Why I love princesses

A few months ago, I came home from teaching my gay and lesbian literature class and as I walked in the backdoor, our youngest son Eliot, who is three years old, was twirling in the middle of our kitchen, wearing his white satin dress-up dress.

“Daddy, isn’t my dress beautiful?” he squealed.

I smiled at him and emphatically agreed.

There have been many such moments in Eliot’s and our life in the past months. (Consider a similar moment when my partner, Mark, came home from work one day and Eliot ran to him equally delighted about the sparkles in his pink dancers dress—“Papi, look, it sparkles!” Or Eliot’s proud declaration during bath time of his “booty-vagina.” Or his excitement in inheriting a girl cousin’s hand-me-down clothing: in a matter of minutes he had tried nearly a dozen of outfits and finally swooned over the pile of them. This from a child who often desists in dressing himself.)

Decidedly femme in his aesthetic preferences, Eliot is showing early signs of his own queerness. In a family like ours—a queer co-parenting duplex model of shared but separate domestic life with two gay dads, two lesbian moms, and a five year old brother who is a light saber loving bundle of physical energy—Eliot’s interest in dolls, fancy decorations for his room, clothing that our culture typically associates with girls, pastels, and listening intently to adults’ conversation doesn’t really stick out, but in subtle ways it’s striking to me how queer our youngest son already is.

And to be honest, I feel slightly anxious, but also incredibly honored. Let me explain.

For example, when I take Eliot out to the park or the grocery store and he wears a dress or even a shirt with pink ribbons on it, I have to admit that I do wince inside when person after person mistakes him for a girl. Or when they realize he is a boy and for a brief moment a flicker of something—is it judgment? is it confusion?—flickers across their face. I know that I do a hefty amount of projecting in these moments; for the most part, I know Eliot is aware of his own difference, but to what extent I’m unsure. He appears to sashay through such moments oblivious to the world’s sly, knowing looks. I hope this is so, at least for now. He is only three, after all.

But let me be clear, I am not embarrassed or ashamed of Eliot or the way he manifests his own gender (or is it sexuality?) at this point in his life. It brings him such joy to wear dresses, pink leggings, and Dora underwear that as a parent, I can’t help but celebrate his desire to dress in a way that he enjoys. What I am profoundly aware of is how rigid our culture is about gender, even for young children. True, nothing has happened to Eliot, outside of a few comments from a few people who express their not quite hostile, but decidedly unfamiliar sense of incongruity at a young boy wearing a pink flouncy tutu. What I am aware of and anxious about is both how others will continue to respond to Eliot and the rest of us. Will Eliot somehow manage to bring it off and naturalize his own choices through the sheer force of his personality? Or will his first year in our neighborhood pre-school squelch his creative flair for life?

More personally, I also worry—not a lot, mind you, but enough—about how my role as a gay father is evaluated by the queerness of one of my sons. This is a very understated worry, more like an occasional prickle underneath the skin, but it exists, and I want to confront it head on. Being a gay parent in our particular community has been relatively easy so far, but I never lose the feeling that I am somehow on, somehow performing, somehow representing the cause. In a state that might ban same-sex marriage this fall, it’s hard not to feel a bit scrutinized even during simply daily activities, like grocery shopping or taking the kids swimming at the local community pool.

Let me close this entry, though, with a much more positive assertion: parenting Eliot gives me a fierce sense of pride as a gay man. To be the father of young boy, who, no matter how this gender difference develops later in life, expresses his desires in toys, clothing, and games that most people only imagine girls to be interested in, is quite an honor. In a culture that still remains murderously opposed to all forms of gender and sexual deviation from heterosexual norms, being able to love and help cultivate Eliot’s own sense of self as free as possible from the restraints of our culture is miraculous. It certainly was not something I experienced as a child. I realize that this is every right wing, fundamentalist’s nightmare—a gay man announcing his defiant pride in the possibility of raising a queer child—but if we won’t step up and defend our children’s right to be free to become whoever and whatever they desire, then who will? Not only is my commitment to my sons (more on Zian, Eliot’s older brother, in my next posting) an honor, but I consider it an ethical obligation, a parenting duty, to help them cultivate their identities, as queer they might end up.

As Eliot asked me one afternoon as we were coloring pictures of Barbie princesses, “Daddy, what do you like about princesses?”

“Well,” I answered, “They’re pretty, and they wear fabulous dresses.”

He nodded, taking it in with a serious look, and continued to color.

Oh, Eliot, there is so much I love about princesses. I can’t wait to show you more.

--Geoffrey