Do Us Queers Need a Family?

Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one. - Jane Howard

The above was quoted by Dr. Brand Doubell, gay sexologist from Bloemfontein South Africa, on his Facebook status a while ago. A Girl called Bonita posted that she loves her weird family. Benjamin Breden from Johannesburg posted that pack animals need their pack & a guy called Edwin van Wyk responded with "Family; you can't choose them and you certainly don't want to lose them". I am always more than eager to like Dr. Doubell's status updates, because they are always either a well chosen quote for the occasion or a perfectly formulated utterance from his own wisdom, but somehow I did not respond to it.

My question is whether this sentiment still holds water in our time, our generation or even worse in our LGBT community? Being far away from my own extended family, geographically and emotionally, I passed by his status update without being impressed at all and I am usually more than impressed with anything Dr. Doubell says.

Later that week on Wednesday evening the "big brothers" of Facebook decided that it was my turn to be deleted from the face of their book; how frustrating!!! My first reaction was forget them. It took me months to build my list of friends to 1500 and I had no inclination to start over. Why would I risk spending all this time building a list if some bored individual had the authority to break it down with a few keystrokes on his keyboard? Making it worse is the fact that it is very difficult to contact a help-department on Facebook. If you send a message you hardly get a response and if you look for an answer the only posts you see are those of other Facebook users. In many cases that kind of help files are nothing more than the exchange of stupidity.

What do you do now?; I thought. So with no page, no way of getting to Facebook friends and no idea what plan of action to follow, I nearly gave up on Facebook. A friend motivated me to start from scratch, but I must say you feel reluctant to start over if it is so easy to be deleted again.

The thing I enjoyed the most was the response I got from many Facebook friends. Posts like "welcome back", "happy to see you're back" and "what happened and where can we help" really made my day. It almost gave me the courage to start all over again, despite the possibility that this might happen again. My Facebook family, or should I say my gay Facebook family gave me the energy and the willpower to try again.

That brings me back to my original question. Do we still need a clan, a support-group or a family in our generation or even worse in our LGBT community? My answer is yes without a doubt; maybe even more than ever. As a community we are challenged daily; whether it is the straight community that hates us, the large companies that toy with us, the governments that does not accept our relationships or big brother that slows us down; we need each other. I was in trouble and frustrated but my family came through for me, not my biological family, my gay family.

This experience helped me to remember Dr. Doubell's status update:

Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.

Now I am prepared to click the like button on every gay and lesbian page on Facebook, because we are an extended family, and a great one at that.

Andrew Blade is a founding member and sex-therapist at the Cobra group. His specialty is gay and lesbian sexology. You could read more of his articles on:

http://www.facebook.com/cobragay

or

http://www.cobrahelping.blogspot.com/

or invite him as friend on Facebook under the name Andrew Blades.

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Coming out with my family

Knowing that you are gay men may be confusing, disturbing and lonely time. For many people there may be more difficult for them to "come out" to family and friends for fear of being judged or cast, unloved (Instrumental) for the lucky ones who understand that they are loved unconditionally and regardless of whether they are gays and lesbians and straight families will be for them, regardless of what.

Fortunately, these days, which is much more accepted, and we know from an early age that not everyone is born, the same thing. But it can be very hard, even when you have accepted those around yourself, you can accept, and do not think that this is "just a phase" or something that will grow from there are so many people suffering in silence, we tend to think that it is simply youth who pass this stage, but there are so many elderly people in their 50 and 60 'syou have lived all their life with the fear of rejection and ridicule.

I had his uncle, who died at 70, all we knew he was gay, but for some reason our family that has never been used, which was about 35 years ago, I think about how much we enjoyed your life could be If he was raising his homosexuality openly and if he knew that it had the support of his family. People can be accepted for who they are, not what they are and thank God times is moving.

More often than not result is happy most of the families have said that they need to know that their son and a daughter of gays from as young as 2 or 3 years, but nobody showed up. I think at times that we are smart enough to realise that the real birth of gay men is not something that can capture, or something that we can make to somewhere along the way.

I hope this article will give people gay courage, to explain their loved ones, that "I'm gay" and be able to enjoy life-loving support of family and friends.

I have many stories from people who have already gone through this, they give their advice on how to go about telling your family and you might what to expect. I have also a large amount of resources that will be useful both to people coming out and their family. Announced just may be the first stage, often some of the members of the family may be necessary to seek, advice to reconcile this.

http://gaylesbian.weebly.com/

I am a 50 year old mother of four living on the beautiful Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia.

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