Father’s Day: Celebrating The Strength Of Queer Families

Father’s Day holds a unique significance for the queer community and our rainbow families.

It can be a time of double celebration for some, while for others, it’s an opportunity to honour the diverse parental figures that make up the many family structures within our community.

We’ve often heard that as queer people, we have the privilege—and sometimes the necessity—of choosing our own family.

This choice is often born from fragmented or fragile relationships with our biological relatives, making it vital for our emotional well-being to build families of our own.

When it comes to starting a family as queer individuals, the experience is often different from what we might have expected. For many of us, the idea of having a family wasn’t something we thought was possible in our futures.

Unlike heterosexual couples who may find themselves becoming parents by accident, queer people typically embark on the journey to parenthood through careful planning, extensive preparation, and, yes, a fair share of anxiety about what the future might hold.

We enter into parenthood fully aware of the extra challenges ahead. We know that while the world is evolving, the love and protection we must offer our children go beyond what we could ever have imagined.

At twenty-five, I wasn’t fully prepared for how profoundly becoming a parent would change me. My partner and I were ready for the lifestyle changes, but we didn’t anticipate how it would reshape the very core of who we are.

It’s been thirteen years since we became parents through the foster system, welcoming our son into our lives when he was just nine years old. In those years, we’ve witnessed him grow into a remarkable young man, and through his growth, we’ve experienced our own evolution. His ability to question the world, and by extension, ourselves, has transformed the way we see who we are.

As gay dads, we had our fears—fears that people would judge us, judge him, and that our family might be a burden on his happiness.

But the reality has been quite the opposite.

Those fears pushed us to reflect deeply on who we are, to assert our identities, and to arm ourselves with the strength to protect him from the world’s judgment.

In doing so, we discovered a resilience within ourselves that we hadn’t recognised before. We went from seeing ourselves as vulnerable to understanding our own strength—a strength rooted in the love and protection we offered our son.

But the journey wasn’t one-sided. As much as we protected him, he gave us strength in return.

He taught us what resilience truly means, showing us that family is not just about protecting one another, but about growing together in love and understanding.

As we celebrate another Father’s Day again, we celebrate not ourselves or our achievements, but we celebrate our son and all the other children in rainbow families out there.

We celebrate the strength that they give us, the pride and unconditional love they provide us and the people and Father’s that they have helped us become.