Chosen families ruptured: How Covid-19 hit an LGBTQ lifeline Julie Compton
Fantasia McKenzie, 35, comes from a big family. She has too many nieces and nephews to count, and at least five children, some who now have children of their own. A lesbian from the Bronx, New York City, McKenzie calls them her “chosen family,” a common phrase LGBTQ people use to describe nonbiological bonds they’ve forged in the absence of biological family.
“I became an adult, and I made my own family,” said McKenzie, who met most of her long-term chosen family members at Sylvia’s Place, an LGBTQ homeless youth shelter in Manhattan, and at nearby New Alternatives, a drop-in center for queer youth, when she was a young adult.