I sit in an arcade overrun with unaccompanied minors, setting up a private party for my grandmother’s 80th birthday. I arrange a tower of SusieCakes my diabetic family has no business eating and welcome aunties I haven’t seen in years. In a whisper, I ask my mother why we aren’t gathered at a restaurant; you know, something more suited for this kind of milestone celebration. She tells me Granny wanted to host this party for the children in her life, only half of whom are even blood-related.
My Granny is many things, but she is a caregiver first. It’s a part of her that feels obvious and abundant and is intrinsically tied to her queerness. Granny is a lesbian, the old-school kind. “I never even thought about being bisexual,” she says to me with a prideful huff, over a much-too-sweet banana pudding. “I was just having sex with men because that’s what my mother told me I was supposed to do.” She makes a retching sound, then giggles. It’s the first time we’ve talked explicitly about her sexuality.
I’m 31 years old for that dessert-fueled conversation, but I don’t remember when it first dawned on me that Granny was queer. I’ve known some version of this about myself since I saw Roxanne in A Goofy Movie and held hands with a raven-haired middle school bully named Lauren, but I didn’t know what a lesbian looked like, really. I was familiar with the feeling of queerness long before I could identify it.
Still, it felt impossible to look at my Granny through any heteronormative lens simply because she was never any kind of normal. Granny, or GG, was no grandmother; the word doesn’t even sit right on my tongue. She was too young for the title, often braless and brash, with her ears stacked full of silver piercings. Granny didn’t sing me lullabies, but she did know every lyric to Eve’s “Let Me Blow Ya Mind.” She was always moving homes and cussing people out. There was a rotating cast of children in her one-bedroom apartment in Oakland whom she babysat for one reason or another; by my early teens, I started to assume everyone was some kind of cousin. That might just be part of being Black, but it was also part of being Granny’s.
While everyone else’s grandmothers softened with age, mine only seemed to harden into her butchness by the year. Even without the word “lesbian” said aloud, there was always some unspoken union between Granny and me that drew us both to nose rings and kept us loud and curious. I would drive up north from Los Angeles and visit her, her “roommate,” and their enormous Rottweiler, Juma—the dog more of a sign of her sapphic life than the dark-skinned stud living in her apartment. There were no pointed questions or formal sit-downs around her sexual identity; she just was. She just is.
I saw a whole world of possibilities in Granny. I loved the color and the chaos of her life. I loved her radically left political beliefs and her bad manners. I loved her baggy denim jeans and her T-shirts that were somehow always stained. I loved her messy apartment and self-coined colloquialisms. I loved the way her breasts sagged and the way she let them. I even loved her disdain for my father out of her fierce loyalty to my mother. I loved the way she hated the cops and still does. She visited me in New York City last spring, and the first thing we talked about was how insulting and ironic she found ICE’s presence to be throughout her tour of the Statue of Liberty.
