The Ginger Child

by Patrick Flanery

  Looking at this list of worries, I wonder why anyone would have a child, let alone adopt one, and I begin to understand the thinking of a friend who describes herself as an antinatalist, opposed to reproduction because the planet cannot sustain it. I have never pushed her on this belief, but wonder whether she means only intentional reproduction or all reproduction. Does she mean merely the reproduction of people like us, who want to have children for, presumably, largely selfish reasons? Does she think that the high-minded should make way for those who would never consider such a position, or who are disempowered from making their own reproductive choices? Or does she think that everyone should be sterilized and the planet left to survive what remains of our species for the next century, making way for another species’ rise to dominance? Is she on the side of the antinatalist philosophers who believe we have no right to bring a person into a world of suffering, because we cannot guarantee their happiness, and what little happiness might exist in any given life cannot outweigh all the pain, sadness and grief?

  Despite my own misgivings about reproduction, the arguments of antinatalists irritate me because they seem to fail to see how privileged their position is. There is the privilege of being able and free to reproduce in the first place (though there are undoubtedly those who cannot reproduce who hew to the antinatalist line). There is the privilege of living in a society or inhabiting a position in one’s society where the choice is yours to make (‘I could reproduce, but I will not, for ethical or philosophical reasons’). The privilege of not feeling the need to parent. The privilege of believing that you will never need the support of children as you age. The privilege of believing that you will miss nothing emotionally or psychologically or socially by not having children – nothing, at least, that you cannot bear.

  Undoubtedly, the antinatalist philosophers would argue that I fail fundamentally to understand their position, and that my arguments against them fail, equally fundamentally, to convince on philosophical grounds, but I am not a philosopher and not interested in winning on those terms. Winning, in fact, is not the point, but contesting is, and I think especially so because the philosophy of antinatalism seems so absolutist in its aims, so determined to insist on its correctness.

  There is a group of queer theorists whose own thinking often seems in concert with certain strands of antinatalism. Lee Edelman, whose No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, a work of sophisticated cultural criticism indebted to the thinking of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, also criticizes gay men – like American writer Dan Savage – who embrace parenthood through adoption. Edelman charges Savage with advancing a ‘message… of compulsory reproduction’, which he describes as being on a continuum with anti-choice movements: ‘choose life, for life and the baby and meaning hang together in the balance, confronting the lethal counterweight of narcissism, AIDS, and death’. This position, Edelman says, is tantamount to a ‘fascism of the baby’s face, which encourages parents, whether gay or straight, to join in a rousing chorus of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”’ (the song sung by the blonde and blue-eyed Hitlerjugend in the film of the musical Cabaret).2

  Intellectually I can understand the arguments of someone like Edelman, who makes compelling points about the supremacy of the Child in American culture, about the ways in which the American right so often uses the figure of the Child as a cudgel to beat women in particular, but queer communities too, denying us the full exercise and enjoyment of our human rights – in the case of women to make their own reproductive choices; in the case of queer people, simply to be and live freely. Nonetheless, such radical position-taking and polemic seems to turn the energies of a fight for equality back onto those of us in the queer community who experience, who live daily with, a yearning to parent. Might that impulse not be radical in its own way?

  It is unthinkable to me that I should disavow my desire to have a child because theorists like Edelman see it as ‘psychically invested in preserving the familiar familial narrativity of reproductive futurism’ rather than embracing ‘what is queerest about us, queerest within us’. As if the desire to live one’s same-sex attraction and also to be a parent were not itself a radically queer act. At this stage in my life, I am unwilling to ‘insist that the future stop here’, with me – in other words, to mark myself as the end point of my own hereditary line, to call a halt and say I will be the last of my people.3

  Perhaps my investment in the possibility of parenthood lies in my own childhood. Perhaps I grew up in too normative an environment. Perhaps what was positive in my own upbringing was powerful enough to inculcate that investment in a narrative of reproductive futurism, even in the face of hatred and excoriation from the religious right and bewilderment and disdain from some within the left queer community. I cannot find it in myself to apologize for the urgent hope that parenthood might yet be part of the life I’ve been given.

  HOTEL

  In Hotel, the fifth season of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s series American Horror Story, Lady Gaga stars as Elizabeth, The Countess, a neo-noir femme fatale vampire who abducts children she believes are suffering from neglect and turns them into vampires. Although the mechanics of this transformation are largely typical of vampire mythology, in this case requiring no more than feeding the victim-convert a few drops of one’s own infected blood, and while there is an element of the supernatural (Elizabeth is notionally immortal but she and her spawn are rather more susceptible to being killed than vampires in other folkloric traditions), her consorts are a parade of queer characters or out queer actors in straight roles, and her vampirism is described as a virus. (Recall that one of the earliest meanings of ‘virus’ is semen, either human or animal, as well as venom, as from snakes or spiders.) Elizabeth is actively bisexual, and her vampirism – or the way she inhabits and mobilizes the viral infection that produces vampiric effects – is a hallmark of a queerness that is strenuously both maternal and reginal; she is at once hero-protector and villain-predator reigning over the season and its characters.

  Although female, given her predilection for queer male lovers (bisexuals Rudolph Valentino and Tristan Duffy, both played by Finn Wittrock, and gay designer Will Drake, played by Cheyenne Jackson), Elizabeth can also be read as a coded drag queen. Reproducibility seems impossible, at least initially, and the death drive is here literalized and instrumentalized but also transformed and perverted so that it becomes generative of future (immortal) queer generations empowered to reproduce in the same way.

  As Elizabeth abducts and ‘adopts’ the children of opposite-sex couples, turning these children into vampires who sleep in glass coffins and never grow up, Hotel offers a queer adoption fantasy gone rogue and rendered grotesque. She spoils the vampire children with video games and candy, gives them free run of the hotel, and allows them to feed on – to murder – unwitting hotel guests.

  The stunted psychology and zombie-like affect of Elizabeth’s vampire children suggests, however, that transformation before adulthood produces arrested psychological, emotional and intellectual results – but only when the act of infection/conversion is performed by the queer Countess herself. Why should her child vampires alone be zombie-like but her adult conversions not? And why, when other children are turned into vampires by heterosexual carriers of the virus, does their affect remain… unaffected?

  The rationale for Elizabeth’s particular approach to queer family making lies, implicitly, in the monstrousness of her sole biological ‘child’, Bartholomew, who is more sinew and tooth and force of fury than human, lacking the ability to grow beyond his tiny stunted form, but nonetheless capable of killing with as much ferocity as a creature many times his size.4 As if aware that her capacity for biological motherhood is limited to the creation of hideous and violent monstrosities, Elizabeth subsequently, or consequently, converts the human into the monstrous on her own terms, in her own image, creating a family of beautiful little monsters, every one of them as ghostly white blonde as she is, but as Bartholomew, crucially, is not.5 We migh
t understand this dynamic through Freud, who described parental love as ‘so moving and at bottom so childish’ that it is ‘nothing but the parents’ narcissism born again’.6 Faced with a child as physically repulsive as Bartholomew is, Elizabeth’s narcissism is forced to find its fulfilment through the adoption and conversion of children who mirror her (childish) vision of her own beautiful self at the same time that her emotional investment remains entirely with Bartholomew, the converted children operating as mere props for her ego.

  Through its troubling conflation of the energies of abduction, adoption and conversion, the series implies that a queer family can only be produced or reproduced through violence, that its result is violence, that it will be happy with nothing less than abducting and converting beautiful children who remain stunted zombies, or preying upon children to satisfy either an unfulfilled narcissistic impulse or even a psychotic bloodlust. This is a vision of queer family forged in death, which delivers nothing but a legacy of the same. Such a pessimistic and cynical narrative of queer adoption might even be read as implicitly reinforcing conservative religious narratives of queer recruiting and predation. Or, more generously, the series could be read as attempting to turn itself into a funhouse mirror for such nightmare narratives, revealing the monstrousness but also the absurdity of reactionary paranoia about queer parenting.

  Attempts by a pair of heterosexual biological parents – Alex and John Lowe (Chloë Sevigny and Wes Bentley) – to reclaim their vampirized young child, Holden (Lennon Henry), end in disaster. In an early episode, Sevigny’s character, a paediatrician, admits that she never really wanted children, framing herself as the not-goodenough biological parent, although she recalls that Holden’s birth triggered her maternal impulse. In flashbacks to a period prior to his abduction and transformation, Holden appears ‘normal’, without the zombie affect of his vampiric state. His younger sister, Scarlett (Shree Crooks), is the first in the family to see Holden after his disappearance, and lest we think we might be misreading the young actor’s performance, Scarlett reports to her incredulous parents that, although it is definitely her brother, Holden is ‘different’ and without ‘normal feelings’.

  Not yet realizing what Holden has become, however, Alex goes to the hotel and brings her son home. The boy’s expression is blank, his temperature far below normal, and when Alex leaves him alone for a moment he kills and feeds on the family dog. After he asks for his ‘other mommy’, Alex returns him to the hotel where she accuses Elizabeth of stealing her son. The Countess insists on the contrary that she has saved him – as she saves all of her children – from neglect and ‘a tragic wasted life’. What, one wonders, does she see as their value in the life she gives them (or to which she condemns them)? They certainly have utility as trophy ornaments, as apparatuses of her blood filtration system, and as the equivalent of the household dog or cat that eliminates unwelcome vermin (some of it human). But there is little if any indication that Elizabeth actually loves these children, or that her supposed affection for them is anything other than affectation.

  Faced with this enraged biological mother, Elizabeth offers to convert her so that she can remain with her son forever, in exchange for which Alex must also look after the other vampire children (so rendering herself utilitarian), under threat of Holden’s own death should she fail in her duties. In this way the birth mother is incorporated into the adoptive queer family, but only as an auxiliary whose service is required to sustain the ‘life’ of her biological child. Alex consents – what other choice does she have? – but her subsequent conversion is not only a matter of becoming a vampire. She also crosses over into the realm of the queer. The conversion rite begins with her kissing Elizabeth before drinking from a wound slashed in The Countess’s exposed breast. This bargain, and its violent terms, both neutralizes the mother’s ongoing claim upon her biological child, and eliminates any future possibility of her reproducing in a way that consolidates the power of The Countess.7

  Alex, however, proves an untrustworthy host for her queer virus, intentionally infecting one of her child patients, Max (Anton Lee Starkman), in order to save him from dying of measles through the negligence of his anti-vaxxer mother (Mädchen Amick). This suggests, once more, the failure of heterosexual parents to care adequately for their offspring, but also the failure of the hetero Alex Lowe to know how to wield the queer power she has been granted.

  Left to do what he will, Max kills and feeds on his parents, then infects his classmates and kills all of the teachers in his school, feeding on them as well. Significantly, the affect of these vampire children is not flattened in the same way as that of Elizabeth’s four child converts. It is as if being out in the world keeps them ‘normal’, or as if their infection by the heterosexual Alex allows them to remain ‘normal’.8 It is exclusively Elizabeth’s child converts who exhibit such flatness, as if the abduction/adoption itself produces the flattening, although it could equally be explained by Elizabeth’s failure to demonstrate genuine love for her abductee-converts, or by the fact that she is manifestly queer. The series, however, offers none of these possible rationales – it offers no rationale whatsoever. Curiously, when John and Alex decide later to take Holden home, retrieving him from the hotel playroom, his affect is less blank, more natural than it has previously appeared, as if the reassertion of the hetero birth parents’ rights over him reawakens his own sense of life and liveliness.

  The series complicates all of these reproductive and alienating energies with a flashback in which Elizabeth, already a vampire, visits an illegal abortionist in the 1920s, seeking to terminate the pregnancy that produces Bartholomew. In the midst of the botched abortion, Elizabeth’s monstrous offspring attacks and kills the doctor’s nurse. The fact of his being ‘born’ in this way suggests that Bartholomew himself is Elizabeth’s punishment for seeking an abortion, reinforcing what often reads as the series’ curiously reactionary message, notwithstanding its queer ethos over multiple seasons and its co-creation by Ryan Murphy (who is gay, married, and has children through surrogacy, an experience dramatized and fictionalized in his short-lived series The New Normal).9

  Despite these queer credentials, in Hotel the heterosexual biological family is presented as the acme of genuine love, even when such families are depicted as profoundly and insolubly fraught. Vampire Donovan (Matt Bomer) is so viciously cruel to his (non-vampire) mother Iris (Kathy Bates) that she decides to take her own life, only for Donovan to ‘rescue’ her at the last moment by dripping some of his infected blood into his mother’s mouth, so transforming her, too, into a vampire. This act of salvation has been prompted by transgender Liz Taylor (Denis O’Hare) reminding Donovan that no one will ever love him more than his mother – horrible though Iris undoubtedly is. Later in the season, Liz’s estranged adult son Douglas (Josh Braaten) visits the hotel bar and acknowledges Liz as his father (as was), asserting his willingness to have her in his life once more. The emotional force of this reconciliation and Douglas’s acceptance is enough to keep Liz herself from committing suicide over the death of her lover. If there is any queerness in these two biological families, it is only evident in Donovan’s infecting of his mother with the virus as a way of bringing her back to ‘life’, and in Liz Taylor’s own identity as a pre-operative transwoman.

  So, while this season of American Horror Story at once posits queer family as a constellation of elective and radical possibility, one formed (in its vampiric variety) through abduction, conversion, adoption, it also insists that such queer families can only be built on the ruins of a loving biological heterosexual family (however imperfect). Moreover, the loving bonds of that biological family always have the power to transcend its legal dissolution, reaching from its ruins and into the queer family to stake its claim – even in some cases to reclaim those members who have been taken from it.

  More alarmingly, Hotel suggests time and again that the queer family is devoid of genuine love. We do not see Elizabeth or her multiple consorts attending lo
vingly to any of the vampire children. She is, if anything, even more neglectful than the biological parents she reviles, merely fashioning a materialist cage in which the children can play for all eternity and filter her blood supply as they sit mesmerized by video games. The acquisition of children, the creation of family, is framed as an intrinsically utilitarian act: the child helps to maintain one’s own life and wellbeing, but in its abducted/converted/adopted iterations it is never the object of altruistic care or unconditional love, nor is it framed as the fulfilment of a legacy that will transcend the adoptive parent’s own life. The utilitarian is also, ultimately, the imminently disposable and replaceable. Elizabeth does not hesitate to threaten Holden’s life in pursuit of her desires, and the most attention or affection she shows any child is to Bartholomew, her own biological offspring.

  It is certainly possible to read Hotel as a tongue-in-cheek retort to those conservatives who see nothing but horror in the idea of queer couples raising children, but it can just as easily be read, and much more disturbingly so, as a pointed critique of queer couples who adopt or have children through surrogacy, as if those of us moved by such an impulse are the real monsters, that our desire to parent children neglected by their biological (straight) parents is a hubristic one belying the undoubtedly common occurrence (at least in some affluent circles of queer life) of adopted children being placed in the care of nannies whose own lives are marked by radical precarity, people who are regarded too often by their employers (those queer adoptive parents) as disposable and replaceable.

  If even the queer creators behind Hotel present – however inadvertently – such a confused narrative of queer family, what hope is there that straight society will ever wholly accept men like my husband and me as parents? It may only be a soap opera from hell, tongue firmly in cheek, but a series like American Horror Story still offers narratives that people consume and internalize in ways impossible to police, whatever the intentions and identities of their makers. The creators of Hotel are not suggesting their story is anything other than fantasy, and yet fantasy lives in the world, even in the moment of disavowing its reality.