Family is Fraught

A still from Circus of Books with the mom and the son (picture credit: Rachel Mason) 

I think the metadiscursive move of queer theory is to start producing a counter/comparative standpoint from where we first start to see the world as not uniform. Gradually, the project of queerness, after having produced enough "not this but another way" reference points, allows for the questioning of that which was held to be normative in the first place. The switch flips on and a queer subject is the one who questions, who is ever so cautious and perhaps to a great extent always unsure. That fundamental loneliness of queerness if to feel unsure, to feel alone and to be able to not fully participate in ritual or scripted enactments of anything. To be queer is to remember one's constantly exceptional, excessive self, often with the realization that one has to live a little less to live sanely.
"Is this love?"
She answers, "It could be, who is to tell what the way to love is? And afterall, love is what love does. Is there a love outside of or opposed to its practice?"
We just saw 'Circus of Books', a Netflix documentary about a sort of underground adult media store in Los Angeles, run by two very straight people. They sort of fall into it because they need to earn a living. One a former journalist and the other, a less successful inventor and media technician. They run this store and they raise three kids. One of the kids makes this documentary as the store is shutting down because after the Internet, their only clientele is ageing (and dying) gay men for whom consuming pleasure and their sense of identity came from participating in the gay video cultures (VHS tapes, pornos, men who made a name for inventing genres of gay porn, people who survived the Reagan administration's morality crusades and the AIDS epidemic). Halfway through the film, the focus shifts to the coming out story of one of the couple's three kids. If the eye is well trained to the presentation and performative gestures of gay bodies, it is not hard to see from the start how this now fully grown, out-of-the-closet man is so gay. But the reveal happens in the later half. It centers more on the mother who was raised as a conservative Jewish girl, she reconciled her business and her (very pleasant) social interaction with her gay employees, customers and business partners as business - as the means to earn money and thus drew a mental line around family and business. Family is straight, family is normal. Business is simply what is needed to nourish the family. But then her son comes out and her first reaction is disappointment. Her less religious husband had less trouble accepting it.
As she says later in the film, "I wish I could take those words back but we all know that is impossible and I talk a lot so I have to remember all that I say." Her moral crisis and her inability to accept her son's full identity while staying true to her own theological cosmology is very raw and real. But what follows both surprised me, it almost seemed unreal and it made me sob a lot. She started doing soul searching, looking for readings, people who have tried to bridge religious tenets with homosexuality. She eventually joins a support group of parents and families that support lesbian and gay children/people. The film reaches an emotional crescendo when she and her husband lead a group parade at the LA pride, representing PFLAG (the organization). It's not the kind of moral arc where an overtly homophobic and antagonized parent has a change of heart. She had already never disowned her son which is the more common story we hear and see on screen. But her whole sequence is supported by an audio track of her speaking and her son speaking too.
He says (or she), "Parents are always supposed to be the ones leading the change and children are expected to just you know, go about their lives..." (heavily paraphrased but something like that)
That is the exact moment when I started to sob because I had already started substituting my own parents into the picture. The long and short of this could be that I wish my parents were capable of such emotional journeys. The truth is that my parents and their seemingly flat emotional arcs are at least symptomatic if not fully the product of the "Indian society" we grew in. In short, growing up, Indian parents' inability to emotionally express or be vulnerable was already a joking point, especially dads.
I like cinema because it allows for this third space between what is (at-large, normal) and what could be (or already is in very small proportions). Like when someone shows you a real example of a good school and it makes you want to believe that good schools exist, surely not where I grew up but they surely do somewhere. It's half desire realized and projected. And I told my partner who was also watching the film, "I wish my mom had such self reflexivity." The times I've brought up queer things with her, just things that are not to be discussed between parents and kids - sex, drugs, wayward desires...she literally blanks me out. She shifts the conversation to herself. She immediately says, "when have I stopped you from speaking your mind and you say what you want anyway"
I know that discomfort. I know she wants to get out of the specifics. It makes me at least momentarily desire the mom who might go join therapy or a support group or be the starter of a conversation around my general waywardness and how perhaps there are other ways of being in the world.
But my partner said something so astute, he said,"we like to pretend that it is us (Indian families) who are infused with love, warmth and care, we maintain our relationships...but we are so transactional, it is full of transactions" To the reader of this post, my purpose is not to be instructive, I am in the half desire space, I am merely exploring things that could be (better or worse). His words struck a chord with me because when my parents visited America, they were amazed to see that most people (in Orange County, San Fran and New York) were not obese, they saw a lot of happy caring families. They cultivated a hesitant appreciation for what they expected would be a wreckage. Afterall, for years we have had NRIs, cinema and newspapers tell us that Americans are facing a moral crisis, families are breaking up and divorce rates are peaking. To find that there are other people who happen to live in other ways and it does not lead to the end of the world is very destabilizing. From my limited perspective, the desi life principle of log kya kahenge (what will people say?) also works in reverse. It also implicates us as a social public into a kind of log/people that feel that constant need to live as if we are living better than others.
Cinema is not evidence in the strict social science way, it is also not anecdotal. The knowledge status of cinematic texts or their instructive value is up for debate. For some of you reading this, there are now countless serials that play on the stereotypes of Asian and Black and Hispanic family cultures in the US but also of SoBo family cultures and Delhi family cultures and Tambram families in India. As they become an easy way to entertain and relate to markets, it is harder to figure out what is organic and what is not (life imitating art?). But this is a documentary and some of my positive reception might have to do with the fact that I have been listening to podcasts on US constitutionalism. Without belaboring it, legal histories especially of landmark cases and autobiographies and documentaries about historic progressive events are very heartening. They just instil a deep appreciation of a land, its people, possibilities for empathy. And cinema is definitely a great vehicle at being able to produce that effect even with one single story, definitely more than my research papers :) I highly recommend 'Circus of Books' and also Pose (both produced by Ryan Murphy). Thanks to Anubha for the recommendation to watch!