When Gays Wanted to Liberate Children
June 17, 2018 9:00 AM   Subscribe

"Rearing children should be the common responsibility of the whole community. Any legal rights parents have over ‘their’ children should be dissolved and each child should be free to choose its own destiny."
posted by latkes (15 comments total) 38 users marked this as a favorite
 
Very interesting read, thank you.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 10:01 AM on June 17, 2018


This is really fascinating, thanks latkes for posting it here.

I’m still processing it — some of the ideas really speak to me, though I have mixed opinions on how well this kind of system could actually work in practice. But I definitely like the idea of reducing the degree of “ownership” parents have over children.
posted by fencerjimmy at 10:07 AM on June 17, 2018 [5 favorites]


Thank you for posting this. I've often proposed the idea that the nuclear family is the root of 'us vs. them' mentality and that an effective tool of moving beyond feudalism, war, competition is to leave behind the idea of family as we currently practice it. Family sets up the idea that some people, people who are most like you, are more important to protect than other people, outsiders. An idea that gets extended to the other groups to which one belongs: neighborhood, college, country, race, religion.
posted by rubyskye at 12:01 PM on June 17, 2018 [9 favorites]


Wacky take Twang. The gay liberation moment and it's intersection with the radical women's liberation movements of the 60s and 70s is pretty solidly documented by historians and easily googleable. Radical revolutionary ideas were just about commonplace in the 70s.
posted by latkes at 12:04 PM on June 17, 2018 [5 favorites]


Happy Father’s Day!

And thanks for the interesting read.
posted by Barack Spinoza at 12:10 PM on June 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


Super wacky take, indeed. From my perspective, as a queer person with a... let's call it complicated relationship with my parents who is still dealing with wanting elders in my life, it makes absolute sense that a group of gay folk trying to advocate for a better future would come up with this concept.

I don't, to be clear, think that the vision that the members articulated would necessarily be any good for children. But I can 100% understand folks from a community in which children are, heh, queerer than their parents intend, marginalized in a way that parents neither comprehend nor, generally, appreciate, coming up with this concept out of love for children like their younger selves. I could also see this concept coming out of other communities with related sentiments, like the general cultural sense I get from the Deaf community.

We whose parents did not love us as we were have strong feelings about children being loved for who they are. That's all.
posted by sciatrix at 12:12 PM on June 17, 2018 [42 favorites]


I think this article makes a lot of good points, but the idea that kids are oppressed by not being able to have sex with older people is not one of them, and I wish the parts talking about that had been left out. The fact that the article breezily quotes Summerhill as having no harm and doesn’t mention that it had huge controversy for, among other things, teachers having sex with and swimming naked with students is problematic as hell.
posted by corb at 12:26 PM on June 17, 2018 [25 favorites]


Mod note: Comment removed, “never heard of it, sounds fake” is rarely a good way to kick off a thread.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:28 PM on June 17, 2018 [7 favorites]


Reading further...

But it also would be to formally acknowledge that queer adults had been raising other people’s turned-out and runaway queer children for years, particular in gay ghettos such as New York’s West Village and San Francisco’s Castro. Queer kids who were homeless, either by choice or circumstance, tended to flock to these neighborhoods, where they would often find themselves taken in by a sympathetic adult. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, for example, started Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in 1970 to set up shelters in Manhattan for homeless trans youth. In the gay slang of the 1950s and ’60s, an older gay man would be called “mother” if he took on the task of guiding or advising newly-out young gay men.

I have so, so many feelings--grief and love, I think, chief among them. It is also fascinating to me that even though these community structures aren't around in my own experience--or, well, I've certainly never had access to them, my primary community being heavily skewed toward my own age and thin on elders--I see them replicated in nearly every queer space I'm part of.

For example, in my college Lambda Alliance, even though everyone there was college-age, there was a definite community ethos that upperclassmen ought to pay attention to and 'adopt' newly-joined younger students with similar identities. Trans students would share clothing stashes and binders and knowledge with younger peers, in particular, and there was a big drag community scene, and there was just... there was help for kids who were dealing with parents or questioning or wanted to help others or do things or just celebrate with one another from slightly older kids who had been where they were. I joined as a senior, but there was an ace freshman who joined at the same time that I promptly adopted and I still check in on them from time to time with great affection. (And they adopted their own underclassmen. And I hear they adopted their own, and so forth.)

One of my fellow Lambda alums has since gone into advocacy as her full-time career, and I know Laverne Cox adopted her in the same kind of informal mentorship way. And I just.

That's what we do, isn't it? That's what community is about. That's what queer family is about. It's about choosing to look out for people who are just walking along the path you know well and reaching out and choosing to love them and show them how to avoid the pitfalls and climb the great rewards. There's something powerful about that: we choose to be the family for others that we might not have had for ourselves.

There's longform conversation about how the decision to move away from children and intergenerational sponsorship in lgbtq activism was a painful and deliberate tradeoff over here that I think brings up some interesting additional fodder for thought, too.
posted by sciatrix at 12:34 PM on June 17, 2018 [24 favorites]


For those looking for a historical take on collective child-rearing in a modern society, read Communism and the Family by Alexandra Kollontai (one of the very early female Soviet intellectuals who wrote extensively about both women's role in communism and the role of the family in communism).
Just as housework withers away, so the obligations of parents to their children wither away gradually until finally society assumes the full responsibility. Under capitalism children were frequently, too frequently, a heavy and unbearable burden on the proletarian family. Communist society will come to the aid of the parents. In Soviet Russia the Commissariats of Public Education and of Social Welfare are already doing much to assist the family. We already have homes for very small babies, creches, kindergartens, children’s colonies and homes, hospitals and health resorts for sick children. restaurants, free lunches at school and free distribution of text books, warm clothing and shoes to schoolchildren. All this goes to show that the responsibility for the child is passing from the family to the collective.
posted by thegears at 12:39 PM on June 17, 2018 [5 favorites]


sciatrix, thanks so much for those links, these are topics I think about a LOT and it's really exciting to have more longform stuff to read about them!
posted by ITheCosmos at 3:30 PM on June 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


I’m surprised how even the subtitle brings about such possessiveness and rage so as to render me unsafe for metafiltering. Children are not possessions ffs, but are under the care of their parents. Reducing that relationship to chattel is missing the point. Whoever proposed that idea does not have kids but resents having been one and/or the relationship they did have with their own parents. Yes it takes a village but kids need some close primary relationships to get it going and the state can’t interfere with my relationship to my own little one. I’m not attachmentless.

So yeah I took the bait, but man that makes me stabby.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 10:42 PM on June 17, 2018 [8 favorites]


Reducing that relationship to chattel is missing the point. Whoever proposed that idea does not have kids but resents having been one and/or the relationship they did have with their own parents.

What kinds of relationships with their own parents do you imagine that 1970s queer radicals had?

What kinds of opportunities to engage with children--opportunities to have their own children--do you imagine that gay men in the 1970s had?

Pull quote aside, did you read the article itself?
posted by sciatrix at 8:34 AM on June 18, 2018 [7 favorites]


Thank you for sharing this. Queer community as chosen family is important to me. I personally have been both lucky and privileged - while I have Family Issues and the therapy bills to prove it, overall, family of origin has been a source of stability and support for me as long as I maintain some carefully patrolled boundaries for my own sanity. But with perhaps one exception that I can think of, I am the outlier in that regard in my queer community. Almost all of my loved ones have been badly hurt, traumatized, and/or endangered by blood family, and their love and support and healing and food and rent and medical bill payments and hugs and pet food and babysitters and job leads and everything else has come from queer community.

Of course, this gets tricky when you extend further into the next generation. Most of my queer friends who are raising kids are desperately marginalized one way or another - disability, poverty, lack of education, you name it - and to some extent struggle in raising their kids for those reasons. Those kids are loved and supported as hell but their parents live in very valid fear that if we start looking around for "which kids are better off in other families," their kids are going to be the first to be taken away, because they will never be able to give them the opportunities available to their peers, who may be living in shitty abusive queer-hating households, but by god, they are getting sent to good schools and they have health insurance and they don't go to bed hungry as long as they shut up and stay in the closet and don't make waves.

I don't know. Family is a mess, and the intergenerational effects of trauma from family are complex and messy. I don't think Gay Men's Liberation had this right by any means, but it's also nowhere near right now, and I'm glad for anything that reminds us that there are other ways to raise children and form community, and specifically advocates for reconceptualizing family. I don't actually think that abolish the nuclear family as a legal and social structure is the answer, but there just has to be a way to make room for other family structures as well, to make life better for queer kids and maybe eventually blunt some of those intergenerational effects of family trauma.
posted by Stacey at 9:09 AM on June 18, 2018 [6 favorites]


Reducing that relationship to chattel is missing the point.

Tell that to the parents who do so.
posted by PMdixon at 3:09 PM on June 18, 2018 [4 favorites]


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