of people’s situations, they often end up spending more time with their [friends]. … I think they become like family’ (F43).

As these comments illustrate, people slide easily between viewing the family as a site of hostility, and as something they can invent. Friends are like family; or they are family. The family is something external to you, or something you do. This ambivalence in language is revealing. We are clearly in transition from one set of norms to another. The ‘postmodern family’, as Stacey (1996:7) has described the current diversity of patterns, underlines the contested, ambivalent and undecided character of contemporary familial patterns, combining a mixture of experiment, pastiche and nostalgia. The language of ‘family’ used by many contemporary non-heterosexual people can be seen as both a challenge to conventional definitions, and an attempt to broaden these; as a hankering for legitimacy and an attempt to build something new; as an identification with existing patterns, and a more or less conscious effort to subvert them. The stories that many non-heterosexual women and men tell about families of choice are creating a new public space where old and new forms jostle for meaning, and where new patterns of relationships are being invented.

The concept of ‘stories’ or ‘narratives’ is an important element when considering the changes that are taking place. Through narratives, individuals give meaning to their lives, affirm their identities, and present their relationships as viable and valid. The new stories about families of choice that characterise the contemporary non-heterosexual world provide new truths, and these in turn circulate within communities, and give rise to claims for recognition and legitimisation as crucial elements of the claim to full citizenship (Plummer 1995). As Lewin observes, ‘same sex commitments are nothing new; only the demand for equity and recognition have changed the landscape’ (Lewin 1998:25).

The best way to conceptualise this changing landscape, we believe, is in relationship to the circulation of new stories that are significantly reshaping the ways in which we conceive of intimate life. In his book, Telling Sexual Stories, Plummer (1995) argues that:

Society itself may be seen as a textured but seamless web of stories emerging everywhere through interaction: holding people together, pulling people apart, making societies work … [The] metaphor of the story … has become recognised as one of the central roots we have into the continuing quest for understanding human meaning. Indeed culture itself has been defined as ‘an ensemble of stories we tell about ourselves’.

(Plummer 1995:5)

If this is the case, then the emergence of new ways of expressing basic needs and desires (‘new stories’) are very important. They signal both changing perceptions and changing possibilities. We can speak of intimate lives in new ways. New stories about sexual and intimate life emerge, it may be argued, when there is a new audience ready to hear them in communities of meaning and understanding, and when newly vocal groups can have their experiences validated in and through them.

In the case of the non-heterosexual world there is a growing audience, in the burgeoning sexual communities themselves, ‘fattened up, rendered ripe and willing to hear such stories’ (Plummer 1995:121). And there are many individuals, like those we quote in this book, willing to vocalise new experiences, which has led to a conscious presentation of the viability of non-heterosexual ways of life. As Lewin observes, as narrators ‘construct their stories they engage in a process of explaining their own worlds to themselves, thereby conceptualizing who they are’ (Lewin 1998:38), and, we would add, making sure that their stories are heard, not only among their immediate circles, but in the wider world.

This involves a high degree of reflexivity in the accounts we listened to. People offer stories to validate their lives, and simultaneously reveal their awareness of the similar stories circulating in the communities with which they identify. They provide examples of ‘the reflexive project of the self’, which the sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991) has argued is characteristic of the late modern world. Faced with the breakdown of traditional ways of life and older forms of legitimisation, people are forced to shape new values, norms and life patterns. In so doing, they draw on their own experiences and those of their significant others, and begin to define themselves anew. Pioneering books such as Kath Weston’s Families We Choose: Lesbians,Gays, Kinship (1991), which was followed by a number of works, including Valued Families: The Lesbian Mothers’ Legal Handbook (Harne and Rights of Women 1997), We Are Family: Testimonies of Lesbian and Gay Parents (Ali 1996), and No Place Like Home: Relationships and Family Life among Lesbians and GayMen (Carrington 1999), simultaneously document these changes and circulate the new narratives, promote alternative ways of being, and offer models for ‘doing family’. People are rethinking the meaning of their relationships, and the new meanings of family.

From this perspective, the emergence of the emphasis on ‘family’ and relationships in the life stories of many non-heterosexuals represents an important shift in the cultural politics of sexual nonconformity. Of course, many of the patterns that have recently come to public consciousness are not in any fundamental sense new. The burgeoning literature of lesbian and gay history offers plentiful accounts of same sex relationships in the past, from the passionate friendships of women (see Faderman 1981; Smith-Rosenberg 1985), and the emergent networks of homosexual men from at least the seventeenth century onwards (Bray 1982), to the intricacies of bisexual life (Garber 1995). Historians have documented patterns of religious same sex commitment ceremonies, which some have argued are prototypes of contemporary ‘same sex marriages’ (Boswell 1994; Hexter 1997). We are not, therefore, arguing that non-heterosexual relationships have emerged fully armed out of the flux of postmodernity. The myths of the promiscuous, hedonistic homosexual man, capable of no more than fleeting relationships, or of the sexless spinster, cosily ensconced in private life, have some passing contact with a difficult and complex history, but are belied by the realities of many non-heterosexual lives and the intense erotic, romantic and friendship commitments which have long existed. But at the same time as we acknowledge a rich history, we also need to recognise crucial contemporary changes in the life stories of those who have been forced to live outside what we describe in Chapter 2 as the ‘heterosexual assumption’.

These changes are the result of two closely intertwined shifts in contemporary culture: a transformation over the past generation in the possibilities for living an openly non-heterosexual life; and wider changes in the organisation of sexuality and gender, which have given rise to both the so-called ‘crisis of the family’ and to complex transformations of intimate life. In the remainder of this chapter, we concentrate on these two transformations, and the new narratives which they offer.

From identity to relational rights

From being a subject ‘hidden from history’, homosexuality has in recent years come to dominate at least one form of writing about the past: sexual history (see Weeks 2000). This is due to a growing recognition that the history of heterosexuality is inextricably bound up with its ‘other’, same sex activity We cannot understand one without the other. Different cultures, and diverse histories, have responded to same sex activities in a variety of different ways, so there can be no simple history of homosexuality as a transhistorical experience. There is always a dual movement in the history of sexual nonconformity, a story of difference, and a story of convergence. The sexually outlawed are regularly forced to live in at least two worlds: of outward conformity, and of secret transgression. Each defines the other. Sexual history has to be, inevitably, about both heterosexuality and homosexuality.

Since at least the eighteenth century, and increasingly codified from the nineteenth century (Trumbach 1998, 1999; Sedgwick 1985, 1990), the execrated category of ‘the homosexual’ has served to define the parameters of what it is to be ‘normal’, that is heterosexual. The fact that the boundaries between the two have always been permeable, as countless personal histories have revealed, and the for long ambiguous category of ‘the bisexual’ underlined (Garber 1995), made little difference to popular beliefs and prejudices or the legal realities. The divide between homosexuality and heterosexuality seemed rooted in nature, sanctioned by religion and science, and upheld by penal codes. It is not surprising, therefore, that distinctive social worlds emerged in which at first male and later female ‘homosexuals’ developed different ways of life (see Chapter 3 for a fuller discussion). These worlds were generally covert, and always vulnerable, but they provided the context for the solidification of distinctive sexual identities, and what Michel Foucault (1979) called a ‘reverse discourse’. The hostile categorisation became the starting point for positive identification.

For recent generations of non-heterosexuals, however, the real turning point was the emergence of a radical lesbian and gay movement from the late 1960s, though this inevitably was rooted in longer-term developments (Weeks 1977/ 1990; D’Emilio 1983; Adam 1994). The new movement had a profound effect not only on the lives and relationships of people directly involved in it, but also in the wider community. One of the fundamental effects (if not the original inspiration) of the lesbian and gay movement was the assertion of identity and community: an affirmation of a positive sense of self and of the collective means of realising this (see Weeks 1995). Finding community, said one of the interviewees in Kath Weston’s book, means discovering ‘that your story isn’t the only one in the world’ (Weston 1991:123). The new stories—embodied in a library of ‘coming out’ narratives—told of discovering the self, achieving a new identity, finding others like yourself, and gaining a new sense of belonging.

Although the radicalised movement of self-affirming lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgendered people and others proclaimed the desire to ‘end the homosexual’, and indeed the heterosexual (Altman 1971/1993)—that is to get rid of redundant and oppressive categorisations—the reality was different. Since the early 1970s, there has been considerable growth of distinctive sexual communities, and of what have been called quasi-ethnic lesbian and gay identities, and the proliferation of other distinctive sexual identities, from bisexual to sado-masochistic, and many sub-divisions (Epstein 1990). Difference has apparently triumphed over convergence, identity over similarity. The rise of a queer politics from the late 1980s can be seen as both a product of and a challenge to these developments, rejecting narrow identity politics in favour of a more transgressive erotic warfare (Warner 1993; Seidman 1997)—while at the same time, ironically, creating a new, post-identity identity of ‘queer’.

Since the 1970s, the lesbian and gay movement has oscillated between two elements—a ‘moment of transgression’ and a ‘moment of citizenship’ (Weeks 1995:108–23). The first marks a challenge to the existing sexual order, the subversion of existing norms and the questioning of conventional values in the name of something better. The second is about justice and equity, daring the existing order to recognise difference, and to redefine the grounds of full inclusion. In practice, sexual politics must always involve features of both, which implicitly, or increasingly explicitly, involves a challenge to heterosexual hegemony, and its most characteristic social form, the family

The transgressive element of lesbian and gay politics offered a sharp critique of the family as the forcing house of hostility to homosexuality, and the subordination of women. As the Australian gay theorist Dennis Altman put it, ‘straight is to gay as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Families of choice: the changing context of non-heterosexual relationships
• 2 Life experiments: the meanings of non-heterosexual relationships
• 3 The friendship ethic
• 4 In search of home
• 5 Partnership rites
• 6 Sexual pleasures
• 7 Parenting
• 8 Towards intimate citizenship
• Appendix 1: Researching Same Sex Intimacies
• Appendix 2: Biographies of interviewees
• Bibliography
• Index