Calling In the Cavalry
June 30th, 2010 by Lydia
There’s a way to call on people that lets you know you exist, that validates your experience.
My friend, A, celebrated her 30th birthday this weekend amidst the backdrop of gay pride festivities and intense family drama. She wasn’t alone though. She called in a queer cavalry to come to her rescue, sort of, and what better place and time to call upon a queer cavalry than San Francisco during gay pride?
The backdrop: A is a queer pinay, more on the boyish/butch side of dyke; her family, who hasn’t fully accepted A in her queerness nor ever acknowledged her partner, is in town for a family wedding that happens to be on A’s birthday; the family has dysfunctional power dynamics.
All of this can only lead to one thing, DRAMA.
The setup: A’s family is coming to her apartment the evening before the wedding and her sister is imposing herself and her boyfriend to stay at A’s apartment, even though A has drawn boundaries – her queer friends are in town for pride and need a place to stay; her partner is coming home from a weeklong conference that evening and it’s a one bedroom apartment; it’s her birthday and it’s pride weekend, she needs her space.
Maybe you have a similar queer family nightmare story. How do you negotiate acknowledgement and safety for yourself in a situation like this where the unwanted battle is brought to your turf, to your city and within your own home?
The plan: a gay buffer. There would be a few couples – one real lesbian couple, one pretend lesbian couple, and one pretend gay couple. One of the couple’s would be new transplants to the Bay Area, arriving in town for pride, and staying at A’s for the festivities (to divert her sister’s stay with boyfriend). All couples would already be in A’s apartment and socializing when she arrived with her family.
Here we are, the gay cavalry, in A’s apartment socializing and waiting for the family to arrive. We have our cues from A – touchy, sitting thigh to thigh, hand on knee type of touchy, but not making out. That would freak out the sister and the mom, someone would explode, and all hell would break loose.
The door opens, thighs touch, arms go around shoulders and hands rest on knees, and in rolls the sister with her suitcase, her boyfriend with his bag. She’s staying she declares. And following her are the rest of the fourteen member clan of siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and cousin’s boyfriend. All of them here to see A’s apartment and have some birthday cake with her. They had just come from dinner.
A manages everyone beautifully. During a millisecond breather she tells us she was strong armed into paying the dinner bill, a fifteen person tab at a nice restaurant, even though her dad was the one who invited everyone to come along and the responsibility fell on him to pay.
A round of birthday cake, some wine, and then the family started filtering out. The sister and boyfriend go out for a quick liquor run. Alone now with the gay cavalry, A breaks down.
“Today was so hard,” she says in tears. Holding it together had been so hard. Being stuck with the dinner bill and not knowing why, especially when it was her birthday. No one stepped up to help her, it was an embarrassing moment, and she had to carry the awkwardness and shame even though it wasn’t hers to carry. Meanwhile someone else got to save face at her expense. Her sister and brother were unsympathetic, saying she should have known better.
Earlier that day, she spent the morning cleaning and de-gayifying her house, removing evidence that she and her partner live there together. Her parents didn’t know yet, and she wanted to tell them on her own terms, yet her siblings were carelessly dropping hints left and right, insensitive to A’s need to be able to tell them in a way that felt right to her.
Her sister and her sister’s boyfriend were staying over.
I realized at the moment how brilliant A was in assembling us to be there. It wasn’t so much about diverting the sister’s stay because A knew she was going to do whatever she wanted anyway. It was about having a support system there even though we weren’t interceding. She knew she wasn’t going through this alone. We could witness her barely holding it together internally even though she captained the visit masterfully and with such poise. We were able to hold a space for her to break down afterward and just let her be in the way she can’t with her family.
As pinoy queers we negotiate piecemeal pockets of acknowledgment and safety wherever we can find them when our families are unaccepting and unacknowledging. Negotiating things on our own terms is difficult because our relationships aren’t valid. The line drawn that delineates the compromise of our alienation for finding a “place” somewhere in family or for keeping the peace sometimes cracks, and when it does, it’s often times us who break.
How is it that when it comes to family it’s always we who cede, leaving parts of ourselves at the door when no one else has to change to make it work?
Our ten minutes of vulnerability and sacred breakdown with A was up as the sibling and boyfriend duo returned from their liquor run. Showtime. Tears dry and composure returned, we straighten our backs from being slightly hunched over with ears turned as intimate listeners do.
The gay cavalry plan was devised over a dinner the night before the big family visit. It was four queer pinays getting together for the sake of connecting and self-care when A brought up her family visit dilemma. Of course that recalled several of our stories. Being omitted from family ritual is one of them. One of the sisters at dinner jokingly shared how her own sisters received a brand new set of pots and pans from their mom when they got married and engaged. My friend asked her mom where her set was and the mom’s response was that she’ll never get married. Because she’s gay. In other words, her relationships don’t count.
We joke, we laugh, we cry, and we survive. It may be through some convoluted scheme like having all your gay friends come to your house under some fabricated pretense to help you maintain your sanity while with family. It may be leaving yourself at the door for one last time to get through a family party. It may be divorcing your family for a while to be who you are. There’s no right or wrong way, there’s only the way that maintains your sanity and reflects your humanity back to you. There’s only the way that lets you know that you exist.
Whatever your solution, whether it’s to get through the unwanted family visit, or to figure out how to make your relationship work with your family, you do the best you can with what you’ve got. Acknowledge yourself for it. It’s brave. It’s doing what you need to do to get through another day, and that’s one amazing feat when we consider what we’re up against.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by tif guevara. tif guevara said: RT @KabuuanKoaching: New blog post: Calling In the Cavalry http://ow.ly/256Gv #queer #pinoy #filipino #sf #pride [...]
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