As a queer parent I’m all for reconfiguring family hierarchies and interrogating the language we use to describe the important people in our lives. I feel this particularly around Mother’s Day when a very staid, heteronormative version of motherhood dominates every shop window and greeting card aisle.
But instead of questioning my role as the non-biological Mum to my daughter, and how we celebrate Mother’s Day when there are two Mums (it’s really not hard, we just buy each other a card), I want to celebrate the internet’s family unit - the people we anoint ‘babygirl’, ‘Daddy’ and most importantly ‘Mother’ - asking where these terms have come from and why, despite their fun and flippant usage, they are so important.
Hand clap emojis at the ready because Mother is mothering! But she’s not cobbling together a last minute World Book Day costume, cutting up apple slices or telling a rampaging six-year-old to use an indoor voice, God no. Such lowercase mothering signifiers are lost on MOTHER all caps exclamation point. This woman doesn’t even need to have children to be deemed the ultimate pop culture matriarch.
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To reach Mother status as a celebrity you must exude a powerful presence - think Angela Bassett in Wakanda Forever. You must be doing what you do exceptionally well. And like all good mothers you must feed your hungry children, aka your fans, giving them treats - from addictive pop bangers, to memeable moments, to stunning looks. But amid the high camp performance, there’s also an element of nurturing - which is what I think most differentiates Mother from Diva.
A Mother, like Lady Gaga, satiates every strata of a fan’s hierarchy of needs and then gives even more. She is raising us! Meanwhile, your favourite Diva is camp, she’s funny, but would she care about keeping you happy and hydrated? Hell no.
Mother, as a term of adoration in the queer lexicon, has its roots in the largely African American and Latinx drag houses of the 1980s New York ballroom scene. Each drag house would be presided over by a drag queen or trans woman who had been around and seen it all and was maybe a little older than the other girls and had the wisdom of experience. She looked after the ‘children’ of her house, often cooking, mending and making their clothes, distributing chores and keeping track of her wayward brood. She commanded respect.
As with so much of the slang that originated in queer culture, specifically black queer culture (slay, for example), Mother has crossed over into a general Gen-Zedy online lexicon, reminding us how quickly the mainstream can eat-up the creative output and ideas of marginalized people, without necessarily understanding their roots and importance.
One of the reasons I wrote the book Do Ask, Do Tell: Queer Life, Love and Culture Laid Bare with Stu Oakley (out May 29), was to encourage everyone, from cis-straight allies who love to 'Yas Queen' their bestie, to LGBTQIA+ people who assume their sexuality or gender automatically means they understand the full spectrum of the queer experience (spoiler alert: it doesn’t!), to admit the limits of their own knowledge, and be open to learning.
I love how every community can have its own Mother. Lesbians, for example, have laid claim to Cate Blanchett (guilty!), Audrey Plaza, Julianne Moore, Gillian Anderson - and good luck to anyone who tries to challenge this sapphic maternal bond.
For fashionistas it’s Donatella, for millennial gays and the gay-adjacent it’s Madonna, for royalists it’s Camilla, for Huns it’s Oprah, for Gen-Z Brats it’s Charlie XCX. Maya Rudolph Mother of comedy brilliantly juxtaposed actual motherhood with the pop-culture slangy meaning of ‘Mother' in the hilarious SNL performance. As Bowen Yang introduced her: 'But, Maya, You're not just a mom. You're mother.'
Along with the proliferation of Mother, has been the rise of Daddy. Another term appropriated from queer culture. Daddies were the older, more ‘masculine’ queer men within a Drag House, or the straight-coded boyfriends who financed their partner.
Now, outside of its specific use as a gay male identifier, a Daddy is any man who gives off friendly mentor vibes, but is also kinda sexy, and is probably over 40 (but not necessarily - hello Harris Dickinson). A few years ago we declared Pedro Pascal the internet’s Daddy and I’m not sure anyone is coming for his crown.
Completing this new configuration of the pop culture family is Babygirl. A term, bizarrely, used to describe a boy who is probably straight but definitely in touch with his femininity - Timothée Chalamet is Babygirl, so is Nicholas Galitzine and Jacob Elordi.
Struggling to keep up? Trying to picture Pedro Pascal and Lady Gaga as parents to a gorgeous babygirl named Timothée? Just remember this: Language is fluid, it shifts with the mood of the moment, it references the past, it captures the strangeness, frankly, of the present day and a fun or throw-away term can express layers and layers of meaning. In other words, just go with it!
So this Mother’s Day let’s hear it for the women feeding the culture with their fabulousness, the women facing the onslaught of celebrity life with grace, kindness and humour. Regardless of whether they actually have children, they have turned a proper noun into an adjective and that, you’ve got to admit, is so Mother.
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