Steph* has never been a fan of labels.

“If forced to identify, I identify as queer both in terms of my gender and my sexuality,” she tells LGBTQ Nation. But, having long been married to a cisgender man, she wasn’t always able to say this so confidently, especially while raising small children. 

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“I was very much in the closet in large part because I didn’t have relationships. I didn’t have friendships with queer people [at that time]. Not by choice but sort of by lifestyle situation because my kids were in elementary school and preschool and so those were very heteronormative environments.”

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For bi and pansexual mothers in straight-passing relationships, it can be easy to feel disconnected from the queer community. Oftentimes, there is a need for significant effort to find a sense of beloniging in the queer community. But effort requires time, a commodity mothers don’t often have. 

Steph openly explored their sexual identity throughout the 90s. Now in her fifties, she has been in a monogamous marriage with a cis man for over two decades and has two sons in their early twenties.

Due to the makeup of Steph’s family, people tend to make assumptions about their identity and count her out of the LGBTQ+ community. In some ways, those assumptions make life easier. But they also create a divide in community spaces. 

“I benefit a lot from heteronormative privilege because I can go about the world as a hetero person and be perceived that way, and yet I also have negative feelings when I’m in LGBTQ spaces and people assume that I’m not part of the community.”

The LGBTQ+ community isn’t always as inclusive as it should be, and that’s particularly evident with bi/pan+ erasure. People attracted to multiple genders are still often subject to criticism based on unfair stereotypes suggesting that they’re deceiving someone or themselves. That can already make people feel ostracized by the queer community, but it comes with an additional level of detachment from the group if they end up in a long-term relationship that is interpreted as heterosexual. Add having kids into that mix and it can add even more distance between a queer person and the LGBTQ+ community.

Steph works in an academic area that includes a lot of queer people, so some of her experiences outside the home have been more welcoming. But that hasn’t always been the case – even within her own family. 

Steph’s husband comes from another country where he was not culturally exposed to LGBTQ+ people in a positive light. Discussions about sexuality don’t come naturally to him. That struggle caused some rifts in their relationship early on, and while he has demonstrated that he rejects anti-LGBTQ+ ideas, she recognizes that it might be a short-term issue if one of their children turned out to be queer. Ultimately, Steph notes, “We have a closed monogamous (as far as we’ve both declared) marriage and so [my queer sexuality] faded from relevance.”

When her children were younger, Steph’s family was living in a more conservative area and found that much of their social lives were dictated by their children. There weren’t kids with openly queer families to befriend, and Steph still feels that hole for both herself and her children.

“I often wish my family life were more queer than it is. And I did at certain points of time try to seek out queer families for us to be in relation with… I would have preferred when they were young and still full-time in the house that we regularly interacted with queer families. But it just didn’t come to pass in the course of life. So, is that a regret, maybe? It’s a missed opportunity.”

While Steph doesn’t conceal her identity from their children, there’s never been an explicit conversation about her identity. As Steph points out, her kids don’t need to know the details of her sexual history and identity. 

“Even with my own parents and my grandparents, there are conversations I haven’t had with them that I’m fine that I never had with them.  And then, you know, there’s a couple times I’ve had conversations with them that I wish I had never had, like my grandfather and grandmother told me about his challenges with impotence and lack of sex in their marriage in their 70s and 80s. I wanted to die when I found that out. I didn’t need to know it.”

A painful disconnect

“It does make you feel a little bit more invisible, or made me feel a little bit more invisible,” Jordan tell LGBTQ Nation. “Having a kid also means that it’s harder to preserve connections to the queer community, because you have to prioritize what relationships you want to keep. Because you don’t have time to keep them all.”

Asked about how they identify, Jordan explains, “I’ve reverted to more just queer because the bigger bucket feels less like cutting off pieces of my identity. But I guess pan would also apply.” In their late thirties, Jordan has been married for over a decade and has a nine-year-old child. While they have been relatively open about their sexuality for a long time, being married to someone who is often read as a cis man has sometimes made it hard for them to feel close to the LGBTQ+ community.

The disconnect from the queer community didn’t just start with becoming a parent. They recognized the start of that challenge when they were getting married. While they were sure about the relationship, it felt like cementing their identity to the outside world as being someone in a relationship with a male-presenting person.

When Jordan and their spouse had a child, that disconnect got worse. Jordan explains that it took a little while to notice what was happening:

“I think it took a few years for me to take stock of things and realize that that had happened, because when your kid’s young, that takes up a lot of your time and energy. But I started to feel it as the toddler years came, as I was able to have time and energy to have more adult friendships out of the, like, three that I had kept, to realize that I’d lost connection with the larger interconnected community.”

Like Steph, Jordan notes the difficulties that come from your social circle being defined not by your own choices, but by spending time with the parents of your child’s friends. They found that they were spending hours a week with people that they might not have otherwise sought the company of.

Not always knowing the views of those people, Jordan pointed out that the priority was often to preserve the friendship for their child before getting comfortable sharing much about their own identity. “It can make it harder to build connections there, because you aren’t sure if you’re safe or not.”

That being said, more recent developments have helped Jordan reconnect more strongly with queer community spaces. They have been regularly going to see a friend’s burlesque performances which, at least in Jordan’s area, are very queer. Their spouse came out more recently as nonbinary and, while he is still masculine-presenting, his comfort with his own identity has helped home to be a queer space in itself.

Jordan is also polyamorous and has been able to ethically date other partners in the last few years, which has kept them more connected to the queer community and has helped to override some of the invisibility that they felt in the LGBTQ+ community earlier in their marriage.

When it comes to their child, Jordan doesn’t hide anything from them, but it’s not a big issue at home. “She’s aware that I am interested in all genders, I just also don’t think it’s something that she ever thinks about, either. I mean, it’s her mother’s sexuality. I don’t think that should be something that’s at the forefront of her mind.” 

Editor’s Note: Names have been changed for anonymity 

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