Latinx Estrangement, the False Privacy of Homophobia, and De-centering Your Blood Family (Happy Holidays?)

When I look up the etymology of the word “estrangement,” it brings me back to Spanish, and family, and home. The word “estrangement,” comes from the Latin “extraneare” which means “to treat as a stranger.” This is the same etymology of the Spanish word “extrañar”, which we say when we miss someone. This means that in Spanish, “estrangement” and “missing someone” are connected, that maybe they can happen at the same time, that we can both treat someone like a stranger, even as we continue missing them.

For the last five years, I’ve been both estranged and missing my family. When I say “estranged,” there are a million asterisks and qualifiers I could say next, and if you’ve experienced estrangement in your own family, you probably understand what I mean: that it is never linear, that it rarely has the finite clarity that we crave.

In my case, it has meant being estranged with some family members but not others, and for different periods of time, with some brief moments of reconciliation in between, before distance happened once again. It has meant being told not to share my queerness with my niece and nephew, or compartmentalize it from other members of the family. It has meant not seeing much of my family, or being “home” for Christmas in over three years.

Estrangement, coming from a Latinx culture, feels like the ultimate failure. Some days, it also feels biologically impossible, like every molecule in my body knows I am not meant to be isolated from my own blood. 

I think some part of me always knew my queerness came with the price of losing my family, and I think that’s why I delayed confronting queerness until so late into my life. And I think that’s why I prepared for it as much as I did: queerness made me finally start going to therapy. It made me abandon the last of my “lone wolf” coping mechanisms and instead reach out towards community–things I stubbornly refused for years. Maybe since I already knew, on some level, that I’d soon lose my family, queerness made me finally admit I wouldn’t survive unless I began building that support somewhere else. After so much time dealing with trauma through hyper independence, queerness was the first thing I finally admitted to myself I couldn’t do alone. 

It’s hard to describe this fully to straight people, the specific brutality of queerness amidst other forms of oppression. I don’t mean to suggest that being queer made my life necessarily harder than being a person of color, or a woman, or a child of immigrants. Maybe I just mean to say that it compelled me towards a new kind of collectivity that no other oppressive force in my life could quite convince me in the same way to surrender to.

Homophobia, more than other oppressions I’ve faced, attacks directly at the family: it determines how your family perceives you as part of their lineage or not, how you choose or choose not to continue that lineage, which love gets acknowledged as part of the lineage, and which gets ignored. And because queerness confronts family and love so directly, maybe that’s why it more than anything else, can feel so uniquely brutal, so ancestrally triggering.

In an odd way, naming myself as someone estranged from family feels like yet another “coming out,” another aspect of my life I believed I had keep privately to myself, when really that only amplifies the shame around the experience. In her book Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, Sarah Schulman writes about the “the false privatization of homophobia,” how the “active assaultive abandonment” of queer people by their families is viewed as an “inherent right.” That this gets “falsely constructed as the perpetrator’s ‘privacy’ somehow outside of the realm of accountability.” 

I didn’t write about my experiences with estrangement out of some kind of protection for this privacy, some belief that my family members’ exclusion of me were personal decisions that I had to respect.

Instead, Schulman argues for what she calls an “ethic of intervention,” where we normalize taking action against those who reject queer family. I think about the ending of The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School: when the father tells his wife that he cannot accept his two queer children and must disown them, all the three of them – wife, daughter and son —  instead shout into the phone at him, “WE disown YOU!”

I remember how mesmerized I felt reading that ending two years ago, shocked at the idea that a family could take such decisive action, that disownment could go both ways, that it wasn’t only the most homophobic people in the family that get to decide who gets to stay in the family. 

I guess that’s why I’m writing this now, after so many years: to push back against the false privacy of estrangement, and the “inherent right” of straight people to hide queer life. To instead follow some kind of ethic of intervention, even when I don’t have many examples of what that looks like, even when I only have the endings of young adult novels to point me towards an alternative vision of what Latinx queer family can be.

A few days ago on Twitter I saw this tweet from Nneka Okona that I haven’t stopped thinking about for days: 

“Decentering men is critically important. But the real healing begins when you decenter your parents.” 

Seven years ago, when I first started exploring my own queerness, “decentering men” felt like the first crucial step. It meant no longer doing anything in my life just to obtain – or retain – cis straight male approval, or gain access to their power. It meant giving up heterosexual and cisgender power altogether, and being okay with the very real economic and societal consequences of that. These days, at the most basic level, decentering men means I just don’t think about cis men all that much anymore. Most days, in my mostly QTPOC circle of friends, it’s easy to almost forget that cis men and straightness exist. 

Decentering your blood family is kind of a similar process. It has meant building my own sense of self-worth outside of what certain family members think about me. It means doing all the inner healing work to make their opinions about me as inconsequential as possible. And it means coming to terms with the fact that all the power and privilege I can gain through my family isn’t worth a thing if it comes at the price of erasing how I love. 

In my baby queer days, at first it felt impossible to live a life that didn’t center men, that didn’t strive towards heterosexual ideals of what a successful life looked like. Once I let that go, there came immense grief, but also a stunning sense of possibility. 

Until fairly recently, it has felt similarly unimaginable to live a life without my family. All my life, my family has been the center of my universe. They’re not anymore. And as much grief as that has caused me, it also means that now I can center other things: things that affirm and celebrate me in ways they could not. It means there are stunning possibilities for what my life can look like when loved by different people.   

Years ago, I read this interview with Caro De Robertis, a queer Uruguayan author who has been estranged from their parents for decades. In it, they argue against the common “redemption arc of a queer story of familial homophobia,” one where the queer person’s happiness is always contingent on the family ultimately “coming around.”  

“The thing that’s been really powerful for me is to experience deep in my bones, deep in my blood, the way that it is possible to thrive. We actually don’t need the people who have decided to stay mired in their homophobia,” De Robertis argues, “I think the narrative I’m hungry for in the world is the one where we can still absolutely say regardless of that, we don’t actually have to wait for home.”

For the last few years, I have tried not to stay in place of waiting — not like that first year, which I spent standing by the phone, hoping for it to ring with their name, in the perpetual limbo of if I’d ever return to my family. Instead, I want to write from a place of possible thriving, from my self-created homes that are not perfect or even fully built, but in a state of becoming that one day may feel as deep and real as my family did. 

During the first Christmas I spent estranged from family, I wrote an email to queer loved ones to ask for help:

“How have you or other queer people in your life celebrated holidays without family? What rituals have helped you celebrate yourself and queerness in general, outside of the heteronormative constraints of Thanksgiving, Christmas, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, etc.? I’m all ears for suggestions as I begin trying to build this new life for myself,” I wrote.

The response was beautiful: long, gorgeous emails from several friends describing the intimate realities of their life as a queer person during the holidays, the new traditions they invented, the ways they take care of themselves. 

Holding this, in 2020 I decided to create Queer Noche Buena, a ritual where my queer loved ones gather on zoom to queer-up my favorite parts of my long-held family tradition of Noche Buena and Midnight Mass. We take the witchy queer shit from catholicism (incense, wine, drag, communist twink Jesus) and leave the rest. I read the Gospel According to Audre Lorde, and then invite others to read any of their favorite poems/writing/songs. We indulge any and all genderfuckery and come dressed up in wigs, glitter, gay Christmas sweaters, keffiyehs…whatever makes us feel amazing. Most of all, it is just a lovely excuse to be in queer community during a time of year that can be so difficult to get through. 

I’ve hosted the event for the last four years. Every time, around eight folks show up and stay the whole time, and another five or so hop in and out throughout the night, calling in from a closet in their parent’s house an hour before they get dragged to church, or a basement in their white partner’s mother’s house when they’re desperate to escape.

Friends call in when their family gets COVID or their kids have grown up, and suddenly they’re stuck alone at home for the holiday. Friends with chronic pain show up off camera and from bed. Friends show up with their kink partners that they tie up sometimes on weekends. Every year, a crew from college shows up – friends who were “straight” during those years, but have since come out later in life, like me. 

Each year, I am mesmerized by the kind of readings friends bring into the space, how they always feel like exactly what everybody needs. We end each year by listening to Tracy Chapman’s rendition of O Holy Night and asking everyone to write prayers in the chat, and I am mesmerized by what people offer there too:

“For queer and trans kids, that they have the support and love and affirmation we may have never had.”

‘For our queer and trans ancestors, for our queer and trans descendents: may we heal forward and back.”

“For the queer abundance we have here to ripple in and beyond each other.”

“For pleasure as great as our grief.”

Estrangement from my family has been the most difficult thing I have ever experienced in my life. Queerness has been the most liberating thing. Maybe that is always the ratio.

And maybe I say this all to say that rituals like Queer Noche Buena is also what de-centering your blood family looks like. It was a new vision of love and spirituality that was waiting when I no longer only focused on the way things have always been. It is just one example of the stunning possibility that gets created from the loss of what we think will carry us.

And on nights like this, I know that I live a beautiful, brave, amazingly gay life. I know I have experienced in my bones that it is possible to thrive, without my family. With a holy group of queer people who love me exactly the way I need to be loved, I don’t have to wait for home.

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