Queer Kinship and Chosen Family

I. A Second Household, Built on Choice

Every essay on this site devoted to Mulhern’s grandmothers, aunts, and mothers has, by necessity, been an essay about family defined by blood and by the accidents of birth into a specific Irish-Catholic or Italian-American household. The “Myra Bocca” sequence of the Molly Bonamici story cycle introduces a household built on the opposite principle: cohabitation and loyalty chosen in adulthood, between a straight woman and her gay best friend, sharing domestic life — dinners, wine, a media room, weekend plans, the small liturgies of an ordinary home — in Wilton Manors, a real and well-known LGBTQ enclave in South Florida.¹ This essay argues that Molly and Gabe’s household deserves to be read as seriously as any of the blood families examined elsewhere on this site, and that the bigotry it survives — some of it startlingly casual, some of it startlingly close to home — is essential to understanding what chosen family costs as well as what it offers.

The household’s ordinary tenderness is established quickly and without fanfare: “What I enjoyed most about living with Gabe was dinnertime and afterwards when we would sit together in the media area of the living room to enjoy news or a movie.”¹ Mulhern gives this domestic scene the same unremarkable warmth he gives Nana’s bathtub or Nonna’s kitchen table, which is itself a quiet formal argument: chosen family, on the page, looks exactly like blood family, because it performs exactly the same daily work of care.

II. Loyalty Tested by Slurs, From Both Directions

The household’s first real test comes not from outside the LGBTQ community but from within it, when Myra Bocca — herself introduced as warm, funny, and eager for friendship — reveals a startling capacity for casual homophobia in the same breath she claims tolerance. Describing her own stepson, she says: “The boy was one of those vindictive fag types. Jimmy was… is his name. God, I wish he were dead,” before immediately backpedaling: “Oh, I got nothin’ against gays, Gabe. I wouldn’t be living here if I…”² The scene is structured so that the reader watches the exact mechanism by which bigotry disguises itself even to the person expressing it: Myra’s casual slur and her immediate claim of innocence occupy the same paragraph, with no space between them for the reader to be fooled by the second sentence. Mulhern places this scene in Wilton Manors specifically — a place chosen by its residents, including Myra, precisely because it is supposed to be safe — which sharpens rather than softens the betrayal.

Molly’s earlier defense of Gabe, before this later scene, has already established that she experiences slurs directed at him as a direct assault on her own household: when a stranger refers to her as a “fag hag,” the narration records that the term “irked me,”¹ a small but telling detail, since Molly is otherwise the corpus’s most defiantly thick-skinned narrator, unmoved by insults that would wound other characters. That a slur aimed sideways at her chosen family unsettles her where direct insults to herself do not is the essay’s clearest evidence that Molly experiences her bond with Gabe as genuinely familial rather than merely convenient.

III. Espresso Boys: A Second Chosen Community

Mulhern extends the chosen-family argument outward from the household to the neighborhood itself in the extended Espresso Boys café scene, which functions as a kind of secular parish for Wilton Manors’ gay community — a recurring gathering place with its own regulars, its own gossip network, and its own elder statesman in Alexander Michaelis, the Greek café owner who warns Molly away from Myra: “She’s a lying greedy bitch. She’d sell her sister if she could.”³ Michaelis’s warning is delivered with the exact cadence of a worried relative protecting a newcomer from a con artist already known to the family — which, functionally, is precisely his role. Molly notes that the café’s regulars display an unmistakable hierarchy of belonging: “women, I soon learned, were sometimes met with hostility in establishments that catered to gay men,” while a beautiful man like Gabe is treated as an insider from his first visit.¹ The scene does not flatten Wilton Manors into an idealized queer utopia; it gives the neighborhood the same mix of genuine welcome and internal exclusion that characterizes every other community in Mulhern’s fiction, chosen or inherited.

The corpus’s most pointed detail about this chosen community’s internal contradictions may be the throwaway fact, delivered by Michaelis, that Myra’s own sister Catherine “lives up in Massachusetts… The sister hates Myra. They haven’t talked in years”³ — meaning that Myra, who has built an entire new life and a New Age business on performing warmth and instant intimacy with strangers, has failed at the one relationship, blood kinship with her own sister, that chosen family is supposed to be able to repair or replace. Myra herself has fled a broken blood family into a constructed community and constructed profession, and the story is quietly unsparing about how imperfectly that flight succeeds.

IV. What Chosen Family Proves

Placed beside the grandmother-centered blood families studied elsewhere on this site, Molly and Gabe’s household makes an argument that is easy to miss if the two kinds of family are read in isolation from each other: Mulhern’s fiction does not present chosen family as either superior to or a substitute for blood family, but as capable of the identical range of failure and grace. Gabe offers Molly the same unconditional loyalty a Nana or a Nonna offers her grandchild — present through her aunt’s death, her professional life, her half-serious skepticism about romance, never once wavering even as Molly needles him about his vanity or his optimism about Myra. Myra Bocca, despite belonging to the same chosen community Gabe and Molly have built their household within, proves capable of exactly the betrayal and casual bigotry that blood family members elsewhere in the corpus (Molly’s own father, dismissed by Nonna as a disgrace at Molly’s graduation) are also capable of. The lesson Mulhern’s fiction draws from Wilton Manors is not that chosen family redeems what blood family damages, but that both kinds of family are subject to the same moral physics: loyalty has to be actively practiced, in both directions, or it curdles, regardless of whether the family in question was assigned at birth or built, deliberately, by two adults choosing each other.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays Women Who Perform Belief The Confessor-Grandmother Across the Corpus