Abigail Garner

Families Like Mine is a compendium of conference youth panel knowledge about what it's like to grow up in an LGBTQ-parented family. There's a ton of excellent content in here that is useful for sensitizing adults to the experience of the children, from continued familial pressure to have all the right answers, the constant barrage of questions from adults that ask elementary schoolers to be able to contrast their families with some unexperienced alternative, the pressure on the children to be straight, what it means for identity development to be culturally queer but not actually queer, and more. Extremely easy read, and even though it was published in 2004, I don't have the impression that all that much has changed.

More specifically, almost everything I read in this book reminded me of the challenges and fraction points that occur in the experience of Children of Deaf Adults (CODAs). Hearing children of Deaf adults are from the Deaf community but never really in it; they have a rich cultural experience as children that they aren't allowed to return to as they grow older; they struggle with how to claim their families and often really appreciate or sometimes only feel truly comfortable spending time in groups of people with similar background; and so on. On the other hand, Deaf children of Deaf adults do not need to engage the identify formation quests of their peers at similar ages, which puts them simultaneously ahead and outside of the culture to which they belong in their teens and early twenties -- just like queer children of queer adults. Additionally, in the late 1990s and early 2000s when I was investigating the Deaf experience in books mostly from the 1980s and early 1990s, there was also marked attention to exactly the same political question of whether these families should even exist. There are areas where the LGBTQ and Deaf family experiences differ, of course -- such as the potential lack of heterosexual relationship role models for the queerspawn and the pressure to translate in adult-adult interactions from an early age for the CODAs -- but on the whole, the dynamics are eerily familiar.

As a result, I place Families Like Mine in direct conversation with Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, which focuses on what he terms "horizontal identity formation" -- the creation of identities that differ from the "vertical" identities that your parents can and will transmit to you. Families Like Mine addresses the inverse of Far From the Tree: rather than mainstream parents making sense of and trying to successfully parent children with exceptional primary identities, Garner's book on LGBTQ families focuses on what it means for the child to have their parents' culture rooted in a niche subculture that is uncommon, their families questioned by the mainstream, and the children's legitimacy within the culture questioned even by the members of the culture itself. Families Like Mine is not an academic treatise, but it is specific, engaging, easy to read, and offers well-deserved attention to a different dimension of "horizontal" identity formation.… (mer)

All parents hope that they’re doing a good job of raising their children, but the truth is that they won’t know how well they’ve done until the children are grown. This is what makes Families Like Mine such an invaluable resource. This book surveys and candidly discusses the actual experiences of children raised by GLBT parents who have now become young adults. Gay parenthood is an issue about which many people have opinions or theories – on both sides of the issues – yet no one knows what it’s like to grow up in a GLBT family except the children themselves. As Garner says in her Introduction “Questions [that people commonly asked about my family] … made me realize that the reality of my family and the common assumptions about families like mine were vastly different.”
This book deals with many of the topics that might be expected: “coming out” as the child of a GLBT family, homophobia, schooling, the impacts of divorce/separation and HIV/AIDS, and so on. If these were the only topics covered this book would still be a valuable resource. Yet Garner also discusses other issues that are not immediately obvious, such as the differing experiences of growing up gay (“Second Generation”) or straight (“Culturally Queer, Erotically Straight’) in a GLBT family, and what that means once you’ve become an adult. If you grew up going to Gay Pride parades with your fathers, what happens when you grow up to be a straight man but still want to go to Gay Pride? Along the way, Garner shows that understanding these issues also requires that we reexamine the meaning of ideas such as “culture” and “family”. Families Like Mine is a useful book for those who want to better understand the reality of GLBT families. But it’s an even more useful book for gay dads or other GLBT parents who want to know that their children’s lives will really be like, and what they can do to best help prepare them for the future.… (mer)