⁂ I. To save the Migrant, kill the family. (fragment)

A petition to free ourselves from our Theban cycles.

This essay is an incomplete draft originally intended for Pinko, a queer communist journal. It was abandoned after I experienced severe mental health issues related to my inability to adapt to life in México. Shared here to exorcise it from my notebook, without edits and without the two remaining sections which exist only as a bulleted lists and scribbles in my notebook.

One editor called the writing unjustifiably decadent; best compliment I’ve received to date. I still insist on family abolition, but my decadence has since been proved justified.

Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him

Early autumn on the grounds of the Norton Simon is Pasadena at its most charming. There, in a gallery hangs a Bassano, acid greens and pinks belying a lingering Mannerist tendency in its attempt at a classical frieze. Tour groups always stop before it. The docent’s voice sweeping, always sweeping, describes the scene: it’s the flight into Egypt, when, to save the infant Christ from the law of King Herod, the Holy Family flees after an angel appears in Joseph’s dream. They are the first refugees, the docent says. In 2017, that carries something of a new weight that, only briefly, leaves the group breathless before moving on mercifully to Dutch still lives painted on copper plates. One of my last memories of California: crying before an ancillary painter of the Italian Baroque. A humiliation I simply still can’t recover from.

The Flight, is in many ways the origin mythos that girds how we speak about all migrations today. It’s the form recreated in the tepid sermons of the Colleges of Bishops as well as in the chants of leftist, grassroots organizers outside detention centers across the country—families belong together and education, not family separation. It’s chromosomal to immigrant rights movements internationally, even more inextricable than the plea for the paper protections of citizenship itself. Surely, staring out from a drain ditch from Mexicali into Calexico, it’s easy to see in the story of the Flight the echoes of the first migration, when early humans looked across the sea and were first tempted by the other side of the Bab el-Mandeb—the Gates of Grief. Leaving behind East Africa with hope in their eyes, one child in arm and another in womb, aboard makeshift rafts they navigated shattering currents to arrive on a strange shore. The memory of hunger, the Law of Herod, NAFTA; aboard a raft, an ass or by foot—it’s all the same. Surely, families belong together. What could evince this more than the fact that the family sits at the center of American immigration and naturalization law, the only text conceivably more authoritative than the New Testament.

The leftist insistence on the sanctity of the family in matters of migration has not gone undocumented. On the right, it has been the object of scorn and ridicule that, after decades of criticisms and debates on the nuclear family as an invention of capitalism, as a necessary step in destruction of communal societies, that migrant advocates have seized upon it as an inviolable entity in matters of immigration law and enforcement. They can say this because, above all, the American immigrant rights movement across the spectrum of its ideologies has seized on the ideal of the family, the innocence of children and its political power in the mind of an electorate, bureaucracy and elected leadership who might be persuaded. To humanize the refugee fleeing the sackings of their country or the raging civil wars, the intellectual gesture and the work of the messaging was to shatter the teeming masses threatening to overrun the borders into family units that could be more readily conceptualized, who might even elicit the voters’ facsimiles of empathy. Even more so than the wide smiles of youth with baby fat on their cheeks in their caps and gowns with their dreams and ambitions, it has been this transformation of refugees from Saracen hordes at Charsian gates into the Theotokos incarnate that has powered precarious, but very real political victories for refugees

However, the genius of that humanizing compartmentalization has also shattered Us. Has made speaking Our truths more difficult as it has forced us into dilemmas. Never could I be accused of being anything as démodé and loathsome as “private” or “shy”, but even I hesitate to share the story of my own migrant family. The way my father wielded his residency then citizenship and my mother’s and my illegality over our heads. The way that power imbalance came crashing down on my mother after nearly twenty-one years of marriage, suddenly as fists, then as a chokehold, and finally a VAWA application. The way I was caught in the triangulation, first as patient confessor and then ultimately when the knuckles of my left hand broke caught in a doorframe trying to stop my father. The way that, after crossing the river on foot by night at three years old to reunite my family, I ended it, at nineteen with one statement notated by a Sheriff’s deputy with my sister as the catatonic witness.

It’s a personally painful, but relatively mundane story in the scheme of things. Among the more than eleven million clandestine refugees in the United States, the family very often becomes another battleground where the laws that dictate migration also dictate the family experience as domestic violence in all its forms, ranging from financial to physical abuse that thrives in communities saddled with PTSD and few resources. Stories of those experiencing violence attempting to survive by fleeing, by reporting only to end up dead or, worse, deported, are as common as they are chilling. The criticisms of the family are the most obvious, most urgent to consider when patriarchy and capitalist alienation wield exile as a weapon in their holster to hold us hostage. The family is the wrought iron cage inside the golden one.

Yet, on Alameda Street, those of us who have survived or are surviving, those of us navigating the double closets of being queer and illegal are still chanting, “Families belong together,” as the detained bang on the windows of the Metropolitan Detention Center.

Why?

In my mind’s eye, I can visualize the possibility that the first people to cross the Gate of Grief didn’t do it as a family. I have to disagree with the wonderful Lesbian pastor at the sanctuary church in Simi Valley where I spoke when she said, “When single men leave to other countries, it’s migrant labor. When women and children come behind them, that’s the labor of migration.” Instead, I ask, what if we insist that the first person who came face to face with the straits was what we today could call queer? What if we understood the refugee, not as the infant Christ in the arms of his Virgin mother, but as the queer migrant cast out—not by the Law of Herod—but by the nation at its most granular, the family itself? Unsanct. Unsafe.

II: Yet more pass through the Gates of Grief

1. The double closet; dual loyalties for illegal fags; economic survival and personal martyrization;

2. Chosen family; QUIP, Familia TQLM and all the other ignominious, but cherished failures as potential alternatives

3. Illegal chosen family not just as rejection of the biological or legal construct, but also a crematorium for citizenship-based assimilationist politics of the LGBT 501(c) world

III: In defense of patricide, a mini-festo

1. The narrative of family migration and its appeals to heteronormative social norms kills migrants.

2. Queer migrants stress the limits of political power both of contemporary pro-refugee discourse and of contemporary pro-LGBT discourse. They are hurt by their unsaid assumptions and unfinished conclusions that undergird their discourses.

3. Neither the migrant family nor queer citizenship can protect queer migrants.

4. We must reject these to save ourselves and those who will one day cross the Gates of Grief after us.

5. We must imagine alternatives to save ourselves and those who will come behind us.