I wrote all of these poems, and many more like them, in my late twenties and early thirties, long before Katrina reconnected me with my family, long before I began asking my mother about her past. And even as I have learned more about her life and my uncle’s, these poems queerly trace a family tree, a queer lineage, that feels more right to me than anything I actually “know” about my family.

 

This fantasy genealogy came slowly and with much difficulty. In my early twenties, before coming out, as I struggled with my own queerness, I imagined my uncle having sexually abused me, taking me to see Fantasia and then bringing me home and raping me. Surely that is why I am queer, why my desires are twisted toward other young men. I needed an excuse for why I was queer, and my uncle’s legacy—and his absence—provided the possibilities. I could project into him all of the pain of coming face to face with my own abjection, the shameful realization that I was queer. This is the difficult lesson of the alternative genealogy: it need not be affirming or even sustaining; it can be damaged, itself twisted to affirm the dominant order.

 

But I worked against that twisting, making my life a working against, a queering toward other orientations. And in the process, such queering has re-created for me what family is, or could be. I imagined my mother and uncle, playing as kids, themselves already remaking family, with a difference—resistant, gritty, but satisfying:

 

Meal

 

In the afternoon, we’d steal leftover

rice and the refuse of canned goods

from the dumpster and cook with the

heat of the sidewalk on shards of

domesticity. I do not remember who

played mom or dad or child or what

not, but the rhythms of family carried

us to our chores, cooking, arguing, bully-

ing your friends into the peace of the

evening meal. This is the way we took

our bread, broke it, and made a prank of

the lives our parents called us into.

Soon, we were summoned to the real meal,

the grinding of someone’s day into

conversation, the salt shaking tally of

the week’s accumulated bills, passing the

plate of so much pretense, so much interest.

I pick a stubborn grain of rice from be-

tween my toes, and when nobody looks

I put it in my mouth, chip a tooth and

smile.

 

Such family scenes are balanced with others in which the achievement of “family,” however under erasure or qualified, is less sure, more fraught. Shortly after my lover and I moved in together, I wrote a story about a young gay man trying both to navigate his new relationship and to introduce his mother to his new life. Called “My Uncle’s Window” and published online at Blithe House Quarterly, the story borrows liberally from my uncle’s life (Glen became Gary, Michael became Martin). In it, I tried to vector through their former model of life together as a way for the mother in the story—my imagined, fictional mother—to come to terms with her son’s (and my own) queerness. It doesn’t work; the mother’s ability to adapt is limited. In real life, my own mother has proved surprisingly flexible over the years—but only with time. Indeed, in the fiction, I truncate time, with the narrator moving in with his lover while still in school; this didn’t occur for me until my thirties. I wonder in retrospect if that truncation is an attempt to close the gap between his life and my life, between him as potential model and me as hopeful disciple.