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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