An Appreciation of Queer Parents
Parents who attempt to challenge cishet norms in their parenting are mocked and vilified in the media, but need to be celebrated and supported.
I want to start today with two stories.
First is the story of Adam Vena. Vena has become a star in the conservative media sphere over the past several months with his story of losing custody of his child “because the mother decided the boy was really a girl,” to quote the viral social media post by a right-wing influencer that launched him to fame in the fever swamp. Vena’s story has been all over right-wing media over the past few months, with every outlet relaying his “heartbreaking” story of having his child ripped away from him by the woke mob.
Now, if you’re not a complete fucking moron, you might wonder if there is more to this story than that of a good upstanding family man who lost custody of his kid because of the crazy, man-hating California family court system (a favorite target of “men’s rights” groups since the rise of no-faulty divorce in the 70s) and the child’s evil mother, who is apparently so infected with the woke mind virus that she has decided to pull a Sleepaway Camp-inspired social experiment of raising her son as a girl.
And lo and behold, when an actual news organization, the Los Angeles Times, looked into the story, the results were absurdly predictable. Turns out Vena is a rage-filled asshole whose abuse of his ex and child did not start (but was exacerbated) by his child’s gender expression and his ex’s affirmation of it. Vena had harassed his ex dating back to when she was pregnant and she had already filed a restraining order against him before any issues regarding the child’s gender arose. A year after the initial restraining order, Vena found out the child liked to wear a pink dress and this unleashed more abuse, including calling the child’s mother, in the redacted language of the LA Times article, a “stupid f-- c--” for letting the child wear the dress.
The other story is of New York Times columnist and professional Stupid Person Pamela Paul. In February, Paul published a long opinion column on detransitioners that was at least the sixth major article published in the Times over the past two years “asking questions” about whether or not too many minors are transitioning. This piece was immediately debunked by trans journalists Erin Reed and Evan Urquhart, who pointed out that Paul, among other things, cited studies that had been debunked and misrepresented the findings of other studies that did not fit her narrative.
Paul, in true smug Times fashion, did not engage with these criticisms but simply dismissed Reed and Urquhat, who had done exactly the type of deep reporting and fact checking that you would expect a writer for the New York fucking Times to do, as “activists.” Paul didn’t feel the need need to engage in a good-faith discussion with Reed and Urquhart because, despite the grandstanding to the contrary by Paul and the Times leadership, that was not the point of her work.
The point of Paul’s weekly Times column and the newspaper’s ongoing attacks on trans kids is to reach an audience that does not watch Fox News or follow right-wing weirdos on social media and therefore probably has never heard of Adam Vena. This audience is made up of self-described liberals of a certain age who mostly vote Democrat and hate Trump but also don’t understand what’s up with the kids today with their pronouns and puberty blockers. Trans-skeptical coverage in places like the Times gives these people cover for their weird feelings about trans people.
I knew Paul’s piece had achieved its objective about a week after it was published when I got a call from a friend of mine, the mother of a trans teenager. My friend had been emailed the Paul column by her own mother, a Boomer white liberal who, despite being progressive on most issues, had already expressed her discomfort at her grandchild’s transition. She thought that if her own daughter just had the facts as they were laid out in the Paper of Record, maybe she would see the error of her ways in affirming her child’s transition.
The Adam Vena story and the Pamela Paul editorial are illustrative of how media stokes the current anti-LGBTQ+ panic in different ways. Right-wing propaganda outlets just completely fucking lie about someone like Vena to stoke transphobic and anti-feminist outrage in their viewers. More “reasonable” centrist publications like the Times insist they are “just asking questions” and paint themselves as brave truth tellers for doing so.
But what both of these stories have in common is a parent (not incidentally, it is a mother in both cases) having their parenting called into question because they have chosen to affirm their child’s identity which does not conform to the cishetero standard. In one case, she’s being harassed by a rage-filled ex, in the other she is getting smugly corrected by her own mother who is citing the New York Times as evidence. What this illustrates is that the current war on LGBTQ+ children is also a war on parents, specifically parents that are refusing to teach their children that being cisgender and heterosexual are the expected norms.
First (inevitably for an essay on LGBTQ+ issues), a note on terminology. Typically, we have talked of “LGBTQ+ parents” in reference to LGBTQ+ people who have children. When parents who are cisgender and heterosexual support their LGBTQ+ kids, we usually use language like “affirming” or “ally” parents. But having spent a lot of time with parents who fit these descriptors and others who fall somewhere in between, I have decided to describe all of the parents I am talking about today as “queer parents.” By “queer parents,” I am referring to any and all of the following:
LGBTQ+ people with children
affirming parents of LGBTQ+ kids
hetero or hetero-presenting parents who expose their children to queer culture through things like Drag Story Hour and teach that queerness is normal and healthy
hetero or hetero-presenting parents who engage in the kinds of flexible intimate and familial arrangements pioneered by queer people, from non-monogamy to the construction of chosen families in place of or in addition to extended biological family.
In calling these various, overlapping groups all “queer parents,” I am using queer in the sense famously defined by bell hooks:
‘Queer' not as being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but 'queer' as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.
I am referring to people raising children outside of the strictures of cis- and heteronormativity and with the expectation that their children will be loved and supported regardless of their gender or sexual identity and who teach their children to love and respect others regardless of their gender or sexual identity.
What I want to argue here is that the current attack on LGBTQ+ people, from bans on gender-affirming care to bans on LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum and books to attacks on events like Drag Story Hour, is as much about the fear of queer parenting as it is about the fear of queer kids. And in attacking queer parents, its opponents -- which range from right-wing Christian Nationalists like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to supposedly liberal centrists like Pamela Paul -- are doing exactly what they accuse these parents of doing: putting maintenance of their ideology over the well-being of children. And in doing so, they are attacking and slandering some of the most amazing parents you will ever meet.
In 1998, gay historian Michael Bronski’s book The Pleasure Principle argued that right-wing attacks on gay rights are rooted in fear of the attractive alternative presented by queer people to the strictures of heterosexual society:
These attacks occur because homosexuality and homosexuals present attractive alternatives to the restrictions that reproductive heterosexuality and its social strictures have placed upon heterosexuals. The real issue is not that heterosexuals will be tempted to engage in homosexual sexual activity (although the visibility of such activity presents that option) but that they will be drawn to more flexible norms that gay people, excluded from social structures created by heterosexuality, have created for their own lives. These include less restrictive gender roles; non-monogamous intimate relationships and more freedom for sexual exploration; family units that are chosen, not biological; and new models for parenting.
Conservatives pathologically fixate on sex when discussing LGBTQ+ people. Under Project 2025, the truly dystopian playbook for a second Trump administration assembled by a Legion of Doom-style coalition of right-wing groups, all depictions of queerness and “transgenderism” would be declared pornographic and any teacher or librarian caught giving kids access to this newly-defined “pornography” would be jailed.
But what truly scares conservatives about something like Drag Story Hour is exactly what Bronski identifies, a fear that has little to do with actual sexual activity and much more to do with embracing a more flexible and “queer” idea of relationships, family, and parenting. While Drag Story Hour audiences have always included many families with queer parents, I think what truly terrifies right-wingers is the amount of heterosexual (or hetero-passing) parents who bring their kids to an event like ours.
I believe that the “attractive alternative” presented by queer people is more attractive than ever before, especially for people under 50. We live in a time when many of the old tenants of the midcentury American Dream have been fully exposed for the frauds they are. Millennials, the people in their 30s and early 40s who most often have young kids, have come into adulthood and parenthood experiencing two financial crises, one pandemic, and half a coup. The pillars of American society, from capitalism to the Supreme Court, seem shaky at best. And while some have responded to this by fully inhabiting the fascist fantasy world of Trumpism, others have responded by questioning the basic assumptions they were raised with, on everything from capitalism to race to religion to gender and sexuality.
Following Bronski, I believe this is one reason for the widespread embrace of queer culture in the mainstream in the 15 years since both Glee and RuPaul’s Drag Race premiered. In an era when even many “straight” people feel more alienated than ever before, they have learned from a subculture that is used to being alienated. Meanwhile, the defenders of the old order burrow deeper into their fantasy worlds in order to deny the fact that they have also by and large been screwed by the failures of the old system.
Many Americans have seen themselves failed by bastions of the American dream ranging from the housing market, where the idea of owning a home as a path to middle-class wealth has become a cruel joke, to politics, where since 1992 the Republican presidential candidate has only won the popular vote once but has appointed six of the nine justices on the Supreme Court. And the flexibility of queer culture, and its determination to build something new and better after being failed by the mainstream, has become more and more attractive.
While The New York Times has spent years sympathetically interviewing non-affirming parents of trans kids, and right-wing media has made stars out of abusive, transphobic parents like Adam Vena, queer parents have largely been either ignored or vilified as evil/stupid libs drunk on wokeness.
But if you actually know queer parents, you quickly see through the dumb stereotype. These are people trying to do their best to raise their kids with kindness in an increasingly cruel world. They know (either from personal experience or listening to their queer friends) how hard it can be for a queer child and how important having an affirming parent can be. So they try to raise their kids to understand that if they are queer, that is OK, and if they are not, they should not be bigoted assholes.
Many of these parents are doing the best to provide their kids with the safety they never had while also still healing their own childhood trauma. I don’t believe it is a coincidence that the rise in queer parenting has happened as the children of the 90s/00s evangelical megachurch boom have started having children. So many of the queer parents I know are still working on their own religious trauma from upbringings in high-control, often-abusive conservative religions like Mormonism and evangelical Christianity. Many, largely because of this religious trauma, came out as LGBTQ+ later in life, sometimes after they were already in hetero-passing marriages with kids.
Other parents I put in the “queer parents” category are those who had queerness introduced to their family by their kids. I have seen parents at all different stages of acceptance and self-education, many stumbling over terminology and pronouns but on a quest to learn for the sake of their child. These parents, at least at first, are usually not people who read Judith Buter in college and are not particularly invested in dismantling the cishetero white supremacist patriarchy. They just want their child to be safe and happy. But they are often the ones that become the most politically radicalized when they realize all of the ways our society conspires to make queer children unsafe and unhappy.
Regardless of how they get there, these parents demonstrate the most pure and powerful parental love I have ever seen. They are determined to break out of the old, toxic ideas of parenting, gender, and sexuality for the good of their children and themselves, even though it is hard and potentially dangerous.
This is quite a remarkable change. When Jeanne Manford founded PFLAG in 1973, the idea that straight parents would be accepting of their queer kids was almost unheard of. And the idea of queer parents raising kids was more ridiculous still. One of the earliest organizing issues in lesbian politics in the 1970s was fighting for the rights of lesbian mothers, who routinely lost custody of their children after coming out as gay and leaving their heterosexual marriage. Decades of activism and legal advocacy slowly changed the presumption of family court judges that gay people were fundamentally unfit to raise children.
But today there is a growing population of queer parents of all types. The existence of programs like Drag Story Hour is proof of their existence. Because despite what Fox News may have told you, we at Drag Story Hour do not go out in vans to kidnap children and force them to listen to Lil Miss Hot Mess read Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag. All Drag Story Hour events are voluntary and attended by kids and parents/guardians together. If there were not enough parents who wanted this kind of educational programming for their kids, we would have gone out of business years ago. But to the contrary, our small organization cannot keep up with the demand for our programs, especially when so much of our time, money, and energy goes to making our events safe from right-wing psychos who threaten to bomb us in the name of “protecting children.”
I have a lot more to say on queer parents, and so this is going to be the first of a multipart series. But for now I will end with a note about why this issue is so important and personal to me.
I know so many of these parents. Some are strangers who come to Drag Story Hour looking for community and support because their child just came out and they are not sure what to do. Others I see lobbying their state legislatures, often putting up with abuse and scorn from Republican politicians while lobbying their supposed representatives to see the humanity of themselves and their children. And then there are the many queer parents in my own chosen family, for whose kids I have the privilege of being “Auntie David.”
And I know from them that despite the growing number of parents and despite the growth of supportive programs like Drag Story Hour, it takes great courage to raise one’s kids outside of the cishet paradigm. Returning to bell hooks’ definition of queer, queer parents have to “invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live” against a cultural backdrop that sees them as naive fools at best and child abusers at worst. Working in some small way to create that space where they can speak and thrive and live is the great work of my life, and they deserve so much more.