❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🩵🤍🩷🤎🖤
NOTE: I made the montage above a couple of years ago. In an effort to see my mom and mother figures through frozen moments of other’s family photos. I miss them all dearly…today and every day!
❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🩵🤍🩷🤎🖤
Mother’s Day has always been complicated for me.
So has being a son.
Like a lot of gay men, I had a rocky relationship with my mother. The kind of rocky relationship people tend to soften and smooth over after enough years have passed. But the truth is, my mother and I didn’t really like each other very much. We weren’t even on speaking terms when she passed away just over five years ago.
We loved each other, yes. But love and liking aren’t always the same thing.
Still, we tried.
And sometimes trying has to count for something. Riiight?
My mother could be funny, competitive, dramatic, stubborn, wounded, and loving…in her own special way. She could make me laugh and break my heart in the same sentence. She also had a gift for denial that bordered on performance art. If Queen for a Day had still been on tv, she would’ve won.
When I came out, my own private “Queen Of Denial” pretended not to hear me.
Somewhere deep down, she has convinced herself I was probably asexual. Quiet. Sensitive. Artistic. Different, sure. But not gay. Never that.
Maybe I’d eventually marry a nice woman and give her a grandchild she could parade around to the neighbors.
Instead, she got me. A gay son growing up in a time when being openly queer still felt dangerous and even deadly. A son who learned early how to make himself smaller and quieter in order to survive.
Coming out wasn’t some magical healing moment for us. There was no dramatic breakthrough. There was confusion, distance, hurt, and long stretches of silence.
And yet, love survived anyway.
Not perfectly. Not gracefully.
But imperfect love is still love.
As I got older, I stopped needing my mother’s approval. I tried (and mostly failed) to appreciate the good parts of who she was. Without forgetting or rewriting the past.
What I know now is this: many LGBTQ people spend their lives building family in the spaces where traditional family fell short. I became a collector of mother figures. Women who loved me in ways my own mother couldn’t.
I’ve been lucky enough to have several of those wonderful women in my life.
Women who nurtured me in ways my own mother either couldn’t or simply didn’t know how. Women who reminded me that motherhood is not strictly biological. Sometimes motherhood is just showing up consistently for someone who needs tenderness.
Some of the strongest mothers I’ve known never gave birth at all.
Especially in the LGBTQ community, “mother” can become a sacred title earned through action rather than DNA. Chosen families understand that. Ballroom culture understood it long before the rest of the world did. Sometimes the people who save us are simply the people who decide to claim us.
Being a son, especially a gay son, often means living between gratitude and grief. Gratitude for the love we received. Grief for the love we didn’t receive. Gratitude for the mothers who tried. Grief for the parts of them that couldn’t meet us where we were.
Both things can be true at once.
Every Mother’s Day, I try to hold space for all of it. The good memories. The sharp edges. The forgiveness that arrived late. The forgiveness that never fully arrived at all.
Mostly, I think about the women who loved me the best they could, even when “the best they could” sometimes fell short.
Maybe that’s what motherhood really is.
Not perfection. Not sainthood. Just imperfect people trying to love each other through fear, expectation, silence, and hope.
So today is for the mamas:
The biological ones.
The chosen ones.
The drag mothers.
The aunties.
The women who stepped in quietly when nobody else did.
And for the sons still trying to make peace with all of it.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the Mamas…and the Papas!
Clint 🌈✌️
P.S. Thank you Nellie, Alta, Sandra, Katherine, and all the other mamas and mother figures who helped me become the man I am today. With love always…
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ICYMI = IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
SUNDAY = My Belated LA Anniversary
MONDAY = Keith Haring Was Here
TUESDAY = It Ends With This?!
WEDNESDAY = DJ’s Private Collection (Preview #1)**
THURSDAY = Don't Poke The Bear
FRIDAY = Snooze Uncontrolled
SATURDAY = News + Views
** For those wondering when I’m going to post more of DJ’s Private Collection, I finally got my good scanner working properly, so will be working on scanning them all later today and tomorrow.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
BORN THIS WAY ON THIS DAY
05-10 = Andrea Jenkins (1961- ) = American politician, writer, and artist 🌈
05-10 = Scott Brison (1967- ) = Canadian politician 🌈
05-10 = Steve Gunderson (1951- ) = American politician and executive 🌈
MAN CRUSH(ES) OF THE DAY
“I have no desire to prove anything by dancing. I have never used it as an outlet or a means of expressing myself. I just dance. I just put my feet in the air and move them around.”
Fred Astaire
