Quiet Fraying: Notes on Black Queer Family
Beloveds,
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” — James Baldwin
“Queerness is not yet here… we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world.” — José Esteban Muñoz
I keep noticing the places where the fabric thins. Not the spectacular tear—no slammed doors, no last-word exit wound—just the quiet fraying at the edge: the text that never gets sent, the “we should get together” we keep postponing, the check-in that falls into the undertow of fatigue and the long ache of our days. It’s astonishing how soft the unraveling can be. We call it busyness. We call it life. We call it “I’m fine.” But the weave loosens.
Reading Dr. Thelathia Nikki Young on Black queer family gave me language for this tenderness and this warning. Her invitation: to understand family not as a blood-bound inevitability but as an ethical practice—something we do with one another, again and again. In her framing, family is an ongoing construction of care, accountability, and imagination; not simply a noun we possess but a verb we fail or fulfill. That reframing shifts the ground beneath my feet. If family is practice, then fraying is a practice too—the cumulative effect of skipped rituals, avoided conversations, small silences calcifying into distance.
Black queer ethics refuses the fiction that there is one legitimate household and one ordained shape of belonging. We have long known how to mother one another outside of maternity, to father without patriarchy, to kin across the lines that empire drew to keep us lonely. Survival taught our people to stitch: to gather aunties who are not sisters, cousins who never shared a last name, elders who chose us. But survival also taught us to store exhaustion in the body, to carry a vigilance that steals our sleep and sharpens our tongues. So much of the fray comes from the cost of making a life in structures designed for our dispossession. It is not a moral failing to be tired. It is an ethical crisis when we let tiredness become our only liturgy.
Young’s work presses me toward the small, stubborn practices that thicken the weave. She names family as an imaginative, ethical project, which means the craft is in our hands. What might that look like in an ordinary week?
Tell the truth early. Silence is a solvent. When something snags—hurt, confusion, the creeping sense you’re carrying more than your share—name it before it becomes narrative. “I love you, and this is hard for me.” Honesty is not aggression; it is an act of future-making.
Redistribute labor. So many families fray at the point of invisible work. Who tracks the medicine? Who remembers birthdays? Who carries the weather report of everyone’s mood? In Black queer households, the ethic of shared care is not idealism; it’s oxygen. Make the list. Share the load.
Restore ritual. Rituals are the reinforced hems of collective life. They don’t have to be grand: Tuesday stew, Thursday walk, Sabbath phones-off, first-of-the-month playlist. Repetition is not redundancy when it holds us.
Consent and boundaries. Family is not ownership. It is mutual regard. Ask for consent—before advice, before touch, before assuming availability. Say “no” without punishment and “yes” without martyrdom.
Repair as a reflex. We will fail each other. The ethical question is not if but how we return. Apology is not humiliation; it’s calibration back to the relationship we say we want.
I write this as a trans, Latinx, queer theologian watching communities strain under scarcity, surveillance, and the scorched-earth politics of our time. When institutions collapse or calcify, we are left with what we’ve practiced. There is a reason the undercommons persists: we rehearse care until care becomes muscle memory. Black queer family—blooded or chosen—has long been a rehearsal for another possible world, one where belonging is distributed, where power is held with rather than over, where tenderness is not a luxury but a strategy.
The fray shows up in me, too. In my avoidant scrolls. In my righteous exhaustion. In the way I sometimes narrate people as problems instead of narrating us into possibility. Young’s insistence that family is ethical practice asks me to get specific: What am I practicing when I ghost? What am I practicing when I overfunction? What am I practicing when I assume the worst? If I want a different weave, I need different stitches.
Here are a few stitches I’m trying this week:
The 3-minute check-in. I send a voice note that answers: How’s your spirit? What’s one thing off your plate this week? How can I hold you?
A shared calendar of care. Not events—care. Who needs a meal? Who has a deadline? Who’s grieving? We populate it together.
A micro-ritual called “the breath and the bowl.” We take two breaths together and put one hard thing we’re carrying into a literal bowl on the table. We name it. We don’t fix it. We agree to revisit next week.
Young’s work opens a room where ethics is intimate and daily. Family isn’t proved by hardship alone; it’s composed by how we move through hardship: with consent, with redistribution, with a fierce tenderness that refuses to let scarcity narrate our relationships. This is the opposite of quiet fraying. This is quiet mending.
Reflection Prompts
Where is the fabric loosening in your people? What is the smallest stitch you could make today?
Which hidden labors in your kin-network need visibility and redistribution?
What language of repair can you practice before harm hardens?
What ritual—however small—can you re-introduce this week to thicken the weave?
A Ritual Exhale
Inhale: We are held.
Exhale: We learn to hold.
Inhale: We practice family.
Exhale: We mend the fray.
If this note speaks to the quiet edges of your life, send it to a cousin, a comrade, a co-parent, a chosen sibling. Maybe add one stitch together today. Another possible world will not announce itself with trumpets; it will arrive, thread by thread, in how we make and remake family—on purpose.
— RCE+