We’re in a cabin somewhere in Virginia with C’s extended
family for the weekend. He would correct my use of “extended family.” He calls
this group of about 20 -- his parents, siblings, aunt, cousins and their
spouses, other relatives who live nearby, and half a dozen or so various
offspring -- his “immediate family.” The extended family, he tells me, consists
of some hundreds of far-flung kin whom I’ve had a small taste of at two
weddings but will not feel the full blunt force of until I attend “the family
reunion” this summer, an event the contemplation of which sends me into a cold sweat.
I exaggerate. I do -- despite cultural differences (someone
Thursday morning asked if anyone was planning a trip to Walmart because she
needed a few things) which are, with each family gathering, a little less
stressful for me to just shut up about -- love C’s family, all 500 of them.
Immediate, extended, whatever. A marriage (or maybe it’s me) can only tolerate
so much arguing about nomenclature.
We left our apartment Wednesday at about 3:30, picked up a
zip car a few blocks away, and drove 9 hours to get here. A couple weeks ago, the women in the family
circulated an email with information about the cabin, accommodations, plans, and
a menu and sign-up sheet for the big meal. I volunteered for mashed potatoes
(because I make awesome mashed potatoes) and decided to also make a few pies
(god knows why, because I’m not really a baker and nearly had a nervous
breakdown Tuesday night when the crust was giving me trouble, but I really
wanted to make a pear pie and C wanted pecan, so …).
I also brought 3 dishes without which Thanksgiving would not
be Thanksgiving for me: succotash, Grand Marnier cranberry sauce, and maple/garlic
roasted carrots. When I said in the email chain that I would bring a couple
dishes from my own Thanksgiving traditions, a cousin of C’s replied that she
loved that I would be bringing dishes from my own family’s traditional meal. I
don’t think I had said “family,” but of course these dishes are
from my family traditions. Just not my biological family. I haven’t had
Thanksgiving with my parents and siblings in many years, not because I’ve been avoiding
it, but because most years I had little time and little money and couldn’t
justify or afford two trips to Indiana in less than a month. So I chose Xmas,
at least until the last 10 years, when I didn’t even usually make it home for
Xmas.
Thanksgiving in my adulthood has been a time for celebrating
with what queer people our age call our “acquired family.” My parents are
liberal, accepting, not homophobic by any stretch, so I’ve never had the
experience of being spurned or excluded by my family like so many LGBT folks
have. But I have felt that essential difference that at
holidays can put distance between parents and their gay kids, and I’ve known
the feeling which so many of us have in common of safety and relief when
socializing without straight people.
It was important and inevitable that I put some distance
between my family’s lives and mine when I left Indiana at 18, to find and
assert the difference between me and them, to find an aspect of me that I
couldn’t learn from their example. As I get older, the loss
aspect of that experience seems to have more meaning than the
assertion of independence aspect. In retrospect I guess it
gets more sad than exhilarating.
But what is there to do about it? The most convincing
argument for gay marriage, the one that seems to be working because it
convinces even, or especially, people with a conservative world view, is that
by allowing and encouraging homosexuals to form traditional families we avoid
or at least mitigate that loss. Don’t force gay kids to leave their families,
but accept them fully as part of traditional families. But won’t there always
be something about us that our parents
(if they’re heterosexual) won’t really understand or appreciate? It seems to me
that if our parents are heterosexual, that one essential difference between us
and them will always force us to seek to find reflections of ourselves outside
the family, and that will always in some way weaken traditional family bonds.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is what gay uncles are for. Everybody has a gay
uncle, right?
At any rate, it was loss that led me to find and create all
these remarkable little families I’ve been a part of through the years. So, though
I love and miss my mom’s cooking at Thanksgiving (her pumpkin pie and her sage
dressing are still the gold standards), most of the foods that mean
Thanksgiving to me come from later epochs of my life.
Succotash. The recipe itself came from the restaurant in
Hell’s Kitchen where I waited tables in the late 80s for two years. The
owner/chef was a lunatic and a bully, but he made delicious American comfort
food at that time in New York when regional American cuisine was making a big
comeback.
I loved my co-workers and the food, and I made tons of money,
so I stayed for 2 years. When I left I just didn’t show up for work one day and
never went back. I am not proud of that, and it literally gave me horrible
waiting-tables-and-everything-is-going-horribly-wrong nightmares for about 20
years.
But I loved his succotash so much I started making it
myself. It takes me back to that Thanksgiving (1986? 87?) when B and I lived in
Brooklyn and my sister was in New York for an internship at Paramount her
senior year at Indiana University and she was living with a friend a few blocks
away. I wanted so badly for her to move to New York, but just the previous
summer she had met the man who would be her first husband, and she went back to
finish school in Indiana, then moved to Louisiana to live with and soon marry
him.
That fall, she and I and B prepared a sit-down dinner for
about 25 or 30 of our friends and various Thanksgiving orphans, and we ate at a
long makeshift table crammed into the living room of our floor-through
apartment in Ft. Greene. The kitchen was a sink and stove wedged into what had
been a closet in the original one-family brownstone which had been converted
(but not really – our bathroom and another small room were off a stairway that
the upstairs tenants passed through to get to their apartment). The fridge was
in the living room.
I have made that succotash every time I’ve made Thanksgiving
dinner since. The recipe’s not hard. Equal parts corn and baby lima beans,
diced red bell pepper, simmered for about 20 minutes with cream, butter, a pinch
(or more) of ground cayenne, and lots of salt and black pepper. I like the
consistency better when it’s made the day ahead, cooled and reheated.
The cranberry sauce is J’s recipe. I don’t know if it
predates our relationship, but he always made it when we had Thanksgiving at
home or if we were invited somewhere and asked to bring something. I can’t
imagine a turkey dinner without it. I had to email him last week for the recipe,
because I’d never made it. He follows the recipe on the bag of cranberries but
substitutes Grand Marnier and orange juice for the liquid, reduces the amount
of sugar by about half, then stirs in a little more Grand Marnier after cooking
so it has a slightly boozy taste. I added a little orange zest and a pinch of
clove too, because I can’t resist fussing with everything and that orange was
just sitting there. We also didn’t have Grand Marnier so I used triple sec and
didn’t notice the difference. It’s delicious, and it makes me think of all the
wonderful things about our years together and how dear and generous J is and
how glad I am that we’re still close. He is still as much my family as anyone.
The carrots were on the menu at Hell’s Backbone Grill in
Boulder, Utah, where I cooked 2 seasons in 2005 and 06. It doesn’t feel at all
correct to me to describe Hell’s Backbone Grill as a restaurant where I used to
work. It was more like total immersion.
Boulder is a town of fewer than 200 people, a Mormon
ranching settlement and tiny oasis for tourists on Scenic Route 12 which snakes
through southern Utah’s glorious landscape. I had just finished my film Life
in a Box, couldn’t find a job in San Francisco where I had ended up
because an editor I wanted to work with lived there and in 2005 it didn’t much
matter where I went because nothing was keeping me anywhere.
I met a skinny smiling queer Buddhist in a leather bar who
said, “Why don’t you come to Utah with me and cook in my friends’ J and B’s
restaurant?” A couple weeks later I met J and B when they were in San Francisco
for a fancy food show, and, a few weeks after that, I was in the middle of
nowhere, surrounded by awesome spectacular beauty every moment of the day, preparing
food in a restaurant where love is the mission statement.
The menu there incorporates elements of New Mexican cooking
(lots of green chilies), ancient Native American cuisine (seeds, beans, corn,
squash), and Mormon pioneer cooking
(beef from local ranches, trout marinated in molasses, dredged in cornmeal, and
fried in a cast iron skillet, and lots of Dutch oven dishes). I’ve never eaten
more delicious food in my life.
My first season there I lived in an old RV that was half
sunk in the yard of one of those women, surrounded by chickens and lilac
bushes. I shared the RV with a colony of mice who stole my office supplies and
turned them into a vast elaborate city under the mattress of my bed. Though
it’s been 6 years since I’ve been back, I still hold that place and those
people deep in my heart. I think of them nearly every time I cook anything, and
that’s not exaggerating.
The carrots are sliced about ¼” thick, tossed with maple
syrup, garlic, vegetable oil, salt and pepper, and roasted at 350 until they
shrink and caramelize a bit. I added mustard, which I don’t think was in their
recipe (fuss, fuss).
I also learned how to make mashed potatoes at Hell’s
Backbone Grill. There’s no secret to
making the best mashed potatoes ever. Just lots of heavy cream, lots of butter,
and lots of salt and pepper. Lots. For 10 pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes, I
added 2 sticks of butter and about a pint and a half of cream. Boil the
potatoes, mash the butter in first, then add the cream. Handfuls of salt. At
the restaurant we added fresh chopped sage leaves to the breakfast potatoes and
lemon zest and sour cream to the dinner potatoes. Though I have nothing against
a little lily gilding, even without, they’re every bit as good as you want them
to be.
These dishes remind me, on this weekend when we’re all under
a lot of pressure to express gratitude, that I have had an abundance of
experience, tradition, love enough for a hundred lifetimes, and I’m only 51
years old. It’s almost embarrassing how good I’ve had it. I well up with
emotion just contemplating the depth and richness of my life so far.
Now C and I are creating our own family, which is somehow
nestled into his larger clan and, what I didn’t expect, finding a renewed
closeness with my own parents and siblings, a new way of thinking about my place
in their lives and mine in theirs, a re-experiencing that began with the run-up
to my wedding and their participation in it. And it all adds up to a much more
traditional kind of family. I cherish it. But it’s not without loss. Loss of the
primacy of that ramshackle family I cultivated over the last 30 years. I still
have those people in my life and love them just as much. But I will not spend
Thanksgiving with any of them.
Looking back over what I’ve written, it’s not lost on me
that a lot of what I have presented here as acquired family is just past
relationships. There’s a lot to contemplate there -- the differences between
those relationships and my marriage to C, differences that come from different
aspirations and desires, cultural expectations that change with the times, the
differences in the particular families of those past partners and their
relationships with them. One of the things I love and hate
about sitting down to write (or even having a conversation, for that matter) is
that it often feels impossible to discuss one thing without discussing another
thing, which doesn’t make sense unless we bring in this other thing, and
eventually it seems necessary to be talking about everything
in order for the current topic to make any sense. Writer’s block is never about
there being nothing to write about. It’s about there being too
much to write about.
