‘Choosing Family’ is a queer Chicago couple’s gentle, no-drama argument for redefining what it means to be accepted
Every so often Francesca Royster hears someone in her neighborhood refer to their quaint slice of Rogers Park as “Shangri-La,” as a kind of paradise, isolated and content and unchanging. If you’re charitable, you might say that referring to their street as “Shangri-La” is harmless pride, a cute way of thinking about a particularly peaceful oasis in Chicago, an uncommonly quiet respite tucked into the greater noisy urban sprawl. Or you might hear something more casually transgressive, a sigh of relief that somehow their street is still an immutable, homogenous anomaly within one of Chicago’s most culturally diverse neighborhoods.
Royster is a longtime professor of English at DePaul University, specializing in Shakespeare, critical race theory, gender and sexuality studies, popular music; her classes often help to satisfy the university’s requirements for multicultural courses.
She is a tuning fork for language.
So she says “Shangri-La” with a smile, but also a slight wince. It’s easy to hear a dogwhistle in “Shangri-La,” a reminder the street has many of the same white, ethnically European families as it did generations ago. Yet she’s fast to note: It is lovely there. In fact, she’s never lived in a community that felt as much like a vibrant community. There are Latinx households, Asian households, South Asian households. She’s a Black woman married to a white woman, and they’re not the only interracial or queer couple (though maybe the only one with a Black adopted daughter). She writes in her new book, “Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance”:
“We’ve felt safe as a queer multiracial family.”
There are tensions. A Black Lives Matter banner that vanishes from the street, but Blues Lives Matter reminders that do not. Awkward book-club conversations when she and her partner, Ann, put up their own Black Lives Matter sign. White families who settled on the street generations ago and only pass their homes on to their children, “thereby inadvertently keeping outsiders out.” She mentioned the Spanish-speaking residents left out of neighborhood activities when signs and event notices were only in English.
But considering it’s a memoir about identity, race and gender, arriving at the peak of a particularly menacing cultural war driven by politics, “Choosing Family” is closer to a portrait of stability, even acceptance. In spite of the world, you might add. “Shangri-La” and its pros and cons are a small piece. The book doesn’t read like another contemporary memoir about social justice, gender politics and finding your place. But it is. Royster, who is 56 and talks with tenderness and warmth, said she preferred to leave the typical tensions vibrating at the margins. “My take on social justice is my whole life has been about teaching, and teaching critical (thinking), but my way to live life is to embrace joy, find the ways we are similar.” She let that settle in, then said: “It is a Pollyannish worldview, I guess. But I want to show how to move through this world in good faith. We have a society to fix. We have to make more stories visible. But that isn’t impossible.”
Indeed, if there’s lingering tension in “Choosing Family,” it’s a byproduct:
“There is the dark side to being too acceptable,” Royster said. “The resistance part of a life gets buried: How do you challenge society if you look a lot like what society wants?”
Not surprisingly, editors and agents asked for more conflict in the book. They asked her to tone down the side trips into queer academic theory — only to have Abrams, the publisher, ask for more. “Hellhole by the Lake” might have been a sexier title than “Choosing Family”; for a time she wanted “a more in-your face title.” But tonally, it wouldn’t have fit her style.
Her office in DePaul, on a winter morning, is a literal ray of sunshine, radiating from an open door at the end of a gray hallway. A green watering can promises spring. Being Valentine’s Day, a half-hour later, Royster asks the 18 or so students in her class on writers of color to declare their love for something that doesn’t get enough love, and their replies are like coos: Airports! Snow! George Harrison! Woody from “Toy Story.”
I mention this because even the one potentially provocative part of “Choosing Family” sounds more argumentative than it actually is. Writing of her upbringing in the Chatham neighborhood on the South Side, she notes: “My family was queer without ever claiming the word.” She writes that many Black families share a lot with queer communities. It’s a queerness mostly outside of typical mainstream associations with gender and sexuality.
She said: “I mean, in terms of connections, collaborations. In terms of valuing things not approved by the wider culture. In the sense of being in excess — too loud, too fertile. In terms of redefining family. This idea is not new; it comes from queer theorists like Eve Sedgwick, Jose Munoz, Cathy Cohen at University of Chicago. Jack Halberstam (a renowned professor of gender at Columbia University) has an idea about queer time, not necessarily defining yourself by a clock in which you marry and have children and so forth. It’s a positive thing to think of Black families as queer. The ways in which you struggle, reinvent yourself, patch things together to make them work, treating people like family, taking care of each other. That’s all connected with queerness. I saw it in my own family as a kid. Informal adoptions. My great-grandmother ran a boardinghouse in Chicago that had folks coming in from the Great Migration. When marriages broke up, you might even have a ‘bachelor uncle’ staying in your spare room for a while. Getting through the challenges of racism and class struggle sometimes meant redefining who you belong to and who you work with.”
Her father, Philip Royster, is a professor emeritus of English at University of Illinois at Chicago; her mother, Sandra Royster, was a programmer at the Chicago Cultural Center. Francesca, who received her Ph.D. in English literature at the University of California at Berkeley, has been at DePaul for 24 years and written (academic) books on Black country music and queerness in post-soul music (think Grace Jones). In her office, as if they were dots connecting a picture, there is a knitted Prince plush, a Scary Spice doll, a Spock action figure and rows of books on gender theory, Shakespeare and social justice. Closest to her, there’s a smattering of candids, shots of her dad, her daughter Cece; a photo of Francesca and her partner, Ann Russo, who also teaches at DePaul, getting married at the Daley Center. After, they went to McDonald’s for dessert.
“Choosing Family,” in a way, is a road map to being an interracial lesbian family in Chicago. Or rather, it’s one road map. Chicago being politically left, there’s less of a threat of violence to her family “and more a navigation of assumptions, since I’m Black, Annie’s white, we’re older, I don’t look like Cece, so she gets read as a random child.”
She wrote the book, she said, “to slow time,” to document her ancestry in Chicago, and to reflect how her small, newer family of three is and isn’t like their neighbors. “But I think I wrote it really to figure out how to be a mom. It was a way of thinking out loud on the page. Cece (now 10) is adopted and I think her struggle — maybe this is true for most of us — is to feel like she has roots, that she belongs. I gave her a copy of my book and said ‘This is here for you, whenever you want to open it. Take your time. It was intended for you.’”
