Reflections on outness 2: a game of you

When I wrote the first Pride month post, I had vaguely planned on writing a series of them. But life got in the way and to be honest, I couldn't really come up with anything around which to crystallize another post. Then yesterday the following picture popped up on facebook:

It is the cross-stitch sampler my aunt made as a wedding gift for my husband and mine's wedding. And, with my aunt's recent passing, and Pride month, I was once again struck by its singular power as a cultural artefact.
For that cross-stitch sampler is undeniably, unequivocally from one place: Alsace, the region of France my mother comes from. The motifs, the use of red thread on white cloth, the costumes worn by the two figures are found on hundreds of such similar wedding gifts made throughout Alsace over the centuries. My brother and sister each have one. My aunt herself had one. And she would have learnt how to do this from her mother and aunts, who would have learnt it from their mother and aunts.
My aunt always claimed she had no creativity: she just researched and reproduced Alsatian motifs from books and museum exhibits. And yet in this, she must have created. For as much as this object is undeniably, clearly Alsatian, yet in another I am almost certain there are no two like it. In the simple, radical gesture of putting two male figures in the center, my aunt changed the pattern. In doing so, she did two things: reaffirmed my identity as an Alsatian man, and expanded the iconography, and indeed to some entire scope of Alsatian identity. She argued, through this, that traditions could be expanded, that identities were compatible.
A similar thing happened at the London wedding we held a few months after our wedding in West Virginia for those friends and family who couldn't make it to America. That wedding was held in my old church. The church my siblings and I were all confirmed in. The church on whose council my mother sits. It is an old church, with a complex history: founded by French protestants (Huguenots) fleeing persecution under Louis the XIVth four hundred and fifty years ago, it has survived in London's Soho, serving a complex community of recent French expats, and old Huguenots families tied together primarily by a shared history. It is not exactly the most active, or radical of churches.
After a debate, the church agreed to celebrate our marriage. It was a full wedding ceremony. And, suddenly, our gay marriage was also, well, the marriage in my family's church, with all the trappings and politics that entails. As I joked, I am the only one my mother's three children to have had a good French protestant wedding. And it was true. Even as it was also an expansion of what a good French protestant wedding can be.
There is a lot of discussion at every Pride about identity, and assimilation, and passing. Much of it is important, and sad. And some of it reflects false dichotomies. There is no a priori reason that traditional identities of culture, religion, and family cannot be expanded to include new identities of gender, and sexuality. Yet that requires a transformation, an expansion of the old culture. And that comes through the willingness of individuals to expand their definitions, to invent new iconographies and languages and symbols, to say "You are gay, and you belong, and you are welcome".
Identities are complex things. We all have many, and they exist in tension. But, as I have known since someone first asked me "which are you more, French or English?" those tensions derive primarily from the boundary policing of identity by others. My aunt's cross stitch sampler is a reminder we always have the power to go another way: not to police the borders of identity and community, but to open them with gifts of welcome.