I disavowed capitalist individualism, decried assimilationist gay politics, denounced the nuclear family.

I poke fun at the revolutionary overenthusiasm of university queers because I was one of them. We would raise chickens and cows and free-range unicorns and go riding across the fields, our multicoloured hair flowing in the wind. We would learn how to grow crops and make our own vegan cheese. We would take in scores of LGBTQ teenagers kicked out of their houses by their parents and teach them the ways of the radical queer. We were going to build queer urban-housing collectives, gay land shares in partnership with Indigenous nations, trans-inclusive lesbian nature communes run by consensus. Gay marriage, the university queers said (often with more than a hint of superiority), was bourgeois and passé. Trans Writers Have More Than One Story to Tell.Why the Unapologetic Representation of LGBTQ Love in Online Games Is Worth Celebrating.But it was more popular, especially among university queers with asymmetrical haircuts and penchants for citing Michel Foucault in everyday conversation, to lean toward polyamory and collective living. Some of us longed for monogamy and middle-class domesticity-for a gay version of the kind of existence our parents had taught us was worth wanting. When I was first entering the queer community in the urban centres of Vancouver and Montreal, I often heard other young people talking about their radical plans for growing up together. Shut out of the heteronormative institutions of marriage and the nuclear family for most of history, queers have traditionally turned to more daring and creative notions of kinship and sharing the future. We dream of relationships that stand the tests of time and gay drama, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. This is why the concept of chosen family is woven so deeply into the fabric of queer-community culture: where the bonds of blood have failed us time and again, we hope that our friends, lovers, and mentors will fill the void.

I Hope We Choose Love by Kai Cheng Thom