I have a brother.
I last saw him in October 1967 when I left home. It was the last time I saw anyone in my immediate birth family.
In early 1970, about a year after I came out, I told my mother I was living as a woman and taking female hormones in preparation for getting SRS. I told her to write me in my new name and address me as she. My mother told me how she would always love me but how she was afraid that if I put my name on the return address the neighbors would learn and would talk.
She told me I shouldn’t call because my father might answer. We arranged times when I could call.
I told her I had a boyfriend I was living with. She immediately demoted him to room mate. I said, “He’s my lover.” She blurted out, “But what do you do together?” I told her I was as much of a woman for him as I could be with my pre-op body.”
When I got my surgery date and was struggling to get the money for it she started with the trying to discourage me routines. And the warnings
When I got my operation she wrote me about how my father’ considered me to be a sexless freak and how if I ever came home he would kill me. Oh I was disowned and no longer their child but she still loved me and would pray for me.
Can you say toxic relationship? Sure you can, just try.
Along about that time I heard Esther Phillips chilling version of Gil Scott Heron’s “Home is Where the Hatred is”
Home is where the hatred is
Home is filled with pain and it,
might not be such a bad idea if i never, never went home again
People talk about family and how precious they are as though for some the hell of the reality of living with a toxic family is just in their imagination.
Families can be filled with rage and abuse, especially if one grows up queer in any sort of way from parental expectations.
Zucker, Bailey, Blanchard and all the rest of the pathologizers never seem to factor in the fear of being disowned by the one set of people who are supposed to accept you no matter what.
The fear of never being able to go home again.
Don’t ask me what it feels like to be disowned. 40 years later the pain is still there although I no longer try to drink it away or drug it away. I’m a survivor.
But others say they were afraid that their families would disown them. I believe them as their words are a thousand times more believable than ZBB &L.
Fear of being told that those who are supposed to love you because you are family can no longer love you because of who you are.
But I’m the lucky one because I was defiant and I walked away from them in 1967 knowing what I had to do because I believed the personal was political and in the Panther slogan, “By any means necessary.”
Yesterday was my brother’s birthday. We haven’t spoken in years but I have a book I am working on and I have re-established a friendship with a woman I went to high school with and I wondered about him so I called to wish him a happy birthday.
Some guy, not my brother answered. My brother was in the shower. I told him I was Joey sister, Suzy. He yell out to my brother, “Your brother is on the phone you should take it.”
My brother said, “Hang up on him.”
Fuck it… Why bother. I have family by choice now. More sisters and brothers than I ever dreamed of.
So I remembered Gil Scott Heron’s words.
Home is where the hatred is
Home is filled with pain and it,
might not be such a bad idea if i never, never went home again
