The Enduring Power of Chosen Family: A Celebration of Love and Belonging
After the conclusion of the hit TV show Pose in 2021, I was left with a lingering sense of unease. The series, now available on Disney+, is set in 1980s New York and brought together different corners of the city's social landscape, becoming a cultural phenomenon. Against the backdrop of the HIV epidemic, ballroom culture, and the Reagan and Trump eras, Pose explored survival, identity, and the transformative power of chosen family.
"You don't need to be born into a family to be claimed by one," says Mj Rodriguez's character, Blanca Evangelista, a compassionate trans woman who creates the House of Evangelista to care for and support abandoned LGBTQ+ young people. This defining message stayed with me long after the credits rolled, forcing me to confront my own understanding of family and the assumptions I had carried for years.
The traditional definition of family, shaped by a Western, cisheteronormative ideal, assigns fixed roles to the people who are supposed to love us. This narrow definition leaves little room for the many other relationships capable of offering the same care, commitment, and sense of belonging. Yet, for many communities, including my own, family has always meant something much broader.
Black and Brown communities have long challenged these rigid ideas of kinship, often relying on aunts, friends, and community members to help raise children alongside parents. This understanding of family as an extension of community has been a foundation for many families, even if they didn't always recognize it.
Watching Pose forced me to question why I still felt attached to the traditional definition of family. I grew up in a deeply dysfunctional household where affection was often withheld and love rarely expressed openly. Inevitably, it took me a long time to understand that finding your people is something you learn to choose along the way.
The irony is that I had been surrounded by examples of chosen family my entire life. Like many other children of the diaspora, there was the one family member who was never related to us but whose house became our second home every summer. There were cousins we met much later in life but would protect without hesitation. Looking back, I can see that love was always present, and it simply came from people who would never have appeared on a family tree.
That's what chosen family represents – the decision to build lasting relationships with people who consistently show up for one another. Friends, mentors, partners, community members, and neighbors can all become family when love is matched with care, responsibility, and commitment. These relationships remind us that belonging cannot always be measured by legal documents or shared DNA.
Chosen families can be found anywhere, and they are just as important as blood relatives. For many queer and trans people, friends and community members become the people who help them find housing, access healthcare, or simply make it through another difficult day. They provide the care that institutions and, sometimes, relatives fail to offer.
When systems around us make it harder to exist with dignity, community becomes a way of surviving. The people who choose to stand beside us can offer the kind of care, protection, and affirmation that institutions so often fail to provide. There's something quietly powerful about building that kind of support together.
Chosen family simply expands our understanding of what a family can look like, building on mutual care rather than expectation, on trust rather than obligation, and on the shared commitment to show up for one another. Forever working as a reminder that home isn't always a place or a surname and it can also be the people who make us feel safe enough to be ourselves.
This idea has developed spaces where people can be seen, celebrated, and held through uncertainty, grief, and joy alike. At a time when anti-trans rhetoric and legislation continue to impact lives across the world, these relationships remain especially vital. For many trans people, particularly those who cannot safely live openly, a chosen family can offer the sense of belonging, security, and unconditional acceptance that every person deserves.
On 25 July, from 12:30 to 18:00, Pride of Place Living: The Chosen Family Initiative will bring together Black and Brown community members to reflect on the realities of housing insecurity, the structural inequalities that continue to affect queer lives, and the ways chosen families often become lifelines when traditional systems fall short. Tickets are available now.
