Getting to Know You

Meet Dylan Flunker, the first in a clump of new regular contributors here at VillageQ! He’ll be filing monthly posts and we’re thrilled to have him aboard. ~VQ Eds

 

Welcome to VillageQ! My name is Dylan. I usually don’t look quite as fabulous as in this photo, but I’ve heard you should always put your best foot forward. I couldn’t decide between my right or left foot so you get my best rainbow headband. I have been assured that VillageQ is not like a village in a B-grade horror flick that no one ever leaves because of the monsters in the woods. In my head it’s more like the village in a musical where everyone bursts into choreographed song and dance as you walk past in the morning, but that might not be a vision shared by the rest of the bloggers. Either way, I am so excited to be joining this community of people talking about LGBTQ families!

I live in Minneapolis with my partner, Rebecca, and our almost two year old kid (nom de internet: Little Bear. I know, she’s probably going to roll her eyes about this nickname as soon as she masters rolling her eyes).  I am trans and queer identified, and post what probably seems like an excessive amount of photos of Little Bear on social media. In my defense, her great-grandma gets feisty and sends us pointed Facebook messages about having to look through “old” photos if there aren’t new photos every few days.

We pass for a straight family all the time. We’ve developed a few techniques for disrupting this assumption in public. We jokingly refer to ourselves as the FaB family (the initials of my last name and Rebecca’s last name are conveniently F and B), say things like “we’re both LGBTQ” when explaining to our neighbors that we aren’t legally married yet, and delight in our child’s fascination with rainbows, flags, and rainbow flags.

Even so, our family looks so much like the whitebread image of mom, dad, and kid that we are rarely perceived by strangers as a queer family. Balancing how much we want to disclose about our identities and our family in public is one of those parenting skills that just isn’t discussed in a lot of mainstream parenting books and blogs. It’s also not talked about very frequently in the activist/leftist/queer organizing communities I hung out in before becoming a parent and that’s truly a shame. I’m excited to join VillageQ not because I think all our LGBTQ families have the same experience but because I’m looking forward to having more space for people in queer families to bring their whole selves.

So hello! I’m looking forward to getting to know you! Feel free to wander over to chastely Queer Dads Blog where I also hang out. If you want to picture me in a choreographed welcome number down the street of your local village, go right ahead.