‘Alternative’ families: the importance of queer community

by Gypsy Tart

Your coming out story is a staple of any conversation with your fellow gay: where, when, what and who you were doing when you realised your alternative sexual preferences? Your coming out experience shapes you for life, and has an immeasurable impact in shaping your identity. But what happens when you’re in for a bumpy ride?

The angst and frustration that go hand in hand with realising your sexuality can be incredibly difficult to overcome, especially when the whole coming out process is, essentially, a long and protracted quest to discover who you are and where you belong. Many people are in a difficult situation to begin with, due perhaps to parental hostility, religious or cultural conviction – or simply not knowing a gay person. How can you understand your own sexual preferences if you’ve never come across someone who can empathise? Such a situation is more common than you might think, even in twenty-first century Britain.

It makes sense, therefore, that for many queers, discovering their sexuality coincides with being away from the environment they grew up in; once you leave home, especially if you find yourself in a completely new city, with a completely new group of people, you’re basically being given a fresh page to rewrite your identity. Nerdy, socially-inept outcast at school? Here you can be a sexual conquistador, charming the boy shorts off beautiful women with your innate confidence and charisma.

But despite the rich social opportunities a new environment, and a new identity, may grant you, there may be one thing missing – a family. Now, I’m not talking about the biological, rows-over-Sunday-lunch, knitted-jumpers-at-Christmas sort of family, I mean the kind that is frequently more important to young gays trying to find their feet; the queer family. Trendy newspapers often talk about friends as the new family, but there is a closeness and a sense of mutual struggle within the LGBT community that makes the bonds we forge even stronger, and more permanent than our hetero counterparts. Despite all the love and support we may receive from our biological family, it has to be said that they can never really understand what it is to be one of us; what it’s like to know you’re seen as an abnormality, a deviation from the ‘norm’. When our well-intentioned mothers say to us, ‘Well, you can still get married to a girl!’, how does that feel? Oh, it’s ok, you may be gay, but you can still pretend to play the hetero game! For many of us, being queer isn’t just about sexual preference, it’s a whole outlook, one that seems increasingly marginalised as gay culture is adopted by the mainstream as something fabulous and glittery – not a home for the ignored and excluded, as it should be.

It is exactly this sense of exclusion – from the lack of positive LGBT characters on television, to the continued struggle for full legal rights – that forces us to seek solace in others, especially when coming out and realising the effects accepting such an identity will have on the rest of your life. But how does one go about finding a queer family? For many people, it is the friends they made in those first few weeks, months or even years of the coming-out process that have become their family. I met many of my closest queer friends by simply stumbling into the nearest gay club, looking nervous, and chatting to someone who didn’t look like they wanted to eat me for breakfast. And it is absolutely vital that everyone has those friends; coming-out is terrifying, and often lonely, especially for younger people and particularly, I think, for women, who are often highly under-represented in queer culture as a whole. Even when they do find suitable space to exercise their sexual preferences, lesbian bars and clubs can be intimidating places, dominated by a cliqueness and incestousness unrivalled in the straight world.

Luckily, there are alternatives; thankfully, in London the queer scene seems to be moving away from its rather unfriendly image, towards a more inclusive, welcoming approach characterised by clubs such as Duckie and Bar Wotever, a change many of us hope to see echoed in other gay meccas across the country. But for those who find the sink-or-swim mentality of the mainstream gay scene a little frightening (and who wouldn’t?), finding a solid group of friends to support you through it can be a lifeline. Once you find that group –gay, bi, male, female or anything in between – you find that they can help you seek the confidence every young queer needs to feel comfortable and secure in their identity. They’ll take you out to Popstarz when you need cheering up; they’re there for you after your first break-up; they’ll set you up with a hot rebound girl. They teach you to ignore the bullshit, disregard those who love to eat their own (and God knows there’s a lot of them in any scene),  and just walk out there with your head held high and say to yourself, ‘I’m fierce’. Arrogant perhaps, but it sure as hell works.

Growing up, finding your identity and where you belong is probably the hugest hurdle to happiness in anyone’s life. And of course, when you’re queer, the families we make or find are a crucial part of this process, particularly for those whose identity is not so fully understood at home. These families ultimately provide a safety net for all of us in this complicated and difficult world, whilst preparing us for the terrifying yet wonderful world of the London queer scene. Once you’ve survived that, you can take on anything.