#yesGayYA

[kfabian]

holyschist has a really great, informative round of up links to do with #yesGayYA -- there's a lot going on in this conversation, and it's interesting, if rather painful, to watch how people with power hide behind the notion of ineffable market forces.



This post is not about microeconomics. It's about why my heart hurts whenever I try to focus on this discussion.



I want kids. I plan to have kids. The woman I plan to have kids with once told me -- brimming over with delight -- that if we split up and both ended up with other women, our kids would have four mummies. (We've decided to keep this as a backup, rather than Plan A.)

My kids' lives will be shaped by the stories we tell each other -- in books and TV and film and music and casual conversation and epic poetry and my half-hearted attempts to inculcate some Jewishness in them -- and they will learn about life through imagination and experience.

I don't know my kids yet. I haven't met them. I don't know anything about them, apart from that I hope to love them with all my heart. But whoever my kids are, I want them to see themselves in the stories they hear. All their lives, I want them to have stories that include them and their friends and their family (however many mothers it contains...). And, just as much, I want them to have stories about people they've never met and points of view they've never considered and joys they didn't know existed to reach for.

I want that for my kids at all their ages, whoever they turn out to be, whoever they turn out to love. I want them to know that they and everyone else have a place in the stories we tell, the happinesses and sorrows we imagine. I want that when they're five, when they're fifteen, when they're fifty.

And I can't do that alone.