Family. Chosen family. Found family. Non–bio family. However you name it, the idea that kinship isn’t determined by blood but by care and choice is foundational to queer existence. We build our own familial tables when the ones we were born to have no seats for us.
I thought my table was already full. I had siblings across the world, ride-or-dies, fellow freaks and gremlins, lovers and friends who had shaped me into who I am. I felt pretty darn complete.
And then, in October 2024, there was a queer intervention.
We started on the dancefloor.
It was our second date. I took my now-partner Lauren to a favourite queer party - Bad Dog - hosted at UTS in collaboration with Mince. We barely knew each other, both tender from recent relationship ruptures, curious but very cautious. We both said falling into someone quickly was not on the agenda.
But that bloody mirror-ball had other plans.
We threw on our leathers and descended into the basement - bodies layered over bodies, queers vibrating at heightened frequencies, levelling up to release their demons. These spaces are more than parties. They are places to unburden and derobe - to unmask. Bodies compact and expand together. With the bass through your boots and the treble in your ribs, you become part of the soundscape. It is ego-killing and empowering all at once.
At every party there’s a quiet ritual: you don’t claim space, you feel for it. You sense the tempo, the density, the mood, until the right pocket reveals itself. It’s not spoken, it’s just known.
And we found ours.
In that sweet spot - the music hitting just right, the crowd in sync and pulsating together - we met a radiant woman, easily 6 foot, and her beaming, brunette wife. Time on a dancefloor is elastic, and it’s magic. The four of us shared a gorgeous moment and parted ways. The next day, I received a text from a woman Lauren and I had a deep and meaningful with on the basement floor. She said we’d met her friend and she wanted to get in touch.
We were invited to lunch. And that’s how we officially met Sharon and Sandy - the Shandies. And it was love at first lunch. Sharon soon named us their ‘Disco-Ball Bling-Things’ and them our ‘Mirror-Ball Mummas’.
Lauren. Lucy. Sharon. Sandy. Something locked in immediately. It didn’t make sense - we were so new - but we just seemed to recognise each other.
Here’s the part that still stuns me: Lauren and I still weren’t sure what we were to each other. Whether we would work. And uncertain of whether the other wanted to. The Shandies didn’t hesitate, though. They didn’t hedge their bets: they just saw us and held us, until we were ready.
We fell in love inside that holding - as a couple, yes, but also as a unit of many, as a family. Sideways, upwards, outwards. It was communal and it was deeply queer. We all ran to each other with a purpose we weren’t sure of yet, we just felt a need to be together, to become something. All of us were throwing down love in abundance. And it was - and is - a love that feels both ancient and brand new.
There is something profoundly stabilising about intergenerational queer relationships, and the reparenting that can come from it.
Lauren and I were in flux - individually and together. The mummas helped us heal, bolstering us through one of our hardest years, and in that they demonstrated what family can look like when it is chosen with intention and tended to with true care. They modelled communication, accountability, play, and longevity. They showed us an example of what our own queer future can look like.
And perhaps most radically, they offered us the opportunity of queer-reparenting.
As adults, especially queer adults, there often comes a moment when separation from bio-family becomes necessary - not out of anger, but for growth. To quiet the inner voice, that of the child, that reacts due to old wounds. This is not a critique of anyone’s biological parents, it is an acknowledgement that adulthood is about more than blood legacy, and it is more than money or milestones.
Reparenting is looking at yourself, looking at your past, and choosing the legacy you want to continue: it is about introspection, correction, and redirection.
This reparenting is a responsibility. To the inner child and to the adult self. It is consciously redefining our values, beliefs, and place in the world. When we reparent, we have the opportunity to queer what it is to be an adult, breaking cycles, and bias, and binary thinking that may be passed down through our genetic bloodlines and enforced in how we were raised.
Yes, reparenting involves choice, but being in queer community is being part of a lineage. A history forged in resistance, pleasure, grief, and invention. When we gather with those who have walked decades ahead of us, we learn our history from the mouths of those who lived it. Those who have loved in the toughest of climates, combating ideologies that tried to govern, police, and define them. Those who have endured losses we only read about, and managed to keep moving forward despite it all.
It’s hard, though, and it can be deeply lonely. But over the past year, our new family - our queer elders - have stood with us, and gifted us something rare: guidance gained from their own lived experience of queer-reparenting.
The world was not built for queerness. But our elders have carved pathways through it anyway.
And on a party floor in a university basement in Ultimo, as we danced out our demons, Lauren and I stumbled into one of those pathways.
Family is not always inherited. Sometimes it finds you when you’re footing it to techno in your leathers, holding onto a pair of strangers.
Sometimes it texts you the next day.
And sometimes it invites you to lunch - and never lets you go.✨
