Revision is one of my favorite parts of my writing practice. It’s the part where the revisitation of the work creates opportunities for imagination and discovery, challenge and clarity.
A lot of people think about revision through a lens of limitation and suppression — think revisionist histories where a dominant narrative is heralded even in the face of deliberately oppressed and/or obviously inconvenient evidence to the contrary — but to regard revision through a lens of abundance and exploration, the activity is transformed into something that beckons us all toward new, expansive ways to describe, experience or relate to a thing. Through this expanded view, we are able to launch into possibility. Some people don’t like that, though, and we have to reckon with them accordingly.
Last month, Pride Month, the bitter, love and joy-hating governor, signed a proclamation to recognize June as Faith and Family Month. The organization that launched the month, also called Faith and Family Month, which isn’t weird or uncreative at all, opens their website with the sentence, “The cornerstone for society is marriage and family and they have been under attack.”
The website then cites “The Psalmist” as the voice of their call to arms. The Psalmist, when capitalized and in this specific reference about “what the righteous do” is King David, who goes unnamed for obvious reasons I think
(Yes, it’s that King David who had the husband of the woman he was lusting over killed in battle so he could marry her and yes, that King David who had about eight wives and numerous concubines). Hypocrisy aside, this isn’t really about the theological inspiration behind the sad and ridiculous “reclamation” of June in the spirit of the same whackness of folks who ask, “Why isn’t there a White history month?”
I’ve got a lot of thoughts. Off the top, I don’t ascribe to marriage or family as narrowly defined “institutions,” in the way that Faith and Family Month aims to define and weaponize them.
Being queer showed me, in ways that were both difficult and affirming that family, at its best, is a messy, complex web of relationships that goes beyond bloodlines, is often informed by personal, social, and cultural needs, legends, and folklores, and is many times referenced through platitudes and expectations that have no anchor in the care and compassion that loving someone requires.
The supposed Faith and Family Month is approaching family as if it is a concrete, singular definition when family has always been a flexible, abstract and highly designable concept that thrives on constant revision. I say thrive because families have been the most abundant, the most responsive, and the most successful when we’ve allowed ourselves to revisit and reimagine them for our highest good.
When families are designed with the care and compassion that loving requires at the very center, the results are so varied, vivacious and victorious, we’d be stupid to think families could ever be defined as one thing and one thing only.
I’m not calling Faith and Family Month stupid. I’m saying that efforts to stymy the efforts of people to define families by and for themselves miss the entire point of what family is and what family can be.
The governor’s proclamation and the Faith and Family counter-Pride efforts are particularly out of step with what we’ve always known to be true about how families work and how communities thrive. Especially queer families and queer communities, and I’m not just talking about how “it takes a village.”
When I began living my truth as a lesbian, there were quite a few members of my genetic family who showed their disdain and disapproval, mostly in coded, quiet ways that grated more on my nerves than outright rejection.
Fortunately, new family — chosen family — not only embraced me for who I am but they encouraged me to be who I am, out loud and without shame.
To this day, most of that chosen family is still here to comfort me and celebrate me through the inevitable ups and downs of life. To this day, I am supported and encouraged, nurtured and inspired by my chosen family in ways some folks with whom I share blood couldn’t begin to offer or understand.
And now, as a Black, lesbian wife and mother with a family of my own, I’m learning even more about the depth and power of love, care, and compassion that lives beyond single-story definitions of what family means. Queer people, Black people, and other historically resilient communities who’ve survived displacement, disenfranchisement, and destruction know better than anyone else that families are created not defined, their versions multitudinous not singular.
I hate to break it to ‘em, but Pride Month is and will always be the original month of faith and family, as our queer communities continue to celebrate the tremendous hope and faith it takes to be visible and live authentically in places and among people who — some quite literally — would rather see our hearts and our stories hidden and/or eradicated from this life, this world.
And our queer communities will continue to celebrate the families we’ve made and sustained, families we’ve had to revise and redesign to live in a world that promises everyone a chance to be possible.
Sheree L. Greer is the author of two novels and the founder of Kitchen Table Literary Arts, which showcases and supports the work of Black women writers. Learn more at Kitchen-Table.org.
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