A Status Update

Well it has been a long time since I’ve posted anything and that’s honestly because TOR (Through Our Roots) stuff has taken off.

First, there was an article written about the seven habits of highly effective lesbian families that Sadie (one of the TOR founders) and I were interviewed for. It was a very interesting article to be part of and read. I liked that the framed it as the children raised by queer (in their words, lesbian) parents were better off. There has been lots of studies that have said this in the past but people are often afraid to talk about them, including this queerspawn, but rather instead try to frame it as the “we’re the same, we’re just like you” (I definitely think this video is awesome, but I’m tired of saying that we are just like everyone else, we are amazing and should be celebrated, but more on this later). But we’re not the same and I was really happy to be part of an article that celebrate’s being raised by queer parents. Because this is something that should be celebrated and been seen as positively different. I did have a few niggles about somethings in the article, but was overall happy about it, it was very exciting for them to mention Through Our Roots. And this article was on the front page of the globe and mail…how exciting!

Second, lots of amazing things are coming down the pipe that TOR is putting together, including a very special launch event, a website, a video and an amazing presentation at the Rainbow Health Ontario conference in Ottawa in March! Exciting!

And third, some of the Through Our Roots folks were part of the Ten Oaks fundraiser, CampCurl. And we won best team spirit! When I say TOR, you say tastic!!!

Through Our Roots, Naming a Revolution

So this Queerspawn Revolution is really going. I feel like I’m on this amazing roller coaster but without intense ups and downs, so maybe just a train but more exciting. Anyways, I am just blown away by what we’ve been able to accomplish in a few weeks and how big our dreams are. I am excited to see what comes of this. I am excited to be part of this ride.

In talking about what we wanted to name ourselves, which was more than one conversation, we knew that we wanted to have a name that talked about who WE are, nothing to do with our parents. We knew that we wanted something that had a natural feel as a shout out to our connection to the Ten Oaks Project, as this is what brought us all together.

We also wanted a name that demanded attention and space, we didn’t want something that was too passive, while Through Our Roots was in the running since the beginning, and we did put it aside because we were worried that it might have been too passive. But it kept coming back up. We kept putting it on our endless lists of names…and eventually it was down to two. One for the Books and Through Our Roots.

One for the Books came up during our last conversation about names and we liked it because we have been talking about history and our presence as Queerspawn. How we are often overlooked, which is why there isn’t much of a documentation of Queerspawn anywhere in queer histories. We thought our movement, our continuation of a Queerspawn movement that has always been there, would be One for the Books. But something about it wasn’t quite right, it didn’t sound like the name for us. We still love it and there is some talk about using it still but in a different way, maybe as the name for our newsletter or the name for a speaker series, who knows?

So it came back to Through Our Roots, and that seems to work for us on so many levels. It speaks to how we came into the community, through our roots, through our families. It gives us the sense of being here on our own terms, about ourselves and our own identities. I like it because it just speaks to who I am, I am a part of queer communities because of having a queer mom, but that’s not why I’ve stayed. I came to these communities, through my roots and I’ve stayed because of who I am.

Now that we have a name, we can start working on our other goals, like planning a forum in Ottawa, visiting a conference in New York so we can decided if we might want to plan a conference for Canada in the future, remaking my documentary, making a short video-sort of like a Queerspawn manifesto and so many other cool things. The sky is the limit for us, actually that is a lie, there is no limit to what we can do!

We Are Here, Project Acorn 2011

The following is from a panel that I was part of in July 2011, which is explained here.

I am here to talk to you about Queer families and Queerspawn, but first I’d like to explain what the word Queerspawn means, before I use it a bunch. The word Queerspawn is one that some people who have LGBTQ parents use to describe their own identity. It can be considered a controversial term, but it is one I use to describe myself and so it is something that I will use in
this conversation with all of you.

I’d love to be up here and talking to all of you about the history of Queerspawn, but unfortunately that’s not possible because of the way that Queerspawn are often framed. We are often not seen as people who are part of Queer communities in a way that speaks to our own identities, we are often seen as here with a borrowed identity. We are often seen to be children forever of someone who once grown up, are no longer are part of Queer communities, if at all.

But I do want to recognize our families and the struggles that have affected us and what we have been a part of. Queer families have been existing long before they were legal, recognized or safe. In the past, Queer families have often had to hide or be stealth about their families. Many times they would refer to one parent as a roommate, or being a single parent, due to the fear of their children being taken away as a result of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

In the 1980’s for example, the overwhelming majority of cases that went before the courts for a parent who came out later and was divorcing or for a single parent, would result in children being removed from their Queer parent, based (usually) solely on the parent’s sexual orientation and gender identity.

Two Queer parents raising a child together were both not able to be recognized until 1995 when in Ontario a Charter Challenge changed the definition of ‘spouse’, in adoption, to include those of same-sex couples, which would allow the non-biological parent to adopt the child of the biological parent. This would result in the biological parent having to also adopt their own child.

In 2000, the Child and Family Services Act was amended to allow any two people to jointly apply to adopt an unrelated child.

In 2006, after a Charter Challenge to the Birth Registration Form, the form was changed to allow two parents of the same sex to be listed as parents on the statement of live birth. However, it only applied to women who have used anonymous sperm donors and one of those women gave birth. This did allow however, four couples and one child of those couples to challenge the Supreme Court to recognize their own families, the child who was able to also be a co-applicant on the case, is here today, Sadie Epstein-Fine.

In 2007, there was another landmark case for Queer families, where the Ontario Court of Appeals ruled that a child can have three recognized parents on their birth certificate, if it’s in the child’s best interest, this case is known as the AA. BB. CC. case. It is important to note that this is not the norm, you have to go to court to get a three-parent family recognized on a birth certificate.

However, all of this history is not about our identities as Queerspawn, while it absolutely impacts us, it does not speak to our identities. I could tell you about the history of the word Queerspawn, which is that it was coined by a Stefan Lynch in the United States who was the first director of COLAGE in the early 2000’s and the term was then popularized by Abigail Garner in her work and her book Families Like Mine (which is downstairs in the library if you want to read it!).

The term Queerspawn is considered by some to be a more radical term, but if came out of a community of folks in the US who wanted a word to talk about their identity as having LGBTQ parents.

While it is important to talk about the history of Queer families, what I really want to talk about and get across to you is about Queerspawn being part of Queer communities. We often get seen as allies and outside of Queer communities, but for many Queerspawn, this is hurtful to us and even problematic.

I think the theme this year, we are here, applies to Queerspawn in many ways. We are here, and you often don’t know it. We are here, trying to find our voices and our space and trying to figure out how to fit in to Queer communities. We are here, with you experiencing homophobia, transphobia, heterosexism, oppression, exclusion, in similar ways you are, with last effects like many of you. Yet where is our space?

We want to be seen as legitimate parts of Queer communities, who can have conversations, who can opinions, who can talk to you as peers, not as a child of.

Someone asked me today about why I thought Queerspawn aren’t seen as part of Queer communities, and there is probably and endless list of reasons but for this conversation, a question I want to answer is what are Queer communities missing out on by not including Queerspawn?

For many of you, you might not be thinking about having kids, or maybe you are, but as Queerspawn we are often thinking about the kids coming behind us and how we can make sure when they get to where we are, there are spaces for them, they
are included, people do get it. We have lived what your kids might live, we can offer insight into a perspective that you might not have ever thought of.

Queer communities are also losing out on advocates and activists who care deeply about these communities but are not always supported in the same way.

Some of you might not have thought of what it is like to be a Queerspawn before, what our experiences are or what we might deal with, and as much as I’d love to have a workshop right now, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to sign up for our amazing Queerspawn workshop. But one thing we thought about when we did the decolonization activity, was that it made us think about Queerspawn being at the heart of queer communities but only up to a certain point, and once we stop being ‘children’ we are expected to no longer need queer communities or be part of it, it stops being our home and our communities. But this isn’t true for us now and this shouldn’t be true for any other Queerspawn.

We are here, as Queerspawn, and we are part of Queer communities.

A Queerspawn Revolution

So the last few months have been silent because I have been busy both trying to figure out how to get something going with Queerspawn in Ontario and not quite sure where to start. Turns out all I had to do, was speak my mind, connect a few people and open my eyes.

It started with Project Acorn, a radical community-building space for LGBTQ youth and youth from LGBTQ families, aged 16-24, who are interested in being engaged in their communities, a program I have been involved with since 2008. It was a program that initially was supposed to only be for LGBTQ youth, but in my interview I asked why if Camp Ten Oaks, the other program of the organization, Ten Oaks Project, was for children and youth from LGBTQ communities and children and youth from LGBTQ families, why wasn’t the soon-to-be-named Project Acorn? Since the mandate for the Ten Oaks Project included both communities, it made sense to those who interviewed me and myself to include both communities for the program, and Project Acorn (which was only known as a leadership retreat for youth from LGBTQ communities at the time) became the space it is today, a place that brings together LGBTQ youth and youth from LGBTQ families to share knowledge, make connections, and build bridges in a safe, empowering, and liberating space.

Project Acorn has a Youth Advisory Committee (YAC) that I was a part of for the first two years of the program. In my involvement, I strived to ensure that the voices of Queerspawn, youth from LGBTQ families, were included in all of the programming and in any way possible. I along with the other Queerspawn who were part of the YAC aimed to keep Queerspawn part of Project Acorn through outreach and workshops.

This year was the first year that I wasn’t part of the YAC (due to my age, I could no longer be part of it) but I was part of Project Acorn in a different way, as a ROC (Roots of Our Community). Although it was difficult for me to be part of Project Acorn in what I perceived as a removed way, I was able to do things that I had never been able to do before. This year, Project Acorn had a theme, We Are Here and on the second day of Project Acorn there was a panel that included four panelists; one talking about the We Demand document from the 1970′s, one panelist talking about activism in the HIV/AIDS communities; two panelists talking about craft and art that has being used in queer activism and myself talking about the history of queer families/Queerspawn (stay tuned for a post about this).

Since the first day of Project Acorn was a little rocky for me, lots of adjustments to being there in a different role and the Queerspawn workshop that I was co-facilitating had to be cancelled and rescheduled to Saturday due to low sign-up initially, I had gone into the panel thinking that I really needed to ‘sell’ people on the idea of including Queerspawn within queer communities. Some of the other Queerspawn that were at Project Acorn met with me before the talk to strategize and go over my notes with me to ensure we were sending the best possible message. We wanted to make sure that we used this opportunity to its fullest.

The talk went over amazing, not only were people listening and receptive, but they also stopped me and cheered multiple times, which was completely unexpected and kind of threw me off a little, but in such an amazing way. To have a room full of people (around 90) cheering for you and something you’ve trying to convey to many people for quite some time, was nothing short of inspiring. While I’ll admit, at the time I wasn’t able to see how amazing that moment was because of the hard time I was having just being at Project Acorn, now I am starting to see what that moment meant to me.

When I got back, I had a few weeks off between Project Acorn and Camp Ten Oaks. I spent a lot of time thinking and reframing things and wondering what steps to take next. I knew that something needed to happen off of the momentum of Project Acorn but I wasn’t sure what.

Then I went to Camp Ten Oaks, and as inspiring as Project Acorn was, Camp Ten Oaks just really put the whole thing in perspective for me.  At Camp Ten Oaks, I am the counsellor for the youngest camper groups, they are 8 and 9, and in talking to them and after an intense activity where we talked about our families, I realized that what they are dealing with at 8 and 9 in 2011 are the same things that I was dealing with at that age in 1995. How is that possible? Even though these Queerspawn have the option of coming to Camp Ten Oaks, that isn’t enough.

This is where the Queerspawn Revolution comes in, and where the Queerspawn Crusaders are going to succeed. We are having a meeting with a few Queerspawn folks in Toronto on Friday and we are going to make a plan. We are going to talk about what we want and what we need and become leaders for ourselves. I am passionate and I know everyone that is part of this Queerspawn Revolution are fighters and we will change the world together. I am putting this intention out there to change the world and make it better for all the Queerspawn coming behind us

Just the beginning

Well, this is something that I have been wanting to do for a long time now, but have never quite given myself the time to do, but now seems as a good a time as any.

My name is Danielle and I am a Queerspawn. I live in Toronto and recently graduated from Ryerson University with my Masters in Social Work. I wrote my Major Research Paper and created a documentary as well, entitled Can Queerspawn Be An Identity?: Eight Youth With LGBTQ Parents Talk About Identity. It was an awesome project and I was proud to be able to do it, but I found it created more questions in myself than answers.

The first thing that I found the most interesting is that I interviewed eight people (I could have interviewed many more, but my timeframe to find people was very limited, oh academia) and not very many of them knew each other. How is it that there are all there Queerspawn out there that don’t even know each other? How do we connect? And how is it that in the United States there is such a community of Queerspawn through COLAGE and Canada hasn’t really been able to do anything similar?

The other thing, and the most common thing that comes up when you talk about Queerspawn is that word, Queerspawn. Each and ever person in my study agreed that there should be a term or identity category for children (of any age) with LGBTQ parents, but only one of them really liked and used Queerspawn.

I feel like these are two of the main themes that I will be exploring in this blog, as well as hopefully using this as a platform to connect with other Queerspawn and get the word out about other Queerspawn-related events that people might be interested in.

I think that might be it for now. I just wanted to get a sense of this whole blogging thing and start myself out.  I’m still trying to figure this whole thing out, like the whole tag and category thing, not sure if I did that right. Hope you enjoyed this first post Stay tuned for more!