Families of Choice

This is an extract from a conversation between Polly Maxwell and Graham Johnson. They discuss what family of choice means to them, how they actively care in their queer families. They also talk about queer death and loss, and we introduce an emerald green sea slug, and how it could symbolise families of choice and closer bonds between queer people.

Polly: I was reading this book, which is Everything For Everyone. And about abolishing the family. Well, abolition is something that preserves and transforms like features of society. And it says about “to abolish the family meant to enable people to love to live to parents to care in the rich variety of ways humans are capable of.” And I think that kind of like, sums up it's like - It's expansive, and it's hopeful. And there is like this possibility. Which I think it's just so at odds to like how we see the word family. 

“Queer as as reclamation, as forging alternatives as protest, as disrupting the norm, as leaving room for the undefined and the self defined.” For me, that's like the queerness that comes and then families of choice, I think, for me, because my family of choice is centred around care like palliative care, caring for my late partner, Jules. And also, from then looking into that and looking into how the origin of the term is from care. Also, Kath Weston’s work in the 1980s, northern Americans, HIV and AIDS epidemic is observing how when families of origin, chose not to take care of family members who had HIV or AIDS. That like there was a lot of people from the community stepping in. Also big like documentation of how like it was like a real big thing within the lesbian community of stepping in. And I think because there are so many inequities and things are so inappropriate, and they're not set up for us, that there's a lot more reliance on informal care networks and networks of care, I think it's a product of that to one degree. And then maybe the other thing for me, just that comes to mind is that like queering, in terms of sort of an action and unpicking of how we live and how we do society is like this is an unpicking of how we do family. Again, it's that sort of active choice of more things, than just a person, it's a choice of how we're doing it. How we live it. So it's centred in care, it's about care, about a network of care, and it sort of transcends the idea that we have a family as being blood related.

Graham: That inclusion also means that those families become very fluid. People get used to the idea that people can join and leave a family in a way sort of through marriage is kind of the way that people think about it, normally, and so it kind of is quite funny sometimes when people like to ‘Oh, but like you can't just gain a family member, you can't just suddenly have someone who engages in your life in that way’. The other thing alongside that sort of just is it tends to be accidental. There are some people who do go out thinking ‘I'm gonna find my chosen family because I need A new family, I need people to understand’ then other times you're just kind of floating through life doing your normal thing, and then suddenly it's like, ‘oh, wait, there's this new person in my life, who I deeply care about you, they care about me, and we're looking out for each other. And I didn't even realise that that was developing that just a bit of I've known this person for months. And turns out, we're family now’.

Polly: I think people are very used to the language of like, being friends, and then perhaps you start dating. And it becomes that kind of love. But the idea of being friends and then becoming like, siblings is just like, bizarre to people.

Graham: The idea of platonic love is just something that like, a lot of people and even some queer people don't really process. They're just like, oh, well, love. Love is romantic and friendship is platonic and intimate intimacy is romantic, and, like, you can't be intimate with anyone. platonically. It's interesting the way that humans like to categorise

Polly: People. Yeah, and placed them in sort of this hierarchy.

Graham: In that verb way, what, what is mothering for you in the context of your family?

Polly: So mothering for me is, is something that was something that was demonstrated to me by my father, I think, and it's this sort of, like, more of a tactile kind of care. Mother is in like, you know, Earth like, like, in an unhippy way. Well, like it's like, there's a lot more like nurturing. Which to me is like, then comes back to food a lot, which then I find like, slightly problematic. So I'm not saying mothers are in the kitchen. And but this warmth and joy from like, like providing in social situations, so like food of social and like, the intimacy that I think those who would in my family say that they mother, it's like, it's very much like under wings kind of intimacy. And it isn't, isn't gendered at all, obviously, in our family. But it wasn't modelled to me as gendered when I was growing up under the disguise of a little girl. It's not it's not how I experienced it. So yeah, I think I think that's probably part of the mothering and I think I'm still trying to figure it out.

Graham: The object in the workshop that I bought, was the engagement ring my husband gave me. it was a lovely proposal at our engagement party, which happened because I had proposed to him so he just kind of wanted upstage me in front of all of my friends. It came with this wonderful story. It's made of silver and oak and two materials that stronger together. And that's, it was very beautiful. And then within a matter of years, we had opened our relationship and then gone ‘oh, wait, we keep we keep falling in love with these people'. Maybe we're actually polyamorous rather than just open’. And then fast forward even more, I did some heavy lifting and the ring snaps. So all that sort of two materials strung together sounds very poetic, but in practice, not necessarily accurate. I've never actually gone and gotten it mended, but I kind of have an intention to see if I can get the little break mended with a third material to kind of represent that thing is not like I think that idea of of ‘Oh other people joining your relationship fixes it’ is not not the best not not very accurate and potentially quite toxic. But I also think that in learning How to communicate around polyamory and communicate through jealousy and the changes to our relationship and to our lives. With that did strengthen relationships, we've become a lot stronger in our relationships and with those of our other partners, simply through the fact that we changed our relationship to a model that meant that we actually had to start communicating like adults.

Polly: So beautiful. It is quite fascinating in my research have found that a lot of families are formed around like, an illness or some kind of trauma. And there is like this. Yeah, kind of moment that things are sort of sent off…. off balance and with us, that was Jules’, diagnosis of cancer and like, suddenly, yeah, there's suddenly this need to be close. And what family that looked like, and how we enacted care, I think there's another one that comes into it massively like it, like, again, it goes back to its origin of the term. But there was something in enacting care and how we chose to do that. That kind of that I would definitely say, formed the family, I think that we were family, in words,  and like love, but it was it was it changed it to the act of doing it, it kind of had this moment where it was like, we were going to do this differently, we're going to do family differently. And this is what it means. Theres this notion of like inherited friendships or inherited bonds, relationships, really inherited relationships with people. And I think that often when someone dies, in the queer community, like there,  like that I've found is that there's a lot of friendships that then sort of relationships start to happen across. across that person, the family kind of formed around this loss and instead of like, it's not about filling the hole necessarily, but it's almost about like holding it together. 

Chloe: This is, Introducting an Atlantic emerald green sea slug. it's green and shimmery looks a bit like a leaf in between the leaf and a slug. And the reason why I chose to represent kind of families of choice, or like a closer queer Bond was that it lives in like a relationship with algae in the water. So algae lives on it, and inside it, and the algae shares DNA with the slug. So the slug can photosynthesize, so it makes energy from light. And it provides a home for the algae to live. 

Graham: That matches very nicely with the stuff that was being said about sort of family comes and goes and like it can come back as well. And it doesn't just look like one set thing for the rest of your life.

Polly: The imprint and impact of people that we meet and people that we love and that we bring in emotionally and physically into our homes and families and how that stays and that goes for like people who have died. It feels incredible that in a way that's almost ancestral with the queer families that have kind of gone before that they could form part of this DNA that we act out and keep re-enacting.

Chloe: You heard the voices of Polly Maxwell and Graham Johnson with Chloe Meineck, facilitating