Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.
- Jane Howard The above was quoted by Dr.
Brand Doubell, gay sexologist from Bloemfontein South Africa, on his Facebook status a while ago.
A Girl called Bonita posted that she loves her weird family.
Benjamin Breden from Johannesburg posted that pack animals need their pack & a guy called Edwin van Wyk responded with "Family; you can't choose them and you certainly don't want to lose them".
I am always more than eager to like Dr.
Doubell's status updates, because they are always either a well chosen quote for the occasion or a perfectly formulated utterance from his own wisdom, but somehow I did not respond to it.
My question is whether this sentiment still holds water in our time, our generation or even worse in our LGBT community? Being far away from my own extended family, geographically and emotionally, I passed by his status update without being impressed at all and I am usually more than impressed with anything Dr.
Doubell says.
Later that week on Wednesday evening the "big brothers" of Facebook decided that it was my turn to be deleted from the face of their book; how frustrating!!! My first reaction was forget them.
It took me months to build my list of friends to 1500 and I had no inclination to start over.
Why would I risk spending all this time building a list if some bored individual had the authority to break it down with a few keystrokes on his keyboard? Making it worse is the fact that it is very difficult to contact a help-department on Facebook.
If you send a message you hardly get a response and if you look for an answer the only posts you see are those of other Facebook users.
In many cases that kind of help files are nothing more than the exchange of stupidity.
What do you do now?; I thought.
So with no page, no way of getting to Facebook friends and no idea what plan of action to follow, I nearly gave up on Facebook.
A friend motivated me to start from scratch, but I must say you feel reluctant to start over if it is so easy to be deleted again.
The thing I enjoyed the most was the response I got from many Facebook friends.
Posts like "welcome back", "happy to see you're back" and "what happened and where can we help" really made my day.
It almost gave me the courage to start all over again, despite the possibility that this might happen again.
My Facebook family, or should I say my gay Facebook family gave me the energy and the willpower to try again.
That brings me back to my original question.
Do we still need a clan, a support-group or a family in our generation or even worse in our LGBT community? My answer is yes without a doubt; maybe even more than ever.
As a community we are challenged daily; whether it is the straight community that hates us, the large companies that toy with us, the governments that does not accept our relationships or big brother that slows us down; we need each other.
I was in trouble and frustrated but my family came through for me, not my biological family, my gay family.
This experience helped me to remember Dr.
Doubell's status update: Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.
Now I am prepared to click the like button on every gay and lesbian page on Facebook, because we are an extended family, and a great one at that.