Do we still need family?

Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.
 Jane Howard

The above were quoted by Dr. Brand Doubell, gay sexologist from Bloemfontein, on his facebook status in the last week. A Girl called Bonita posted that she loves her weird family. Benjamin Breden from Johannesburg posted that pack animals need their pack & a guy called Edwin van Wyk responded with “Family; you can’t choose them and you certainly don’t want to lose them”.  I am always more than eager to like Dr. Doubell’s status updates, because they are always either a very well chosen quote for the occasion or a perfectly formulated utterance from his own wisdom, but somehow I did not respond to it.
My question is whether this sentiment still holds water in our time, our generation or even worse in our LGBT community? Being far away from my own extended family, geographically and emotionally, I passed by his status update without being impressed at all and I am usually more than impressed with anything Dr. Doubell says.
Later in the week on Wednesday evening the gods of facebook decided that it was my turn to be deleted from the face of their book; how frustrating!!!  My first reaction was fuck them. It took me months to build my list of friends to 1500 and I had no inclination to start over. Why would I risk spending all this time building a list if some bored asshole had the authority to break it down with a few keystrokes on his keyboard? Making it worse is the fact that there is no help-department on facebook.  If you send them a message, they never respond, if you look for an answer the only posts you see are those of other facebook users. In many cases the help files are nothing more than the exchange of stupidity.
So there I stood with no page, no way of getting to my friends and no idea what plan of action to follow. I talked to my husband and he suggested that we should start an Andrew Blade fanpage. I was a bit skeptical, because I do not like the idea of fans; I prefer the idea of a list of friends. The fact of the matter was that I had to do something, because my friends on facebook do mean a lot to me. On the other hand I wasn’t to keen to start all over again. I immediately contacted my friends at Cobragay and all of them liked Jim’s idea of a fanpage.  So there I was trying to understand the inner workings of a fanpage, realizing that it would not be easy to do the postings I always did through my profile. Later Benjamin Breden suggested that I should rather start a new page and profile from scratch and by then I were frustrated enough with a fanpage that I listened to his good advice. So I started all over again.
The thing I enjoyed the most was the response I got from many facebook friends. Posts like “welcome back”, “happy to see you’re back” and “what happened and where can we help” really made my day. It almost gave me the courage to start all over again, despite the possibility that this might happen again. My facebook family, or should I say my gay facebook family gave me the energy and the willpower to try again.
That brings me back to my original question.  Do we still need a clan, a support-group or a family in our generation or even worse in our LGBT community? My answer is yes without a doubt; maybe even more than ever. As a community we are challenged daily; whether it is the straight community that hates us, the large companies that toy with us, the governments that does not accept our relationships or big brother that slows us down; we need each other.
After working vigorously to get my profile back on facebook another message came through to me. The guy said that he has friends who might be able to help me get my old profile back. How cool is that? It is not who you are but who you know, and this guy obviously knew the right people and I knew him. We still have to see whether they will be able to help, but the fact is that my family came through for me, not my biological family, my gay family.
This experience helped me to remember Dr. Doubell’s status update:
 Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.

Now I am prepared to click the like button on every gay and lesbian page on facebook, because we are an extended family, and a great one at that.


Andrew Blade  


http://www.facebook.com/cobragay

-Andrew Blade’s Weekly Cobra-bite-
Taken from Andrew’s Column in

The Gayly Mail