The Ginger Child

by Patrick Flanery

  I know that I do not wish – neither does Andrew – to form a family through violence, nor do we want zombie-like copies of ourselves, nor to convert a straight child to a queer one. And yet I also recognize that there is in our thinking about the kinds of children we feel we can and cannot parent a tacit acknowledgement that we are looking for a child who will fit into our lives, who can be raised to share and reflect our progressive – even our queer – values. This may not be an impulse to convert, but it is a desire to nurture someone who will share our ethics and morals, even if she or he ultimately arrives at a different system of belief to our own.

  QUEER

  At the beginning of this adoption approval process – which feels already, in the midst of completing the Stage 1 workbook, like a process in the legal sense, a mounting and marshalling of evidence in our defence as reasonable, as good, as good enough – I did not imagine that the system would require so much self-definition from us, or such extensive self-narration.

  We are asked to write a timeline from our own birth to the present, noting in every year a significant memory, an important event, the moving from one home to another, education, jobs, births and deaths in our families, ‘other significant deaths and losses’, happiness, sadness, loss.

  Even in an attempt at balance, the questions and directions always slide into negative affects, so that it feels as though what the social workers want most is to understand how we have suffered, and how resilient we may or may not be.

  We complete our timelines and I try, despite the directions, to be upbeat, but reading mine over, I am aware that the life I describe – and the life Andrew describes in his own timeline – is nothing like the usual run of English lives that our social workers are likely to have encountered. Our foreignness marks us in ways that render us increasingly illegible.

  After the timeline, the workbook poses a further series of questions. The first asks me to think of a time when I felt different or isolated and how this felt. As I read it, I laugh out loud.

  This is absurd, I say to Andrew.

  We just have to get through it, he says.

  I compose my answer:

  As a man who identifies as queer… I have grown up and continue to live in a world in which I am constantly made to feel my difference even when I do not myself feel as though I am intrinsically different to anyone else. I have been lucky, however, in not experiencing rejection by friends or close family members… I felt quite isolated for much of my childhood because, apart from my sexuality, I was an unusual child who lived largely in his own mind.

  The next question asks me to think of any times in my life when I have had to grapple with ‘difficult, painful or worrying experiences’. Again, I laugh, but that laughter is a symptom of the genuine unease I feel. How can these social workers imagine that one does not feel experiences of this kind in such number that it would be ludicrous to try to enumerate them? I answer:

  For the sensitive person life is a constant process of negotiating difficulty, pain and worry. To name particular experiences I would not know where to begin, or indeed where to stop. These are not problems, however, but part of the way one tries to live an ethical life. I am lucky in having had parents who raised me to face the difficult, the painful and the worrying in as frank a manner as possible, to recognize the complexity of a given situation, and to seek ways to understand how best to negotiate the problem at hand. They have helped me, friends have helped me, and my husband always helps me.

  The next question wonders when, if ever, I might have had to ‘manage change’. I begin to understand that the social workers’ assumption – or perhaps fear – is that they will be faced with prospective adopters who have lived such unreflective and stable, unchanging lives that they have no capacity for empathy. I answer:

  Again, life is a constant process of managing change. Much of my childhood and adolescence was not marked by significant change (I spent sixteen years in the same house; changing schools was the most significant change per se). Since leaving Omaha my life has been marked by a series of major changes: moving to New York, to Oxford, to London. Changing cultures is one of the most significant changes one could possibly face. Understanding how to live in Britain has not always been easy, and indeed I feel it is an ongoing process that may continue for the rest of my life. Life for me is living through the negotiation of changes both large and small.

  The questions continue in this vein, one after another, never rising above the insultingly reductive. And then, at last, I arrive at a page that demands I define my identity in terms of ‘gender, language, ethnicity, disability, class, culture, sexuality, spirituality’.

  By this point, I am having a perverse kind of fun. I answer:

  I have to begin from a place that resists set categories because I believe identity is fluid. Nonetheless, within the paradigms of this assessment, I am male, English-speaking, second-language French speaking. I am white American, of English, Irish, Scots-Irish and German ancestry. I am a dual American and British citizen who regards himself as American as well as British (but not English).

  I have no significant physical disabilities and no mental disabilities. I was raised in a typical middle-class American home by intellectual and highly politically engaged parents. We were comfortably well off but not rich.

  I identify as queer (although for the purposes of this process you might wish simply to identify me as ‘gay’ even though this is not a label I myself choose, for political reasons).

  I was raised in a nominally Christian household (my father was Unitarian, my mother agnostic, though he grew up Congregationalist and she grew up Presbyterian), attending church occasionally, and particularly around the major holidays. I now identify as agnostic, but culturally Christian.

  Andrew reads my responses and wonders whether I’m asking for trouble in describing myself as ‘queer’ instead of ‘gay’. But the problem is I don’t think of myself as ‘gay’ even though I am a man whose primary physical attractions are to men, a man who is married to a man who also prefers the term ‘queer’. When I was in the process of figuring out who I was, one of the great barriers to self-acceptance was an inability to see myself as ‘gay’.

  How do I come out when I don’t really understand what I am? I once asked my friend Ben, who was among the first people I came out to, telling him then that I was gay because I could find no other language to describe what I felt myself to be. I cannot find a category that fits, I told him. Bisexual somehow did not, since I was, at most, bi-affective, or bi-affectionate, but largely homo-sexual.

  It was not until 2005, when I began teaching literary theory at the University of Sheffield and had to engage with queer theory seriously for the first time, that I found a language for understanding myself. Even then, the idea of settling on a fixed category ran counter to my sense that I would prefer not to be labelled at all, but rather to be described as a man married to a man, or as one half of a same-sex union. I would not want a straight person to call me queer or to ask if I was queer, but nor would I want, necessarily, for them to describe me as gay. I know that for some people – self-identifying gay people in particular – this may read as a mark of internalized homophobia, but when, as a child, I was becoming conscious of my own attractions and sexuality and the limited range of available identities, ‘gay’ suggested a rigid category and set of associated behaviours that I could not find a way of fitting inside. I was attracted to boys, but I was other things as well. From a very young age, I was gender-nonconforming. When I was two years old, an elderly neighbour could not understand that I was male. My hair was too long (in fact, long and wispy and white blonde, like those vampire children in American Horror Story: Hotel), my affect too feminine, and this neighbour used female pronouns to describe me for years. Another neighbour, an elderly woman who walked past our house every day, made a habit of referring to me condescendingly as ‘such a big boy’, and I felt no less uncomfortable with this. I was not big, and some part of me was also, I fe
lt certain, not a boy, or not a boy in the way that other boys in my neighbourhood were boys. I recently found photographs from slightly later, from the ages of four, five, six, when my flamboyance and ambiguity strike me as so visible that it’s a wonder nobody ever, well, wondered (although of course many undoubtedly did). At the age of five, I am dressed as a butterfly for Halloween, but I love the strap-on wings so much that I wear them throughout the year as a costume for playing outside in the yard. There are other photos of me mimicking the Statue of Liberty with a bouquet of lilies of the valley instead of a torch. Or in short shorts and a cowboy hat directing invisible traffic. Or perched in a tree dressed as a chipmunk in a costume my mother made, with a brown feather boa for a tail. I know that these descriptions will suggest to many, simply, the femme gay child, and while I can see such images through that lens, I discern something less easily defined, too, and more radical: an inability to see my own gender, to understand why it might be important, or even to see the gender of others.

  A case in point: at the age of six I was enrolled in my first acting class at what was then the Emmy Gifford Children’s Theater, taught by the great storyteller Nancy Duncan. On the first day of class, I was entranced by a boy who had a shock of short red hair. At the next class, I was devastated to learn that this red-headed boy was a girl, not because it meant we could not be friends (though we never really spoke) but because I had been attracted to the red-headed boy who was, in fact, the androgynous red-headed girl.

  By the time I was ten, other students in my school would ask me if I was a boy or a girl. A couple of years later, one day out shopping with my mother in the mall, a clerk said, ‘Hello, ladies’ when he saw us. It would have been fine if I felt positive about this ambiguity, and the curious thing is I wanted to feel positive about it, I cultivated an androgynous aesthetic, whether consciously or not, but the dominant culture of Omaha did all that it could to tell me I should adhere more closely to the narrowest, most normative codes of masculinity.

  At twelve, in the locker room of the school swimming pool, changing into shapeless black wool swimming suits, a boy named Justin asked me if I was gay. This was the first time I had ever been asked directly about my sexuality and in retrospect I think it was not intended as a hostile question. Perhaps it was even a hopeful one. We were alone in a row of lockers and he said it quietly, not aggressively. In second grade, Justin had dressed up for Halloween as Eleanor Roosevelt, complete with skirt and wig and stuffed brassiere. But when I heard him ask the question, I blustered and panicked and said no, because what else could I say? I did not know. I hardly knew what gay meant. I thought Playboy must be a magazine full of naked men because, you know, the ‘boy’ in the title, until a friend showed me a stack of his father’s issues hidden in the back of a closet, and I remember feeling both confusion and disappointment.

  There were other occasions, around the same time, when I was asked directly about my sexuality and insisted, no, I wasn’t gay, because I wanted a wife and children. A gay man does not reproduce, a gay man is the end of the line in his family. I knew that well enough. If I wanted to reproduce, to have children of my own, I could not possibly be gay.

  When I came out to my mother at the age of twenty-six, her only note of regret was that she would not have grandchildren.

  I tried to reassure her that was not a foregone conclusion.

  MAX

  Max is twelve and I am ten. He is a foster child in the care of one of my mother’s colleagues, Joanna, whose vast and hideous home has seen a parade of such children, deposited and looked after for days or weeks or months, alongside her own two sons.

  Joanna has a meeting and has been unable to find anyone to look after Max one afternoon, so he will spend time with me, playing. He is thin, athletic, blonde. I am instantly attracted to him, but also feel a duty of care that I have never felt before, which takes me by surprise. I know he is a foster child, and because my mother has worked as a lobbyist on childcare issues I understand what this means. I have met other foster children in Joanna’s care, and in the care of other foster parents we know across the city.

  Max and I do art at the long counter in our basement craft room. There are pads of paper, paints, markers, glue, glitter. I draw spaceships. Max draws tanks. We have a snack: peanut butter on celery sticks. My mother is upstairs in her office. The care of Max, such as it is, has been put in my hands, and I take it seriously. I do not ask him questions about his life. I assume he would not want to be asked. Foster care is something that happens to people who have had horrible experiences – that’s how I understand it. When I don’t think he’s looking, I examine his tanned muscular arms with fine white-blonde hairs, the hard line of jaw, the cropped hair. He is a boy in a way I will never be. Along with desire I feel a complex blend of insecurity in his presence, a wishing to be liked by him, an undercurrent of empathy that sails close to pity, and a longing for our encounter to be over as quickly as possible because I also recognize that we have nothing in common.

  When Joanna comes to pick Max up, I am relieved to be rid of him, not because he was unpleasant, but because I felt the weight of responsibility to be nice, to switch off my own curiosity, to play with him as I would play with a much younger child. And I am relieved because he is blank, passive, almost affectless, and the unresponsiveness is exhausting. There is no character evident, just a mild but unengaging presence – almost zombie-like, as if he has been sedated or hypnotized. During our time together, he expressed no strong desires to do one thing over another, listlessly setting himself to whatever pastime I suggested. He took orders well. I could have told him to do anything, it occurs to me, and he probably would have complied.

  I recount to Joanna what we did in the way a patronizing nursery school teacher or babysitter might describe looking after a four-yearold: we did some art in the basement, and then we had a snack, and then we watched TV, but nothing inappropriate. ‘We’ as passive-aggressive care-speak signifying the other who is too remotely other to be fully sympathetic, rather than ‘we’ as the inclusive personal pronoun it ought to be. ‘Nothing inappropriate’ as if I were the older of the two, the one who might indeed have seen something inappropriate and took responsibility for policing the viewing of the older/younger child.

  I never see Max again.

  QUEERED

  When Andrew’s father falls ill, we decide to take a six-month break from the adoption approval process. On our return, we are assigned a new social worker, Gemma. In the days before our first meeting, I look at her social media accounts, clicking through what little she has made public.

  There is an image of her on her birthday. She is smiling and cheery looking, our age, perhaps slightly older. She has four children, all boys.

  When she comes to our flat for the first meeting, on a warm wet morning in July, I sense that this is not going to go well. There is something in her manner that puts my back up. Once we sit down in the living room with coffee and muffins I have baked, she goes straight to the matter that is already agitating her and which will agitate most of the other social workers we encounter over the next two and a half years.

  Gemma is uncomfortable with the fact that Andrew and I both identify as ‘queer’ in our workbooks. For Gemma, ‘queer’ is so derogatory she can hardly bring herself to say the word. I suppose this should be admirable, but her discomfort with our own conception of ourselves puts me on the defensive and betrays her ignorance that the word has been actively reclaimed and rehabilitated since the late 1980s. She asks us to explain why we use it. Although we have done so already in the workbooks, we begin to present our understanding of ‘queer’ as informed by our reading and teaching of queer theory.

  She looks unpersuaded by our patient explanation and I can tell that she is uncomfortable in our presence in a way that Eleanor was not, in a way that no one else we have met in the whole process so far has indicated they might be.

  She has a look through our flat, pointing out everything that will have to
change, all the places where sharp edges will need to be softened or buffered, the necessity of installing gates here and here and here, at the tops and bottoms of stairs, into the kitchen, at the door of the child’s bedroom. What a lot of books, she says, as if the books disturb her. You’ll want to put doors on those bookcases. Grubby little hands…

  Back in the living room, she asks us about our art, the West African masks, the prints by South African artists. One image in particular, of Eve departing the Garden of Eden, Eve’s face buried in her hands, concerns her.

  It seems like a very sad picture, she says. What do you imagine a child might think of that?

  Is she asking us to change our art? I grew up with all manner of art on the walls, was taken to museums from infancy and held up to see much more realistic nudes than our cartoonish Eve.

  How do you think it might make a child who’s had a very sad beginning in life feel to look at a picture like that? she asks.

  We suggest that a ‘sad picture’ might be a talking point, a way to think about feelings, although this does not seem to satisfy her. Before she came, I suggested to Andrew that we take down the art, not because it is obscene or offensive – it is neither – but because I feared we might end up with someone who may never have been to a museum and has no idea how to look at a piece of art, who sees in the representation of a naked body – however stylized or abstracted – something quite other than what the artist intended. What would she say if we told her that we found it rather funny to have a shamefaced Eve hanging over our bed?