Like many LGBTQ+ people, my relationship with my family of origin was fraught from adolescence. I had already run away from home several times before the cataclysmic event of being expelled for being a lesbian and a “bad moral influence on the other girls” from the school—Philadelphia High School for Girls (Girls’ High)—that my mother, grandmother and sister all attended.
The scandal of it stunned my family and put me in a kind of lockdown at home as my parents searched for another school that would accept their “degenerate” daughter. I couldn’t see or call any of my friends. I couldn’t leave the house. Two weeks after I was expelled, a family friend, a psychiatrist, advised my parents to admit me to a local psychiatric unit for adolescents with my “problem” for what was then in the 1970s, cutting-edge treatment for girls (and boys) like me: conversion therapy to de-gay kids who were “going through a phase” or “indoctrinated by older degenerates.”
Everything you’ve heard about conversion therapy is true. It’s a series of worst things you can imagine over a couple weeks and then you are either “cured” or suicidal. I was the latter. I left the hospital, came home, slit my wrists, was rushed to the emergency room, sewn up and put back in the psych ward. This time, I knew what was expected of me and acted accordingly. I was out in days, not weeks. Out in a state of complete despair, unsure of who or what I was, but certain I would do anything to stay out of that place again.
Another lesbian friend from that same psych ward slit her wrists. Another took a bottle of pills and I sat with her in the ER as they pumped her stomach and she begged everyone to let her die. This was the status of many lesbian teens of my generation: the first post-Stonewall, but with families who, no matter how progressive (my own parents were civil rights workers), just didn’t understand their queer kids or what they had done to have this “scandal” in their family.
At 16, I was already a suicide survivor, a conversion therapy survivor and a lesbian activist. I was also a teenager searching for a family that wanted and accepted who I was. I found those women in the gay clubs in Center City where I passed for 21 with fake ID to adults who knew better. I was protected by older butches who knew a kid in trouble when they saw one.
My search for lesbian family took me into every lesbian and gay activist group. I met one of my best friends at a lesbian meet and greet out at Penn. I became a lesbian activist in my own right. I was still just a teenager, forging a path while living in the house I shared with parents, grandparents and a sibling. It was a time of duality and subterfuge and fear.
I moved out of my parents’ house when I started college and began to build that lesbian family that I knew existed and would somehow offer me what my family of origin could not: unconditional love and support. The Center City apartment I shared with my then-girlfriend became a refuge for other lesbians who had fraught relationships—Thanksgivings of lesbians with no family to accept them. New Year’s Eve parties filled with lesbian couples and single lesbians who all felt embraced by the welcoming space I created that was the space I had always wanted for myself.
My second year of college, I broke up with my family. It was painful, but necessary. The toxicity—we didn’t use that term then—was overwhelming. I just couldn’t be part of anything involving them. I couldn’t go home one more time. The people who had raised me, who should have known me best and loved me most, didn’t. After college, I joined the domestic Peace Corps, left Philadelphia and lost touch with my family of origin.
While my sister and I reached a rapprochement when I moved back to Philadelphia and I became a loving and devoted aunt to her children, I didn’t speak to either of my parents for decades. It wasn’t until each became ill that I re-entered their lives. There were never any apologies nor acknowledgment of the trauma they had caused me, the way my life was upended for years because of that harm. Those things happen in books and movies. Real life is very different. Unresolved and haunting.
Fortunately, I had my lesbian family to see me through each of their deaths, a decade apart.
I have thought a lot about my lesbian family over the past 18 months. My wife of 23 years, artist and design professor Maddy Gold, died suddenly during treatment for a rare aggressive cancer leaving me devastated in ways I could never have thought possible. My lesbian family—the one I built that had become my wife’s as well—stepped in to keep me from drowning. When I was diagnosed with cancer myself in May, exactly two years after my wife’s diagnosis, they were there to support me.Three weeks ago when I became seriously ill and was, without knowing it, dying, they rushed me to the hospital where I was admitted in critical condition and spent 13 days, most of it in critical care.
These women—my best and closest friends, the family I have had and counted on and supported in return over years—taught me that we can make our own families when our families of origin fail us. My oldest friend, Roberta Hacker, ran a series of social work agencies for decades, including Women in Transition, the country’s oldest continuing agency for abused women. Roberta and I met when I was 17 and have been friends ever since.
I met Martha Peech, a graphic artist and painter, through another friend, since deceased, when I moved back to Philadelphia. We’ve been friends for 40 years. Judith Redding—filmmaker, photographer, screenwriter—has been in my life for 35 years, first as my partner, then collaborator and always family. We did a lot of projects together, including several books. She made award-winning short films of two of my poems. She became my wife’s best friend and helped us both through Maddy’s final illness. Judith has literally kept me, along with Maddy’s and my cats, alive since Maddy died.
When I was 16, I was told in conversion therapy that I had no future if I continued to be a lesbian. But I did have a future, in no small part because those three women and my wife provided a loving and sustaining family unit with whom I shared holidays and events, who I saw through illnesses and losses, who were the foundation for my emotional life in many ways.
Family sustains us through the best and worst of times, but when the families we were born into reject who we are, all is not lost. It’s essential that we know we can extricate from toxic families if we must and build the families on whom we can depend.
My lesbian family has been a foundation and a keystone for me, the support I have needed and the unconditional love that I knew I deserved.
As I continue on this cancer journey, with more surgeries and treatments ahead of me, I am in a state of continual gratitude for all that these women have done for me and continue to do. All I can say is thank you.
