05/06/2026
Care has always been a central part of q***r culture.
From Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera’s STAR shelter, to the “house mothers” of ballroom culture, to the widespread community nursing that sustained so many through the HIV/AIDS epidemics, this is a community that has always stepped in to care for its own. Especially when systems have failed.
Today, according to The Cancer Network, it is still true that LGBTQIA+ individuals are more than twice as likely as the general population to take on informal, unpaid caregiving for sick or disabled friends and neighbours. Q***r individuals are nearly 50% more likely than the general population to be disabled themselves. We still require care.
Care is also obviously in indispensable truth of parenting. It is the soft, crucial core of family. Now as much as ever, though the world shifts.
As gender norms have become more expansive across all of society, fatherhood increasingly involves identifying as an active caregiver. Just a generation ago, nearly half of fathers in the UK never changed a single nappy. Now, that number is less than 3%.
Simultaneously, mothers have been standing up and increasingly demanding that their crucial, daily work of care, so often invisible, be genuinely recognised and celebrated. Demanding too that they receive the often lacking care THEY need in order to thrive and raise healthy families.
The giving and receiving of care then starts to form a radical part of gender and personal identity across the spectrum.
The mandate of q***r families is to raise children who know that they deserve care in their lives and that they in turn can and MUST care as well, in deed as well as thought and word.
Q***r families of all kids - born, built, and found - are out here doing the daily, invisible, impossible, amazing work of caring for each other. It is our overwhelming privilege to support these families in our work.
If you find during Pride that you are in need of a rest or some care yourself (in any form - a pep talk, a ranty chat, a quiet sit down, or one of our perfected-over-a-million-grazed-knees Mum Hugs), please come find us!
***rfamilies ***rcaregiving
