Queer and Estranged: A Lesbian on Mother's Day

By Renaissance

“When someone has rejection from their mother and father, their family, when they get out in the world, they search. They search for someone to fill that void. I know this [from] experience because I’ve had kids come to me and latch hold of me like I’m their Mother or like I’m their father ‘cause they can talk to me and I’m gay and they’re gay and that’s where a lot of that ball-ness and the Mother business comes in because their real parents give them such a hard way to go, they look up to me to fill that void. But a lot of these kids that I meet now, they come from such sad backgrounds- you know, broken homes or no home at all- and then the few that do have families, when the family finds out that they’re gay, they X them completely.”

— Pepper LaBeija in Paris is Burning (1990) talking head

The history of queerness and estrangement from family feels longer and more intertwined than is historically accurate. In the post 2010s liberalism-Love Wins-legalization of marriage-Love Simon (2018)-Netflix’s Queer Eye- HBO’s We’re Here reality of mainstream queer politics in America, the image of a homosexual child estranged from a suburban White registered Democrat family might seem antiquated, even comically so. A mere reference from To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar (1995) that then was used to chastise the rejecting parents and produce sympathy for Patrick Swayze’s Vida Boheme. Despite all the media depictions that we have evolved from the days of the abandonment of queer children, as shown in the recent season of RuPaul’s Drag Race where all top five queens had a parent show up for them, the reality of the estranged queer child is still alive and well.

It is Mother’s Day, I am 24 years old, and I am estranged from both my mother and father- and am vaguely absent from the lives of my extended family members. I blocked my parent’s numbers in late March of this year after five years of increasingly minimal contact and communication. By March of 2025, it had already been over a year since the last time they called me, and even less since they called me with anything good to say. May 8th marked one year since the last time I saw my mother in person. The truth of the matter is, I have nothing to say to her. Another truth is that for the first time in nearly a decade, I have stopped feeling suffocated and trapped by our relationship.

When I was 15 years old, my mother became an alcoholic. Despite nearly a decade of nightly black-out drinking and an overdose that almost killed her, she still does not self-identify as an alcoholic or addict of any kind. Since the beginning of my mother’s overt addiction, that I know of, our relationship has faced irreparable damage and interpersonal offenses that have only stacked, compounded, intensified, brewed, pressurized, and calcified. Not until very recently did I begin practicing acceptance and peace about the reality of who my mother is and the state of our relationship, but this does not change the fact that what is best is estrangement. Anyone who has been the child to an addict parent knows that the issue is not with the substance itself, but with the way that addiction robs someone of their sober personality and completely rattles and replaces priorities and intimate relationships. I knew the reality of life for daughters of alcoholics before it happened to me–my mother, my two aunts, and five of my cousins are children of alcoholic mothers. It runs in the family. My mother was the last of her siblings to let the likely genetic disposition take over, leading to my late-in-adolescence childhood vibe shift.

My childhood home went from my sanctuary, a happy and safe place, to a prison. Most of my high school memories are of my mother aggressive and drunk downstairs and me dissociating upstairs in my room. A typical after-school routine would be coming home, going upstairs to start homework, and at some point between late afternoon–or maybe even mid-evening if she tried–I would hear the bluetooth speaker blasting country music and the shuffling of cards. This was the auditory cue that my mother had started drinking for the night and thus was not to be disturbed. I have the distinct memory of recounting my day to my mother after school while standing in the kitchen. I was probably going on and on about something that annoyed me about a peer when my mother interrupted me: “Can you hurry up and just go upstairs so I can start drinking?” The gag: I was drawing out my story because I knew once I stopped talking and went upstairs, she was going to start drinking. That would be the last time I got to speak to her for the day.

In the beginning she did not like to drink in front of me (guilty conscience) and she still made dinner, even if she was too drunk to sit up by the time it reached the table. I knew if she was drunk or not by dinner because she only blessed the food and led prayer when she was sober. Eventually she stopped praying altogether. Over the course of high school, dinners stopped being made. I would not even be able to eat until late at night since I would not even go down to the kitchen when she was drinking. I’d have dinner once my mother had finally passed out drunk and my dad would text me that he made a vat of pasta for me to eat out of for the next couple of days.

The hours between school lunch and dinner could span from noon to 10pm, sometimes later, and sometimes with no snack in between. Due to the constant anxiety and pressure to keep up the appearance that I was not living in an addiction-riddled household and that I had the same loving, envy-inducingly sweet relationship with my mother as I did when I was a young child, I lost my appetite for months at a time. The emotional dysregulation of being rejected by my mother daily so blatantly made me reach for a mode of control, which manifested in restrictive eating and developing an eating disorder linked to my anxiety disorders. My mother was fat and short, and had considered herself fat (regardless of her actual weight) for most of her life. She loved that I was skinny and tall for my age. Her praise of my thinness subconsciously rooted in me that her love for me was connected to my body. This was never said out loud but regardless of what I thought, my mother was fatphobic and I knew that she would be displeased if I didn’t stay skinny. Anti-fatphobia politics put language to a belief that I had already developed through seeing the bigotry my mother faced but my politics weren’t more important than my mother’s opinion of me.

Senior year of high school, I had gotten so thin and my appetite so small–I was only eating a hand-sized scoop of pesto pasta for dinner–that my therapist called my mother in during one of our sessions. She, the therapist, brought up a number of things, including the possibility of consistent family dinners helping me regain weight and some normalcy around eating. My mother declined taking on that responsibility and said it was not something she was interested in doing. My therapist asked my mother if she was willing to stop drinking and find other alternatives to relieve her stress in order to improve her relationship with me, “No, I don’t want to stop drinking. Shots of vodka are cheap, fast, and it works. She [being me] will just have to deal with it,” my mother replied to the therapist in front of me.

I did not realize at the time that this perspective she shared with my therapist, that spoke to her newfound approach to child rearing and fostering a mother-daughter relationship, was my alcoholic mother’s truth that would then define the next eight years of our relationship. Back then, I thought this would be a blip. It could be stopped before any more damage was done, I would get my real mother back. But there is no real or fake version of my mother. Through practicing acceptance, and time proving it so, my alcoholic mother was and is her real self.

Before her alcoholism, one of my mother’s biggest pet peeves with me was that I would leave my shoes anywhere and everywhere around the house. Wherever I plopped down after school and kicked them off was where they stayed. Under the dinner table, by the edge of the couch, by the sliding glass backyard door, in front of the stairs, by the garage door. She was constantly asking me to put away my shoes and expressed her annoyance at this flaw of mine, but still loved me endlessly despite it. One day while driving home after middle school, we stumbled onto the topic of gay people and religious conservatives being homophobic. I grew up in a very casually irreligious but culturally Christian house. We never went to church, so I did not really understand the zealous and cruel nature that American protestantism could engender in people. My only understanding of the Christian God was that “He is a loving Father in Heaven who loves us even when we sin.” I remember expressing to my mother that I just could not understand how people think that God hates gay people, even if being gay is a sin (although I didn’t think that). My mother expressed that she felt like a “bad Christian” for not being homophobic, hilarious. “For example, I leave my shoes everywhere almost every day and you still love me all the same. So why would God stop loving people if they aren’t homophobic or even are gay? If my biggest sin is not being homophobic, then I think that is okay with Jesus if he died to forgive us for our sins.” (Obviously, I did not know the full context of colonialism, femicide, the violent regime of cis-heterosexual patriarchy but for a 12 year old, that’s not a bad ideological breakdown of religious homophobia.) It was an off the cuff train of thought for me but it was profound enough to my mother that a couple years later I found that she had written down the conversation in her notes app. I don’t know if it was just to remember or if she sent it to someone, but her holding onto my words and agreeing gave me the confidence to come out to her when I was 14 years old.

While some kids come out socially first and then tell their parents, my mother was so wrapped up in my school and social life and everyone was under the impression that I told my mother everything, the idea of being out but her not knowing felt like a recipe for disaster. So in the middle of the night during winter break of my freshman year of high school, I came out to my mother. I told her I was bisexual and the conversation that ensued was so incredibly tenderqueer split model of attraction cringe that I simply cannot bring myself to divulge that to the public yet. I remember asking her if she still loved me and her replying, yes of course. After that, I came out to my best friend whose immediate response was, “Yeah, I kind of already knew.” She is still like a sister to me. I also came out to my friend group at the time, whom I stopped hanging out with a year later due to all of them becoming Trump supporters, despite supposedly being friends with a Black queer girl. (Side note: Do not raise minority kids in the suburbs!) I think my mother liked the Democrat liberal clout that having a gay kid with gay and trans friends gave her. She donned her water bottle with LGBT+ ally stickers, took me to Palm Springs Pride, and bought me a bisexual pride flag. When I got my first girlfriend my senior year of high school, she was supportive and my parents would drive me to see her in the San Fernando Valley on the weekends.

In this way, even throughout the horrors of her burgeoning alcoholism and my related crippling anxiety disorder, she was great. However, her supposed support of my queerness would later be thrown back in my face if I would speak against her habitual excessive drinking. “I accept you for what you are. It’s hypocritical that you do not accept me and my flaws. You are allowed to be imperfect but I’m not. I always raised you to be accepting of all people,” she would write in texts, equating my queerness (now lesbianism) to her alcoholism. The underscoring of acceptance and flaws as means to implicate her support despite my sexuality and that I should be indebted in gratitude for her lack of homophobia towards me and thus ignore her mistreatment of me in other aspects of our relationship. This was a beating drum of her view towards me as recently as the end of 2024. “Are you sure your mother’s drinking isn’t related to your sexuality?” A therapist dared to ask me multiple times during our first session together in March of this year. “I’m sure,” I retorted bluntly.

Although now, as I am on the other side of estrangement, it is not lost on me that out of my mother’s siblings (who all developed alcoholism), my mother is the only one who has yet to get sober and whose relationship with their child is zero motivation to get sober, unlike two of her sisters. She is also the only one who has a Black and homosexual child. Could it be that somewhere in the unspoken subconscious of my white heterosexual mother’s brain, she does not view me as worthy of preserving a relationship due to my race and sexuality? And ultimately, beyond the mandatory care required to keep a child alive, the loss of our closeness was a price willing to pay to maintain addiction? Is the clear liquid consistency of vodka, measurable and pourable, that demands nothing of her but a few dollars more valuable than the ever-changing life she birthed into this world? Possibly. But I will never truly know. It does not change the fact that her number is still blocked on my phone.

My mother never had to kick me out directly. When I went off to college, I lived in the dorms as most people do. Even when COVID started, I opted to stay by myself for as long as possible in the building- preferring to live in peace by myself in a college dorm than with my mother. But eventually, I had to move back home and surprisingly, my parents were on better behavior. I still stayed in my bedroom as much as possible. Sophomore through senior year of college, I worked as a Resident Advisor. This was not financially the best option for me, considering my parents did not provide any allowance during college and the wage was $50 biweekly, and the schedule was so inconvenient that it was very difficult to have another job while doing it. But my parents made me keep the job, saying they would not pay my tuition and never help me with rent if I needed it if I quit being an RA and got a job and paid rent elsewhere. This was their response when I told them I hated my job and wanted to live with my childhood best friend off campus who went to the same college. It’s not that I would ever rely on my parents for rent or demand support, but the knowledge that if for whatever reason I was in a pinch, I could not reach out to my own parents for help terrified me. The one benefit of the RA job was that I moved in early for training and got to stay late for dorm checks, which limited the time I lived at home in the summer.

Then during my senior year of college, around two years ago now, my mother called me to tell me that they were taking away the car I had been using for four years and giving it away. They had already told the person they were giving it to and there was nothing that could be done. They would be giving it away the day after I got back home after graduation. They had let me use the car independently since I got my license when I turned 18 and they repeatedly told me that it was mine to do with as I please. But when I brought up that they couldn’t take away my car, she coldly responded, “It’s not your car. It’s ours. We paid for it.”

Financially, this makes sense. And in telling this, I might come off as a bratty entitled child. And that might be true to you as a reader. But this was not one instance of random punishment and retraction from my parents. There is no way to impose the full gravity of this action in words. What I can share is that I had already made plans for Sunny to come stay with me at the house for that summer. The plane tickets were already purchased and I had coordinated the dates with my parents since they were going to be out of town in Billings, Montana (my mother’s hometown). What my parents certainly knew at the time was that the suburbs of the Coachella Valley did not have a comprehensive transit system and that June is one of the hottest months of the year. My parents effectively left me and my best friend stranded at the house during one of the hottest months with our only mode of transportation, even to the grocery store, being by foot in heat over 110°F or by the charity of friends. I was in no position to blow money on Lyfts everywhere, since I had budgeted to have my car while not being employed for the summer before moving to France for seven months as a teaching assistant. They did not care about that nor did they feel like their decision to unexpectedly take away the car meant that they had any personal impact on my well-being, safety, or finances before such a big move.

The day my dad was going to take the car, I asked what time he was planning on leaving. I wanted to take the hour or two before to drive down to the fast-food place by my house that I would go to all the time, one last time. It’s less than a 5 minute drive. I ordered chicken nuggets and a small fry at the drive-through as I had done so many times before. In order to milk more time and nostalgia in my car before it was gone forever, I decided to eat in the parking lot before driving home. I was not gone for more than 15 minutes when my dad called me screaming that I was disrespectful and scheming. How dare I choose to eat in the car when he had to take the car to give it away. According to him, I had no right to choose to eat in the car without asking his permission first, despite the fact that I was 22 years old. He demanded that I drive home right that instant. When I entered the house, he kept shouting at me, different this time after years of his misplaced outbursts at me. I started yelling too. “How dare you talk to me this way! I am an adult!” he screamed. “You’re yelling at me! I’m an adult too!” I exclaimed right back. This realization stunned him for a moment, since most of our screaming battles happened when I was just a teenager. Now at 24, I could not imagine screaming at a teenage girl the way my father screamed at me when he was a grown man in his 50s.

Later that same summer of 2023, my mother randomly called me. She never called me, let alone without texting first. I happened to be outside, coming back from a walk to get sandwiches from Lou’s in San Francisco where Sunny and I were staying in Gabby’s, my butch, former apartment. For whatever reason, I answered. She sounded strangely pleasant. “I just wanted to hear your voice and see how you’re doing. How are things with Gabby? Are you and Sunny having fun?” she asked, sounding unusually normal. I told her that everything is going really well, Gabby and I had been together for just over a month, and Sunny and I were happy to be in San Francisco. Pleasant and vague simplifications that revealed very little. She sounded happy and we joked a little. It was the first conversation in years that my mother and I had that did not end in a fight or made me so anxious to the point of being catatonic for hours. Two days later my dad called me and told me that my mother was unconscious and unresponsive in the hospital after ingesting expired morphine that she was supposed to throw away. She had taken it three days prior without telling anyone. “Mom called me just the other day and sounded fine, though? Thursday.” I told my dad. “She had taken the drugs on Wednesday, she was high as a kite. I don’t think she knew she called you,” he responded.

I was completely distraught at the idea that my last conversation with my mother could be when she was literally dying unbeknownst to me, or anyone. I dropped everything and $1,000 to fly to be by her side, in the blanching fear that she was going to die. When she became conscious again, and began recovering from the trauma at the family home in Billings, she still made time to clarify that she was not ready to call herself an alcoholic. She still made time to criticize the fact that I booked my flights out of a further airport for cheaper tickets and asked for a ride to the airport after the fact because it was “rude and inconsiderate” and “showed that I was entitled to their time because what if they had plans that day of my flight.” She made time to correct my order at a restaurant when I wanted to try a new salad but insisted I get the Caesar. She still asked me to tell Sunny not to accidentally fall asleep on a couch when Sunny had also dropped $1,000 of her own money to be by my side while I dealt with the fact that my worst fear had come true. An on-slaught of unwavering corrections, lack of grace, inability to accept any change since the beginning of her alcoholism. My aunt, the middle sister, tried to facilitate a conversation between my mother and I. My mother did not reciprocate any real desire to be close with me again, or not in any way that would resemble a present adult mother. She wanted a relationship with me without ever acknowledging the hurt of living with an alcoholic mother, without ever apologizing for the cruel things she said to me while drunk that I still live with, things she has no memory of. A singular self-centeredness that prevailed even after seizures and hospitalization. I asked her if she remembered calling me and she confirmed that she didn’t.

The two years since have just been petty and punishing interactions between us, mostly regarding finances. When I was in France, they threatened to release my phone number off the family plan, the same phone number I’d had since fifth grade. So I agreed to pay them $69 USD every month to keep a phone number that I was not using while abroad and making just under 900€ a month. I asked them not to file me as a dependent for 2023 since they have not paid for the majority total of my expenses or income that year and so I could apply to graduate school as an independent, but they insisted that the one quarter of $4,000 college tuition they paid that year counted.

When I came back from France, my grandpa passed away. My parents were the first to know but they did not tell me until the day of his memorial that they did not attend. Thankfully, my aunt, the youngest sister, thought to tell me and I hitched a ride with my cousins and baby niece to make the service and support our grandma. In the fall of 2024, my phone got stolen at a club in West Hollywood. A common occurrence for the area but was absolutely devastating to me. They had swiped inside my bag and had also stolen my CBD cigarettes which were some of the last things I still had that I bought in France. I found my cigarette protective box scuffed and empty on the dance floor. I was relieved to find it, even if the cigarettes were gone, since it was a gift from a friend I had spent my birthday with in England. I texted my parents about the stolen phone and told them that between rent and bills, after months of struggling with unemployment, I just did not have enough money to buy a replacement phone at the moment. My mother’s first response after 10+ hours was, “How are you texting me if your phone was stolen?” I replied, “from my Mac laptop.”

The last straw on the collapsing camel’s back was when my mother texted me out of the blue in February that they were selling my childhood home. The house that I visited with my dad while it was being built when I was just five years old. The house that my dad spent his healthiest years customizing to my mother’s liking. They were moving into a tiny home in a retirement community and had already started the process. Over text, my mother told me that if I wanted to get anything that I still had there, then to let them know when. The devastation hit me as if a closest family member to me had died. I’m an only child and so, in a way, the house was the only other thing in existence that experienced my entire childhood the way I did. I strongly identified as living there, even when I was away at college or another country, and the house was defined by my family’s habitation. By selling it, it felt like they were permanently cementing me, and our three-person family, in the past. With no physical remnants or memories of my existence as their daughter. I tried scheduling to go on a Saturday but my mother replied that they would not be at the house for all future Saturdays until May. I said, “I can go by myself.” To which she insisted that I was not allowed to be in the house without one of my parents there. A lasting punishment since the last time they came back to the house after I was home in 2023, there were crumbs on the stove from a grilled cheese I had made after cleaning.

I knew from experience I could not say anything inflammatory or express my emotional distress while planning to return home. Although during and after our text conversations coordinating this, I would cry so hard I had to scream into pillows. The rage, hurt, and anger so fiery inside me that the only way to express it was through shattering wails. Finally, we coordinated a day where my mother would be away but my dad would be there. I wore all black and old clothes that I knew they had seen before, as to not even share with them what my new personal style could be. To give them nothing to try and start a conversation about. The garage was full of already packed up stuff. The house was already 60% emptied when I got there. My shelves full of trinkets already were packed up making it difficult to see it all and parse through what I wanted to try and save one last time. My butch and I made it to my bedroom while saying as little as possible to my dad. He’s not much of a conversationalist anyway. I went through my things again, but unlike the other times I’ve looked over my personal effects to choose what to save from my volatile parents—defined by this feeling of trying to save things from a burning building I’d need to survive–this time it felt like meeting up with my younger self and picking out things to remember her by. My stacks of tween pop magazines, my tiara from Claire’s I wore on several birthdays, and a pair of pink Converses, a size 12 for kids.

My dad offered my childhood school photos to take that used to hang on the wall outside my bedroom, and I did. I was not, and still am not, above all the anger. But that day, I knew where I wanted to manifest the anger. So often my genuine care expressed in communication with my parents was called ruthless and cruel towards them even when I told them that it wasn’t my intention. If they were already going to see me as mean and greedy regardless of how I expressed myself and what I did, then I might as well take all that I wanted.

I took the childhood art I had made that my mother kept in the laundry room. Art I had made from kindergarten to middle school, including a random flower I drew that she later got tattooed on herself for Mother’s Day in 2017, were all in that room. All the art had already been taken off the walls and was sitting on top of the dryer. I leafed through it for a moment. There was a drawing I had done in third grade for Mother’s Day that she particularly liked because it had a spelling mistake, “Moter’s Day” with no h. It became an inside joke and thus all cards after were written “Happy Moter’s Day.” I sandwiched the stack in my hands, put it in a trashcan I was taking, and told Gabby to put it in the car. He pointed out a ceramic piece I had made in first grade that had ornaments that spelled “I <3 U” and asked, “What about this?” I paused. “Yeah, take that too.” I instructed. On the drive back home, Gabby told me that’s when he knew I was really upset. At best the art would go to a tiny home that I never lived in and at worst they would throw it away, erasing more evidence of my childhood from memory. I made it, so it was mine to take.

Gabby and I had spent about two hours already at the house collecting things and packing the car. It was longer than I thought it would be, but there were more things than I remember having. I was doing a final walk through the house by myself, taking pictures on my phone even though the house didn’t look like itself half packed away, and tearing up at the sixteen years of memories there. I didn’t cry as much as I thought I would. I was not as inconsolable as I was when I received the news.

Before leaving, I decided to fill up my water cup for the drive back to Los Angeles and left Gabby and my dad in the garage. Sometime during college, my parents got rid of the white refrigerator that came with the house and got a double door fridge that had the water spout in the front–bougie. Even though I had seen the new fridge, something seemed different about this one. “Did they get another newer fridge?” I thought to myself. My parents effectively stopped eating once I went off to college. On the day of my college graduation, they told me they had nachos at the venue so they weren’t hungry enough to go out for dinner together to celebrate. I ended up getting drive-through fast food the night of my college graduation. I opened the new fridge door to see what random stuff they kept and how empty the shelves were. Something told me to open the freezer door, especially while my dad wasn’t there. Sitting at the bottom was a clear vodka bottle, opened but not empty. I scoffed. My heart started to race realizing that my mother was about to be home soon and I would not be able to contain myself if I saw her. How ridiculous. I walked back out to the car:

“We have to go now,” I said flatly yet sternly to Gabby.

“Oh, okay!” he replied while trying to configure a bedside table and a Razor scooter in the stuffed car.

“She’s pulling up right now! She’d really love to see you,” my dad said to me.

“I don’t want to see her,” I replied.

“Why?”

“There’s alcohol in the freezer,” was the last thing I said to my dad as I sat down in the car and closed the passenger side door.

I could see only her car but not the inside. The nighttime and bright lights of the headlights and garage made it impossible for me to see her face, although I think she caught a glimpse of mine. My mother’s headlights shone through the back window of Gabby’s car. Gabby pulled out of the driveway. My mother probably thought we were making room for her to park in the garage and then would get out to say hello. I can only assume this because there was no attempt to guilt me to stay, no attempt to try to say hello. Once we were out, we drove away with hearts pounding. My parents did not text or call me for weeks after.

In late March, my mother told me that they had spent the last night in the house. She mentioned how many guests were able to stay there, but shared no words regarding raising me or my childhood spent there. That was the last text she sent me, that I know of. I blocked her number. My mother has a penchant for unsuspectingly sending me the most ill-timed devastating texts. Telling me my car was being taken away right after a date with Gabby, trying to guilt trip me into accepting her alcoholism right before I went on a plane to visit Sunny, telling me that the house was being sold three days before Valentine’s Day, and that they no longer live in the house seven days before my birthday. On top of six years of living with an alcoholic, cruel, cold, scathing mother with nowhere else to go. Before blocking her, I expressed that the state of our relationship has always been in limbo, waiting for a decision if she chose alcohol or me. I told her that I finally realized that every day she chose alcohol. Even if she could not admit it to herself.

For the past nine years, I searched everywhere for a new mother. In high school teachers, in mothers of friends, in my French professors at college, and even in the teachers I worked with in France. Trying to come off as normal in their presence, but also impressive and sweet, while internally desperately seeking their approval and validation. Years of having to bite my tongue to not ask them to be my mother. To take me in as a spiritual daughter and let me rely on them. To want to ask them questions of advice and guidance, or share celebrations that should be shared with a mother. Things that would be too close to do with a professor or co-worker.

It was hell being so insecure in the tumultuous decade of my mother’s alcoholism. But now, for the first time in my life, I feel free. I don’t seek a mother; I do allow the joy of my relationships with others fill me. I give love to those around me. I have no fear of coming off as someone who doesn’t have a mother, because in ways I don’t. Now, where I feel most myself and the love and joy of family is in the gay club. This Mother’s Day weekend was started at a Dyke Day fundraiser that I went to with Gabby and our mutual butch friend Samya, and it was a joy! Surrounded by lesbians of Los Angeles that all look so wildly different yet so wonderfully and hilariously dykey. Friday night was spent at Club Wavey, dancing and drinking with friends who were strangers just a year ago, and starting new friendships. Whether or not the patrons of Club Wavey feel it back towards me, I love them on a kinship level. A love that I am secure enough to feel in one direction, with no desire for reciprocation. A love I feel with all gay people who find a home and a family in the gay club. A love stemming from a place that, even if your own mother stopped loving you, I love you now. My maternal history is the lineage of Black ballroom house mothers, Black lesbian leaders, and estranged queer women. My family is the collection of misfit queers who, for one reason or another, can’t go home. My mother is Liza Minnelli. I still have my biological mother’s face, as people who see a photo of her in my apartment will point out. And I can’t deny that. But my blood and my family are the estranged homosexuals of the world, now and forever, real and fictional.