I didn't
have a gay uncle growing up, but I remember the first one I
saw. It was Paul Lynde, playing Samantha's
Uncle Arthur on Bewitched. No one said he was gay,
but Arthur's sneering innuendo, campiness, and
suburban gate-crashing had enough cultural signifiers
to raise a pink flag in my 9-year-old brain.
These days, real
gay uncles are de rigueur. At least a dozen companies
sell onesies printed with "I Love My Gay Uncle." A new
children's book called Uncle Bobby's
Wedding explores a young guinea pig's
jealousy when her favorite uncle marries his
boyfriend. There are Facebook groups where teens praise
their GUs ("I'm not gay, but my Uncle Herb is;
yes, I do have a gay uncle!") and a co-ed worthy
cocktail called "the gay uncle," made with Jack
Daniels, cream, and Tabasco. The Urban Dictionary's
definition of the term underscores the ubiquity: "gay uncles
-- you either got one, or you are one -- or both!"
As a guncle
myself, that seems like a good thing. When my niece Amber
heard some schoolmates teasing two girls who were playing
"wedding" at recess, she turned on them. "It's
called gay," she shouted. "Get over
it."
While it's
nice that gay uncles have become integrated into the family
circle, what's our role supposed to be?
I have a
master's degree in early childhood education, and
I've worked with young kids professionally for
20 years -- as a preschool teacher, school director,
and youth researcher. I have seven nieces, and I wrote a
book called The Gay Uncle's Guide to
Parenting. (Of course, being an expert is different from
putting it into practice: The shoemaker's kids
go barefoot. Child psychologists are insane parents.
You get the idea.)
When I was doing
publicity for my book, interviewers consistently used a
line that seemed to offer a clue: "Gays are the new
grandmas."
At first the
phrase confounded me. Was it a slight on my prematurely
graying hair? My fashion sense? Eventually, I demanded an
explanation.
My interrogator
explained that it had to do with advancing maternal age,
and its correlative impact on grand-maternal age. My
mom -- exceptional in many ways -- was only 20 when
she had her first kid, making her mom a grandparent at
age 39. But many of my friends didn't even
start thinking about pregnancy until they were nearing 40,
and their parents are all significantly older than
mine.
If you do the
math, you'll realize that many modern grandparents
are beginning this career change in their 70s.
Even with recent advances in joint replacement,
plastic surgery, and mental-robics, the current
generation of grannies is, quite simply, old. Where my
grandma taught us gin rummy, took us biking and swimming,
and out to concerts -- I saw the Cars with her in
'84; she and my sister hit the Jacksons'
Victory tour that same year -- today's nanas are more
physically and mentally frail: forgetful of any
child-rearing tricks they once had, and more likely to
be using a walker than moon-walking.
So who does this
leave to spoil the kiddies, take them to key cultural
events, and treat them like little princes and
princesses? Their gay uncles, of course.
We're
around the same spry age as our breeding siblings and
friends, making us capable of running after a
traffic-bound toddler, or whisking a tantrumming tot
from Gap Kids without slipping a disc. My grandma
took me birthday shopping at Saks, but these days people
simply ship their tweens off to the big city to troll
the boulevards with their guncs. My 9-year-old
niece is obsessed with Canal Street's
"silk" dresses and garish knockoffs, and
digs my favorite East Village thrift shops. But
the first time I took her into the Prada store in SoHo,
she eyed a pair of thigh-high white leather boots, crossed
her arms, and exclaimed, "Now
that's what I'm talking
about."
Taking these
consumer adventures even further, I've heard stories
of some fashion-forward, urban gay uncles teaming up
to host special playdates for their nieces. Not
content with serving cupcakes and playing Wii, these
gents use their special homo-bilities to provide the little
girls with full-on makeovers: hair, face, clothing,
accessories.
Of course, all
this spoiling sometimes comes with unforeseen
responsibilities.
My fashionable
friend Carlton was thrilled to take his teenage niece to
his favorite New York boutiques during her visit last
fall. And when he visited her in Baltimore that
Christmas, his sister was equally thrilled with the
gifts she'd brought home. "A Marc Jacobs
coin purse," she said. "You
shouldn't have." Carlton squinted at
the bag. "I...didn't." He
stormed upstairs and confronted his niece. "I
take you shopping and you steal?" he
said. "Unh-uh. Not OK." The
girl cried and apologized.
Still, not all
gay uncles are thrilled about being cast into this
consumerist role.
"I love
the idea of being kooky and zany," said visual artist
Brad Hampton. "That's totally
gratifying. But I hate all the gift-giving
pressure, like uncling is just about commerce and
merchandise. Hopefully my reputation as a fun-loving
uncle will back up my performance as a 'bad Santa'
uncle."
Other gay uncles
reject even this unspoken pressure to entertain their
friends' and family members' kids.
"I hate the idea that as a gay man I'm
expected to become some sort of child-centric clown,"
said Mike Albo, author of The Underminer and The New York Times's Critical Shopper
column. "I feel like I'm good at
being strange with my nieces and nephews -- like Aunt Jenny
from the Brady Bunch -- observing weird phenomena. But
I don't want to have to goo-goo over them all
the time."
Forgetting the
kids themselves for a moment, gay uncles also consistently
cited the sense of loss they experienced when friends or
family members had children: the way in which, as
childless siblings or friends, they felt supplanted by
the monomaniacal focus that contemporary parenting
seems to require. This spurned feeling was certainly a big
inspiration in my writing my tell-all book about the
heinous mistakes my friends and family members made
raising their kids. "Even when you do see your
friends," one gay uncle said,
"there's no quality time for conversation.
They just talk about their kids."
Capping this off
was the way many guncles feel somewhat...let down by
their friends' life choices. My
generation's gay activist experiences in the
'90s -- ACT UP, Queer Nation, gender studies -- had
us convinced that our peer group really was going to
create a new society.
"It's not like I wanted our 20s to
continue," said Albo. "But it bums
me out that all these formerly sex-radical, gender-fluid
people followed this conventional path of hetero
marriage and kids." Echoing this concern,
Hampton says, "It might be a retrograde
view of my sexuality, but I thought not having to
participate in all that family stuff was kind of the
whole point of being gay."
I have to say,
I'm down with this sentiment. While I love
working with kids and enjoy my nieces, my boyfriend of
18 years and I are both uninterested in organizing our
life around that "family stuff": marriage, kids,
settling down. Frankly, we don't buy its
benefits. But I believe this creates an important role
for people like us in the lives of the kids around us,
especially given the smothering parenting culture in
which they're being raised.
For example,
I've remained close with many of my former preschool
students. Though they're all supercool urban
teens now, I can say with certainty that my external,
but genuinely adult, perspective has been extremely
useful and relevant for them. They ask me questions
about things that they'd be ashamed to ask their
friends, subjects they're unsure how to look
up, or would be horrified (or perhaps punished) if the
issue were broached with their parents. And I try
to answer them as honestly as I can. I certainly
remember these connections with adults who respected
me as a kid -- who took my concerns seriously, who
weren't afraid of hard topics, who offered limits and
practical guidance -- as some of the most profoundly
important and influential in my life. More than
shopping instructor, clown, or cultural attache,
it's this kind of guncling I truly relish.
"I guess I
look forward to when my nieces and nephews are
teens," Mike Albo said, echoing this sentiment,
"and they don't want to speak to their
parents. I'm totally looking forward to them
being the completely immature teenager that I still
am." He laughed. "Finally,
another 15-year-old girl in the room besides me."
