Queer & Adopted

"Coming out" is a familiar refrain for most queer people. Widely acknowledged as a process rather than an event, the process of revealing one's identity to an often hostile world become a lifetime task.

In 1995 I came out to my adopted parents in what I believed to be the last step in my coming out process. In profound ways, it was just the beginning of a journey of self-discovery and personal development -- that, at the time I'm writing, is hardly complete.

Shadowing the urgency of declaring my sexual orientation lay another simmering concern. Although I'd frequently shared my status as an adopted person with friends and lovers, as I grew older I found that it was harder to reconcile my feelings about adoption with the expectations of adult life.

Those outside of the adoption triangle (with points touching adopting parents, birth parents and the adopted person) quite often have a difficult time understanding the lifelong affect of adoption. The heroic status bestowed to adopting parents (and its concomitant demands for gratitude on the part of the adoptee) coupled with the notion that adopted children as chosen (and therefore luckier than biological children) creates a sense of dissonance with one's lived experience. To reveal one's adopted status as an adult, much less to problematize it, is to raise questions about one's emotional development. Indeed, to those unfamiliar with this emotional terrain (and even to those living within it) an inference often arises: get over it.

Over the past decade I've begun to explore my experience as an adopted person, both through autobiographical exploration and speculative narrative. I'm not simply interested in filling gaps that I intuit in my family life, but also deeply interested in the idiom of biology.

These pages present some of my on-going exploration. They stand as another facet of my coming out.

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