Acting Out at Home, by Leah DeVun

Conservative politicians in the United States have long viewed expanding LGBTQ rights as a threat to “traditional” family structures. And they aren’t exactly wrong; many queer people do refuse assimilation and challenge heteronormative demands for a certain kind of family or home as part of an expression of their own political beliefs.

Rejection of home—or home’s rejection of LGBTQ people—has also functioned as a key turning point in many coming-out stories. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, coming out narratives have often unfolded as tales of migration, with newly out queer and trans young people fleeing their oppressive homes to find accepting communities, sometimes in distant cities.[1] Far from being places of refuge, in this context homes have been sites from which LGBTQ people need escape.

Yet we might also think of home as the ideal place to be most true to ourselves. Our best and worst traits are often on full view to the people who live with us. With our intimates, we may feel we have permission to act badly—to “act out.” “Being out,” of course, means being visible as a queer or trans person, announcing one’s identity as a part of accepting and making public one’s true self.

Identity—that individualized sense of being that makes a person a self, makes a person want to be out—perhaps finds its most genuine expression, then, paradoxically, when we are not out in the world but when we are in at home. But what does it mean to be out while being in?

For two years, I have photographed my partner, a transgender father, and our son. Many of my photographs take place in and around our home and at my parents’ home, recording moments from our daily life. At home we play, eat, dance, draw, hug, sleep. Much of what we do is joyful, and the photographs offer a counterweight, in part, to stories about anti-LGBTQ violence and trauma that dominate the news and our social media feeds.

The onslaught of grim stories about LGBTQ life is not inaccurate, but it does wear on us. These photographs, in contrast, are a visual reminder that trans life can also be full of safety and care. Queer and trans kids can survive; they can grow to adulthood; they can create families and have kids of their own, if they want to. But in the photographs, too, there are threads of ambivalence.

I resist presenting a perpetually smiling, idealized trans family, reassuringly one-dimensional and respectable enough to merit the approval and acceptance of straight society.

Excerpt from  Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt |  The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with  Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial  (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)