Part 1: (Part 2 relates to them! in! action!) Lez (inclusively) Talk About Queer Parenting…
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One of the things I’ve learned from the Queer Parent Convenings is that my notion of parenting is inextricable from my queerness and my family’s expansive gender identities and our practice of building a gender expansive culture and awareness; my parenting is queer parenting. And a gift I’ve received from being a queer parent, from my experience of queer parenting, is that my gayness has become louder, gayer, prouder, and more integrated in all aspects of my life.

Perhaps it was always that way, more than I realized certainly as a straight-passing cis femme, at least according to my partner and of course by certain keyed-in passersby, but now with a kid, the straight assumption is overwhelming and thus so is my internal pressing outward of “I’m gay and my kid is proudly queerspawn, and I want everyone to know about it, because I’m not fucking around.” 

It is hard to describe what the Queer Parent Convenings are… they are fellowship groups, gatherings for queer and trans parents, to creatively reflect on their experiences of gender and sexuality and parenting and family formation. They have only just begun.

They are intended to be welcoming gatherings and spaces of 
Honoring
Celebration
Connection (and perhaps support)
Reflection
Expansion
Energetic exchange 

In practice this means 
we come together and play icebreaker games
we do story circles to share where we are each coming from
we talk and draw at the same time around topics the group selects as relevant to their experience or things they want to unpack together
we do creative movement exercises meant to support and expand our bodily attention in caring and nonjudgmental ways
we dance (sometimes and as folks feel comfortable to)

And everything is optional. People can leave; people can take a nap; people are invited to show up how they are. And we provide childcare in person or stipends for virtual gatherings. 

At one in Seattle, in person, we literally rolled out the red carpet and velvet ropes for parents and caregivers. Because I think what you do is truly exceptional and glorious and mundane and you should be celebrated for it. 

And they are responsive. We are building this as we go, and it is the foundation of my current creative research - it is my energy and fuel to talk to and share with other queer and trans parents while I try to understand my own questions through artmaking. 

When I first initiated the Queer Parent Convenings in 2020 and began spreading the word about them, I wondered what was particular about them… what did they add to the field? My kid is 7 yrs old, and I’m happy to say that now there are SO many more resources for queer and trans families than I was able to find when we were first trying to get pregnant in 2014. Incredible midwives, doulas, educators, and organizers like…
King Yaa
Intersectional Fertility
Love Over Fear Wellness
Moss the Doula

….offer invaluable support to queer and trans reproductive and family-building needs, touching on so many aspects necessary to the nuances and difficulties of the process and working to educate and increase awareness, especially as both many providers are claiming inclusive care AND reproductive justice and gay and trans parenting is actively threatened. Thank the goddex for them and their work; they deserve your attention, follows, and support so please click the links above. 

So, beyond collating and suggesting those resources, what do the Queer Parent Convenings themselves actually do? It’s not the Queer Parents FB group (also great, and there are many regionally specific groups too) or the Birthing and Breast or Chestfeeding Trans People and Allies FB group. Just to name a few… The resource exchange the Queer Parent Convenings offer is dedicated attention, and attention to the caregiver, informed somatic and bodily attention, sex-positive creative space, and attention to some of the questions that maybe circle around a queer and/or trans parent’s head while they are packing snacks or standing awkwardly at the playground or listening to their kids speak to their peers: 

How do you teach your kids about gender? About queerness? 

What does queerness mean to you? How do you SEE it in your particular brand of family-building and daily life as a now uplifter of young people, a translator of culture for them? 

These are questions about you. About us. About how parenting shapes us back, and the Queer Parent Convenings are an invitation to unpack and stay in the questions TOGETHER. Because the answer is each of our personal experiences and all of them and their differences held together. Coming together in the actualization of many ways to be.

It may sound abstract, but in practice, really deep new relationships have formed out of some of our groups. People meeting up with their kids offline, sharing books, or hiring one of the queer-positive, trans-inclusive birthworkers who was facilitating as their birth doula. 

It’s pretty incredible to be a part of. It is invigorating and daunting and wonderful. To be continued....

Imagine there is a stack, a collection of photos here from last March until now. ​

In that time my younger kid went from so fresh (3.5 months earthside/1.5 months adjusted) to a cruising, babbling, laughing, speed crawling, teeter stepping, putting things inside other things big baby/young toddler. Carpet Womb went from an idea in my mind and on my freshly, wobbly postpartum body to a score, a DANCE form, collectively held and activated by the performers.  

Time moves fast. 

It feeeeels like we just finished the LA presentation of Blood Baby at ONE Archives (INCREDIBLE), but it was actually now a month and a half ago. Eons in the time of the imagination, nothing in the processing time of the body and less than nil in the time of rocks. 

In no particular order…

12 stations of Touch Library with durational Fabric Rock Pull/Eruption Touch Librarian practices. Missing Time was a new station created by Rabbit’s response to the architecture of the space in collaboration with the stretchy tension of cord holding a teal colored pencil—so as you draw, participant, the cord builds in tension until it won't go with you any further. 

Someone wrote Ceasefire Now HUGE in cursive, and I imagine the tension ebbing and flowing as they loop through the letters of each word, matching their intention and commitment, to statement. To peace. To justice. 

The prompt was to draw Earth’s timeline, then your own, and I imagined what would resemble a geological drawing of rock strata, but instead people took it over, which perhaps is more appropriate. They filled in the blanks and responded to those who came before. 

People listened to the original Communion script and drew and drew and drew. The archive grew. 

Communion played with lights (the lights at ONE were confusing and we started after the sun had already set and it was dark), a living room feeling, a common, domestic reflection and ceremony. The preciousness of archive both true and something we made—those words and lives came from people living them. It’s developed a multiplicity, a fractured timing, and it doesn’t make itself make sense, it layers. I talk about not knowing how old my children are or the process of watching a person form—all the forms, the wiggling flesh sac that is a baby to a bundle of desire, curiosity, and observation that is a young toddler and a blossoming KID with language that digresses from their family’s because it embraces the culture of their own particular interests and then the bridges of communication attempted to share, to be together. And how is that instance of togetherness manifested? It is another form, coming and being together, a collective body moment in time.  

The LA basin is 6.3 miles deep of sentiment—clay, sandstone, loose loose material, material from something else that has broken off and down, eroded and recollected. Beneath that the "basement rock"—the bedrock—is broken and faulted in a way that creates what's known as The Great Unconformity, pulling mountain ranges into perpendicularity and East-West spans. 

To be continued...
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lineage
​is the one-word mantra of Blood Baby. The idea that rises to the top as I try to illuminate the constellation of concepts, so interrelated and also sometimes seemingly disparate.
Blood lineage
Cultural lineage
Geological - cellular - material lineage
Ancestral lineage
Our individual lineage - this self to that self to this self to that self
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Housed in a moment of conception
Which in family-building, in self-building, happens over and over and over, moment to moment to moment.
Two cells divide and from there on out we keep forming, deforming, re-forming in collaboration with others and our environments. 
Improvisation + choreography. 

I have begun to think of Blood Baby as a universe. The project is a collection of performance and body-based explorations around and within the idea of queer and trans parenting, with the idea that these experiences are distinctly embodied by the parent or caregiver in question and that that experience is situated in a larger timeline of creation, specifically the earth’s creation and geological progress. <3

And lineage here is both blood lineage: body to body, but also body to body in cultural lineage (raising a child into queerness and gender expansiveness and all the queer elders before me) and material lineage (we are made of the same material as rocks) and in dance lineage (I am raising my child into this way of thinking through making, through playing, and all the teachers who came before me and taught me.) So it's not about my mom or my genetic line singularly. It’s about how we come together, how we come to be and centering queer and trans perspectives in that exploration. 

There are six distinct iterations of Blood Baby: 

• -Queer Parent Convenings - a series of creative reflection and fellowship gatherings with other queer + trans parents to share communal knowledge and care and build collective insight and connection
• -Carpet Womb - an immersive dance installation inside a womb/cave-like sculpture: a hot, gay, ritual disco
• -Communion - a performance performed by the audience exploring text and how our bodies extend beyond our physiological edge, guided by a script/score by playwright Sylvan Oswald
• -Primordial - a site-responsive ritual drag performance as a boulder, filmed and presented as a video by artist (and my co-parent) Carmichael Jones
• -Touch Library - a tactile browsing library where participants can be guided in their own explorations with the prop materials and choreographic practices of Blood Baby
• -Queer Creation Story - an automythology of the creation of the Blood Baby project and the story of my own parenting and gender journeys in a context of deep time. 

In the universe analogy, each iteration is a constellation full of its own moving parts, formal elements, and aesthetic logic, but they are all connected by their approach to the central question exploring how we shape our queer and trans families and self in tandem. And they share conceptual and physical materials, atmospheres, vibes…. I imagine them as distinct facets on the complicated prism of bodily experience (gender, gestation, sexuality, and parenting), that here are pulled apart into relief so that each can be explored in depth. For the presenters or programmers reading, they can be presented together or separately -- with some partners it will be local Queer Parent Convenings, Touch Library, and Primordial. With other partners, it’s all the parts. 

It’s all Blood Baby. There is no singular access point to these questions. To this experience. 
lineage. 
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And so I want to talk about rocks. About the Earth. Our predecessors and who will remain when we are gone, to whom we return. Our kin. Subject to its own system of formation and transformation, but ongoing movement towards transformation just the same. 

Recently, while on residency at Kinsey Institute, we met with Dr. Andrea L Stevens Goddard, faculty at IU Bloomington in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Dr. Stevens Goddard researches “the timing and rates of Earth processes over geologic time. As a sedimentologist, she investigates these questions from a sedimentary basin’s perspective, using information preserved in eroded material to interpret the geologic evolution of source areas.” So she studies what materials move from one place to another, how they got there, when they got there, and from where to where. It is the story of Earth’s simultaneous dissolution and accumulation = material lineage…. Over millennia.  

Accretion, n. - 

• the process of growth or increase, typically by the gradual accumulation of additional layers or matter. "the accretion of sediments in coastal mangroves" // Similar: Accumulation, collecting, gathering, amassing, cumulation, accrual, growth, formation, enlargement, increase, gain, augmentation, rise, mushrooming, snowballing, amassment
  
  
• a thing formed or added by gradual growth or increase. / plural noun: accretions "the city has a historic core surrounded by recent accretions" //Similar: Addition, extension, growth, appendage, add-on, supplement
  
  
• ASTRONOMY: the coming together and cohesion of matter under the influence of gravitation to form larger bodies. "the planets could have continued to grow by accretion from solid debris"

We talked to Dr. Stevens Goddard about how placing gestation next to geological processes and rock evolution makes so much dang intuitive sense to me - about how ALIVE rocks seem to be to me, how alive the Earth is and that we are Earth matter (I just happen to be queer Earth matter) - and about gender, one shaping of our selves, in relation to how rocks are formed. We asked about nonconformity in rocks, and she mentioned MISSING TIME. Missing time in geology is an “unconformity.” And “unconformities are gaps in time in the rock record,” where perhaps the uppermost layer of rock was sensitive or subject to the layer that cooled on top of it and so that once uppermost layer of rock, now covered, is no longer there. Its evidence of being is gone, except for the GAP - the absence of it. 

Missing time. 
Unconformity. 
Nonconformity. 

The stories we have been sharing in the Queer Parent Convenings are often mundane ones, silly and sad and about the daily realities of parenting, and also about the moments of rupture where your reality is invisible to someone else’s. And they are absent from the record. The records at Kinsey brought little to the fore in terms of archive - rock records? - of gender expansive family experiences. We will keep looking. 

Missing time. 
Lineage.
You were here, doing the thing, even if it’s not recorded. 

I’d like to roll out the red carpet for you and send you flowers. 
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Why the Queer Parent Convenings? I call them “network sparkle” in shorthand. There is glory and luster in building a family for me. It was romantic to get pregnant at a fertility clinic - it was not some violation of my bodily function but an expression of the world I am a part of, the world I want more of. Creation is kink perhaps. As queers, we are duping the system of what we’ve been told is how you build a family, how a family comes together. I love being knocked up by my trans nonbinary partner. How'd you get here? Let’s talk about where we encounter the system and if and where there is or isn’t space for us in it… this coming together is its own creation story. 

And this group, this group... this group of queer gestational parents that recently gathered to explore questions of our genders, our sexualities, our gestational experiences. We covered ourselves in fabric, pressed our faces in pillows to feel the texture, the pressure, the fabric giving back, holding us. We had shared exuberant dance parties, on and off camera, with each other and our children. We drew in order to feel our bodies and stay close while listening. We improvised together and expanded the space of what could be held together. There are so many ways to be, so many ways to show up. Hearts abound. 

Through this I’m learning what is particular about Blood Baby’s Queer Parent Convenings:
-Its exploratory nature - approaching something grounded in daily experience from a place of unpacking resonance
-Focusing on creativity and our bodies and questions at the center
-Fellowship as a creative and improvisational practice - yes, we are resource sharing, and we are practicing being together 

But that is not even half of it….

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give credit where credit is due: 
The work of the Queer Parent Convenings is supported by facilitators Darcelle Lewis, Paloma N. Irizarry, and Michèle Steinwald and by manager Linnea deRoche, and in its inception by shared thinking and scheming with midwife, sex educator, and dear friend Pati Garcia and by Logan Cryer. And the incredibly giving, inspiring, and hilarious parents of the first Queer Parent Convenings group, thank you!!

-Our time at IU was supported by Kinsey Institute, a Bloomington IU Arts & Humanities Council grant, and the thoughtful care and charge of Kinsey Institute's Art & Artifacts Collection curator Rebecca Fasman. 

above L-R: Cadence and I adventuring into McCormick's Creek Canyon to perform Primordial, on IU's campus heading into research at Kinsey!

Why “Blood Baby”?

I have this strange thing where I sometimes - often - imagine us, ourselves, humans, as big walking sacs of blood. I obviously know that is not true, that we are comprised of blood AND a whole bunch of other tissue and cells, but still, the evocative sensory image stands. We are 60% water, and essentially all of our tissue, even the hardest parts (teeth and bone and nails) still contain water. They are to some degree “soft parts.” Teeth in particular take a long time to disintegrate, but they do eventually disintegrate, more breakable than concrete or limestone and faster than granite to decompose. And babies are especially sac-like, soft and squishy, and are much more liquid than adults are. Their bones have not fully formed yet, and all the parts are still shifting and moving. 

So from a standpoint of feeling, as I dance I often imagine my body as a liquid form constantly de-forming and re-forming. As well, I am obsessed with heating my interior to the point that I can feel the totality of the inside edge of my skin organ. And in that embodied sensation, I imagine it is a contained liquid - perhaps blood - pressed up against and often seeping out of the container itself - the skin. 

ALSO

Queer family by nature redefines what “blood” relation means, in that we can reclaim and reframe the cultural primacy of “blood relation” while also subverting the biological imperative in the phrase’s origin. Blood lineage is often highly privileged in our culture and does not make one a parent. Intention and practice make one a parent in my opinion. I like embracing the essentialism of blood lineage in that our collective blood lineage is related to the earth and stars. Metals in our blood are also metals found in the stars, and those are the atoms from which we - humans - were formed. And it is those malleable selves who then build family that are bonded by a feeling of being “blood” - “they are blood to me” “blood brothers” - without the necessity or hierarchy of actual genetic or biological relation. Families are formed regardless of that and through intention and practice, building the intimacy and proximity of “blood relation” without a doubt. 
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AND

Blood is one of the abject parts of a human body. The inside. Injury. Gore. Things going wrong. Part of the process of taking apart and building. Blood spilled. It looks different on the inside than it does on the outside. 

FINALLY

(If you can’t tell, I like titles that can be viewed through many angles.)

I am a gestational parent, so I produced a human inside my body and then worked with them to get them out of me. In that sense, I gave this other person A LOT of my blood. My blood was the fuel that created them. And in grappling with my experience of gestation - the physically overwhelming transformation I underwent and how it flipped my gender and sex all around - I imagine this collection of a part of myself, funneled into another person, embedded but separate, and then leaving. An extension detached. And for me, that has related to how I think about parenting and particularly gender construction and physical intimacy. For me, as a parent, as my child ages and the physical proximity becomes less and the bodily autonomy becomes more, I am constantly reminded that they are their own person. I love getting to meet my kid over and over. And I am confounded that someone I am meeting now once knew - as the only thing they knew - the inside of me. Which they did not know to be me but just was… 

There are many ways to make and be a family, and a parent. My co-parent is a non-gestational parent to our kid with no shared genetic material, and we have a nibling who is adopted, so I think a lot about the ways we form family and appear in our kids. The ways that my kid is so obviously an apple from my partner’s tree, and they too are responsive in that process. I do not believe that experiencing gestation is what made me a parent, but it is a part of my particular parenting journey. And I think what is truly magical about queer family creation and adopted families is both the many paths to parenthood diversity AND that what runs throughout all of them is I think an embodied sense of family and “you are blood to me” however you got there. Because that shit runs deep. 

I was recently in Denver to do Primordial (thank you, Redline Gallery for hosting me!)- to get my body hot, sensual, and full of feeling and then to cover myself with blankets and pretend to be a rock - with other performers for the first time - ever! - and with rocks making their creation stories be known, visible. It was exciting to dive in with the smarts and tender loving attention of artists and performers Jaimie Henthorn and Nile H. Russell. I had traipsed through some amazing landscapes - Roxborough State Park, Red Rocks, Clear Creek Canyon - that stirred my body, thinking about my small 40 years in their 300-600 million year old story, imagining visuals and how the rock might look. But how would it feel? What we were doing, actually? 

I pulled a tarot card before our first day dancing together, on the rocks, under the blankets, after hauling them up steep trails and hopping fences; I got The Fool. Beginner’s mind — know nothing. Deep play and foolishness. 


In 2019, my kid turned 4 and I was thinking about my queerness, my gender, and how it related to me being a mom. I am body-oriented person and am fascinated by how it moves away from me, how it changes, how it can hold so much multiplicity or at times align to a singular presence. I was overwhelmed during pregnancy by the sensation of housing a stranger, who was also a partner.

Carmichael asked me what I hoped for for our child, when I was pregnant. We are a queer and trans family so we had talked a lot about who we are individually and how that had been recognized, tolerated, or not growing up. I said I wanted Cadence to feel free and loved to be who they are. 

Being pregnant is a strange simultaneous feeling of sameness and difference; you are a part of me, my body materials build your body materials, but I do not know you. We have not touched yet; you are so close that you are inside of me, but you are suspended in a fluid sac, protected by YOUR PLACENTA, a whole organ just created to keep you alive. To protect you from my bodily systems that may want this foreign being to be gone. The question of self and other and who you will become are literally embodied. 

A child "born into queerness" - feminist activist, essayist, poet, and playwright Cherríe Moraga in Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood

And then and then and then, on top of all that, for me, my strictures of femininity cracked. The way I was femme was no longer possible. And everyone thought I was straight. I felt myself mothering - becoming a mother - at the same time that I felt less feminine. Mothering has nothing to do with gender? Or mothering is just parenting self-identified by a parent’s gender identity. Or mothering is action and cultural resonance that transcends gender? I don’t know, and I assume that a bunch of parents - especially those conscious and critical of gender construction and assumption - will have a bunch of different answers.

And I haven’t even shared about my experience of Cadence leaving my body yet and how my partner and I continued our gender creative parenting, building a house of queer joy and trans joy. And how that changed me - the only cis member of our household. And I feel more like my gender is the hot guy exiting the pool and shaking the water off their hair more than it has to do with any expression of femininity… that is until, we get in the bedroom or I want to put my sex forward and have it be seen. My cisness lives in the bedroom I suppose. But I digress… 


As an artist, my practice has long housed itself on one’s body - on a riding of your own presence, material mechanics, and illustrious imaginations and associations - so how could I possibly make something ABOUT my experience of queer motherhood and the puzzling of gender and intensity of gestation??? I don’t know, but I covered myself in blankets, and I felt like the fort and the person inside the fort and it was hot and obscured and private. It was the opposite of what I’d done for years, developing a performance practice that strategically exposes the transformative interior of a performer’s experience, as choreographic form. 

So I kept covering myself in blankets in a landscape of time. And then I was a time boulder, I was born in the belly of a rock. A seed. An egg. A zygote. And of course, that is where my lineage comes from, my queerness, from the earth. 

So it begins.

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"There are many ways to be." - badass midwife, birth worker, and educator Pati Garcia

I'm gonna put a little plug here because I want to have this conversation with others. If you want to talk about this, please join us for a Queer Parent Convenings Interest Meeting this Sunday Oct 17 12-1:30pm PT / 3-4:30pm ET online. The Convenings will be facilitated by Garcia, Paloma N. Irizarry, Darcelle Lewis, and Michèle Steinwald. 

This WHOOOOOLLLLE project, Blood Baby, begins from these questions and is sustained by a deeper unpacking of the varied aspects of queer and trans parenting -- with six different arms that each approach the facets of the gem experience that is family-building and parenting from a distinct perspective. One arm is Queer Parent Convenings. Let's talk about it... <3

Image descriptions: 
-Nile under a pile of blankets on mountaintop, amongst boulders with mountain views behind him. Only Nile's hand is visible, peeking out from in between the blankets in the center top of the pile. The image is overlaid with a large circle, half blue and half purple. 
-A dark-skinned child sitting on the sand next to their sand art. They are only visible from the shoulder down, with outstretched sandy legs and their hand resting on the sand. The image is overlaid with a large circle, half blue and half purple. 

Images were taken by me, and the circle overlay was designed by artist Logan Cryer. 

​What does parenting queerly mean to you? What is your story of gender and sexuality in relation to gestation and parenting? Are you a queer parent who likes to reflect on the intricate and slippery intersections of queerness, pregnancy, gender, family-building and community? Blood Baby is a performance project that explores these intersections through dance and participatory performance. It is being made in partnership with The Painted Bride Art Center and is directed by me, Philly-based choreographer, performer, educator and queerdo mom in a trans family Meg Foley, and supported by a team of queer creative artists. 

To support and inform this project, we will be hosting queer parent convenings over the next two years. We are currently beginning with a queer gestational parents group and are seeking Philly-based participants for an intimate group to meet online for 6-8 weeks (90 minutes/wk) beginning in 2021 -- [UPDATE 10/1/21: the groups are now open to parents of all regions, and the first groups will begin Oct 24, 2021 (queer gestational parents group) and early 2022 (queer parents group). Click here for more info and to join the online Queer Parent Convenings Interest Meeting on Saturday Oct 9]. This group will explore our respective experiences of gender, sexuality, and gestation in relation to whatever parenting queerly means for people, and be one perspective in relation to the larger project goals of delimiting notions of family building and gender identity in a queer vein. 

The group will be structured as a story circle and open forum, supported by facilitated somatic exercises, and will act as an advisory and fellowship group for the performance project. We will employ care-based and equity-focused facilitation, and accordingly the gathering will be group-led and open to the direction of the participants. A $75 stipend will be provided. We aim to represent the racial, gender, age, and cultural diversity of gestational parentage. QTPOC gestational parents are especially encouraged to reach out. 

This a multi-year project and in the future, we will host forums and gatherings for all queer parents in Philadelphia and in other partner cities, but as gender and gestational experience are where my research begins, we are starting with a gestational parents group to explore the experiences of pregnant people themselves in relation to the larger questions of queer and trans family. We recognize the focus on pregnancy excludes the valuable perspective of non-gestational queer parents; parentage is not determined by pregnancy. This is a pilot group and is not attempting to represent queer families and parenting in total, and in the future there will be opportunities to engage that are not primarily focused on gestational experience. 

We’d love to hear from you! If you are interested in participating or have questions/want to talk, please contact us at [email protected]. To learn more about Blood Baby, click here. 
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We look forward to hearing from you! 

Green Heart by Joan Semmel (1971). bodies on bodies. bodies in bodies.