I didn't blog yesterday, so I missed Blogging for LGBT Families Day. Pam Spaulding, over at the newly-cooly redesigned Pandagon site reminded me.
When we first began to get to get acquainted with some of the lesbian couples in our Toledo, Ohio neighborhood, my initial response was something like "Wow, this is cool." I had had gay friends and neighbors for years, but never seen gay families with children, minivans and houses in the suburbs. I thought it was wonderful--but the point is that I thought about it. I think I created a "lesbian family" category in my mind and filed the families I knew in there. It was a category I thought about in a very positive light, but it was still a category separate from my general "families" file.
Somewhere over the last couple of years, though, this separate category has faded away. I went to a high school graduation party last weekend for the son of two terrific neighbors of mine. I wished the new grad well, drank beer, ate lasagna and cake, mingled with gay and straight people from teens to sixties and went on home. Not once, though, did I think of my friends as a "lesbian family." They were just a family, having a perfectly ordinary graduation party. Only when I saw Pam's Pandagon entry and started about wondering for five minutes about what to write about did it did it even occur to me that I had just recently seen a lesbian family celebration. Yawn.
I think that the fading away of my mental category of "lesbian family" is being mirrored in larger segments of society. How else to explain the muted reaction to major gay marriage decisions coming out of California and New York last week? This isn't to deny that there is a lot of hateful intolerance out there; of course there is. It's only to suggest that the ultimate goal of events like Blogging for LGBT Families Day should be to make themselves unnecessary and obsolete--and that day may be coming sooner than we think. As LGBT families become more deeply enmeshed in American neighborhoods, putting them into a special category should become as silly as thinking of left-handed families, blue eyed families, and black haired families.
Someday soon, OK?
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