Glen had left rural Louisiana, not finding it possible to make a life there as a gay man. I, in my own turn, had left Louisiana behind as well. We had both become “outsiders” to our families of origin, our shared extended family not exactly throwing us out, as is the case with many other queers, but still not fully comfortable with us either. We had both been raised to understand our queerness as a problem, even damning to our eternal souls. At best, socially shameful; at worst, an ungodly disgrace. And while my relatives might indulge a familial sense that we are “their” queers, we are still queers. At the reunion, I walked into a room where distant cousins were talking about the “freaks” they’d seen on a trip to San Francisco; everyone quickly shut up—embarrassed, surely, and not wanting to offend, but also annoyed that I’d interrupted their bonding. To be sure, at this point in my life, late forties, comfortable with myself and largely at ease in my queer flesh, I have fewer and fewer family-oriented resentments. But I also know that I had to leave; like my uncle, I needed—and need still—a different set of relations.

At the same time, these people are my relations, my family. And this moment has provoked me to think about the genealogies that exist, both overtly and covertly, in any family. For while I may have strayed from both my immediate and extended families in many ways, the gifting of Glen’s memorabilia to me makes visible, if fleetingly, alternative genealogies, different trajectories of affiliation, divergent paths of relational contact and influence—paths that even my family, so clearly ill at ease with queerness, could acknowledge.

Those genealogies are the ones I want to focus on, particularly as they orient us queerly to other ways of being—within and without—a sense of “family.” What’s perhaps most moving, most poignant for me, is that I knew my uncle for such a short period of time; he passed away right as I was entering adolescence. Yet his influence on my life was profound. And however phantasmic my relatives' understanding of that relationship—queer uncle, queer nephew: they must somehow be “related”—my uncle's life and then his death, even thirty years later, is about lost trajectories, an only ever-guessed lost futurity that, in ways known and unknowable to me, I have spent most of my life trying to construct.